Early Footprints 5 side of Prince Edward Island , a few miles west of East Point . He continued on his voyage, landing at several places further along the north side of the Island. His are the first recorded French footprints. Many more, most of them unrecorded, were to follow as European fishermen crossed the ocean in the spring, caught and dried their catch in summer camps along the shore and scurried back across the before the autumn storms.16 Many plans were made in the seventeenth century to settle He St . Jean. But it was only in 1720 that the first organized settlement was established by Comte de Saint-Pierre at Port Lajoie. However, a year earlier, the unoffi¬ cial settlement of the Island had commenced at East Point with the arrival of Matthew Turin , and at St. Peter 's with Francois Douville and Charles Charpentier . All three men were from Normandy, France.17 These are the first three permanent French settlers on the Island with a pin pointed residence and they all belong to the East. A storm is believed to have tossed them in on the north side of Lot 43 at a place ever since known as Naufrage which is the French word for shipwreck. Thomas Pichon , a French official and noted English spy, in his book, Description of the Island of St. John, 1760, mentions the shipwreck at Naufrage in 1719 when a French vessel, lost four leagues out to sea, was cast upon the shore at Naufrage . Several passengers who were saved became the first settlers at St. Pierre du Nord ( St. Peter 's ). He gives credit to the Indians for the rescue and to their squaws for serving long remembered native dishes of roast otter and muskrat.18 Pichon does not specify Matthew Turin , the first East Point settler, as one of the people who were shipwrecked. But his similar date of settlement might suggest the possibility. When Denys de la Ronde, second in command at Port Lajoie, visited this East Point settlement two years later, in 1721, he found Matthew Turin with two domestic servants and seven men in his employ; Joseph Durocher with a wife and two children, one servant and four assistant sailors and a man named Giraud with neither wife nor servant, a total of twenty inhabit¬ ants.19 De la Ronde's nickname, Tranche Montagne (bully), is marked on early French maps as the mouth of North Lake , just west of East Point .20 These three men were still there in 1728, but by the census of 1752 they were gone. In their place De la Roque found Antoine Dechevery , age 40, a native of Bayonne, France, his wife Marie Pinet, and their six children: Denis (11), Antoine (10), Francois (8), Pierre (6), Jean (4), and Marie (6 months). As well, there were three families of the name Pinet: Noel, Jean Baptiste and Pierre—in all twenty-two persons.21 The Antoine Dechevery (or Cheverie) family of this census is important. They were the first family of that name in the area and possibly some of them comprise the founding family of Souris . Dechevery told De la Roque he had been on the Island for twenty-five years although his name does not appear in the 1728 census. At St. Peter 's , De la Roque found Francois Douville of the Nau¬ frage shipwreck well and cheerful at 62.22 Other St. Peters names from this census important to the history of Lots 44 and 45 include those of Chiasson and Daigle. Marie Chiasson of Beaubassin (Amherst) and her husband Jean Baptiste Vascot of Quebec owned a flour mill. It was situated, so De la Roque said: "somewhere between Saint Pierre and Point de l'Est." At Fortune Harbour , the census taker found three brothers of the name Le Prieur and their families, totaling twenty-three in all. The men had been there for a long time— Joseph Le Prieur for thirty years. One important