# The Tourist's Maritime Provinces/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
YARMOUTH—BARRINGTON—SHELBURNE LIVERPOOL—BRIDGEWATER—LUNENBURG CHESTER—HUBBARDS
Yarmouth's excuse for being is the sea. All its pleasures and most of its industries are maritime. Its climate is tempered by ocean currents that refresh its gardens and verdure in summer and mitigate the winter cold experienced in other cities of the same latitude. Its geographical position has influenced Yarmouth's selection as the terminus of three lines of importance to those who tour the Provinces. Boston is but seventeen hours away by the "Boston and Yarmouth's" steamer schedule. The Dominion Atlantic trains leaving the wharf pursue one route to Halifax, the Halifax and Southwestern road offers quite another through the Atlantic coast towns of lower Nova Scotia.
This sea-port has an English flavour explained by its shipping, its ship-building and repairing, its colony of ship captains, and the hawthorne hedges that fence the lawns, green as England's. Its main thoroughfare is dreary as an English High Street, and about the wharves may be heard the ​sailor accent of Devon and Cornwall. Yarmouth, though it is the channel through which pass streams of American tourists, has imbibed little from its neighbour and best patron but a certain un-British crispness in its shops.
Before the Revolutionary War, families from Cape Cod emigrated to the shore of the deeply-indented Yarmouth Sound. The name is probably descended from the River Yar in England. The Indians thought Land's End, Keespougwitk, an appropriate appellation, as do we, looking on the map. Yarmouth nourishes the tradition that "the frith" of Leif sagas "which penetrated far into the country," and the "island past which there ran strong currents" were its harbour and Bunker Island at the mouth. But it is made very clear by Scandinavian interpreters that the currents and the frith had to do with Nantucket Island and Buzzard's Bay. Leif, Erik's son, and his crew of thirty-five Icelanders did disembark on the shore they named Markland, but there is no record in the sagas that these voyagers of a thousand years ago rounded the southern coast of the Nova Scotian peninsula before continuing to Vinland the Good. Some years ago a 400-pound boulder was taken from the ground at a place opposite Yarmouth. Mysterious characters were engraved upon it which appeared to some to resemble the square letters of the runic alphabet, employed by the earliest Teutons. One Henry Phillips avowed that the ​sentence which he spelled Harkussen men varu should be accepted as indisputable evidence that the Norsemen had deposited this stone in souvenir of their landing: "Haka's son addressed the men." In proof, he and his co-believers cite the record that Thorfinn Karlsefne was accompanied by one called Haki when he visited this coast in 1007. The stone was exposed at Bay View Park, and later at the Library rooms. Some months ago the so-called runic monument was sent for temporary exhibition in Norway. William Hovgaard, a Danish naval officer and the most recent authority to speak on the subject of Norse voyages to this continent, declares in a volume published in 1914 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation that the Yarmouth stone is a petroglyph of Indian origin similar to the much-discussed Dighton Rock found a century ago in the Taunton River, Massachusetts. Another pseudo-monument of the Northmen was found in 1898 near Kensington, Minnesota, but has been pronounced a rather modern forgery.
Once the fifth port in the world in point of tonnage owned there, Yarmouth has declined in the statistical scale through the evolution of ships from the wooden to the steel and iron age. Nearly all the pioneer inhabitants skippered their own vessels, and ship owning and sailing laid the corner-stone for the quite obvious wealth of the town. The halls and living-rooms of many homes are adorned with paintings of the Fortune in full sail.
​In November, 1849, a brigantine named Mary Jane set sail for California and going around the Horn arrived in San Francisco Bay six months later bearing its crew of Yarmouth gold-seekers.
About 20,000,000 feet of lumber is loaded annually at Yarmouth's docks for South American ports. Of lobsters there were exported from Yarmouth County nearly 2,000,000 pounds during the season 1913-1914, and 14,000 cases of canned lobster. A thousand men are engaged on this immediate coast fishing for lobster and cod, their fleet consisting of over half a hundred motor-boats. A great cotton factory employs 18,000 spindles making sail duck, the output amounting to 3,000,000 pounds a year.
At Benjamin Doane's shop a little south of the busiest part of the main street, autumn visitors will discover a characteristic industry. Here are moose heads in every state of disarray fresh from the hands of their slayers. It is interesting to observe the different processes of taxidermy by which an antlered trophy is evolved from the natural state.
The drives through outlying country, as well as in Yarmouth town, are especially delightful because of the superior roads and the changing views of marsh, river, bay and crags, fishing hamlets, farms, lakes, hills and the open sea. "The Churn" on the far side of Bay View Park is a fascinating demonstration of the rage of waves ​when trapped in a rocky trough. The drive consumes about half an hour from the centre of the town. Markland, across the Bar on Cape Fourchu, is surrounded by the swirl of Fundy, the ocean and the harbour, and is therefore a desirable place for a summer sojourn. The Milton Lakes are reached by carriage or tram. The road passes through pleasant villages overlooked by the Highlands. Further north, rocky Port Maitland faces both the Bay and the Atlantic from its position on the wind-beaten coast. When the hotel at this point is open, there is daily communication with Yarmouth by stage, a distance of 12 miles.
A drive of a dozen miles brings one to Chebogue Point, at the junction of the ocean and the firth of, the Chebogue River. Another delightful motorride includes the lovely lake country, the strawberry-beds, the ale-wife streams, the Indian encampments and Acadian villages about Tusket, due east of Yarmouth.
The Halifax and Southwestern line leaves Yarmouth from a diminutive station near the lower end of the town. A coast shattered by legions of bights and inlets and showered by a rain of islands extends from Acadia to the Scotch Argyles. The area north and south of the railway is composed of more water than land—probably there is not such a mosaic of lakes and bays to be seen elsewhere in the world.
​At Central and Lower Argyle a clear view of the islands of the Tusket delta is revealed from the car windows. The road descends to Pubnico station at the apex of a deep indraught whose banks bristle with more Pubnicos,—"West," "Middle West," "Lower West," "East," "Lower East" and Pubnico Beach. Another village wears the name of d'Entremont who in 1650 brought French emigrants to this shore. A hundred years later, expelled Acadians were allowed to exchange their tilled lands for uncleared grants on the edge of Pubnico Harbour. Their descendants are the fishermen and small farmers of the region hereabouts,—a tract of principal interest to sportsmen.
Upper Woods Harbour, Woods Harbour and Shag Harbour are the first stations across the Shelburne County line. The road which has dropped almost due south to this point inclines upward now to Barrington Passage, a wee village swept by salt breezes where one might linger a whole summer in peace and contentment. Cape Sable Island which fills the mouth of Barrington Bay, is just across the Passage. A ferry steamer runs several times a day to the little ports on the Island's shores. At Clark's Harbour there are hotels which receive tourists. Fertile farms and rich fishing-banks bring prosperity to the denizens.
TUNA HARPOONED OFF LOCKEPORT, HALIFAX AND SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY
​Cape Sable is the isolated jutty south of the island which Champlain found "very dangerous for certain rocks and reefs lying out nearly a mile in the ocean," and here Leif Erikson is thought to have landed. Concealed ledges and savage currents snarl at the keels of ships that creep along this notorious coast. Vessels steering a course twenty-five miles away from Seal Island (a few leagues west of Cape Sable) find themselves ten miles north of it, so overwhelming are the currents that eddy about the rounded point of the peninsula and carry into Fundy over the ledges of Seal Island, Devil's Limb, and Black Rock. One of the first steamers to cross the Atlantic, the 300-horsepower Columbia of the Cunard Line, went ashore on Devil's Limb while in transit between Boston and Halifax in 1843. Eighty-five passengers were put ashore on Seal Island and were later removed under the supervision of the Honourable Samuel Cunard who came from Halifax to the scene of the wreck.
The horse mackerel or tuna is caught in great quantities off the coast of the mainland and Cape Island. Nearly 200,000 pounds were taken in traps or weirs in the month of July, 1914, between Barrington and Yarmouth. When the tuna is harpooned—small ones weigh two hundred pounds here—the spear is attached to a rope wound around a keg. At the drawing of the herring nets a fish is cast out as bait. The tuna rises, is struck with a harpoon aimed from the ​boat, the keg is thrown overboard to avoid swamping the dory, and the giant mackerel makes off. If the harpoon has taken effect, he is towed into shore and there dissected, to be exported to the States either fresh or in cans.
Among the earliest of the pre-Loyalists who came to Nova Scotia was a band of emigrants from Cape Cod who arrived at Barrington in 1761. The church which they built four years later is said to be the oldest in Canada retaining its original materials and form.
A road leads down shore from Barrington station to the village whose name commemorates brave Charles La Tour. From a fort built on the edge of the bay he defended in 1627 the rights of France against his own father, who through bestowal of vast Acadian baronies by Sir William Alexander had been converted to the cause of England. Claude de St. Etienne la Tour and his wife, whom he had lately married at the court of the British sovereign, were permitted to live outside the fortifications, but never to enter them after the defeat administered by the son. Fort St. Louis was dismantled in 1755. Port La Tour may also be visited from Port Clyde at the head of Negro Harbour. Daily stages run from both Barrington and Port Clyde to the site of the fort.
Beyond the mouth of the Clyde River, the railway ascends the coast in sight of cliff and beach, gulf ​and foreland, and at last brings into view the tranquil harbour of dreams, the Bay of Shelburne.
In April, 1783, eighteen square-rigged vessels flying the British flag left New York. The five thousand passengers were Tory refugees from the thirteen colonies. After a voyage of a week's duration the fleet sighted Cape Sable, then bore to the north-east and entered the postern of a peculiarly long and beautiful basin. On the right bank, at the head of the harbour, the company disembarked their chattels, not the least valued of which were the surveying instruments that were to plot a new city. Streets were named and houses built in disproportion to the inhabitants already arrived, but Shelburne, so named for the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, later Marquis of Lansdowne, was a city built upon faith—and the foundations were fashioned strong. This was to be the major port of Nova Scotia, exceeding Halifax in commerce and power. Previously, a French colony, and an Irish one called New Jerusalem had proven unsuccessful on this site. But this did not daunt the Royalists, who came in increasing numbers until a community of over 10,000 people dwelt inside the bounds of the new-born city. Several million dollars were expended by the optimists who were content to live without labour so long as the Government rations and their own means lasted. Many families brought their slaves; one master had fifty-seven. A Tory Utopia was here, bathed in the ​glow of royal approval. But too soon the truth was established that men may not prosper in idleness. Within five years the spacious plots and parks, the wide avenues and luxurious mansions were deserted. Many banked the fires of loyalty and returned to the United States to retrieve dwindled fortunes. In 1818, there were three hundred inhabitants. Oak beams and mahogany mantels were used for fuel. Only a square-towered church, the so-called "Governor's House" on King Street and a few minor dwellings linger to remind us of the vanished Shelburne. A few black faces, too, from the slave settlement at Birchtown.
For half a century the town lay moribund, peopled by gaping houses. It was not until over half a century had passed that a germ of life stirred in the ashes. To-day, a town founded on hopes strengthened by labour bears the name of its defunct predecessor.
The inhabitants build schooners, tugs and life-saving dories, and go down to the sea in their own ships to fish.
The proudest relic the new town inherited from the old is the apparatus presented by George III to his subjects in token of their fealty and to help keep their span-new city from burning down. The most efficient contrivance then known for fighting flames was paraded with great eclat upon its arrival from London. In our eyes it is a dwarf cart set low on solid wooden wheels. The body contains ​a hose and a water-tub, above which are a few feeble buckets suspended from rods.
Northward from Jordan Falls is another of those garlands of lakes which with their contiguous forests and barrens make of this country a virgin game preserve. Lockeport, on an island four miles from the railroad, has a fine bathing beach commanding a glorious view.
The rounding bay of Port Mouton received the barks of the earliest colonials. De Monts so christened it because in loading sheep here one struggled and fell overboard—disaster momentous enough in that time of random provisioning. De Monts had been given by Henry IV the trading rights of all Acadie but when he arrived in May, 1604, at the harbour which is next to Port Mouton on the north, he found Captain Rossignol from Havre de Grace "bartering with the savages against the edicts of the King." Whereupon, writes Lescarbot, his ship was seized, but the port was given his name. Haliburton declared the town of Liverpool, founded on this harbour in 1759 by Plymouth Rock stock was "the best built in Nova Scotia" having "an air of regularity and neatness." Many among the inhabitants grew rich from smuggling and privateering during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The oddly gabled house of Captain Sylvanus Cobb is the chief monument of this orderly town. That his title was not idly assumed is evidenced by the records ​which show him commander of a vessel before Louisbourg in 1745, and of another which transported Acadians from Grand Pré. Lastly, he was Wolfe's pilot up the St. Lawrence in the memorable year, 1758.
Three miles up the Liverpool or Mersey River are "the falls," a term frequently applied in the Provinces to rapids or "white water," where canoes finish the journey from the Liverpool chain, Lake Kedgemakoogee and Lake Rossignol by way of Indian Gardens. The last-named lake is the largest sheet of fresh water in Nova Scotia, having an area of about a hundred square miles.
Medway is the station for Port Medway which spells tuna fishing to the rodsman. Salmon enter the Medway River from the Atlantic and go up stream to spawn. Fishermen are outfitted at Mill Village, 12 miles from the railroad.
A map issued by the Department of Mines shows both the shore and back country of this region well starred with yellow. There is a gold mine on the county line between Queens and Lunenburg, and several others close to the railroad. The amazing statement is made that one-half the total area of Nova Scotia is in gold-bearing rock. Gold was first discovered in the early sixties, a captain of artillery having come upon the quartz while moose-hunting in Halifax County. There are now about twenty-five mines in operation. Almost 1,000,000 ounces have been produced during the fifty years ​that gold mining has been prosecuted in the province. Until recently only the surface cropping was reaped, but more efficient methods are now being introduced in easy-going Nova Scotia whose inhabitants are proverbially negligent of the land because so blessed in the harvest of the sea.
Bridgewater adorns the banks of "the largest and most beautiful river in Nova Scotia," the La Have, at whose ostiary some of the eminent events in early Acadian history took place. The fathers who planned the town benevolently left a part of the forest standing for the benefit of posterity. The streets are broad, well-paved and deeply shaded. The natural park which encloses the tombs of the dead is beautifully terraced by the hand of the Creator and contains a pond of drifting lilies. Many of the monuments in the silent wood bear names of German families who first arrived in Lunenburg, and later came to Bridgewater.
German thrift is exemplified in musty documents preserved in the small but very interesting museum housed in the building nearly opposite Clark's Hotel. The original collections were bequeathed by Judge des Brisay, a descendant of Cotton Mather and historian of Lunenburg County. Among the exhibits is an ancient tract on frugality which reads thus: "Sir you borrowed a bottle of me last summer and I want it and if you do not return it within ten days from this date I shall sue you for it without further notice." The bottle so ​much desired was a common black flagon which had been loaned to a neighbour to carry home a measure of fish oil. Law suits are still a source of diversion in the "Huckleberry Courts" which are held in rural magistrate's houses. Within recent years a prolonged action amused the country-side in which the plaintiff spent three hundred dollars to get satisfaction from a neighbour who had appropriated fifty cents' worth of waste wood from the yard of a saw mill. Says the curator of the little museum, "Were the tribunal in the centre of a marsh, isolated ten miles from creation, there would be a press about the doors on trial day." This litigious quality among the farmers does not, however, affect the kindness of heart and the hospitality of a people whose gates are always wide to friend and stranger.
On the wall of the museum is a portrait of the Reverend Bruin Romkes Comingo, first Protestant minister to be ordained in Canada. The ordination took place at Halifax in July, 1770. The cases contain fine specimens of native amethysts and agates. Lobster giants of thirty years ago are shown, their claws two feet long from tip to body. Nova Scotia decapods of the present are degenerates in proportion. A formal bill of lading issued a hundred years ago is prefaced: "Shipped, by the Grace of God, in good order and well conditioned by Collins and Allison, in and upon the good ship called The Swallow, whereof is master, ​under God, for this present voyage Edward Crosby, and now riding at Anchor in the Harbour of Halifax and by God's Grace bound for Yarmouth."
A road of enchantment follows the margin of the broad La Have toward the Atlantic. The river is the outlet of seven lakes which pour their limpid flood through this vale
With lilt of life and venture to the sea.
Moored to river docks are tall ships come from Argentine or from Scandinavia to load the lumber of interior forests. A writer of eighty-five years ago gives the situation of thirty saw mills operated by this imposing river. In those days vessels were towed to their piers by oxen, travelling slow on the edge of the swift-running stream. The drive through Conquerall Bank twists like a country lane past farm houses whose door-yards are surrendered to fish flakes, where flag-staffs are rigged like masts and weather vanes are gilded fish. Sails are drying from the limbs of trees that overhang a nest of dories. Rocky tongues of land edged with picture pines have fishing-boats moored near them. Across the river are vivid green hills creviced by valleys and a-glitter with new barns and trim homesteads.
The prospect heightens in majesty as the road ​approaches the ocean at Port La Have, 12 miles from Bridgewater. A grass-bordered way diverges from the main drive, passes a plot where larkspur and foxglove bloom on low mounds, and ends at a wooden range light, whose tower forms a wing of the keeper's dwelling. Behind, a narrow gate swings outward to a promontory whose abraded embankment looks to the ocean. A search about the sandy base may discover a flat red brick or two from the bastions of Razilly's stockade.
Lescarbot is known to have landed here on his way from Port Royal to Canso in the year 1607. Six years later, an expedition outfitted by Madame the Marquise of Guercheville called at this port, planted a cross and went on to Port Royal. Isaac de Razilly, Knight Commander of St. John of Jerusalem, was chief of the Brittany fleet chosen to restore Acadia to the French after the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye. His associates were his cousin, Charles of Charnisay, and Nicholas Denys, the historian and voyageur. Esteeming La Have a more advantageous location for his forty families of peasants from Saintonge and Poitou than secluded Port Royal, Razilly founded on this projecting meadow-land the parent Acadian colony on the Atlantic coast. The fort was constructed shortly after their arrival in 1632. Four years later Acadie lost, by the death of Razilly, the most efficient administrator yet sent out by the Crown. But no permanent memorial ​was raised to him and his grave near Fort Point has been obliterated by time.
Agriculture progressed according to Normandy customs, and fish were exported to France and Portugal. The children of these colonists of La Have built the aboiteaux and planted the orchards about Grand Pré. An apple tree grows near the site of the chapel, whose chime and altar vessels are presumed to lie even to this day in the adjoining pond where they were thrown when invaders came from New England. Des Brisay relates that the colony lands were strewn with ruins and were pregnant with old implements and metal-ware as late as 1880.
Here Champlain dreamed awhile of glorious fame; Razilly here found all his meed of earth; And haply, here the thought of far-off praise Soothed Denys as he wrote thy wave-sung name …
The road rounds from the Point to Dublin Cove, a rocky road with an outlook so fair as to nullify the jolts. Over the buoyant track of Crescent Beach the car speeds close to the brawling surf. Great herring-gulls search the sands for fish left by the ebbing tide. A few miles off shore is La Have Island, the land first sighted by de Monts, April seventh, 1604. In summer, fishing is carried on from the shore. September is the month when the marsh grass is cut. Sometimes two ​hundred mowers go out by steamer from the mainland and make a holiday of the harvest season.
The circular drive of forty miles returns to Bridgewater by Petite Rivière, spoken of by Denys as having an "entrance good for barques"; climbs and girdles a high rounded hill tilled to its peak, descends, to an extensive forest broken by lakes but no habitations, and passes the cranberry bogs near Italy Cross and Conquerall before mounting to a ridge that overlooks river and town. There is no circuit in all the province that combines more of romance and varied beauty than this one.
Lunenburg has a claim on the tourist's attention by reason of its ancestry, its situation, an its industry born of the sea. The town is fortunate ​in being placed upon a sloping peninsula that is broached on every side by the waters of the Atlantic. Below the crown of the hill lies the schooner fleet in the main harbour. The bankers, all rigged alike and all painted black, direct their spoon bows in unison as they shift with the tide. The "back harbour" view embraces multitudes of islands afloat on the great Bay of Mahone.
The Lunenburg fleet comprises one hundred and nineteen schooners with a total tonnage of eleven thousand. A new vessel costs $7000 to $8000. Crews varying from seventeen to twenty-two men are carried aboard each boat at the spring and summer fishing. Bait is secured off Newfoundland before going to the feeding-banks where the fish are caught by anchored trawls, each one over a mile in length, and baited by means of hooks which are set by men in dories. As the cod are brought in to the schooner, they are cleaned and thrown into salt. The total catch, from March to September, may approximate 140,000 quintals, a quintal equalling a hundred and twelve pounds. The 1914 fares were light because live caplin swarmed the Newfoundland Banks in such numbers that the cod refused the dead bait. The captains and crews work on "half lay," or on a percentage. People of the town own stock in the various vessels, whose shares are divided into sixteenths, or in some ​cases into thirty-seconds. If fortunate in their captains, investors may derive a good income from a few shares. Lunenburg catches only "salt fish," that is fish, or cod, that is sold salted down. Crews idle all winter about the stoves at the "lower stores" recounting yarns. They have no interest in "fresh fishing" though they could make a second living out of it if they chose. This would, however, contravene traditions established more than a century ago by the sturdy, strong-willed Germans whose great grandchildren maintain to-day the prosperity of Canada's Gloucester.
THE BRAS D'OR, NEAR BADDECK
​provisions. The town was named for Lüneberg in Prussian Hanover. Its burghers suffered intensely from exposure and poverty and were in daily terror of massacring Indians. One of the most active pioneers was Leonard Christopher Rudolf whose diary is in the possession of his great grandson, a hardware merchant in Lunenburg. He was born in 1710 and as a young man was attached to the court of the Duke of Wirtemberg, then became scribe to the Privy Counsellor of the King of Poland. A Byzantine prince, son of one who had been strangled at Constantinople for championing the German Emperor, engaged him in the capacity of Secretary. In 1739 the future emigrant to Nova Scotia served in the war of Germany against the Turks and was at a great fight near Belgrade. At the age of forty he forsook courts and battlegrounds for the new lands across the sea. He was employed by Governor Cornwallis to oversee those chosen to clear the wilderness and lay out the town on Malagash Bay. Here he married, became Justice of the Peace and Major of Militia, and fathered nine children. He and his male companions wore round hats, knee buckles and wooden shoes and wore their hair braided and looped with ribbon. Their women spun the thread and wove the cloth for all the garments of the community.
A revival of flax and wool weaving has occurred within recent years. The flax is harvested at the end of the summer. When dried and broken on the ​rack, it is "swingled," combed, "hetchelled" (to remove the tow), twisted on the distaff, woven into thread, twilled and spun. There are famous weavers in the back country, where the language, customs and superstitions of a hundred and sixty years ago still obtain. In the olden days, wedding feasts lasted three days; whole oxen, pigs, sheep and calves were served, and gallons of wine, and puddings, hams and geese. "Breaking frolics" took place on the farms when the flax was ready for the rack. Recently an old German lady died who left a treasure of home-woven linen to be auctioned for the Lutheran Church of St. Paul's.
The building which houses the Church of England congregation retains all of its original timbers. The bell and communion plate were given in 1813 by Christopher Jensen who came to Lunenburg in 1752, and is buried in the crypt. The dwelling he erected at the corner of Lincoln and Queen Streets may still be seen. In 1782 it was attacked by American privateers in revenge for his assisting the British.
Lunenburg is properly proud of its good sausages and sauerkraut and klöse suppe with dumplings. German is rarely heard in the town, but residents betray their fatherland by the accent that replaces a p with a b and a w with a v. They are broud to know you and bleased that you like Lunenburg. The stout maid at the rector's door hands you the key to the westrey. Bows of harbour craft are ​bravely gilded Leta Schwartz or Annie Spindler. Owners' names are Zinck and Knickle, Wambach and Naas. The dean of the fishing establishments bears above its door a sign lettered "Zwicker and Co." The tenacity with which the Teutons have clung to their original grant is witnessed by the fact that elsewhere in Nova Scotia one rarely hears a German name.
A curiosity of the Lunenburg environs is the series of great caves hollowed by the surf on the far shore of the harbour. The Ovens are reached by motorboat and should be visited at high tide to gain the full impression of the sea's grinding. The Ovens' Head Diggings were discovered above sixty years ago when the waves brought down the crumbling shale. The ledges are presumed to reach into the sea because more gold is found in the sand after a severe storm. Individuals who wash the sands earn $1 to $1.50 a day. Other excursions are taken to Bachman's Beach, and to Heckman's Island at the entrance of the back harbour, 4 miles from Lunenburg. On "the rackets," or shoals, near-by, herds of seals make their home, but are not hunted.
The branch road, Lunenburg—Mahone Junction (7 m.) joins the main line, by which passengers continue northward, along Mahone Bay, largest of the numerous bights on this coast, to Chester, 19 m. from the junction.
Chester is to the Atlantic shore of Nova Scotia what Digby is to Fundy, though with more aspirations to fashion. For a number of years its ​ourating climate and environment have influenced the patronage of a summer colony from the States, whose cottages adorn advantageous situations on knoll and point. The Hackmatack Inn, intended to provide the resort with a modish hostelry, overlooks all that is typical of Chester—green-turfed islands, islands of rock and hackmatack, the fair reach of bay and twin harbours, inviting coves, safe beaches, wooded vantage-points.
The Lovett House, in the village, has a special reputation for its generous table.
Chester Village mounts a hill above the inlet, where pleasure boats ride at anchor or skim seaward before a sailor's wind. The first regatta held at Chester, in 1856, was for gigs of four oars. The prize was $27.70 in gold. The winner was First-step, built by David Millett, the father of race-boat designing in Chester. Punts, whale-boats, flats and sail yachts were entered in other classes. Three thousand people attended from Lunenburg and adjacent towns, and there were fire-works and processions in celebration of an event familiar enough now among the myriad islands of the bay. Early in August Regatta Week is annually observed under the auspices of the Chester Yacht Club.
An immigrant arriving in the party which came from Boston to Chester in 1759, made note in his diary: "August 4. Saw divers islands . . . and anchored in a most beautiful harbour. . . . At night ​there was an Indian dance." This tract of land was granted, "with reservation of gold, silver, precious stones and lapis lasuli" to settlers from the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The new town, first called Shoreham, was frequently pillaged by American privateers of cattle, poultry and other property.
One of the mother churches of Chester had for its pastor the Reverend John Seccombe, a Presbyterian minister who graduated from Harvard in 1728. He was tried at Halifax in the year 1776 for praying for the success of "the rebels," and was put under bonds not to repeat the offence.
The first bell used in the original Episcopal church of St. Stephen's was cast in 1700 for a French monastery. When its place in the belfry was usurped by a new and larger one, the old bell was used as a fog alarm on a banker. From this service it graduated to a place in the town, from which it rang New Year and wedding chimes. The last seen of it was on the brig Peerless in Valparaiso harbour. Thus do the bells of Nova Scotia, like its ships, wander up and down the world.
Four miles out in the harbour, there is an island famed for beauty, but still more for the suppositious treasure buried in its bowels by no less a personage than the ubiquitous Captain Kidd, who in 1696 left Plymouth, England in the Adventure, a 287-ton galley, to prey on vessels hostile to France and England. The Captain's piratical career ​began during a voyage to the East Indies. Previously he had been in New York harbour. Off the coast of Malabar he burned villages and captured a ship. Thereafter he plundered in earnest. In 1698 he buried spoils on Gardiner's Island east of Long Island, which was discovered, and amounted to 700 ounces of gold, 800 ounces of silver, 1 bag of silver rings and 1 bag of unpolished stones. Our pirate was arrested by the Governor of Massachusetts and sent to England. There, on May 12, 1701, he was "hung in chains" for having killed a gunner by assaulting him with a bucket. The Oak Island Association, relates des Brisay, had as the basis of its foundation the statement of an old man who said he had served under Kidd and, among other exploits, had helped him bury $2,000,000 on an island outside Boston harbour. The Oak Island treasure pit has not yet yielded its store though a fortune has been spent in search of it by men of intelligence and business acumen. A tree was found to which tackle had been attached. Near it, a pit was uncovered lined with stones and logs. At a depth of about a hundred feet the sea rushed in through artificial drains and further work was rendered useless.
Big and Little Tancook, a few miles from Oak Island, are rich in scallops of luscious Mahone Bay quality. The former has an area of over 500 acres and a considerable population of farmers and fishermen. Green Island, 16 miles from Chester, is ​the resort of stormy petrels which make their homes in the earth banks.
Aspotogan, highest point in this part of Nova Scotia, though but 500 feet in altitude, gives dignity to the broad boot of land that divides Mahone Bay from even lovelier St. Margaret's. Both rail and wagon-roads pass within sight of the islands of Chester Basin through East River and so to Hubbards, a distance of 16 miles.
The original Hubbard lived on Green Head, which, reaching into the bay, forms the cove opposite the Gainsborough Hotel. Hubbards, a country village by the sea, is a typical Nova Scotia resort. At a short distance are surf-charged beaches hugged by woods of juniper and pine. Less than a mile inland, forest aisles disclose a fresh water mere with cabins perched half hidden on the sloping shore. Water trails lead to other lakes. Mill, Vinegar, Quacks, where trouting is as good as anywhere in the province.
The proprietor of the well-conducted Gainsborough—a hotel more than ordinarily attractive for its hospitable cheer and excellent cuisine—has a genius for arranging exhilarating land and water trips for his guests. A buckboard journey of 33 miles follows the coast of the Aspotogan peninsula, going one way and returning another, and keeping in constant view the sea or arms of the sea. Mill Cove, on the south side of St. Margaret's Bay, is a quaint colony whose dialect and ​unsophisticated conceits would furnish material for a genre novelist. Many villages on these retired inlets are not yet converted from a belief in the supernatural. Driving to Peggy's Cove, at the easterly side of the bay's entrance, or going by motor-boat, one passes humble settlements where door-sills are not infrequently crossed by visitors whose baleful influence only the witch-master can annul. This region given over to the superstitions and practices of an unworldly peasantry is but twenty miles removed from Halifax. Yet in the cottages one hears of exorcised spirits, of rites which have to do with crosses steeped in hemlock, and pigs' hearts stuck full of pins and thrown with mysterious purpose upon burning coals.
A house which faces Hubbards village is occupied by the son of an old-time captain whose name, John Dauphinée, was once the most powerful heard round-about the Cove, of which, indeed, he was called the monarch. He owned a brigantine and lesser vessels in the West India trade. He was captain of militia and his coat and sword, worn before the birth of the son who is now almost a nonagenarian, are preserved at the homestead. The parlour racks also hold ancient lamps shaped like a double-spouted coffee-pot, candle moulds, and a "Sam Slick clock" bought near a hundred years ago from a Yankee vendor, who, considering the traditional reluctance of this particular timepiece to tell time, must have exercised Sam Slick's ​own gifts relating to "human natur' and soft sawder" in making the sale.
A pilgrimage to Jim Simms has its reward in wandering tales of the life aboriginal—tales of trappers' wiles and rugged hardship, tales of woods "clogged with moose, moose without all reason," of black foxes that bite their snares and leave mocking tufts of fur in the trap, of autumn trips into the wilds with only a gun and a loaf of bread to provision the woodsman for a week. Jim Simms' wife "has learning," she can read and write. Jim went to school "one Sunday afternoon"; he has not delved in books. But he is master of the lore of "dead-falls" and peltry, and so conversant is he with the forest that he is summoned as arbiter to decide for disputants their own lumber limits. The trapping-ground near Square and Long Lakes has been his orb for nigh onto the Bible's span of life. Even yet he goes with his sons to set a hundred steel traps and four hundred wooden ones where the lucifee, the mink, the bear, the red fox and the skunk "got to trabbel to git their livin'." The traps are visited every five days until the snow falls. Christmas is the season for selling the fur. Otter brings the best price, wild cats that can be dyed—those that have their large paw shaped like the hind foot of a rabbit and wear a tippet 'round the neck—are fairly remunerative. "Good extra" minx fetch $7 to $10 a skin, red fox $3 to $8. Pelts of weasels that are ​grey as a rabbit until December and then turn ermine white, are worth 25 cents to a dollar, according to fashion's demand.
The trapper's cottage where one sits in a tiny bright-rugged room and hears all this, is a mile down the road from the village. On the same spot formerly stood the station of the post carrier who made the winter journey from Halifax to Lunenburg on snow-shoes.
Hubbards—Halifax, 35 m. On the way is the beautiful but little exploited retreat called St. Margaret's, and the station from which a stage leaves every week day for French Village and Peggy's Cove.
* ↑ See Chapters V and VI.
* ↑ Not to be confused with Sable Island, described at end of Chapter IV. The names of both are derived from the French word sablon, meaning "sand."
* ↑ Steamers every week day from Bridgewater for Riverport.
* ↑ From The Valley of La Have, by William E. Marshall.
* ↑ The proprietor of Clark's Hotel was pathfinder for the Automobile Club of America from Halifax to Shelburne and drew a map of the coast roads. He is therefore in a position to give authentic advice as to routes and tours.
* ↑ According to a report of the Marine and Fisheries Department, 26,500 persons are employed in the fishing industry of the Province.