Maritime Origins
In Charlevoix’s genealogy, a river supplants the tree, and you’ll often see “Cap.” in front of a grandfather’s name… The Musée maritime de Charlevoix invites you to discover this lost heritage!
Maritime Origins
The Musée maritime de Charlevoix
In Charlevoix’s genealogy, a river supplants the tree, and you’ll often see “Cap.” in front of a grandfather’s name… The Musée maritime de Charlevoix invites you to discover this lost heritage!
It’s true, sailor DNA flows in our veins: Today, that heritage has nearly disappeared, given that the last schooners last sailed the St. Lawrence River around 1978, leaving in their wakes a huge part of the identities of our coastal villages: 200 years of coastal shipping!
Discover this vibrant piece of our history at the Musée maritime de Charlevoix, in Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive, on the site of what, from 1946 to 1973, was les Chantiers maritimes de Charlevoix Limitée, [the Charlevoix Shipyards Limited], which, back then, were used for the safe overwintering, haulage, and refit (repair) of our village schooners…
Initially, sailed schooners, and later motor schooners, vessels we could pick out because they had their two masts, and streamlined, keeled hulls, fearlessly plied the waters of the St. Lawrence. At that time, vessels we called voitures d’eau [water cars] that went from port to port, from the mouth of the river to the Great Lakes, provided shipping for all kinds of goods: often wood, sometimes supplies, machinery, iron pellets, and even dynamite!
Next came freight trains and heavy-duty trucks, leaving the old piers to slowly vanish, lost from Charlevoix’s landscapes. Those that still exist conjure memories in the people who still remember the schooners’ golden age: those who were children aboard, playing on the deck, the captain’s wife’s potato stew, this storm, or that fire! The stories of some 600 vessels that were built in the Charlevoix area, and of which often nothing remains, save for a few wrecks…
Except here, because at the Musée maritime de Charlevoix, you can explore, climb aboard, and even take the helm, of genuine, restored schooners: the more than 100-year-old Marie Clarisse, built in 1923; the Jean Yvan, one of the last in Quebec, was built here in 1958; and the St. André, named after Montreal’s patron saint in seeming answer to the prayers of La Malbaie’s Captain Fernand Gagnon, who wished to acquire the trees necessary for its construction. This was no small request, because sometimes a shipyard like this one required 700 trees and 25,000 hours to build this kind of vessel! Among the forgotten crafts, the hewers of wood, rib-makers, binders, caulkers, and wire bonders used to work here, in this very shipyard.
Inhale the characteristic scent of the impregnated wood of the wheelhouse for yourself, the disorienting effect of walking through the arched hold, measure the smallness of the beds in the cabins and look into the distance at the line of the horizon; the channel off this river was once the quickest route for generations of coastal ships… To immerse yourself in the uniquely Charlevoix tale of the history of its schooners, the Musée maritime de Charlevoix is the place to go!
