Cap Trinité

First Nations History

The Saguenay Fjord has been inhabited and traversed by Innu and other First Nations peoples for thousands of years. The prominent capes, including Cap Trinité, served as essential landmarks for travel and fishing along the waterway.

The Statue of Our Lady of the Saguenay

The cape's most famous historical feature is the massive, white Statue of Our Lady of the Saguenay (Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay). The 9-meter (29.5-foot) statue was erected on a natural ledge of the cliff face in 1881.^[4] It was commissioned by Charles-Napoléon Robitaille, a local merchant, in gratitude for his survival after being lost in a snowstorm on the frozen fjord in 1878. The statue was hauled up the sheer cliff and assembled on the narrow platform, a feat of engineering and community effort that has cemented its place in Quebecois folklore^[5]. The presence of this statue on Cap Trinité has made the site a minor pilgrimage destination and a symbol of local devotion and history.

Legend

According to a legend montagnais, the cape Trinité would be the result of the combat between Mayo, the first Montagnais, and of a bad manitou. While he was paddling on the Saguenay, a creature appeared from the river to attack it. Mayo, responding only with his courage, took the creature by the tail and smashed it on the mountain. It was at the third stroke that the beast was crushed, which explains the three levels of the cape. Where the manitou hit the rock, no more vegetation grew.^[6]

Poetry

Louis-Honoré Fréchette wrote, in 1873, a poem titled Le cap Trinité.

It’s an overwhelming boulder with its crest
Above the black waves, and whose powerful forehead
Dominate the fog, and challenge in passing
The wing of the storm and the shock of the downpour.

Huge pan of rock, threatening colossus
Whose flank would taunt the cannonball and the bomb,
Who rises suddenly in the cloud, and falls
In the unfathomable chasm where its base descends.

What caprice erected this dark wall?
Caprice! who knows ? Bold the mocker
These blind efforts at fertility!

This mass feeds a thousand perennial plants;
The mountain swallow nests in its crevices;
And the fierce monster has its authorship.^[7]

Charles Gill was also inspired by the Saguenay capes. The song VIII^e of the collection "Le Cap Éternité followed des Étoiles filantes", entitled "Le Cap Trinité", begins as follows:

This rock which of God shows majesty,
Who draws up on the sky his three enormous bleachers,
And vertically divides its shapes into three,
It deserves three times its name of Trinity.

Its vertiginous side, scarred with scars
And full of harsh reliefs touched by the sun,
To the sacred grimoires of Egypt is the same,
When the light and the shadow mix their whims.

Browns, grays, golds, tender purples,
To these precise signs are added more vague features,
And the heavenly azure floats there according to the waves,
Who in the deep folds dart their cheerful reflections.

Is it some Titan, is it rather lightning,
Who wanted to print the word "always" here?
What meaning do these strange contours conceal?
For posterity what problem to solve^[8]