The Island of Seven Cities by Paul Chiasson

Author:Paul Chiasson [Chiasson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36703-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2006-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

It was on this aerial photograph of Cape Dauphin, taken in June 1953, that I spotted the ruins for the first time.

I was struck by its size. I could imagine from the photos that it was built of stone, but the scale was enormous. Louisbourg had taken the French forty years to build, and its construction had left a long trail of documents on both continents and in several countries. What I was looking at here had left no documents at all.

All I could see from the photographs was that the enclosure was big, about a kilometre long and half as wide. It was located northwest of the summit, and its lower wall followed the curve of a small river along the far northern border. The road I had originally discovered led up to the enclosure from the east. The enclosure appeared cradled by the low rise of the summit and the shallow valley made by the river. Yet the geometry was clear: its long north and south walls were parallel to each other, as were those that climbed the incline from the river along the far eastern and western ends. I didn’t need to be an architect to see that the building of an enormous walled enclosure over difficult, hilly terrain would have required a major workforce and years of organization and planning. This construction wasn’t Acadian; it wasn’t Mi’kmaq. I kept thinking of Louisbourg.

Though computer programs allowed me to look at the photographs in extreme close-up, it was difficult to make out exactly what I was seeing. I kept scanning the photographs of the area around the enclosure, photographs taken in different years and different seasons, and saw other consistently visible man-made geometry. In the eastern section of the enclosure, a narrow rectangular clearing ran down the slope. It was not aligned to compass north but to true north—the North Star. It looked like an area where something, or a group of things, had been organized and built around a central spine. The lower end of this rectangular area stopped just short of the eastern wall of the enclosure. From the very specific way in which it was configured, with defined edges and a clear axis, it, too, appeared to have been planned and built on an impressive scale. The long axis of the large enclosure was oriented along the magnetic compass, while the axis of the rectangular clearing within the wall was oriented along the axis of the North Star, an almost 25° difference in this part of the world.

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