 L'île aux Basques, located in front of Trois-Pistoles, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River, it becomes a privileged place for the Basque to skin the whales captured in the area and melt their fat.Three furnaces still stand to remind us of this activity.Even if under French rule, more than twenty segnories were granted along the bank of the river, all the way to Métis, and even inland (the segnories of Madawaska, Lac-Mitis and Lac-Matapédia), the settlement of Bas-Saint-Laurent remains sparse until 1790.