Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea

Newly revised Fourth Edition

Lesley Choyce

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781989725153
• eBook ISBN: 9781989725160
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This of Nova Scotia is an amazing story of a land a and people shaped by the waves, the tides, the wind and wonder of the North Atlantic Choyce weaves the legacy of this unique coastal province, piecing together the stories written in the rocks, the wrecks, and the record books of human glory and error. In this newly revised and updated sweeping true-life adventure, he provides a thoughtful down-to-earth journey through history that is both refreshing and revealing.

Here, well into the twenty-first century, he looks back at the full story of Nov Scotia from the legacy in our rocks to the civilization of the Mi'kmaq, the arrival of the Europeans and beyond to the stormy history of English and French. Never praising history for history sake, Choyce takes a critical look at the wars that helped shape the province, the scoundrels and the heroes who lived here down through the centuries and the seas and storms that swept through the land of the Bluenosers.

The original edition of Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea was published to acclaim by Penguin Books in 1996. This new edition brings the story up to date and looks at the changes in politics, economy and global climate that will challenge Nova Scotians in the years ahead.

Chapter 1

The Sea That Surrounds Us

Driftwood and dune grass on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.

In the winter, the “beach” at Lawrencetown Beach disappears. Formidable storms assault this northern coast, pounding the land with waves that gouge and suck at the sand until it is pulled out to the deep. In the summer, it’s a different story. The sea kindly returns the sand to the shoreline and on a crisp, clear August morning at seven o’clock you can find me alone on this beach, walking the edge of the North Atlantic, a sea that is as placid as a mountain lake, with water as transparent as a pane of glass. To anybody watching, it might appear that I’m searching for something, but the truth is I’ve already found what I was looking for. It’s been more than forty-two years since I made my personal discovery of Nova Scotia. I moved here and staked my claim on a five-acre homestead at Lawrencetown Beach, where I could say in all honesty that I also found myself.

When I immigrated to Nova Scotia, it was clear in my mind that a geographical move would enhance my life. My goal was to become a Nova Scotian and it was secondary that I need also become a Canadian. I didn’t mind all that much really, given the fact that my allegiance to this coastal province was so strong that I was ready to swear allegiance to any flag or queen necessary. Hugh MacLennan, the noted Canadian author, once mentioned to me that as recently as the 1950s, passengers disembarking from ships in Halifax Harbour were asked by the customs men if they were foreign, Canadian, or Nova Scotian. Hugh had always answered the latter and I can understand why. Every state or province undoubtedly nurtures loyalty to its soil, but a land nearly surrounded by water and steeped in a history of the sea suggests that kinship between the salt in the blood and the salt in the air.

Because I live a rural life, I like to think that I am more closely linked with the past than those who live in cities. I’m not a historian but I have lived inside the history that is this place. My 250-year-old farmhouse was a window into the past. One day when I was cutting through a wall to put in a new door, I uncovered an alarming fact. I discovered that my house was built those two and a half centuries ago with wood that had already been used before. Whoever had fashioned this home, above this once lonely stretch of salt marsh, sand dune, and sea, had been a scavenger like me. Some closer investigation revealed that it was not a mere barn that had been torn down to provide the sills and beams, but the lumber recycled here was the wood of a sailing ship, ravaged by a storm and left stranded on the beach. My house was once a ship. And with the original captain long dead, I was the only one here to sail her on into the twenty-first century, complete with the aid of satellite dish, online information networks, fax, modems, and call waiting.

Historians often speak with some despair of this province as a place that has been out of step with major industrialized development and the inherent blessings that come along with that. There was for me, however, great comfort in this thought that the world has passed us by. Now I could live here with fewer frills, fewer distractions, a limited amount of noise, and observe the madness from a distance.

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 hardships 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 offshore. The storm subsides, but the waves drive on through deep waters until they reach a stony reef along the rib of land that is Lawrence-town 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] settlement 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.

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’kmaw 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.

And so I feel sympathy for those currently in the province lobbying to rename the towns that have immortalized some of our most barbaric founders. Many 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’kmaw 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 Indigenous 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.

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’kmaw 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 pigs, and some chickens.

In later years, despite the influx of Loyalists to Nova Scotia, Lawrencetown did not flourish. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in the 1800s, 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 summer, 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. Many 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 grandkids 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 beneficiary 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. More recent examples are Hurricane Juan, a Category 2 hurricane that plowed through Halifax and Nova Scotia on its way to Prince Edward Island in 2003, and the even more destructive Hurricane Dorian which made landfall here as a post-tropical storm in 2019.

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 who 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.

Chapter 2

The Story Begins in Africa

The earliest stories of Nova Scotia are written in the rocks.

The Drowned Coast

As I w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction to the Fourth Edition
• 1 The Sea That Surrounds Us
• 2 The Story Begins in Africa
• 3 Cold Wars and Warm-blooded Mammals
• 4 The Land of the Mi’kmaq
• 5 Early Explorers: Myths, Legends, and Maybe a Few Facts
• 6 Sailors Westward: In Search of New Worlds
• 7 Port Royal and the Order of Good Cheer
• 8 A Charter for New Scotland
• 9 Carving Up Acadia
• 10 Acadia: More Than a Bargaining Chip
• 11 Louisbourg: A Fortress City
• 12 A Fortress for the Taking
• 13 The Acadian Way of Life
• 14 The Founding of Halifax
• 15 The Rowdy Town on the Harbour
• 16 The Creation of Lunenburg
• 17 Empires at Odds
• 18 The Deportation of the Acadians: “Into Utter Misery”
• 19 The Fall of Louisbourg
• 20 The Land of Exile and Immigrants
• 21 Coastline of Conflict
• 22 Loyalists: The White and the Black
• 23 From Rags to Royalty: Halifax Comes of Age
• 24 1812 and After
• 25 The Golden Age of Sail
• 26 Sea Crimes of the Nineteenth Century
• 27 Confederation: Nova Scotians Become Canadians
• 28 The Plight of Nineteenth-century Nova Scotian Women
• 29 The Savage Seas
• 30 The Decline and Fall of the Age of Sail
• 31 Dreamers, Schemers, and Telephone Screamers
• 32 Toward the Turn of the Century
• 33 “A Sound Past All Hearing”
• 34 Aftermath of the Halifax Explosion
• 35 Rum and Rum-runners
• 36 The Bluenose
• 37 A Province in Economic Ruin
• 38 Nova Scotia in the Second World War
• 39 The Spoils of War
• 40 The Fifties and Sixties: “A Friendly Remoteness”
• 41 The Tragedy of Africville
• 42 Unhealthy Habits, Unclean Harbours
• 43 Coal Mining in Nova Scotia: A Chronicle of Despair
• 44 The Death of the Fish
• 45 Fish Sheds and Federal Politics
• 46 Tragedy and Beyond: The Sustainable Province
• 47 The Challenges of the New Century and the Path Ahead
• Select Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index