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    Sébillot's writings, which emphasize the distinction between professional fishermen and peasant sailors of the shore fishery, are also important because they echo the oral testimonies gathered in French villages on the Port-au-Port Peninsula.

    While most French Newfoundlanders cannot name the place of origin of their first ancestor to settle on the peninsula, some have retained precise place-names. If the town of St. Malo often appears in these reminiscences, it is doubtless because so many fishermen signed on there for the shore fishery based in St. Pierre. Moreover, most villages and cantons named by Sébillot are in the St. Malo hinterland. La Roche, probably the village of Roche-Derrien, not far from St. Brieuc, the other Breton port which fitted for Newfoundland, is another name which often appears in the recollections of older men.

    I have collected from a French Newfoundland woman a sadly fragmentary memory of a custom which, despite its lack of detail, seems very similar to a custom observed by Sébillot, "Drowning Carnival":

    One year when the Newfoundland fishermen were twenty days late departing, they drowned Carnival. On a cart taken at the Dinan Gate, they had set up a huge mannequin stuffed with straw, and were singing to the accompaniment of the accordeon, their favourite instrument:

    Mardi Gras, ne t'en vas pas, J'f'rons des crepes et t'en mangeras (Jack o'Lent, don't you take off, Pancakes we'll makeyou'll have a scoff)
    And then, all together:
    Mardi Gras s'en est alle, J'f'rons des crepes sur n'un gal'tier. (Jack o'Lent has gone away, We'll cook pancakes in a pan today.)

    Then, with loud shouts, they took up their victim and threw it in the sea, where it drifted off. The "Straw Man " had made the wind change, they said, and the sailors were able to sail that very day.