HALIFAX AND THE HALIGONIANS
In the exact middle of the peninsula of Nova Scotia a
triangular piece of land juts out into the Atlantic. To
this second peninsula is attached a third, and upon this
narrow rocky strip, three miles long by a single wide, a
century and a half ago was founded the “Cronstadt of
Canada.” East and west of Halifax is the sea, but the
sea subdued and serene: for on the one hand is the world-famed
Halifax harbour, and on the other the river-like
north-west arm. In the harbour a thousand ships may
ride quietly at anchor: it is always accessible: as it touches
the upper end of the town it narrows only to expand again
into Bedford Basin—ten square miles of peaceful marine
haven. On the eastern slope of the little isthmus, Halifax
is built, the ground rising from the harbour’s edge, some
two hundred and fifty feet, to where is reared the great
stone citadel, a striking spectacle when viewed from the
sea—to the ocean-borne traveller striking and significant.
“Into the mist my guardian prows put forth,
Behind the mist my virgin ramparts lie,
The Warden of the Honour of the North,
Sleepless and veiled am I!”
Halifax has been for a century and a half the chief naval
and military headquarters of British North America, and
for some time the sole garrison of regular troops in Canada.
Its military spirit dates from its very birth.
There are greetings of every kind and degree in store
for the traveller in parts civilised, uncivilised, barbarous,
and savage; greetings at the portals of the city, effusive,
boisterous, vociferous. There is one time-dishonoured
greeting that I could dispense with more freely than all the
rest, and it is that which awaits the incomer by rail to the
capital of New Scotland. Conjure up in your fancy
seventeen shaggy, wild-eyed men, in whose visages Celtic
traits predominate, standing in a row, brandishing their
outflung fists, bawling at the top of their voices, and only
prevented from leaping upon the traveller and forthwith
tearing him to pieces by a too-slender wooden barrier—and
you have the spectacle which many a time and oft has confronted
me at the Halifax railway terminus. For a moment,
not understanding the pleasant local custom, with stunned
faculties you stand regarding the line of raving madmen,
unable to distinguish the diabolical dissyllable they are
hurling at your head; and then a glimmering of the truth
comes upon you, your hand-bag and umbrella-case fall from
your limp grasp, they are caught up by one of the shrieking
phalanx, by whom you are hustled into an open victoria
and driven at breakneck speed to a hotel. It is pretended
that the natives like this custom—that they have grown
used to it—that as the local poet sings:
“’Tis sweet to hear the cabman’s honest bark,
Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home.”
[Illustration: HALIFAX AND HARBOUR FROM THE CITADEL.]
One Scot, thrillingly ingenious, declares that on arriving
at Halifax he surrenders himself to a wonderful illusion,
one that I dare hardly mention because of its audacity.
He half-closes his eyes and imagines himself reinstated in
his rightful chieftainship in the fastnesses of his Highland
ancestors, and hears the clansmen shouting at him as they
shouted at the returned Malcolm Dhu: “Am faic thu
sin? Am faic thu sin? Tha mi ‘dol do Chualadh!”
and other guttural acclamations, issued with such passionate
frenzy and strength of lung as transport him back to the
land of his fathers.
Far otherwise is it with the newcomer by sea. The
traveller steams into a smooth and spacious harbour, and
suddenly his gaze falls upon the city bathed in sunlight,
stretching up from the wharves to the citadel crowned by
the glorious flag that (with a few slight alterations and
additions) for a thousand years “hath braved the battle
and the breeze.”
“I was dressing,” wrote Charles Dickens, describing his
arrival at Halifax seventy years ago, “about half-past nine
next day, when the noise above hurried me on deck. When
I had left it over-night it was dark, foggy, and damp, and
there were bleak hills all round us. Now we were gliding
down a smooth, broad stream, at the rate of eleven miles an
hour; our colours flying gaily; our crew rigged out in their
smartest clothes; our officers in uniform again; the sun
shining as on a brilliant April day in England, the land
stretched out on either side, streaked with light patches of
snow; white wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs
working; flags hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships;
quays crowded with people; distant noises; shouts; men and
boys running down steep places towards the pier; all more
bright and gay and fresh to our unused eyes than words
can paint them. We came to a wharf, paved with uplifted
faces, got alongside and were made fast, after some shouting
and straining of cables; darted, a score of us, along the
gangway almost as soon as it was thrust out to meet us, and
before it had reached the ship, and leaped upon the firm,
glad earth.
“I suppose this Halifax would have appeared an Elysium,
though it had been a curiosity of ugly dullness. But I
carried away with me a most pleasant impression of the
town and its inhabitants, and have preserved it to this
hour. Nor was it without regret that I came home,
without having found an opportunity of returning thither,
and once more shaking hands with the friends I made
that day.”
“The town,” he goes on to say, “is built on the side of
a hill, the highest point being commanded by a strong
fortress, not yet quite finished. Several streets of good
breadth and appearance extend from its summit to the
waterside, and are intersected by cross streets running
parallel with the river. The houses are chiefly of wood.
The market is abundantly supplied; and provisions are
exceedingly cheap. The weather being unusually mild at
that time for the season of the year, there was no sleighing;
but there were plenty of those vehicles in yards and
by-places, and some of them, from the gorgeous quality of
their decorations, might have ‘gone on’ without alteration
as triumphal cars in a melodrama at Astley’s. The
day was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful;
the whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and
industrious.”
Yet candour compels me to say that the impression
made on the visitor by Halifax viewed at close quarters
is not as favourable as it might be. One writer does not
hesitate to call it “dingy and shabby”; and this effect
is without doubt attributable first to the material employed
in building the residential streets, and secondly
to the utter neglect in the whole Province of which it is
the capital, of architectural beauty. And herein Halifax
shows not least its true British conservative character,
not to say its London and English provincial city character.
For given dull yellow brick as a material, I can show you
miles upon miles of Halifax in Camden Town and Bayswater,
in Clerkenwell and Bloomsbury. As the ballad in
the “Arcadians” runs:
“When first I came to London town,
I thought it dingy, old, and brown.”
I can show you Halifaxes in Liverpool and Glasgow. Let
no Londoner of the Georgian or Victorian age, whose
architectural taste is represented by Gower Street and
Smith Square, reproach the “Warden of the Honour of
the North.” At the very beginning an attempt was made
to copy London; and St. Paul’s Church, long the pro-cathedral,
was built in 1750 on the model of St. Peter’s,
in Vere Street, Piccadilly. Other houses were constructed
on that other Cockney model, which proceeds on the
principle that a square wall, with a horizontal upper edge,
pierced at mathematical intervals with oblong holes for
windows, is a façade.
But an even more serious mistake—perhaps it was at
first a necessity—the founders of Halifax made, in which
their successors and descendants have persisted to the
present day; a fundamental and essential mistake which no
amount of shaping, and trimming, and painting will ever
correct or atone for—a mistake which, it is painful to have
to record, it is difficult to bring Haligonians to recognise as
such—they built then and build now their houses entirely
of wood. Wooden houses may be cheap, wooden houses
may be easy to build, wooden houses may be painted to
look like stone or brick, but wooden houses are not for men,
but children. People who live in glass houses, we are told,
shouldn’t throw stones; and people who live in wooden
can’t care for posterity, for it is certain that posterity won’t
care for them. It is not as if stone were not cheap, or brick
available—the Colonial showed from the first his improvidence
and his distrust in his future, by building of wood,
and the result is what might be expected. Time has not
dignified, but detracted.
“A modern wooden ruin,” Haliburton told his fellow-countrymen,
“is of itself the least interesting and at the
same time the most depressing object imaginable. The
massive structures of antiquity, that are everywhere met
with in Europe, exhibit the remains of great strength, and
though injured and defaced by the slow and almost imperceptible
agency of time, promise to continue thus mutilated
for ages to come. They awaken the images of departed
generations, and are sanctified by legend and by tale. But
a wooden ruin shows rank and rapid decay, concentrates
its interest on one family, or one man, and resembles a
mangled corpse rather than the monument that covers it.
It has no historical importance, no ancestral record. It
awakens not the imagination. The poet finds no inspiration
in it, and the antiquary no interest. It speaks only of
death and decay, and recent calamity and vegetable decomposition.
The very air about it is close, dank, and unwholesome.
It has no grace, no strength, no beauty, but looks
deformed, gross, and repulsive. Even the faded colour of
a painted wooden house, the tarnished gilding of its decorations,
the corroded iron of its fastenings and its crumbling
materials, all indicate recent use and temporary habitation.
It is but a short time since this mansion was tenanted by its
royal master, and in that brief space how great has been the
devastation of the elements! A few years more and all
trace of it will have disappeared for ever. Its very site will
soon become a matter of doubt. The forest is fast reclaiming
its own, and the lawns and ornamented gardens annually
sown with seeds scattered by the winds from the surrounding
woods, are relapsing into a state of nature, and exhibiting
in detached patches a young growth of such trees as are
common to the country.”
“The capital of Nova Scotia,” wrote a traveller in 1856,
“looks like a town of cards, nearly all the buildings being of
wood. There are wooden houses, wooden churches, wooden
wharves, wooden slates, and if there are sidewalks these are
of wood also. I was pleased at a distance with the appearance
of two churches, one of them a Gothic edifice, but on
nearer inspection found them to be of wood, and took refuge
in the substantial masonry of the really handsome Province
Building and Government House.”
“At least,” retorted a Nova Scotian upon a Yankee
critic, “we don’t go in for wooden nutmegs.”
“You’re not smart enough,” was the retort, “your
very heads are of wood.”
“I fear,” remarked a distinguished Episcopal visitor on
being shown the city, “your people are not orthodox.
They make an idol of wood.”
“My Lord,” was Sir Robert Weatherbe’s witty rejoinder,
“we attach little importance to material things.
And remember,
‘The heathen in their blindness,
Bow down to wood _and_ stone.’”
On Citadel Hill, the crowning height of Halifax, are to
be seen obsolete fortifications, begun by the Duke of
Kent, and as time went on altered and improved to
keep pace with the rapid advances of scientific warfare.
In and around Halifax there is now a thoroughly
modern system of fortifications; and improvements and
additions to these works are continually being made.
The prominent points on the shores and the neighbouring
islands are completely equipped with modern quick-firing
and disappearing guns, and other forms of defence are not
neglected.
The annual naval and military manœuvres, of which
Halifax used to be the scene, were a great source of interest,
and attracted throngs of tourists. One saw the North
Atlantic Squadron anchored peacefully in the harbour.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE CITADEL, HALIFAX.]
Suddenly there rang out the shrill boatswain’s whistle,
and there ensued a vision of crews swarming up the rigging,
the loosening of sails, the hoisting of anchors, and then,
in a few moments, the stately fleet steamed majestically
down past the city and out to sea. For “war” had been
declared, and the fleet which thus went out to meet the
enemy, will itself be the “enemy” on its return, and a fierce
bombardment be expected unless the pretence that it is
blown to fragments by submarines and torpedoes be successful.
Meanwhile, the military authorities at the citadel
were on the _qui vive_. The militia was called out, the garrison
were at their guns or at the look-out, the submarine
and torpedo engineers were busy laying surface mines and
inspecting sunken mines and booms. The tension continued
through that day and the ensuing night, until at
daybreak the booming of cannon on the York Redoubt
announces the approach of the enemy and the beginning of
the attack. In all this and the attendant military reviews
and sham-fights the whole of Halifax participated, and the
glory of the manœuvres ended in a ball at Government
House.
A change has come over the Imperial aspect of the
Province since the Dominion Government took over the
naval and military defences of Halifax from the Mother
Country. I found Halifax, with its citadel crowned slopes,
its wooden houses, its tree-lined avenues bathed in glowing
summer sunshine, but Haligonian society with no sunshine
in its heart. “Where are the tars of yester-year?” the
belles of Halifax seemed to be saying. “Where are the
gallant captains, commanders, lieutenants, sub-lieutenants,
and middies with whom we waltzed, and flirted, and played
tennis, and acted and boated within the North-west arm?”
I was prepared for this, but not for a similar complaint with
regard to the British Army. For on parade, at church,
at the Halifax club, were not the regulation uniforms
denoting the British officer as much in evidence as ever?
“Oh, those!” was the supercilious rejoinder of one fair
damsel, lying back in a canoe on the shores of Bedford Basin;
“_they don’t count. They’re Canadians._”
To me these officers in their spick-and-span khaki,
touched with scarlet, were indistinguishable from the Simon-pure
insular breed. But trust a fair Haligonian to know
the difference. I was reminded of the saying of a recent
Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, who did not seem
very effusive in his welcome of one who wore his Majesty’s
uniform, just arrived at Government House. “I’m sorry
the fellow was offended; but nobody interests me who
reaches Nova Scotia _by land_.”
And, indeed, it is only recently that many Nova
Scotians have taken kindly to the term Canadian as applied
to themselves, resembling in this respect the British
Columbians of the pre-Confederation and ultra-conservative
school.
It certainly has made a difference, perhaps only temporary,
to the tone of Halifax society this substitution of
a Canadian for the old Imperial establishment. Nor is the
idea of a Canadian Navy taken seriously in these social
circles. One had only to mention the _Niobe_ and the
_Rainbow_ to excite a smile. The officers may turn out
to be good fellows, but they will need all their tact,
good looks, and gallantry to overcome the prejudice the
fair Haligonians feel towards them as delegates from
Ottawa instead of from the British Admiralty. As for
the military, I heard many complaints as to how their
men had received their appointments at Ottawa, but none
as to how they do their work. And what is better still,
they have earned the respect of the British “Tommies,”
who still form 90 per cent. of the garrison, better paid and
better fed than they were under the Imperial régime. And
yet such pay and feeding hardly serves to attract the native-born,
very few of whom are ready to enlist, so that the
garrison is conspicuously undermanned.
But Halifax is a charming place to live in for all that.
It has so long been a naval port and a garrison town, that the
family ties between its people and those of England continue
to be very numerous. Commercial relations between the
two countries have grown to such an extent that the natives
have now all that is admirable in English business circles
and polite society. A visitor, if given the entrée of the best
society, must perforce carry away the most kindly recollections
of his visit. Whatever his nationality, few places
will make more strenuous efforts to give him the greatest
enjoyment. And the attractions for the visitor are many,
both in and around the town. A favourite drive is along
the Point Pleasant Road and up the North-west Arm. A
most attractive place is this North-west Arm, and the
drive, especially when continued past Melville Island and
as far as the Dingle, is a most enjoyable one.
Attending divine service on the day following my arrival,
I tried to listen to the reverend gentleman expatiating in a
patriarchal, and, I thought, somewhat ungallant way on the
duties of women. My eye roved over the interior of the
sacred edifice, which is, in many ways, the most interesting
in Canada. One of the very first undertakings of the
infant colony a century and a half ago was to provide themselves
with a place of worship, and in the original plan of
the town one square was reserved for a site. They applied
to the British Government, who referred it to Lord Halifax,
who attended service at St. Peter’s, Vere Street, Piccadilly.
His lordship sought out the architect of St. Peter’s, got the
plans, and sent them out to Nova Scotia. There the frame
and other materials were imported from Boston, and in
less than a year the colonists were attending service within
an exact replica of the London church, which they named
St. Paul’s. For many years it was used by successive bishops
as a cathedral, including both the Inglises, father and
grandfather of Sir John Inglis of Lucknow. Richer than
any other church in Canada is St. Paul’s in mural tablets,
and as our eye sweeps the four walls it encounters many
historic names. One of these is that of Governor John
Parr, the friend and comrade of Wolfe.
I wish I could speak in praise of Halifax’s new cathedral,
to which reference will be found elsewhere in these pages.
I wish I could plead that as I saw it, merely in process of
construction, it would be impossible to render judgment
upon it. For to me the whole principle upon which such
structures are built is a wrong one. Even the architects
have been impelled to issue a kind of manifesto, in which
the following interesting statement occurs:—
“Perhaps the greatest disadvantage we of the western
world are compelled to undergo in our buildings, in the vast
majority of cases at any rate, is the sordid meanness or
cheap tawdriness of the surroundings. This condition is
so marked in certain portions of America as to quite dishearten
the conscientious architect at the very inception
of his task. Many noble buildings there are such as would
become beautiful situations abroad that here seem contemptible,
at odds with their environment.”
It is true they hasten to disclaim such surroundings for
Halifax, but go on to say—
“Amid such surroundings any attempt at such glittering
splendours as are gathered in, say, the Basilica of Saint Mark
at Venice, or such sombre glories of carving and metal as are
everywhere present in the cathedral of the debonair city of
Seville, would be wholly out of place. Even the unruffled
sunlit calm of the English cathedrals may hardly be
attempted, much less attained. The city is a northern one,
the land one of long winters and deep snows, and over all
blows the keen air of the salt sea, that singles out each
unprotected bit of masonry, every weak cranny of construction,
for attack. Only the hardest and most enduring of
materials can undergo such a searching test as the old
builders of the town well knew, and much that gives charm
to similar buildings of the old world must be frankly dispensed
with; the parapets for one, that in every period of
the Gothic style as built abroad, heavy and castellated in
early work, pieced and lace-like in later times, are almost an
integral feature, for these would form pockets for great
piles of drifted snow that melting in the spring would
surely creep up and into the slates and woodwork of the
roof. And the heavy floors of irregular flags that so charm
the traveller abroad, must perforce be abandoned, for these
should rest upon solid earth, and only in a land where the
forces of frost are but puny can this be done, while the
same force it is that forbids the employment well, of other
architectural details that involve care, labour, and expense.
I have never heard a more ingenious and disingenuous
defence of flimsiness, the whole truth being that Halifax
would have liked a first-rate cathedral, but did not like to
spend the requisite sum upon it. If these architects had
gone to Russia and Northern Germany, not to mention
Old Scotland, I dare say they would find that a cold
climate is not altogether antagonistic to sound and even
elaborate masonry and even to permanence. The whole
point is contained in their conclusion, in which it is
confessed:
“The cost of the mediæval cathedrals was lightly met
by the people of the past, but the funds which would be
incurred in erecting even such a _lifeless and soulless replica
as we are only capable of_ to-day, would be far beyond the
capacity of any diocese to gather together.”
So much for the great cathedral of Halifax!
Our fellow-citizens in the densely-settled heart of the
Empire, you are just beginning to realise the century-old
ideals of those in the outer marches. You are just
beginning to see the significance of Canadian loyalty—regarded
as loyalty to the race, “Because,” as Mr. Kipling
once wrote to a friend of mine, a Newfoundlander,
“the Empire is Us—We ourselves: and for the white
man to explain that he is loyal is almost as unnecessary
as for a respectable woman to volunteer the fact that she
is chaste.”
[Illustration: IN THE PUBLIC GARDENS, HALIFAX.]
[Illustration: IN THE PUBLIC GARDENS, HALIFAX.]
As the solidarity of the British race—we ourselves—increases,
we can take a greater interest in Colonial origins—we
can be entertained by seeing how each colony reached
the same political goal—self—government—by a different
path.
As Annapolis Royal is the cradle of Canada, so Halifax
may be called the cradle of Colonial self-government.
Urged by this sentiment, Sir Sandford Fleming, the late
engineer-in-chief of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and a
most notable Imperialist, not long since conceived a truly
original and interesting idea. Imperial ideas are not yet
so common that significance may be disregarded by any
Briton. At his beautiful house on the North-west Arm—that
salt-water inlet once called the Sandwich River—the
keen-eyed, gentle-voiced octogenarian explained to me
his scheme, which has already touched the imagination of
the Colonies.
“Whatever,” said he, “may be the latitude and longitude
of each community enjoying the freedom, the justice,
the protection, the privileges, and advantages that spring
from the British system, they must be mutually interested
in this.” Helped by the Canadian Club of Halifax, he
undertook to erect a memorial tower within the precincts
of the city, for the purpose of commemorating the origin
here of representative government, and all the benefits
which have sprung from it. A few months ago the
Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia laid the foundation
stone of this memorial tower on an ideal site in a pleasant
park of one hundred acres, given by Sir Sandford, on the
one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the day upon
which the first Provincial Assembly was opened at Halifax.
Every autonomous portion of the Empire will contribute a
commemorative tablet, and the interior of this lofty granite
campanile will be a museum bearing upon Colonial history.
I found Nova Scotia very much interested in the question
of technical education. Here, as elsewhere, people do not
always grasp the details and possibilities of their own trades
and the old gibe at the fishermen, “How many fins has a
cod”? leaving him perplexed and gasping, has its application
to other callings as well.
The Nova Scotia Technical College, which was established
by the Provincial Legislature in 1906, is a college of applied
science and engineering, and the boast is made for it that it
“stands at the head of the first complete system of technical
education to be established by any Province or State on the
continent.”
The college offers thorough courses in civil, electrical,
mechanical, and mining engineering. There is a full free
scholarship of a value of seventy-five dollars offered for each
county in the province, except Halifax and Cape Breton
counties, which have two each. The opportunity is now
placed within the reach of every boy in the province who
has the ambition and talent to acquire a thorough high
class training as an engineer. I paid a visit to the college,
which is perhaps the finest building in Halifax, and had an
interesting chat with the Principal, Mr. Sexton, who is
young, ardent, and competent.
“The college,” he told me, “aims to serve the industrial
life of the province in every possible way. Nova Scotians
will be trained to develop the great natural resources of
the province, and to captain the Nova Scotian industries
of the future. Industrial research will be carried on in
the laboratories of the college to solve the problems of
the mines and manufactures, and all assistance will be
granted towards our industries on a thoroughly scientific
basis.”
The college is closely affiliated with Acadia, Dalhousie,
King’s, Mt. Allison, and St. Francis Xavier colleges.
Students in engineering secure there their preliminary
two years’ general training in science, mathematics,
language, &c., and pursue their last two years of specialised
professional work at the Technical College.
The arrangement of dividing the work between the
affiliated colleges and the Technical College prevents unnecessary
duplication of equipment and expense, obviates
educational waste, and is another tribute to the genius of
Nova Scotia in education.
The motto of the Technical College not only indicates
its fundamental aspiration, but is an interesting tribute
to the new Gaelic spirit.
“Science for the common weal.”
“Ealin air son math coitcheann sluaidh.”
Under the Technical College is a whole system of
secondary technical schools in practically every industrial
centre in Nova Scotia.
There are technical schools for coal miners, technical
schools for stationary engineers, technical schools for artisans,
technical schools for fishermen, and a Royal Commission on
technical education was touring the entire Province at the
time of my visit.
When it was first built, the Halifax dry dock was the
largest in North America, and is to-day one of the largest
commercial docks. It received at the outset a substantial
subsidy from the city of Halifax, and was also allowed
exemption from taxes for a period of fifteen years. But
despite this help, the dock gave little employment, the
number of vessels repaired being comparatively small. The
Dominion Government at last realising the importance of
such docks as this, granted a bonus to dry docks in various
parts of Canada, the docks being, for the purposes of the
Act, divided into two classes. The largest docks—constituting
the first class—get a bonus of 3½ per cent. for
thirty-five years. But Halifax does not benefit under this
Act, for its dock is only 585 feet long, instead of the 650 feet
that is required. The boats in the Canadian trade are
fast becoming of greater length.
Canada was only in her infancy when the Halifax dock
was built, and the large increase in commerce is shown
by the pay roll of the Dry Dock Company, which last year
paid out eighty thousand dollars in wages. But the capacity
of the dock will not now meet the requirements, and it is
felt that an extension to 800 feet will be necessary to take
the whole trade of the Atlantic coast. To do this, an immense
coffer dam would have to be built in order to extend
the dock seawards, involving an expenditure of about a
million dollars and a closure of fourteen months, with men
working night and day.
But if Halifax is to retain importance it should have
a dock which can take and repair the largest ship that sails
in the Canadian trade. And this will be the more necessary
if Halifax is to be the headquarters for the fast boats of the
C.P.R., the Allan Line, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the
Canadian Northern Railway.
On the whole a comfortable, tranquil, pleasant city is
Halifax, somewhat qualified, I am inclined to add, by Grafton
Street, a unique thoroughfare where bedizened women,
negroes, Indians, Chinese, and whites congregate in a sort
of extra-barrackian squalor. Such a spectacle is familiar in
garrison towns in the tropics, but here in Canada its incongruity
is almost disconcerting. A movement is on foot for
the eradication of this district.
Apropos of negroes, one sees a great many of these in
and about Halifax, and in other parts of the Province.
They came hither, of course, in large numbers from the
American Southern States in the ante-bellum slavery days.
Nova Scotia was then the favourite asylum of coloured
refugees, and their descendants I do not think have degenerated.
On the whole they form a dirty, good-humoured,
retrograde feature of the population. Eighty years ago
Great Britain awarded, on account of their ancestors, the
refugees, a donation to America of one million sterling, as
compensation to the American planters whose slaves were
carried off in order to enjoy the comforts of political
freedom and physical starvation under the British flag in
Nova Scotia, an award long and properly ridiculed by its
beneficiaries, the Americans.
I suppose I need hardly mention that the Nova Scotian
negroes are fully as “religious” as their American brethren.
It was in 1796 that between five and six hundred
Maroons were brought here from Jamaica. In that island
they had been wild and desperate rebels. Descendants of
the original African slaves, they had escaped and made
their home in the glens and caves of the mountains, sallying
down to rob and plunder the white settlements and deriding
all attempts at capture. At length a number of Cuban
dogs were requisitioned to hunt down these outlaw Maroons,
who, panic-stricken at this, surrendered, and were ordered
to be carried to Nova Scotia. At Halifax they were lodged
in tents on the outskirts of the town, but were later transferred
to Preston, where the Jamaican Government granted
them a sum of money towards their support. The experience
of a few winters showed how utterly helpless they
were, and the bulk of them were ordered off to Sierra Leone.
Years ago I talked with an aged Sierra Leone darkey,
who, though unable to read or write, and had relapsed into
many of the savage ways of his ancestors, yet asked after
Halifax with affection. “Me member him well,” he said,
“me born there. Me go back some day.” That was
twenty years ago, and my sable Haligonian has probably long
been gathered to his fathers. Albeit, not all the Maroons
left for Africa. Some remained, and their descendants
occasionally muster in great force about the city, especially
on market days, and they may also be seen brooding about
the wharves.
[Illustration: BEDFORD BASIN NEAR HALIFAX.]
[Illustration: IN THE ENVIRONS OF WINDSOR.]