CAPE BRETON
There are few pseudo-historical anecdotes which stand out
more vividly in the pages of history than that which
Smollett tells of the eccentric Duke of Newcastle crying
out to a courtier, “Cape Breton an island! Wonderful!
Shew it me on the map. So it is! Sure enough. My dear
sir, you always bring us good news. I must go and tell
the King that Cape Breton is an island!”
An island indeed is Cape Breton, and such an island—a
mingling of hill, and dale, and lake, mountain, moor, and
tarn—rock, and crag, and fell—once called L’Isle Royale, and
under the flag of the lilies—now the most eastern and most
northern division of Nova Scotia, and the most Scottish
portion of New Scotland. This island is equal to about
one-fifth part of the whole Province.
Sailing out into the unknown territories of a world
which if as old as the old was new to them, the early
adventurers sought to make their surroundings congenial
by a nominal association with the countries, provinces,
towns, and villages they had quitted, perhaps for ever.
This, the despair of the geographer, is the very poetry of
geography. It began with Columbus—nay, it began with
Leif with his Markland and Vinland, and it continues
down to the days of Peary, and Shackleton, and Scott. Is
there not something pathetic in the fact of a great bleak
headland, locked in an eternal Arctic frost, being named
after some fair Devon hamlet or Essex village, where the
daring sailor first saw the light or loved a lass? The
Arctic and Antarctic seas are full of such names.
[Illustration: STRAIT OF CANSO, PORT MULGRAVE.]
On the south-west coast of France, near Bayonne, is a
Cape Breton, from whence hailed the sixteenth century
sailor who first descried the headland here to which he
gave that name, probably the oldest in North American
geography. When the name of this cape became extended
to the whole island is unknown, and as may be guessed from
the Duke of Newcastle’s remark, many were ignorant of its
wider application even in the eighteenth century.
“The English ministry,” wrote Haliburton, “in the
time of Mr. Pitt was said to have considered the island
worse than useless, and would have rejoiced that Cape
Breton had sunk to the depths of the ocean, being continually
apprehensive that other Powers might obtain
possession and thus establish a post of annoyance, which
motive caused the destruction of the fortifications.”
Utterly neglected, therefore, for a long period after it
had passed into our possession, it remained a useless
appanage to Nova Scotia until a separate government
was established at Sydney, and by the enterprise of Lieutenant-Governor
Des Barres, Cape Breton began to increase
and multiply, and only received a temporary set-back when
it was re-annexed to Nova Scotia in 1820. That event, of
course, lost the island the coal-mining and excise revenues,
and its fees on Crown lands, as well as the salaries of
officials spent on the island; and it naturally took some
considerable time to recover from these effects, especially
as for thirty years the income had been outlaid upon
much needed roads and bridges.
Cape Breton was long considered strategically the key
to Canada. Now, however, that ships of large burden can
and do pass by preference through the Straits of Belle Isle,
it can no longer be said to command even the Gulf of
St. Lawrence. The island is separated from the mainland
by the Strait of Canso. At Port Mulgrave a beautiful
marine view opened up before me, as the Intercolonial
railway train began to transfer its whole huge bulk on
board the waiting ferry boat. The distant cliffs and fishing
hamlets were bathed in sunlight, the blue waters were alive
with multi-coloured anemones; sails of smacks and schooners
darted hither and thither along the surface; there was a
hurrying to and fro of tourists and fishermen on the
green-clad shores; the whole scene was one of picturesque
animation. One noted on the mainland the lofty Cape
Porcupine, from whose summit, before submarine cables
were sunk, the telegraph wires were crossed high in mid-air
over the Strait to Plaister Cove. This stretch of wire was
then part of the link connecting Europe and North America,
and when it broke, as, of course, it frequently did, communication
was suspended between the Old World and
the New. I am told that a pleasing juvenile pastime of
the fishermen’s children in former times was aiming stones
at the wire, probably occasioning from time to time a rude
interruption of the speech between two hemispheres.
[Illustration: A SPLENDID MOOSE NEAR LAKE ROSSIGNOL.]
Mulgrave has a population of about 1500 souls, and is
a centre for bathing and fishing, but its chief institution is,
of course, the ferry. I have never seen such a perfectly
equipped or managed piece of ponderous mechanism.
The train is divided into two parts and shunted on to
the gigantic and specially designed steamer _Scotia_, which
bears the burden without a whimper. Across the Strait we
steam, the passengers either descending and walking about
the deck, standing clustered on the car platforms, or craning
their necks out of the windows in order not to miss the
succession of views. In a quarter of an hour or so we are
safely landed; the metal rails on shore join up to the metal
rails of the _Scotia_ as true as steel itself, and staring about us
we are confronted by Point Tupper. From here a railway
runs to Inverness, a district which no visitor to Cape Breton
should miss, and which I will advert to later.
Meanwhile, let us note that for the first thirty miles or
so there is nothing in the scenery, and certainly nothing in
the very few specimens of the population that meet his eye
to attract the traveller’s attention. Then come glimpses of
interest at Seal and Orange Cove, Mackinnon’s Harbour,
and certain inlets of the Denys River. Near M’Donald’s
Gulch, which is crossed by a steel trestle 90 feet high and
940 feet long, an occasional birch lodge of the dwindling
Micmacs met my eye.
And Denys River! How that brings back historical
memories of the early French adventurer, the right worthy
old Nicholas Denys, Sieur de Fronsac, victim of Charnisay!
We open and shut our eyes—we are on the verge of
dozing, when in a flash the lake of the Golden Arm is upon
us. There is no inland sea in the world quite like the
famous Bras d’Or, that unique salt flood imprisoned in the
land, 50 miles long, and taking all shapes—bays, inlets, and
havens, studded with islands, half-broken by peninsulars
never the same, always disclosing fresh beauties and picturesque
variations.[20]
[Footnote 20: The name Bras d’Or is doubtless of Spanish origin, as
are many other names in this part of the world. There is Mont Real
or Montreal, Anticuesta or Anticosti; Puerto Nueva; Placentia, Basin
of Minas, and several Spanish rivers, and probably Le Bras d’Or and
Labrador (labourer) have a similar origin.]
One is bound to observe that, as regards the Bras d’Or
scenery, the body of waters is so vast, and conveys so much
the illusion of the ocean itself, that to produce a proportionate
effect the surrounding land ought to be on a similar
scale of grandeur. The alternate low hills and flat shore
consequently rob the lake at large of its due effectiveness,
although in the vicinity of the arms and inlets, and towards
the northward at St. Anne’s, there is some compensation in
a bolder and more rugged order of scenery. Viewed from
the heights of the shore, however, this criticism does not
apply, and the tourist’s eye is rewarded by scenes which for
sheer beauty it would be hard to match throughout the
length and breadth of the Continent.
On one hand are daintily wooded islets, on another a
long lagoon, cut off from the lake in rushes. Enclosing it
all are the mountains decked in the primeval wood, sloping
gradually from the marge or rising sheer and naked until
their summit springs into verdure.
This first portion is the Great Bras d’Or Lake; later
on, at Grand Narrows, it becomes still further enclosed,
and is called the Little Bras d’Or. Altogether these waters
have an area of 450 square miles. Its extremest width is
less than 20 miles, but owing to its eccentric contour there
are places where it is only a mile across. The depth also
greatly varies, in the same ratio as the hills—here as much
as 700 feet, there 50 or 60 feet.
The Bras d’Or waters have a surface area of 450
square miles, and while the width from shore to shore is as
much as eighteen miles in one place, there are times when
less than a mile separates shore from shore. So, too, the
depth varies in somewhat the same ratio as rise the surrounding
hills. In one part of Little Bras d’Or there is a
depth of nearly 700 feet, the depression equalling the height
of the surrounding land. Every variety of landscape meets
the eye of the delighted stranger, and it is because of this
variety that the eye never wearies and the senses are never
palled.
In following the railway the tourist will occasionally
see what looks like a shallow pond, a hundred feet or so in
diameter. It may surprise him to learn that the bottom is
sixty or a hundred feet from the surface. This is a country
of heights and depths. At times the train runs through
long cuttings where the white plaster rock appears marvellously
like snowdrifts on each side, to travel for hundreds
of yards on high embankments in which the excavated
material has been made to bridge a valley.
After all, the inland sea is but a part of the Atlantic,
and an outside sea may sweep its waters into fury. I was
told that to cross the Bras d’Or in a gale is not an enviable
experience. The direction of the wind makes all the
difference.
Whycocomagh is reached by a drive of seven miles from
Orangedale (a name singularly infelicitous), where teams
are in waiting on the arrival of express trains. Orangedale
is at the head of one of the numerous little arms of the
Bras d’Or which are found in this part of the journey, and
near at hand are Denys River Basin, and Great and Little
Malagawaatchkt (pronounced “Malagawatch”). The latter
are two inlets of the great lake at the head of West Bay, on
the northern shore.
Whycocomagh is situated on the basin forming the
termination of St. Patrick’s Channel, which has its mouth
more than twenty miles to the eastward, beyond Baddeck.
I do not know a more refreshing place for a summer
sojourn than Baddeck. This village, long since popular
with Americans, and lately of considerable celebrity as an
experimental ground for flying machines, occupies the site
of an old Indian encampment named Ebedek, called by the
French Bedeque. To reach it one leaves the train at Iona,
and takes the small steamer which connects with the
through expresses from Sydney or Halifax, and steams a
dozen miles upon the waters of the Bras d’Or. Once
out of the Narrows, one emerges into a vast and gleaming
expanse of water, dotted with sails, which seem almost
shocking in their whiteness, so intense is the sunlight.
The place-names hereabout are ultra-Micmac, and as
difficult to pronounce at sight as any in Swift. Yonder
is Moolasaalahkt Harbour.
“What does that mean?” I heard a Yankee ask an Indian.
“Oh, that means Big Harbour,” answered the Indian
with a grin.
[Illustration: KING STREET, SHELBURNE (THE TOWN OF THE LOYALISTS).]
“_Big_ Harbour? Then why don’t ye _say_ Big Harbour
and have done with it?” was the indignant surrejoinder;
which seems reasonable. Then three miles later we came
to an upstanding and outstanding headland.
“What’s that?” we asked.
“That?” said the captain glibly, “Oh, that’s Watchabuketckt.”
“I don’t believe it!” retorted the Yankee.
Some visitors entertain the firm opinion that the late
Mr. Dudley Warner, an American humorist, who used to
stay in this locality, invented a good deal of the nomenclature.
But it is not so; it is all in Haliburton.
Apropos of inventors, there is a spacious, well-built
mansion on our right, which was long ago built by, and
is still the residence of, that Scottish-Canadian genius to
whom the world is indebted for that perennially-amazing
instrument the telephone. Strange how many thousands,
even hundreds of thousands of people in London, who
daily see the emblem of a bell on the telephone call-offices
connect that emblem with Alexander Graham Bell, the
white-haired old gentleman who combines work and play
at his summer home here at Ben Bhreagh. Glimpses of
outbuildings can be had as the steamer moves along—laboratory
and workshops; and on the lake in front of
Ben Bhreagh rose the first working aeroplane in Canada,
in which Dr. Bell has taken a keen interest. It must have
been from some aerial craft that the name of Spectacle
Island was given to the _insula minor_ which flanks the
harbour of Baddeck. Myself, gazing at it from terra
firma or the deck of a small steamer, should never have
detected any resemblance to a pair of spectacles.
But here we are at Baddeck, a village of 1500 souls,
built on land sloping upwards from the land-locked
harbour. There is here yet no large summer caravanserai—such
as I had expected to find—adorned with
spacious verandas, pretty girls, and a Blue Caledonian
orchestra; but there is plenty of accommodation in smaller
hotels and boarding houses, and I am bound to say one
meets some very nice people in Baddeck. Amongst them
was a Harvard professor and his two daughters, and a
Brooklyn yachtsman with his two yachts, and it would
be hard to say which was the fairer, yacht or damsel;
although as regards the young lady who discussed with
me Dr. Wallis Budge’s quartos on _The Gods of Egypt_, none
might allege that _she_ was in any sense fast.
O young lady by the shores of Baddeck, take thy Budge
with thee into the wilderness and hook the romping trout,
or paddle the gay canoes with Budge under thy shapely
arm and the gods of Egypt in thy brain, for in such wise
only may any fair Bostonian unbend and frolic with Chloe
while offering at the shrine of Minerva! If it is true that
I chaffed thee, why
“... Nunc ego mitibus
Multare quaero tristia, dum mihi
Fias recantatis amica
Opprobriis, animumque reddas.”
From Baddeck many in the season set out for the
salmon pools of the Margary River, thirty miles distant,
over a good road, and to numerous trout lakes much
nearer at hand. Sea trout fishing, of course, may be had
at Baddeck. All this is Victoria County, a great slab of
territory which runs straight northward to Cape North and
St. Lawrence Bay.
One returns to Iona and Grand Narrows, and entrains for
Sydney and the east. I shall not quickly forget the railway
station at Grand Narrows on account of a curious custom
which prevails at this place. The refreshment room is
managed by a gentleman with a large family. All trains
stop here twenty minutes for dinner and supper. A
sonorous bell is rung. The doors are opened, and a flock
of hungry travellers troop in at fifty cents a head to
discover, not without chagrin, the restaurateur’s family at
dinner occupying the best places and already hard at work.
“It gives ’em an unfair start,” complained a commercial
traveller to me as he filled his pipe. “By the time I’d
located the dining-room, although I sprinted down the
platform as hard as I could go, I was sixty seconds too
late, and—there was only dough-nuts left!”
Which reminds one of the swift gastronomic feats which
greeted the eyes of Chuzzlewit on his arrival in New York
seventy years ago.
I must not forget to mention that there is held here
annually under the broad and open sky, Nature’s own great
cathedral, a famous Gaelic Communion service.
Amongst this Gaelic population are counted many
bards, inspired men who compose epic ballads as they
did centuries ago and do still in the land of Ossian. And
the songs of the Highlands, the “Fhir a Ohata,” the
“Tamhuil mòr, mac sheann Tamhuil,” still float out upon
the air; while the traditions of old Highland feuds or the
Jacobite risings of ‘15 or ‘45 still linger, eked out by such
visible memorials as one may see, beside the rude chimneypiece—an
ancient dirk or a rusty claymore that some long-vanished
ancestor had flourished at Culloden or Falkirk.
But few of the aboriginal red men, the Micmacs, crossed
my path in Cape Breton, and those that did were very
much civilised. One stalwart specimen who travelled with
me to Mira River wore a starched high collar, and was
ready to discuss such questions as Home Rule for Ireland
with me. To find the Micmacs in any number one must
seek out their settlements, chiefly about the Bras d’Or,
or attend one of their annual reunions. Years ago the
Micmacs professed subjection to the Mohawks, and used
to send a deputation in a canoe up the St. Lawrence to
pay homage to the chiefs of that tribe in Canada.
A century or two ago they were savage warriors in the
pay of the French, and gave the English a great deal of
trouble in the eastern and south-eastern parts of Cape
Breton, and were especially active in scalping any survivors
of wrecked vessels which came their way. Nor did they
go unrewarded by titles and dignities. There is still, I
believe, in existence a parchment commission, signed by
Louis XV., conferring on a certain savage the kingship
of the tribe, which is preserved by his collateral descendants;
and there is more than one medal of honour
yet worn emanating from the same exalted source. To-day,
however, the Cape Breton Micmacs are no longer
distinguished for ferocity; such pleasing mementoes as
English scalps have been solemnly burned before the
camp-fire; they have proved amenable to religion, they
have taken kindly to farming on reserved lands, and the
few hundreds who survive seem on the whole very honest,
sober, and good-natured.
It happened at Christmas Island station. There was
an island opposite, long and low, with firs at either end,
and there were newly-made green-clad furrows upon it.
Between it and the mainland was a lagoon formed by a
low reef, upon which a number of thrifty cattle grazed
peacefully. In the water adjoining was the skeleton of a
vessel—perhaps some ship which had been driven ashore
in a winter storm. In the distance the clouds hung so
low as to shut out the base of a range of dark green hills.
“Why is it called Christmas Island?” I enquired of
the girl, who seemed about eighteen, with a comely face and
a profusion of dark chestnut hair. She was dressed in
some light muslin or poplin stuff, and upon her feet she
wore a pair of something which puzzled me at first, until
I recognised in them the saffron-coloured football boots
of Northampton. They were several sizes too large for
her; and I have no doubt the damsel marvelled much
at their shape and colour, but was reconciled by the
thought that they were the latest fashion in the Old
World “across yonder.”
To my question she replied:
“Oh, I think it’s because they discovered it on Christmas
Day. The Indians go there to hold their feast every
year.”
We strolled together to a small cottage marked “Post
Office.”
“I am waiting for the mail to be sorted,” volunteered
my companion.
“You expect a letter?” I asked.
She blushed and nodded.
“Is _he_ far away?”
She answered: “Mother and me are always ‘expecting
letters.’ You see, I have two brothers in the steel works at
Sydney, another out in Manitoba, and father’s mostly away
fishing.”
“And _he_?” I persisted.
“Oh, _he_?” She laughed. “Well, I don’t get any
letters from _him_. He’s a brakeman on the Intercolonial,
and I can see him every day if I like. I’ve written a piece
for a prize poetry competition in a Boston paper, and I’m
wonderin’ if I’ll get my five dollars _or if it’s only a snide_.”
One other scene of a different kind I should like to give,
because it will always live in my memory. It was of an
aged, yet stalwart Highlander, who in early youth had
migrated to the new Inverness across the ocean. I watched
him as he sat by the roadside with his little granddaughter
on his knee; and she told me afterwards he was singing to
her (as he often did) a little Gaelic song he had sung sixty
odd years ago over the grave of his mother and his first
sweetheart, which he had dug with his own hands. It was
a year of famine in Cape Breton, but he had not lost
courage. At first he had hardly missed the heather, “but
now grandfather’s hopin’ to see the heather again—across
yonder.”