Markland or Nova Scotia; its history, natural resources and native beauties

Front matter

r

I

1/ i

Preface

The idea of producing this book originated with W. V. Brown, Esq., of Berwick, N. S. My acquaintance with him began in the winter of 1901 when he laid before me the general plan of the work, and desired that I would aid him with suggestions touching the contents, and their arrangement, and write the book in the main, but making such compilation from other sources as best satisfied myself. Not finding very much printed matter in the shape that suited my purpose, I have been obliged to write nearly all from beginning to end. It devolved upon Mr. Brown to secure the means to carry out the project, and this he has accomplished by the exercise of much energy, diligence, and intelligence. We have done our portions of the work, and now submit the book to the public for whom it was prepared. We are no longer young men, and the labor involved has severely taxed our strength. Mr. Brown has done all the business connected with raising the money, securing a publisher, and obtaining the photographs for illustrations. As President of the Company that issues this work Prof. E. M. Keirstead, M. A., D. D., of Acadia University, has lent his valuable name and official assistance, and Mr. S. C. Parker of Berwick, Secretary of the Nova Scotia Fruit-Growers' Association, as Secretary Treasurer of the Markland Company has aided the business in many ways.

There seemed to be a demand for something like what we have produced." It is true that there are in existence Histories of Nova Scotia, and no small amount of literature relating to the economic interests of the Province. The latter portion is not readily accessible, as much of it is scattered here and there in rare books, or hidden away in publications of societies, and newspaper files. There has not existed up to this date a book wherein could be found the information desired by men of business, by tourists, and sportsmen, and students of natural science. Hitherto our fine scenery away from railway routes, had not been brought before the public by means of the camera and otherwise, in a way that extends to all parts of the Province.

This book will show that Nova Scotia has been mightily enriched by nature. We have scarcely done more than make a beginning in the work of drawing upon these sources of wealth. To make more

4 PREFACE.

widely known our interesting history, our resources of land and sea, and the native charms of this choice bit of the globe, is the object in producing this work. We who are responsible for it, have no schemes to boom, no properties for sale, and no small ends to answer in this way. No man's money has been taken for advertisements of his business or of himself. To insure a more lasting character the book is largely devoted to subjects and topics that do not readily become obsolete. A word about the title "Markland." It is my own suggestion. About a thousand years ago the Norwegians who had settled in Iceland, and discovered Greenland, were not satisfied with such tame enterprises, and therefore without chart, or compass, or quadrant ran their intrepid prows southward into our waters. Written accounts of these voyages exist in the Icelandic language. There has been a good deal of controversy about the locality of the lands they made. Until within a dozen years or thereabouts it has been quite generally believed that when Captain Leif Erikson touched a land "covered with wood, white sands were far around where they went, and the shore was low, and he said this land shall be named after its qualities, and called it Markland," that Nova Scotia was thus designated. That this view is not now so generally accepted is due to the researches of Professor Storm, a Danish scholar, who has convinced himself, and some others that Nova Scotia is the Vinland of the Norse explorers. However, the name is a pleasing word, and for all that any one surely knows to the contrary may be the very one that Leif bestowed upon these wooded shores and sandy beaches. At any rate it will be a restful variation from Acadia, which is another word of doubtful meaning if we are to listen to some respectable critics. This is the "Woodland" where the forests primeval still shelter the moose, and caribou, and bear and other wild things, and for the purposes of this book "Markland" may stand with propriety.

For my own part I would have been pleased had the choice of a writer fallen upon one who could have excelled my performance. It is beyond my expectation to please all my readers, but to that end I have spared no pains, and shirked no duty in the matter, and in the words of Apocryphal Scripture, "If I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired; but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain to."

Robert Randall McLeod.

Brookfield, Queens County, Nova Scotia, July, 1902. ,

Contents

LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS.

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. History of Nova Scotia 9

Chapter I. History Of Nova Scotia. \ A'', N- ^ «' '''' ''''' '

In the order of Nature warfare is an ordained factor of prime importance in the animal world. In human affairs it has often seemed that nothing short of the arbitrament of the sword could settle questions of great interest to mankind.

Any country where such epoch-making struggles have been thus decided, is thereby invested with unusual interest.

Geography destined Nova Scotia to become the arena where issues of the gravest national importance to future generations were to be decided by th€ ordeal of war. Less than one hundred and fifty years ago it was not determined whether French, or English rule should dominate North America. No human foresight could see what decision the "Tablets of Destiny" contained on their hidden faces. A question so pregnant with mighty issues for unborn generations of people must have been decided by the inscrutable will of^ Providence. If France could have kept what she had claimed in America, and thus held the whole of it except the fringe of English Colonies along the Atlantic Coast, from Massachusetts southward, then we may be confident that there would have been no Revolutionary War to gain independence of England, only to be swallowed up by a people foreign to them in blood, in laws, in religion, and in the common usages of social and public life. Indeed it is quite certain that in the event of French occupancy of all other portions wherein she had fastened her hold, that these British Colonies would have been added by conquest to that vast domain, and their populations scattered and lost in the general masses. In other words, less than a century and a half ago it was, so far as human power could discern, an unsettled question, whether or not there was to be a United States, and a British Canada. "Great doors turn on small hinges." Apparently the decision oscillated in the balance, and might have been easily decided against English

interests.

Nova Scotia stands out like a great wharf into the restless Atlantic. Its coastline is a succession of harbors inviting the early explorers to shelter and new supplies of food, wood, and water.

We shall never know whose were the human voices that first broke the solitudes of this region ; whose was the hand that opened hostilities

\ y ^A\ A A^S upon the innocei:it wild things that ranged the unbroken forest without dread io$' piich armed, and tireless, enemies as mankind. He may hajve- been; a /'rugged type of primal m.an," whose kinsmen left their stone implcmeVits -where they were buried in the glacial gravels of Trenton, New Jersey, while they retreated before this invasion of ice, at a time so distant that the Niagara gorge was not begun. If these were the original explorers of Nova Scotia, then the time came nearly one hundred thousand years ago, when the slowly increasing cqM and accumulated snow, drove them from this peninsula that became a world of arctic desolation for thousands of years. Whether the primeval men of pre-glacial America, who retreated southward before the ice-sheet till beyond its reach, survived in their decendants and camped again on their old lines of retreat in after ages as they returned northward, is a matter of speculation for the present. Out of that stock may have sprung the rude sons of the forest who greeted the first white men, and were so long in the land that their fathers had named the natural aspects of the country in a musical tongue that was a mimicry of the murmuring streams and the whispering winds in the restless pines. These Red Men were in the Stone Age of their history ; further progress was barred until iron ore could be melted and forged into implements. Here they dwelt, not without some virtues, but not greatly in advance of the bears and the moose, save in point of intelligence. They called the peninsula Acadie, meaning a land of plenty.

Surely it was no Canaan flowing with milk and honey ; but there were fresh fish, and game, and berries, and nuts, and roots. They hailed with delight the Frenchmen who brought hatchets and guns, and knives, and bartered them for skins of beavers, bears, and moose. They did not perceive that the superiority of the men who furnished these weapons would inevitably make them the rulers of the land. Here on these Acadian shores was begun the New France that once bid fair to rival the glories of the Motherland. Here was poured out the treasures of a nation to build a Fortress Town to scare the British ships from adjacent seas, and make hopeless all attempts to overthrow her power. The utter ruin and pathetic desolation that marks the site of that city is a stern rebuke to human pride and national ambitions of conquests. Such a challenge as Louisburg constituted did not pass unheeded by her only rival on these shores. Before Englishmen had settled at Jamestown or Plymouth the French had begun colonization at least at two points, and when the Mayflower with her pilgrim passengers in 1620 sailed into Plymouth there had been for fifteen years a post and plantation at Port Royal or Annapolis. Nature at this point had furnished a most admirable site and noble surroundings for a city. No wonder the locality was pitched upon for such a purpose. Its great land-locked basin fringed with ample meadows, and fenced by lofty hills that rise almost to mountain magnitude and clothed with noble forests to their summits, are but leading lineaments of a scene calculated to charm the eye and win the approbation of the remarkable men who named it Port Royal and began its permanent settlement before Henry Hudson had discovered the noble river that bears his name, or Jamestoavn was founded, or any colony planted north of Spanish dominions at St. Augustine, Florida. Hereabouts was shed the first blood in the long conflict that was to decide whether France or England should hold this Continental Domain from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson's Bay. No less than t'hree armaments commanded and manned by New Englanders have sailed into this peaceful haven to lay in ruins the forts and settlements, and a Virginian half-freebooter, sailing under orders, struck the infant colony within ten years of its founding.

For a long time the history of Annapolis is the history of Nova Scotia, for the most part, and there is no proper understanding to be had of the founding of Anglo-Saxon rule in America without careful study of the annals of this province.

Beyond question the Norsemen- touched these shores a thousand years ago. It is almost a certainty that Sebastian Cabot in 1498 made a landing on this peninsula. Very probable that Jacques Cartier in 1534 saw the coast of Cape Breton. French fishermen and fur-traders frequented the Atlantic seaboard from then till the beginning of the next century, but made no real attempt to form a permanent settlement. Thus matters stood until 1604 when Henry Fourth of France appointed a Governor-General of this country in the person of Pierre du Guast Sieur de Monts, a native of Saintonge, a man who had distinguished himself in the service of the King and gained his confidence. This enterprising gentleman had already made a pleasure trip across the ocean four years previously with the Sieur Chavin on a trading voyage to Tadousac on the St. Lawrence. His_com mission extended from the 40th to the 46th degree north latitude, and he was "to people and cultivate said lands, search for gold and silver, build forts and towns, and grant lands," etc. He and his associates, certain merchants, had the exclusive right to trade in furs and other merchandise in all this wide region. This looked like what in modern parlance we call a gilt-edged business proposition, and there were not wanting men of large means and uncommon ability to furnish the financial sinews, for the concern had no government backing in money. They fitted out ships and got together a large company of men from various walks of life from a baron to a blacksmith.

The Baron Jean de Poutrincourt was to become a notable figure in this enterprise, but a man of historic fame was in that group — no other than Samud de Champlain of Brouage on the Bay of Biscay, the founder of Quebec, who gave his name to the great lake, surveyed and made maps of the Canadian coast, wrote invaluable history of his voyages, and died in his bed after all his perilous adventures on land and sea. The four vessels sailed from Havre de Grace on the 7th day of April, and on the i6th day of May three of the ships had put into Liverpool Harbor and there de Monts found an opportunity to exercise his authority. An adventurous and thrifty countryman of his was there with his vessel carrying on a trade in fur with the natives, which he had a right to do so far as he was aware, or it was possible for him to learn. The news had not reached him that de Monts and his associates had the exclusive right under a royal permit to all this trading themselves. De Monts showed a callous disregard of proprieties and failed in showing a decent respect for the wholesome opinions of mankind. He confiscated the vessel of this fellow-citizen in a lone land; took her suppHes to help out his failing stock, and sailed aw^ay to the westward in search of some goodly territory yet to be discovered within the limits of his ample patent. Rossignol was the name of the man he had distressed. It was for a time retained by the harbor and now lingers as a designation of the largest lake in the province, on the waters of the Liverpool River.

The vessels rounded Cape Sable and dallying in St. Mary's Bay pushed out into the Bay of Fundy. They named it the La Baye Francois, and found their way into the spacious Annapolis Basin, that they called Port Royal. Poutrincourt, the baron who was looking for some place to make a home in the new world, was so much pleased with this locality that he requested and obtained a grant of it from de Monts. and the King confirmed his title two vears later.

The expedition did not tarry long at beautiful Port Royal, and the River Dauphin, but sailed out and up the bay into the Basin of

Minas. That was the name they bestowed upon a locaHty in which they had discovered copper. Wherever they had landed a search was made for mines as they were bound to do by the terms of their charter. The imagination had enriched these unknown strands with precious things. At St. Mary's Bay they had lost and left in the woods Father Aubry, a priest with an enthusiasm for the new things of this unexplored world. By good luck the poor man was discovered weeks afterwards and restored to his companions.

One of their pilots turned chief prospector and picked out of a rock a smooth blue stone, an amethyst, and generously broke it in two and presented the halves to de Monts and the Baron, who were so pleased with these pretty specimens of quartz that they presented them to the King and Queen after a goldsmith had adorned them in settings of gold. They would be of great interest now in our Provincial Museum, and they have doubtless survived among royal trinkets.

Failing to discover a mine did not prevent them from fixing the name on' the Basin, and they stood across the Bay of Fundy and discovered a great river on the 24th day of June, the festival of St. John the Baptist, and named the noble stream after this ancient worthy. They made some explorations and were greatly pleased with the scenery, the fish, and the game, but were so hard to suit that they set sail again and stood up the western coast not many leagues to the River St. Croix. Selecting an island in the river they began to make preparations to spend the winter there. Certainly they had left behind* them situations far better adapted to their purposes and their needs, as they learned to their sorrow when wood and water failed. Baron Poutrincourt took passage for home in one of the vessels, but de Monts and most of his party spent a tedious winter on that undesirable spot where thirty-five men perished of scurvy and other ills. In the spring they sailed westward to Cape Cod and returned to St. Croix, where they were happily joined by the vessel that sailed in the autumn for France, under Pontgrave, who brought out forty men and new supplies.

They concluded to abandon St. Croix and return to Port Royal for a settlement. Placing Pontgrave in charge of this work, de Monts, seeing it well forward, sailed for France, leaving the afterwards famous Champlaintopass another rather uncomfortable winter there, and charged them to explore the country as best they could. Not till the next 27th of July, 1606, did de Monts return, and by that time many misfortunes had befallen them, but when they met again there was a great jubilation. The Baron had come, and with him Lawyer Marc Lescarbot, a handy learned man to whom we are indebted for a history for what befell them in all these times. He says the Baron opened a hogshead of wine and set up the drink in a fashion so lavish that "Some were so drunk that their caps turned round." A very practical man was this Parisian advocate, for he found them grinding their grain in hand-mills, and grumbling over the wretched toil. He devised a mill, the first in the province to be turned by water power, and aided in many other ways the material needs of the settlement.

Baron Poutrincourt had a taste for agriculture and a desire to get this place into a condition inviting to his family, so he had cleared g-round and sown wheat in the fall. Meantime de Monts with M. de Champdore for master set sail for home again.

The winter was passed in comfort; they built two small vessels in the spring for their convenience and anxiously awaited the return of de Monts. He did not come, but a vessel brought letters informing them that the King had been induced to remove the terms of the patent by which he had exclusive rights of trading with the Indians, and thus the bottom dropped out of the enterprise before it had got on its feet. The King acted upon the advice of the Ministry to whom fishermen and traders jnade bitter complaints of the failure of their business, owing to de Monts forbidding their barter with the natives. One is at liberty to believe that the treatment of poor Rossignol in Liverpool Harbor was largely resented and the penalty, though long delayed, was not escaped.

Thus ended the attempt to make great fortunes in a short time. De Monts and his associates could do nothing but withdraw from such a venture and make the best of a bad bargain. Port Royal was abandoned and de Monts engaged Champlain to make a settlement in Quebec. Thus wp ^^pp that at the close of 1607 this settlement was a deserted locality. Baron Poutrincourt had a grant of that place and was determined not to give up without an effort what had been so well begun. He was back again in the early summer of 1610 and with him came a priest, Messire Josse Flesche, who baptized several Indians shortly after the arrival. This event was deemed of so much importance, from a business point of view, that the Baron dispatched the vessel with his son Biencourt to France with the welcome news to the King, and on the resulting flood-tide of good feeling expected to obtain some aid for the colony that he was founding out of his own none-too-deep pocket.

After many trials this young man returned the next June, 1611, and with him two Jesuit Fathers, Pierre Biard and Raimond Masse. There were in all thirty-six people on board this small craft of sixty tons that had been the plaything of the Atlantic since the 26th of January. They saw great icebergs, and singularly enough fell in with Champlain as he was making his way to Quebec and was detained by the ice, but arrived at Tadoussoc on the St. Lawrence May nth. The Baron was not overjoyed with the results of the trip. Thirty-six were added to his family of twenty-three, besides the old Mic-mac Chief, Membertou, and his relatives, who had not become Christians out of religious considerations alone. This venerable man, who considered himself more than one hundred years of age, was obliging enough to die that summer, and then there were a few mouths less to fill.

The very next month the Baron sailed away for home to secure further aid, and there he carried out a transaction by which a woman secured a grant of the wdiole Province of Nova Scotia, Port Royal excepted. She was Madame la Marquise de Gucherville, lady of honor to the Queen, the wife of the Sieur de Liancourt, first esquire of his Majesty and Governor of Paris. This grand lady, once renowned for grace and beauty, was deeply interested in missions, and was instrumental in sending out the Jesuit Fathers with young M. Biencourt. To this woman the Baron went directly for assistance. She had already invested some money there as a missionary venture, and she was now persuaded to drop a thousand crowns more into this pious enterprise that the enthusiastic Poudrincourt represented in glowing colors. The noble madame concluded to look a little closer into this proposition, and the result was that she found de Monts yet held the Province except Port Royal, and although he was not very active still he had vessels there at that very date. She obtained from de Monts a release of his rights, and the King gave her a grant of the whole region from the Sf . Lawrence to Florida, excepting Port Royal. The Baron remained at home and naturally fell out with the madame. He dispatched a vessel to Port Royal that made the voyage in twenty-three days, arriving on the 23d of January, 1612. blatters at Port Royal w^ere far from prosperous or harmonious, and meantime the Marchioness fitted out a ship and dispatched it to form a new settlement in her ample domain, that extended westward to Cape Cod. There were forty - eight in all. They landed at Cape Le Heve on the i6th of IMay, 1 613. A fishing station was existing at that point, and there unexpectedly were found Biard and Masse, the two missionaries, with three others from Port Royal, where it was no longer desirable to remain on account of short rations and dissensions. Taking with them these two Fathers, they sailed westward to the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, and thence further west along the coast to near Mount Desert, in the vicinity of the Penobscot River, where they began to make a settlement, not without considerable contentions.

Now we come to an event of some real historical interest. At this point was fired the first gun in the contest between England and France for the possession of this western world, that was to have its final decision on the Plains of Abraham nearly a century and a half later.

The Englishmen who had been making a settlement during the last seven years in Virginia claimed to northward all the coast and lands, including Acadia. This claim was not new, but dated from the voyages of the Cabots in 1497 ^^^ 1498.

These Virginian pioneers were an enterprising community, and they were soon harvesting the seas for fish on the coasts of Maine. It chanced in that very summer of 161 3 there sailed into these northern waters Captain Samuel Argall with an armed vessel convoying a fishing fleet. This was the very man who captured Pocahontas and brought her to Jamestown, where she married Mr. Rolfe. Innocently an Indian told him of the white men and their doings not far away. The Captain was a man of action, troubled with no fine scruples about making an attack upon Frenchmen at a time when the parent states were at peace. He rather liked the prospect of an encounter with these invaders of British territory, as he wished to believe. He lost no time and soon had them at his mercy. The valiant Frenchmen, taken unawares by a ship of fourteen guns and sixty men, made some resistance, but surrendered after a loss in dead and wounded. This is a long story, of which we have the details, but the upshot of the affair was this — about one-half of the people were permitted to sail away in their own shallops and get home again if they could, and they succeeded. The other half were taken to Jamestown and treated badly by the colonists. Among these were Captain Flury, who was master of the French ship, and three Jesuit Fathers.

The Governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale, was so well pleased with the success of this expedition that he at once dispatched Argall on another, with three vessels, to destroy the settlement of Port Royal and everything of French occupancy he could discover. Argall took with him Captain Flury and the Jesuits, and cleared for Acadie with this roving commission to carry fire and sword into the disputed territory. The first landfall he made was at St. Sauveur, the scene of his late victory, where he had not made as clean a sweep of all improvements as suited his taste in such matters. There he pulled down a cross, to gratify his religious feelings, and burned the buildings, and doubtless would have sowed the clearing ir\ salt, after the Oriental custom, if that article had been on hand. In the old Norman fashion he made a lavish use of the firebrand and left nothing that would burn. ,

He stood across the bay to Port Royal and there all was deserted. The few who lingered took to the woods at sight of the enemy in such force. However, they ventured back and Biencourt, son of the Baron, failed to make terms of peaceable trade, and Argall destroyed the fort and houses that had cost a hundred thousand crowns, and even picked out of the stone the names of de Monts and his official associates, and sailed away in triumph. To the Baron this was the last straw that was to break the back of the enterprise that he had abandoned, and he then entered the service of the King and managed to get honorably killed in a besiegement where a fellow ''wickedly moved a catapult and struck him on the breast, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more," 1615, in the fiftyeighth year of his age. He was a notable and interesting figure in the earliest annals of our Province. Captain Argall was getting on in the world. He was realizing that nothing succeeds like success. The Earl of Warwick for mercenary reasons took him under his influential patronage, and he was made Deputy Governor of Virginia, where he enforced the Sabbath laws with edifying rigor. Had there been another French settlement in all Acadie when he had wiped out Port Royal we may be sure it would not have been spared. There were no longer any homes of white men in all this region. While a serious check had been placed upon French colonization by this act of Argall's, still the fishermen and fur traders continued their vocations in no very small way. More than five hundred vessels sailed annually from France to these western waters to

engage in fishing and trading with the "saiivagcs," as they were alwa?ys 2 called, even after they had become Christians, but the word did not refer to their dispositions but to their life in the forests. Biencourt, in a measure, rebuilt his ruined post, and in 1618 wrote to the authorities of the city of Paris urging upon them the advantages of establishing fortified posts in Acadie to defend it from the incursions of the English, who continued hostile. It was very evident that French occupancy of this continent was not to be had without a stern contest with Englisl^ claimants, who fell back upon Cabot's discoveries as the moral ground of their contention. In 1621 James I was King, and Sir William Alexander, a favorite courtier, could get most anything he dared ask for. He was a younger son of a large landed proprietor in Scotland, and having some talent for writing dramas and verses was able to flatter the pedantic monarch by praising the royal performances in that line. In 1621 Sir William applied to the King for a grant of Acadie, for the purpose of colonizing it on a large scale. He had no difficulty in securing what no one but himself and his associates wanted; and in his patent the region was called Nova Scotia for the first time, in a formal fashion. It was then a large unlimited domain, of which neither the King nor anyone else in the British Isles knew very much; but they had stores of misinformation. Before this scheme got into practical shape James paid the debt of nature, and Charles reigned in his stead. He confirmed the grant of his father and founded the order of the Knights of Nova Scotia, that resulted in neither good nor harm. This was in 1624. It is currently reported that at this date an expedition had been sent out and made no landing, but returned with the report that the French were everywhere strongly in possession. If that was the case, matters were later in better shape, and a new start was made by certain London merchants under the patronage of Alexander. Among them was Gervase Kirke, an Englishman of Derbyshire who had long resided. in Dieppe, and there married a French woman, who bore him at least three sons of more than ordinary spirit and enterprise. Three small armed ships were fitted out and commanded respectively by the three brothers, David, Lewis, and Thomas Kirke. Letters of marque were obtained and the adventurers were authorized to drive out the French from Acadia and Canada. Many Huguenot refugees were among the crews. Having been expelled from New France as settlers, the persecuted sect embraced this opportunity to return as enemies. Ties of blood and patriotism combined were not so powerful as the sentiment of religion, and thus it is always.