Transcriber’s notes
Changes made are noted at the end of the book.
NOVA SCOTIA
“_Towards Scotia’s earliest bonniest chiel,_
_Across the wild Atlantic wave_
_I sailed my trig auld Norland keel._”
[Illustration: “A FULL-FED RIVER WINDING SLOW.”]
NOVA SCOTIA
THE PROVINCE THAT HAS
BEEN PASSED BY
BY
BECKLES WILLSON
AUTHOR OF
“THE GREAT FUR COMPANY,” “THE ROMANCE OF CANADA,” ETC.
“I don’t know what more you’d ask: almost an island, indented
everywhere with harbours, surrounded with fisheries—the key of
the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, and the West Indies; prime
land above, one vast mineral bed beneath, and a climate over all
temperate, pleasant and healthy. If that ain’t enough for one place,
it’s a pity—that’s all.”—SAM SLICK, of Slickville.
_REVISED EDITION WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1912
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
INTRODUCTION
BY HON. GEORGE H. MURRAY
PRIME MINISTER OF NOVA SCOTIA
All lovers of Nova Scotia will welcome this volume. I
have read it with pleasure as recording the impressions a
sojourn in this Province has made on a man of culture and
acute observation.
It will prove valuable to those who wish to learn something
of a portion of Canada that is not yet well known
abroad. Those who purpose to emigrate to Canada will
read this book with interest and to their advantage, and it
will whet their appetites for more information regarding
this Province.
Nova Scotia is a country that draws wealth from the
ocean, the forest, the farm, the mine and the mill. Our
industries are not exotic, but spring directly out of natural
conditions. Although Nova Scotia has only about one-fifteenth
of the population of Canada, the Province is the
predominating factor in the Dominion in fish, coal, and
steel. The material development of these industries and
of agriculture gives scope to the energies of our people,
and the establishment of a complete system of technical
education develops the practical powers of the young men,
enabling them to conduct and enlarge upon industrial
undertakings both at home and abroad.
It has been said that there are two fundamental conditions
of industrial well-being. The first is a fit people,
and the second a fit country. Both are found in Nova
Scotia. The people of Nova Scotia spring from the best
blood of the British Isles. In a little over a century they
have converted a land of forest into a country of sunny
orchards, rich grain fields, glowing furnaces and comfortable
homes. I would extend an invitation to our British
kinsmen to come over and share in our prosperity.
Nova Scotia possesses a record of substantial achievement
and remarkable progress, which inspires its people to
greater and more earnest efforts for the future. At the
same time we believe that the success of this Province in
the years to come will be assured only by the enterprise,
intelligence, and industry of its people. We realise that
the supremacy of Nova Scotia will rest as much upon intellectual
strength and educational training as upon the
character and volume of industrial output.
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA,
_June 21, 1912_.
PREFACE
I suppose Canadians of the First Immigration should be
very well pleased to see their farm lands overrun by the
mongrel hordes of Europe who, we are told, are presently
to assimilate the manners, institutions, and amenities which
our British forefathers so slowly and painfully through the
centuries established for us.
It is a magnificent spectacle the West is offering to
the world—this great _trek_ of a hundred thousand families
a year—these cities arising in a single night, this flux and
tumult, this noisy abandonment of effete conventions and
ideals. Perhaps it is all going to end, as the optimists tell
us it will end, to the glory of the race—our race. But
some of them do not deny a certain element of risk in
the process. It is a big price we may have to pay. It is
the price the Egyptians paid to the Semites; the Greeks
paid to the Macedonians; the Romans paid to the Goths;
the Persians paid to the Saracens; the Gauls paid to the
Franks; and the Americans have paid to the Irish, Italians,
and Poles. And always the price is—Character.
“When,” once wrote a distinguished American to me,
“I think of the early nineteenth-century promise of New
England, of its race of scholars and gentlemen, of its
thousands of quiet God-fearing homes, and the contented
industry of the countryside, I could wish that a great gulf
had cut us off on the West and an impassable barrier had
arisen on our Eastern seaboard.” But We are going to
win through—We are going to assimilate these alien peoples.
Our civilisation will suffer as our neighbours have suffered;
our serenity will cloud for a time, and when the contents
of the melting-pot have cooled the alloy may be a permanent
part of our whole national being. But We shall
not falter.
Nor will this restless ethnological flux continue. The
current and perhaps necessary methods of to-day will—nay,
must—yield to other and higher notions of progress. We
shall not always be touting for Slav and Hun and Celtic
immigrants, and soon, tout as we may, they will not come.
Europe will settle herself. Europe, in turn, will have her
own “boom.” And, in the meanwhile, all Canada will
not suffer alike, and the part which will longest retain its
fundamental likeness to Britain, its moral unity with the
people of the Mother island, is that province which is the
subject of this book.
Nova Scotia has not been exempt from sacrifices. Great
as the boon of Confederation doubtless was, and is, to the
Provinces of the Dominion, it has been a small boon to
Nova Scotia. She has had to play the part of Cinderella
while her sisters went to the ball. But her comparative
seclusion, added to her intelligence, her frugality, her gentle
character, and far greater natural beauty, may commend
her to the thousands of English and Scottish men and
women who wish to migrate from the British island to
the equally British peninsula on the other side of the
ocean—the nearest to them of the provinces of Canada.
QUEBEC HOUSE, WESTERHAM
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CANADA’S “FRONT DOOR” 1
II. NEW SCOTLAND’S BEGINNINGS 11
III. NEW SCOTLAND’S CHARACTERISTICS 22
IV. HALIFAX AND THE HALIGONIANS 35
V. WINDSOR AND “SAM SLICK” 55
VI. GRAND PRÉ AND EVANGELINE 66
VII. ANNAPOLIS ROYAL AND DIGBY 81
VIII. YARMOUTH AND SHIPBUILDING 97
IX. SHELBURNE AND THE LOYALISTS 116
X. BRIDGEWATER AND LUNENBURG 133
XI. ON THE GOVERNMENT’S FARM 144
XII. PICTOU AND NEW GLASGOW 156
XIII. CAPE BRETON 176
XIV. THE SYDNEYS 189
XV. LOUISBOURG 205
XVI. A NEW INVERNESS 218
XVII. AMHERST 228
APPENDIX 247
ILLUSTRATIONS
“A full-fed river winding slow” _Frontispiece_
Martello Tower at Halifax _Facing page_ 20
Halifax, Boating on the North-West Arm 27
Halifax and Harbour from the Citadel 36
Entrance to the Citadel, Halifax 43
In the Public Gardens, Halifax 48
In the Environs of Windsor 55
Bedford Basin 55
Victoria Park, Windsor, N.S. 60
Near Lochaber Lake 60
St. Eulalie, The Residence at Grand Pré of Hon.
Sir Robert Weatherbe 73
The Scene of the Grand Pré Raid of 1754 78
A Joy-Ride in “The Valley” 81
Annapolis—The Oldest Graveyard on the Continent 87
Annapolis Royal—The Home of Thomas Chandler
Haliburton 87
Off the Pier at Digby 93
Low Tide at Yarmouth 93
The Home of Evangeline 95
At Evangeline’s Well 95
The Old Governor’s House, Shelburne 122
A New Scotland Idyll—In the Annapolis Valley 139
Main Hall—Nova Scotia Agricultural College 145
At Kingsport 148
“Calling” a Moose 148
Truro—The “Joe Howe Falls” 154
The End of Bruin 158
Pictou—Norway House 161
View on the Outskirts of Antigonish 171
Strait of Canso, Port Mulgrave 176
A Splendid Moose near Lake Rossignol 178
King Street, Shelburne (the Town of the Loyalists) 183
The Road to Louisbourg 210
Louisbourg—The Last of the Dauphin Gate 210
Louisbourg—The Obelisk Commemorating the First
Siege 217
La Bras d’Or Lake (Cape Breton) 220
Landscape near Stellarton 227
The Site of Fort Lawrence 239
On its Last Legs—Cumberland House, near
Amherst, N.S. 240
A Fine Catch near the Mira River 242
NOVA SCOTIA
CHAPTER I
CANADA’S “FRONT DOOR”
“_And if he took ship, lo! it was the wrong ship; and when
he had got upon the land the road led him backward, or to the
right or to the left, so that with doubling and turning he was
full twenty years upon his journey. And all this while, if
he could but have seen it, the land of Salabat lay straight
before him, likewise the castle of the Princess Zobeide, which
he could not behold because of the cloud the genie had caused to
float before it._”
Some of us laughed when we recalled that Arabian tale
on our pilgrimage to New Scotland, for there was a man
on board who dwelt at Sydney; and he told us how,
on his visit to London, he had engaged a taxicab at the
Mansion House, and told the driver to take him to Piccadilly
Circus. After an hour or so he waxed impatient,
and putting his head out of the window asked the driver
where they were.
“Hammersmith,” was the reply.
“But that’s the other end of London, isn’t it? I told
you Piccadilly Circus.”
Whereat the man was aggrieved.
“Ain’t I driving you to Piccadilly Circus?” he asked.
“You didn’t say you wanted a _short cut_?”
“There’s Sydney yonder,” concluded the Nova Scotian,
with the glass to his eye, “and we might be at Halifax
this evening. There is the gleaming Bras d’Or, and the
trout streams of the Mira River, and my wife and children
are on the pier at Sydney; and I’m sailing on and on a
thousand miles to Montreal, and then a thousand miles back
by rail, because the Canadian Pacific Railway Company,
and the Government of Canada, and ‘all the powers of the
air, and the water, and the road’ don’t know that I want
_a short cut_.”
Of the nine Canadian Provinces stretching from the
Atlantic to the Pacific seaboard, the one of which Englishmen
might be expected, from its origin, its proximity, its
history, and its resources, to know most about they know
least. This is a puzzle I have often had to explain. Go
down into Kent or into Wiltshire, and you will find villagers
talking glibly of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The ale-house
wiseacre can give you off-hand all the salient peculiarities
of the Far West. I have heard a farm labourer near
Westerham expatiating upon the grazing lands of the Bow
River, and the duties of the mounted police, five thousand
miles away, never forgetting to refer to the Canadian Pacific
Railway—_tout court_—as the C.P.R. To hear him one
would suppose he had already made his venture into those
far occidental regions of the Empire; but no! it was only
in prospect, when he had “saved up a bit more.”
“Why in the name of commonsense do you go so far?”
I asked. “What’s the matter with Nova Scotia?”
The worthy fellow stared and scratched his chin.
“Nova Scotia,” he replied, not without difficulty,
“an’ where might that be, sir?”
Here his intelligent little niece—a half-baked product
of the Board School, came to the rescue.
“Don’t you see, uncle Bob, the gentleman’s only ’aving
a little joke with you? Nova Scotia is an unin’abited
island in the Arctic Ocean!”
Now, Saskatchewan is between 4000 and 5000 miles
from England; Nova Scotia is less than half the distance,
long-peopled, storied, picturesque to the eye. Both are
Canada—both are crying out for immigrants. Yet the one
stands almost solely for Canada in the mind of the prospective
emigrant, and the other he confuses with Nova
Zembla! Could you demand a more striking tribute to
the powers of advertisement? For alone of the Canadian
Provinces those on the Atlantic seaboard had not shared
in the astounding uplift, “the spectacular development,”
which has characterised the Dominion since 1896.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into the
country, past the forests, orchards, and valleys of what
has been aptly called “Canada’s front door.” It was
decreed that they should be carried on to where there were
lands to sell and wheat to be freighted; and so they
travelled westward—“gone farther and fared worse” in
many cases, although serving an undeniably good end in
buttressing and giving body to the lately invertebrate trunk
of the Dominion, of which Nova Scotia is undeniably the
“head.”
But this condition could not endure: the reaction has
come at last;[1] and this beautiful Province is now commanding
that attention which is her due.
[Footnote 1: For advanced legislation dealing with the problem of land
settlement in Nova Scotia recently enacted, see Appendix A.]
To me as a Canadian, the pageant of New Scotland
and Acadia has been familiar from my earliest years, and
as the steamer ploughed its way through the waters of
the Gulf, I had abundant leisure to let my fancy dwell upon
those scenes of the past.
Full of adventurous story are the annals of this Province—erstwhile
Acadia and the Markland of Leif the Lucky.
It was our kinsfolk, the Norsemen from Iceland, who landed
on the peninsula nine centuries ago.
One stops to marvel sometimes how the course of the
history of the world would have run if Leif and his men
had remained and settled Markland, and Vinland, and
the New World. Instead of the Crusades, Europe would
have poured her militant hordes into this hemisphere five
centuries before Columbus; and instead of conquering
England such spirits as William of Normandy would have
found such a field for their energies as Pizarro and Cortez
later found. Or it may be that the Scandinavians, with
their western possessions, would have forged ahead of
Latin Europe, and New Christianas, New Stockholms, and
New Copenhagens would have replaced the Bostons, New
Yorks, and Chicagos of far later times.
But the Norsemen sailed back, leaving Markland unsettled;
and in a few generations the story of their adventurous
voyage was forgotten, or enshrined only in the sagas
of their poets, where it became dim and legendary. The
centuries passed. Markland was given over to the tribes
of wild Micmacs, who inhabited its coasts and roamed its
interior in search of the moose and caribou, paddled their
canoes, and sang their songs of love, and war, and the chase;
who offered sacrifices to their gods in the light of a
thousand lodge fires. Then Columbus came. Five years
after the daring Genoan had sighted the West Indian
islands from English shores, John Cabot set forth, crossed
the Atlantic, landed on the Markland coast, and, by virtue
of his charter from King Henry VII., founded the claim of
England to Markland and to the whole Continent Columbus
never saw. But England’s day for expansion was not yet.
Cortereal, a slave-hunter, appeared on the Labrador coast
in 1500, and there kidnapped a cargo of natives. Eighteen
years later, a Frenchman, Baron de Léry, landed some of his
followers and a few head of cattle on Sable Island, off the
Markland coast. But although this attempt failed, some
of the cattle thrived, and their descendants were found
running wild on this bleak sandy island eighty years afterwards.
After de Léry none came to colonise these northern
lands until Jacques Cartier, the hardy St. Malo mariner,
sailed with his men into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up
the river to Stadacona. On the heels of Cartier, from whom
and other sailors they had tidings of the wealth of the
New World fisheries, came a horde of English, Norman,
Basque, and Breton fishermen, who plied their calling off
the Markland coasts, and returned laden with cod in the
autumn. Many of these landed and dried their fish on the
shore, and during most of the sixteenth century that was
all Europe knew of or dealt with Markland. True, under
a charter granted by Elizabeth, Sir Humphrey Gilbert
landed in Newfoundland and took possession of all land six
hundred miles in every direction from St. Johns, comprising
therefore what is to-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince
Edward Island, and part of Labrador. But his flagship, the
_Squirrel_, sank with all on board in Nova Scotian waters,
and nothing more came of Gilbert’s colonising scheme.
Two years ere the century closed, the French again
awoke to the possibilities of North American settlement;
and the Marquis de la Roche sailed forth for Markland
with a cargo of convicts for colonists, for volunteers were
chary of accompanying him. La Roche steered westward
until he came to that long crescent of sand which the
opposite currents off the Markland coast had formed, whose
treacherous shallows were just hidden by the waves as if
designed to lure ships to their destruction. It was the
same Sable Island upon which de Léry had landed eighty
years before. Fearing the aborigines on the mainland,
La Roche disembarked his convicts while he went to reconnoitre.
Awaiting the Marquis’s return, the convicts roamed
the island, and came upon herds of wild cattle, whose
ancestors had come out from France with de Léry: they
tramped by the solitary lagoon of fresh water, through the
dark grasses, startling the flocks of wild duck, but never a
shelter they saw. And they drew themselves together at
dusk, and dug holes in the mud and sand, and waited for
the ships to come and take them away, even back to the
gaols and galleys of France. There are few more tragic
incidents in New Scotland story than this, one of the
earliest. For the Marquis de la Roche had been driven
back across the Atlantic by an autumn hurricane, and the
forty unhappy wretches in their despair, after ravening
like wolves, and fighting and slaying each other, when other
sustenance was gone, snared the wild cattle and ate the
flesh raw, clothed their bodies in the hides, and out of the
wreckage on the shore fashioned themselves a shelter from
the terrible winter. Meanwhile, La Roche had been flung
by a powerful rival into prison, and it was some time before
he could get the ear of the Court to explain the plight of the
men on Sable Island. At last a ship went out to take them
home, and the twelve wild-eyed survivors, clad in shaggy
hides, and with matted hair and beards, were got on board
and carried back to France, where the King saw and set
them free. A few years later another French noble, Pierre
du Gast, the Sieur de Monts, the founder of Acadia,
procured from the monarch a monopoly of North American
trade, set forth in two ships filled with cavaliers and convicts,
to people the territory named in his grant. This was
Acadia, of no very definite limits, but comprising the
entire north-eastern portion of the Continent. With
de Monts sailed Champlain and a Picardy nobleman, the
Baron de Poutrincourt; and, after sighting Cape la Hêve
(near Lunenburg), and entering Port Rossignol, the party
skirted the Acadian coasts (losing a sheep overboard in
another harbour, which de Monts promptly named Port
Mouton), explored the Bay of Fundy, and finally landed
and spent the winter on a small island at the mouth of the
St. Croix River. When spring came, de Monts abandoned
this settlement for a far better site, on the shores of a
beautiful harbour on the eastern side of the Bay of Fundy,
which they christened Port Royal.
“The most commodious, pleasant place that we had yet
seen in this country,” wrote Champlain. While the colony
was industriously preparing a settlement further down the
coast for the winter, Champlain went off exploring the
coast in his ship, sailing up and down what was destined to
become ere long the territory of New England.
Poutrincourt’s first choice, Port Royal, was found far
superior to the tentative one at St. Croix River, and there
in late spring they began to construct a town near what is
now called Annapolis. De Monts and Poutrincourt, returning
in the autumn to France, managed to induce a
large number of mechanics and workers to emigrate to
Acadia, and Poutrincourt’s ship, the _Jonas_, sailed from
Rochelle in May 1606. Amongst the new emigrants was
the active Lescarbot, lawyer and poet, and man of affairs.
A peal of cannon from the little fort at Port Royal
testified to the joy of its inmates at the advent of the _Jonas_.
Poutrincourt broached a hogshead of wine, and Port Royal
became a scene of mirth and festivity. When, in the
absence of Champlain and Poutrincourt on further exploration,
Lescarbot was left in charge of the colony, he
set to work briskly, ordering crops of wheat, rye, and
barley to be sown in the rich meadows, and gardens to be
planted. Some he cheered, others he shamed into industry.
Not a day passed but some new and useful work was begun:
water-mills, brick kilns, and furnaces for making tar and
turpentine. When the explorers returned to Port Royal,
rather dispirited, Lescarbot arranged a masquerade to
welcome them back, and all the ensuing winter, which was
extremely mild, was given up to content and good cheer.
Then it was that Champlain started his famous “Order of
a Good Time,” of which many stories have been transmitted
to us. The members of this order were the fifteen leading
men of Port Royal. They met in Poutrincourt’s great hall,
where the great log fire roared merrily. For a single day
each of the members was saluted by the rest as Grand
Master, and wore round his neck the splendid collar of
office, while he busied himself with the duty of providing
dinner and entertainment. One and all declared the fish
and game were better than in Paris, and plenty of wine
there was to toast the King and one another in turn. “At
the right hand of the Grand Master sat the guest of honour,
the wrinkled sagamore, an aged Indian chief Membertou, his
eyes gleaming with amusement as toast, song, and tale
followed one another. On the floor squatted other Indians
who joined in the gay revels. As a final item on the
programme, the pipe of peace, with its huge lobster-like
bowl, went round, and all smoked it in turn until the
tobacco in its fiery oven was exhausted. Then, and not
till then, the long winter evening was over.”
But in the spring a ship came from St. Malo with the
tidings that the King had revoked de Monts’ charter, and
after efforts on the part of Poutrincourt and his son,
Biencourt, to linger and retain their hold upon Acadia, the
French were forced for a time to retire. The English,
meanwhile, had got a footing in Virginia, and an adventurer
named Argall came from thence and utterly destroyed
Port Royal, as encroaching upon the territories of the
English. He even caused the names of de Monts and other
officers and the _fleur-de-lis_ to be defaced with pick and
chisel from the massive stone upon which they had been
graven. Biencourt fled to the forest, and for a time consorted
with the Indians, leading a semi-savage existence.
From this dates the long struggle, lasting for a century
and a half, for the possession of Acadia—a conflict that was
not ended until Wolfe’s victory at Quebec and the surrender
of New France.
Eight years after Argall’s inroad in 1621, James VI. of
Scotland conferred on one of his courtiers, Sir William
Alexander, the whole territory which the French dominated
Acadia.
But in lieu of joining with them to build up a New
England, he resolved, by the favour of the King, to engage
his countrymen in extending the glory of their native land
by founding a New Scotland across the ocean. “Being
much encouraged hereunto by Sir Ferdinando Gorge[2] and
some others of the undertakers for New England, I show
them that my countrymen would never adventure in such
an enterprise, unless it were as there was a New France, a
New Spain, and a New England, that they might likewise
have a New Scotland.”
[Footnote 2: Sir Frederick Gorges, Governor of New Plymouth.]