Nova Scotia Read online

But this is also a province of people who still long for the good old days, the Golden Age of Sail, that sort of thing. Not far from where seventy-foot schooners once sailed their way along this coast on serious business, I now scoot along with the wind in a mere plaything of a sailing ship, less than five metres long with a hull of fibreglass and a Dacron sail. I’m a novice in the hands of the wind and grow to respect its many moods as I tack east and west, learning that the quickest route from point A to point B is not necessarily a straight line. *

  In my immediate neighbourhood, whole headlands have been and gone in a matter of decades. Human history has made only a little dent in this community on the Eastern Shore, a mere thirty-two kilometres from the city of Halifax. But the sea has carved and scraped the coast with such serious intent that cartographers might just as well start all over with their work of aerial mapping every five years. The sea has created the history of this place more than colonial politics, more than Confederation and even more than all the demands of the twenty-first century. To live by this powerful North Atlantic is to be intimate with the dreams and fears of seafaring men who sailed this coast and also to laugh with the gulls or shudder with the pounding waves at the many facets of the ocean.

  Wind and water and wave. Three of the great personal and literary influences in my life. I share a passion for the sea with the fishermen and sailors of the previous centuries, but I doubt that I have suffered the hards hips that they have. I started surfing when I was thirteen, further south on a warmer shore. Now I surf a cold but immaculate wave, summer or winter, a stone’s throw from my doorstep. The waves form as the wind pushes against the water some 160 kilometres off shore. The storm subsides, but the waves drive on through deep waters until they reach a stony reef along the rib of land that is Lawrencetown Beach. If I’ve walked the morning shoreline and observed that the waves are plentiful, then I give up my meditative trek along the sand and put on my wetsuit, grab my board and paddle out to meet them. As they rear and sometimes rage in their final challenge of the coastline, I paddle hard and tag along to tap their strength and energy. If you don’t mind cold water, Nova Scotia is a surfing paradise. The waves make their long pilgrimage here and rise up from the depths as they hit the shallows along the shore. In their end is my beginning, because I begin as many days as possible out on the beach or out on the waves and I feed off their positive energy until I am fully recharged for another day of work.

  Lawrencetown itself, for all of its obscurity, is a place of historic beginnings, and my link to the past here is my relationship to the elements that shape this place. As for all of Nova Scotia, the sea has demanded pre-eminence in the history books, even in the story of this town.

  The first peoples of this province, the Mi’kmaq, came to my beach in the summers for fish and mussels, and the salt-water lake beyond my garden was known as Negsogwakade or the “place of the eel traps.” This was a fertile, generous destination to spend the warm summer months feeding on eels, gaspereaux, smelt, salmon, clams, quahogs and waterfowl. But each year, the Mi’kmaq sensibly retreated away from the coast, further into the spruce forests to avoid the hostility of winter storms.

  Early attempts by Europeans to settle Lawrencetown ended in failure. The first white people to try and make a go of it were the French. They were not as intrusive as the English who were to follow and did not mind that this area had no great harbour for big ships. English surveyor-general Charles Morris, in his official report of 1752, missed the advantages of this area altogether, reporting that “the harbour to the [French] settlementf is but indifferent, it being a salt water river or creek, with a shoal at its entrance.” The Acadian settlers, however, had already been finding sustenance from the fish and shellfish and most likely built an aboiteau, a style of dyke, so as to control the tidal flow on the marsh and allow for plentiful salt hay. a

  In search of the remains of anything Acadian, my daughters and I have often set sail in my second-hand Laser across the wide, shallow base of Lawrencetown Lake, which drains into the sea. The forest has long since swallowed up anything remotely resembling a community. There are no signs of the Acadians.

  To simply name a place is to instil a level of significance to that geography, to foster a history or a mythology (sometimes it’s hard to separate the two). I’m thinking of this town named for Lawrence. I can’t say that I’m happy about who we are named after. Charles Lawrence was an English military leader who governed Nova Scotia in the 1750s. Considered by many of his peers to be a military genius and great commander, history at various times paints a picture of a man of heroic proportions. Rethinking the past, we see a different man altogether. For it was Lawrence who ordered the deportation of all Acadians in Nova Scotia and the burning of their farms.

  Worse yet, Mi’kmaq historian Dan Paul points out that there is a reasonable case to be made in comparing Governor Lawrence to Adolf Hitler for his effective program of mass genocide. In Lawrence’s proclamation of May 14, 1756, he issued “a reward of £30 for every male Indian Prisoner above the age of sixteen years, brought in alive; or for a scalp of such male Indian £25 and £25 for every Indian woman or child brought in alive.” Dan Paul points out that women and children were probably not spared the scalping as it was often not possible to determine the sex or the age of the valued scalp. s

  And so I feel some sympathy for those currently in the province lobbying to rename the towns that have immortalized some of our most barbaric founders. Some of my surfer friends refer to this place simply as “Larry town,” a lighter moniker to place on the geography than that of the man who caused so much human grief to the French and Mi’kmaq.

  It was in 1754 that Governor Lawrence and his council decided to create a settlement in Lawrencetown. He granted 20,000 acres of Mi’kmaq and French land and was even willing to underwrite the cost of settlement, providing not only land but soldiers, cattle, sheep and pigs. A road was cut from Dartmouth and a stockade of sorts built. Concerned about the moral character of the first citizens of Lawrencetown, Lawrence declared that those chosen must be “sober and industrious people, rather than crowd their settlement first with worthless wretches.” An argument had also been put forward that the creation of the settlement of Lawrencetown would give the Native people a foe in their own backyard and perhaps dissuade them from travelling further down the road to harass the thriving communities of Dartmouth and Halifax. d

  The fort went up near the river here, the French apparently having moved on or been driven off. The Mi’kmaq were not so easily put aside. Bloody fights broke out between the Englishmen building the palisades and the Mi’kmaq men who could not abide this invasion of their homeland. Four settlers and three soldiers were killed. The settlement persisted, however, until one year into the Seven Years’ War. On Thursday, August 25, 1757, a new order went out to withdraw settlers and troops and burn Lawrencetown to the ground. It was simply a burden on the limited finances of the colony, too costly and difficult to defend. Not everyone left. But by 1767, there were only fifteen people living in and around Lawrencetown: four English, one Scot, three Americans and five Germans. Animals were a bit more abundant with eight oxen, thirty cows, eighteen cattle for meat, fifteen pigrs and some chickens.

  In later years, despite the influx of Loyalists to Nova Scotia, Lawrencetown did not flourish. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in 1808, indicated that there were only fifty people in the entire area.

  Today Lawrencetown has a population of less than 3,000 souls. Despite the fact that we live not far from the suburbs, growth here has never been dramatic. In the summÝer, fog sits heavy on the land for weeks or even months, discouraging those who would rather be in the sunlight, a mere nine kilometres inland. In some ways, the sea has conjured this cloaking device to protect us from rapid growth. The water is cold as well. Even on an inviting summer day, the sea might still stab at your feet with what feels like hot knives, the water is so bloody cold. But this has not discouraged the many fellow wave riders who come here from Australia
, England, South Africa, California and Hawaii to discover the unique and ecstatic business of surfing cold pure North Atlantic waves at the foot of a ragged headland.

  Lawrencetown Beach has been recognized before as a place of beginnings. In the early 1960s, the National Film Board was out here shooting the opening scenes of a film called The Railrodder, where Buster Keaton emerges from the sea riding a bicycle up onto the shore. Not far away he catches the train and he’s off for a trek across Canada.

  The train no longer travels by the beach. About sixteen years ago I watched a work crew tear up the tracks. The ties were sold for landscaping, the iron sent for scrap. The steel rail that tethered this place to the rest of Canada is gone. A forgotten steel spike or two and a trail of cinder and rock are all that remain. The old railroad bed is now a good place to ride mountain bikes with my kids as it snakes its way past the beach and along the shores of a brief Acadia and across to the site of Lawrence’s military attempt to control this place.

  But from what I can tell, all efforts to fully civilize and tame this shore have failed. Each winter the sea undoes the boardwalk and at least one storm will send wave plumes crashing down on the road by the headland. Protective boulders weighing tons, hauled here from inland to save the highway from extinction, groan and shift and sometimes give up and roll off into the deep. Even as the sea carves and reshapes this coast, it has reshaped my own life as well. As a result, I feel twinned with the history of this province, this Nova Scotia that has been both victim and benefactor of the North Atlantic that surrounds us.

  The sea, along with the weather that belongs to the sea, has been the great dictator of history in Nova Scotia. The foggy, cold weather where I live continues to slow the pace of development and progress. While Canadians across the continent consider moving to warmer places like coastal British Columbia, relatively few think of moving to the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia because of the relentless effects of the sea. Were it not for the stiff southerly flow of the cold Labrador Current pushing the Gulf Stream away, we’d have a climate more like continental Europe. And the history here would be a whole other matter.

  But things are getting warmer. For good or bad, the planet is changing and I can see these changes in my own lifetime. Every so often a monster of a tropical storm even lashes this coast and reminds Nova Scotians how little power we have over elemental forces, cold or warm. The classic case is the Saxby Gale of October 4, 1869, which hit the Fundy area the hardest and ripped up miles of forests near that coast. A more recent example is Hurricane Juan a Category 2 hurricane that plowed through Halifax and Nova Scotia on its way to Prince Edward Island in 2003.

  This book is very much about the sea and about the people of Nova Scotia. It is episodic by design and parcelled up into small units for easy digestibility. As I researched and wrote this project, the weight of history has sat heavily upon me as I found myself discovering more about what went wrong than what went right. There is joy here but there is also a long legacy of hardship and despair. Maybe the same can be said of the history of any part of the world.

  The story of Nova Scotia inevitably encompasses the political and military conflicts involving the British, the French and the Americans. It also embraces the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians, the Blacks and the many immigrants whto have found their way here. While war appears to be such a potent ingredient of this province’s history, I have found myself less interested in military or political strategies and more intrigued by motives, personalities and the lives of civilians directly affected by war and politics. Rascals, rebels, reasoned men, feisty women, financial schemers and relentless dreamers have all shaped the human history of Nova Scotia. Despite my great love for this place, I was not about to cover up the legacy of tragedy and the flaws in our decision-making that have led to the ravaging of the sea and forest, the tragedies of Africville and Boat Harbour, as well as the sad fate of so many coal-mine casualties.

  I have tried to create a book that would be of value to both readers who live here and those who have never set foot on Nova Scotian soil. For the record, I own up to certain biases that have shaped the story. Anything and everything regarding the sea was of paramount interest. Those individuals whose lives were enmeshed with the North Atlantic are given plenty of ink.

  While the book is primarily organized in a chronological manner, I have felt the need to fashion specialized chapters about single subjects in order to provide a clear perspective on such topics as the early Acadians, coal mining or the death of the fishery.

  The history of Nova Scotia is deep and broad and could be told in many volumes instead of one. Hard decisions were made as to what to leave in and what to leave out. I don’t believe there is such a thing as “objective history.” I have attempted to tell the story as truthfully as I could, but I agree with Samuel Johnson’s observation that “Every man has a right to utter what he thinks is truth, and every other man has the right to knock him down for it.” Thus I offer up not only what appears to be fact, but also some opinions where I see the need to cheer the heroes on and curse the scoundrels as I see fit. My hope always has been to inform, entertain and exercise the writer’s prerogative to question when necessary. t

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 2

  The Drowned Coast

  As I walk along the shoreline near my home, I am walking on a part of the continent that will be gone all too soon. It will be covered with water; the sea will have both risen and washed away the sand and rocks beneath my feet. I live on what geologists call a “drowned coast.” It’s drowning slowly – or rapidly if you want to figure it in geological time. Someday the people of Lawrencetown and Halifax and other coastal communities will have to retreat. It’s that simple. I think it’s a fair reminder to those of us who live here what a tenuous hold we have on this place. The sea is still ultimately dictating the future and I’m happy for that.

  Someday “Farewell to Nova Scotia” will have a different meaning altogether. But then, much of the coastal world will have changed too. The seas are rising, the polar caps are melting. Or it could go the other way. Anorther ice age might actually help the continent to advance back into the ocean.

  Continents in Collision

  It’s always good to begin a history at the beginning, so just to set the record straight, I’ll mention that the earth is about four and a half billion years old. The first four billion years are not really recorded in Nova Scotia rocks, so I can’t enlighten you much about these early days. Continents tend to build up from the centre and we’re way out here on the edge, so our rocks are fairly young – prepubescent even. The oldest rocks stashed in the earth here are 570 million years old.

  Now for the interesting part. Barrie Clarke, professor of geology at Dalhousie University, points out to me that the real history of Nova Scotia begins in Morocco. What? you say. Morocco? Yes, as in Africa, or to be more precise, its predecessor, the extinct supercontinent of Gondwana.

  From his office at Dal, Barrie points outside to some loose rock walls that divide the campus. “See those stones out there? Those are sedimentary rocks and the sediments didn’t come from the rest of this continent. They came from Morocco.”

  I tell him that it looks like the same loose slate that my house is built on. “Sure,” he says. “You’re living on a chip of Africa.” And suddenly I feel a whole new heritage coming on that I’d never known. “The rock is made from material shed off the Saharan Shield and collecting on the margin of Gondwana – deposited sediment from 500 million years ago.”

  Gondwana was in the southern hemisphere and it was equatorial. But that was where my property was way back then. It started out as warm, dry desert land.

  Not all of Nova Scotia was African. There’s an identifiable place on the Trans-Canada Highway where you leave the geology of old North America and enter into the leftovers of Gondwana. “There should be a sign on the highway near Londonderry,” Clarke suggests. “Put up an information centre and hire a couple of students to say, ‘You ar
e now entering Africa.’” Barrie’s been to Morocco. “Geologically speaking,” he says, “it feels just like home.”

  I dug a well in my backyard once and hacked away at a lot of this African slate. It chipped and shattered and some of it was peppered with iron pyrite. I thought I’d found gold but it was the fool’s variety. I never understood why the slate didn’t lie flat; the sheets of it are nearly upright. It all had to with continental collisions. Yes, collisions. Bang – real slowly. Two continents literally crashing into each other. “Stuff gets reatlly crumpled in a collision,” Barrie says. “It gets pushed around from its original place. Some of it standing on end. Slate used to be mud, fine silts from the Sahara that got compressed then jacked upright.” ve

  The fault line in Nova Scotia, our own San Andreas, runs from Chedabucto Bay to the Bay of Fundy. There’s a gorge along part of it. Everything on my side of that line is from Africa. Gondwana was jammed up against the old continent here, then pulled apart. Stuff got dragged along in its wake, and this chunk was left behind to give me Moroccan slate to carve a well into. I’ll be darned. The big collision of the supercontinents happened about 400 million years ago. Three hundred million years ago, Nova Scotia was still on the equator and the pulling apart happened about 200 million years ago.

  All that dragging apart and leaving behind has something to do with the ragged coastal shape of Nova Scotia, but the backbone of this place is solid granite – granite that had been in Africa/Gondwana for one and a half billion years before being left behind here as the supercontinent cruised slowly away. Barrie pulls out a geological map of the province and points to something “– a “tension fracture” that almost broke and took the land back to Africa. It was a close call. We could have lost almost all of Nova Scotia.

  I’m suddenly afraid that I don’t have the whole picture. Do I really have the story from the very beginning? So he explains that in the beginning, the earth was hot, molten until the outer surface “froze,” solidified and became a crust-like scum rising to the top of something boiling and then hardening there. Lavas keep breaking through, then solidifying. The earth, he points out, is always recycling, refining. “We’re a dynamic planet – destroying, recreating.”