While these colonies were enduring suspense and starvation a French vessel, called the _Indienne_, from Morlaix, was wrecked at the mouth of the Miramichi near the “Baie des Vents”—a name now corrupted into “Baie du Vin.” Tradition states that this ship, before coming to America, had traded in the Levant, and that a large number of bales of old clothes had been taken on board at Smyrna. The clothes were strewn upon the beach after the vessel went to pieces, were seized by the inhabitants, dried, and afterwards worn. However this may be, it is certain that from that date arose a most terrible pestilence among the Canadians, who were already decimated by famine. The first victim of this malady was M. de Beauhair, and he, with eight hundred others, it is said, were buried at Point Beauhair. The survivors abandoned Miramichi and fled, some to l’Ile Saint-Jean—now Prince Edward’s Island—and the greater number settled along the western coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they formed scattered hamlets under the names of Niguaweck, Tracadie, and Pokemouche, combined in one parish—that of Caraquet. For eighty years, although it was known that isolated instances of leprosy existed in the different colonies, they attracted little or no public attention up to 1817, when a woman named Ursule Laudry died of the disease. An account written by one of the nuns of l’Hôtel Dieu attributes a somewhat different origin to this scourge. This good sister writes that the disease was carried to New Brunswick in 1758 by a ship from the Levant; the vessel having made the port late in the autumn, the crew were paid off and dispersed, many seeking a temporary home in Caraquet. Unfortunately, this crew was afflicted by a malady that was unsuspected by any one. The colonists were kind to the sailors; the women washed their clothes and in this way contracted the disease, which was transmitted from one to another and from father to son, and in time acquired its peculiar features. Hamilton Gordon, the Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick in 1862, has assigned a similar origin to the malady in an interesting pamphlet entitled _Wilderness Journeys in New Brunswick in 1862-3_. “A vague and uncertain tradition exists,” he says, “that somewhere about a hundred years ago a French vessel was wrecked on the coast of Gloucester or Northumberland, and that among the crew were some sailors from Marseilles, who in the Levant had contracted the hideous leprosy of the East, the veritable elephantiasis Græcorum; however this may be, it is beyond all question that for many years a part of the French population of these two counties has been sorely afflicted by this mysterious disease, or by one that closely resembles it, and which may be, indeed, the form of leprosy so well known on the coast of Norway.”