The Tourist's Maritime Provinces/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
ANNAPOLIS ROYAL—LAKE KEDGEMAKOOGEE—DIGBY—WEYMOUTH—CLARE DISTRICT
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Drowsy Annapolis, "royal" because famously loyal since the days of Queen Anne, dreams at the fireside of her memories. They go back to the day when a three-masted vessel with double-decked stern-house and square mainsail entered the harbour flying the emblem of France. Sieur de Monts was the commander, the date of his landing, June, 1604. The visions embrace a village on the Granville shore—the first village of white men in New France—and an island fortress close by. In fancy, primitive battles are enacted again about the quadrangle of Port Royal—royal in the eyes of the French for the beauty of its environment—battles in which the flags of England and France were alternately victorious throughout a hundred years. A fort near the site occupied now by Annapolis was set up in the year 1643. In 1680 there was a small settlement adjoining. Poutrincourt and his friends had chosen not to build there because "too far within the harbour."
In the fall of 1710 we see in retrospect Nicholson and Vetch hurling their colonials against Port Royal and forcing the surrender of the citadel. It was at this time that the name of the town was changed to Annapolis. Though defined by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the boundaries between New France and British Acadia were contested for yet another half century. Not until 1763 were the English finally victorious.
An important chapter in the story of Annapolis was written by a Welsh architect who on his way to Halifax to erect new buildings for the Government surveyed the land and resolved to bring New England colonists to settle about the shores of Annapolis River and Bay. In 1759 a grant was conveyed to prosperous farmers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Four years later there were several hundred inhabitants in and about Anne's Town, all of them from New England. In 1781, two American cruisers captured the garrison and pillaged the houses of the inhabitants. After the Revolutionary War thousands of Loyalists passed through Annapolis, some of them remaining in near-by localities.
Reminiscence of the nineteenth century is tinged with the romance of privateering, of attacks and rumoured attacks, and with the tramp and clangour of garrison life. Altogether, Annapolis has been the object of a dozen assaults by pirates, by Indians, by French, English and New England troops. "Oftener than Jerusalem" it has been assailed. In 1854, soldiers were finally withdrawn from the garrison, and the barracks, the officers' quarters, the powder magazine and block-house left to decay. The abandoned fortifications occupy a point of land twenty-eight acres in area. Near the entrance, in the centre of the town, is a bronze monument raised by the Dominion Government in 1904 to the memory of de Monts, who three hundred years before discovered this inland haven. One is free to roam about the old ramparts, to stroll beneath the sally-port, restored by the Government in 1897, and to enter the barracks which now contain a museum of pictures, weapons, implements and antiquated furniture. MacVicar's History of Annapolis Royal says Subercase constructed the magazine in the south bastion of the fort with stone brought from France in 1702. An oak block-house in fair state of preservation was ruthlessly demolished in 1881 by order of an unsentimental Ministry. It overlooked the moat and the road which turns off the main street of the town.
The view from "the cape," at the outermost point of the fortifications, includes the river, the widening basin, the old French marshes, and, further up Allain's Creek, the site of the mill erected by Poutrincourt in 1607 to grind the first corn grown in New France. Lescarbot made note that in many places near Port Royal there were fort belles cheutes pour faire des moulins de toutes sortes. In 1643, La Tour and d'Aunay[1] fought an engagement near Poutrincourt's mill which resulted in its destruction by La Tour. The same year d'Aunay de Charnisay built a fort on the cape, probably the first to be erected there.
The first vessel built in North America is said to have been launched by Samuel Champlain from the ways at Port Royal. In 1710 the first Church of England service held in Canada was celebrated in the chapel next to Fort Anne to give thanks for Nicholson's victory over Subercase.
The ancient burying-ground of the English dates from this period. A gate admits one to it from the fort. Pathways through the grass lead to the sunken graves of garrison officers and their wives, to the resting-place of antecedents of General Sir Fenwick Williams, to the mounds in the Haliburton plot where lie three children of Judge Thomas Haliburton and his wife, the romantic Miss Neville whom he married in England as a youth of twenty. A few years ago a Celtic cross was unveiled in memory of the Reverend Thomas Wood who came to Annapolis as a missionary in 1753. He was born in New Jersey and had charges at Elizabethtown and New Brunswick. "A gentleman of very good life and conversation," he was the friend of all religions and nationalities in Nova Scotia. He preached in English, French, German and Micmac, and sometimes employed them all in one day.
This little grave-yard nestled against the bulwarks of Fort Anne gives sanctuary to the ashes of an unhappy lady whose story, as whispered in Annapolis, involves a great man's love, and a great man's inconstancy . . . a man so great that one need only hear his deeds to know his name. As a baronet he led England's troops against Masséna at Bussaco; he conquered Joseph Bonaparte at Vitoria and won Britain's battle on the field of Waterloo.
Among the prisoners detained before Corunna was a young girl, by birth an Andalusian. The General looking upon her himself became a captive, to her charms. Thereafter his orderly was commanded to pitch a tent for the flashing señorita close to that of his master. In London she was installed in apartments and her fair person decked with jewels. Gregoria Reiez bore the Iron Duke three children. For years she was mistress of his heart. However, as with Royal Edward, there came a day when the Duke must marry—but not Gregoria Remonia. Neither did he wish any longer to be hindered by her importunities. There was an adjutant, conveniently unwedded. Accustomed to the commands of his superior, he married the one no longer wanted when bidden to do so. It was agreed that he should receive £150 a year for life and the appointment as barrack-master at far-way, very far-away, Annapolis. The bartered sweetheart was refused permission to see her children after the separation, but all her furniture, and her fine clothes, silver and jewels were embarked upon the vessel which carried herself and her new companion to distant Nova Scotia.
Very old ladies of Annapolis remember the shrew that Gregoria Remonia Antonia Reiez Norman grew to be. She despised Joseph, her husband, considering him a poor substitute for a Duke and far beneath her who had once charmed a warrior so mighty. She liked to talk of "my dear Duka" before the garrison ladies and to lend his gifts of finery to young girls going to balls. The barrack-master she addressed as "You Norman-a—you beast-a!" Her only solace, besides the souvenirs of her youth, were two white poodles which she fed on rabbits bought from town boys, and always took with her when she drove.
In 1854 when the garrison was permanently withdrawn, Norman retired to enjoy the ducal pension. He and his shrivelled, scornful, quarrelsome wife lived in a house near the corner occupied now by the Union Bank. On the same spot dwelt Fenwick Williams in his boyhood. When Gregoria died in 1863, at the age of seventy-two, Norman sent to England for a niece, who came out with her husband and cared for him until he also was laid in the Protestant cemetery. When his niece, Mrs. Rusted, died some years later, her husband auctioned the Normans' household belongings. Among pieces bought by the people of the village were table-ware from the London ménage and silver that bore the Wellington crest. Some of the silver is now in the possession of a judge living in Halifax. The writer has seen a blue glass bowl obtained from Norman's nephew-in-law which very probably served the Duke's rather blunt fingers after repasts taken with his Spanish Dulcinea. The owner of the finger-bowl recalls Rusted bringing to her mother for safe-keeping two crested ladles of solid silver, a watch with a long gold chain, a set of amethysts and a necklace of square-cut emeralds. Upon departing for England he removed the casket, but not until he had lifted the lid upon Gregoria's treasures before the dazzled and uncomprehending eyes of his neighbour's child.
Joseph Norman's grave is to the left of the centre path of the burying-ground, at the end furthest from the street gate. His head-stone is well preserved. But some time ago the stone which marked the burial place of his wife, who lies beside him, was broken during the removal of another monument. The townsfolk have been slow in replacing it. For years the Duke's amorosa has rested in a nameless grave ignored and quite forgotten.
The last barrack-master of the garrison is responsible for the planting of the trees which ornament the street from the fort to the Hillsdale Hotel. By the Court House an old French willow grows which served as a whipping-post for slaves. Next door to the Corbitt homestead is a cottage nearly two hundred years old known as the Barclay House. The first owners had many slaves. The mother of the family is buried outside the town with her black servants about her.
Judge Haliburton, who practised law in Annapolis before being elected to the Assembly, lived in a house next to the Clifton Hotel. The latter is near the business section of the long thoroughfare which curves from the old wharves to the hill above the town's best dwellings. On one of the occasional side streets there is a modest bake-shop where one may enter and buy a loaf of bread from a great-grandniece of Oliver Goldsmith. For two generations back, descendants of the poet's brother have lived in this part of Canada. One, also named Oliver Goldsmith, wrote in 1834 The Rising Village, based on the rejuvenation of St. John, N. B., and intended as a companion to The Deserted Village[2] of his illustrious uncle. There is a tree planted to his memory on Queen Square, St. John. On a farm outside Annapolis dwells another Oliver, but without poetic aspirations.
DESCENDANTS OF ACADIANS, WHO RETURNED TO
NOVA SCOTIA AFTER THE EXILE.
Photograph taken at Church Point, Clare District near Weymouth.
After the fort, the chief pride of Annapolis Royal is without doubt the sumptuous prayer-book whose fly leaf bears, in clear spaced handwriting, the dedication,
For the church of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, on the occasion of the Bicentenary Commemoration, September, 1910.
"George R. I."
In the year mentioned, the Bishop of London and a great concourse of dignitaries celebrated at Annapolis the two hundredth anniversary of the use of the Litany in old St. Anne's by the Reverend John Harrison, following the capture of the citadel. In commemoration of the first Church of England service held in Canada, the Reverend Henry How, rector of St. Luke's for a generation, solicited from the King a memorial book for the pulpit of the Annapolis church. The superb morocco volume which may be seen at the rectory was brought over by the Bishop of London in gracious response to this appeal. The covers are nineteen by twelve and a half inches in size, they bear the arms of the King and of Canada magnificently tooled in gold, and are set with eight amethysts—a tome in every way fit for a King to give.
Many Annapolis homes possess interesting pieces of furniture which have an antiquarian as well as artistic merit. In the rectory of St. Luke's there are armchairs with inset brass medallions which belonged to Captain Maynard of Nelson's staff, grandfather of the rector's wife. A silver-faced clock made in Yarmouth once stood on Judge Haliburton's mantel. His "coasters" and corkscrew are on the dining-room side-board. The drawing-room at the Hillsdale is notable for its display of fine antique pieces. In the Royal Chamber the Prince of Wales slept when he visited Annapolis in 1860. The house register contains the autographs of the royal party, besides the names of many men distinguished in Canadian life who have been guests of this agreeable hotel under its present and its preceding management.
A certain dwelling within sight of the Hillsdale's shady lawns is the repository for a really remarkable miscellany of rare objects. Closet shelves overflow with entire sets of willow ware, walls are covered with drawings by English masters, there are curious screens and tables designed for the needs of ancient times, and chairs turned out by famous cabinet-makers. Most interesting of all is a group of exquisite wax miniatures all done before the year 1800, supposedly by Patience Wright. She was a spy in the service of Benjamin Franklin, and an expert in wax sculpture. It was her custom to go from house to house ostensibly to secure commissions for bas-relief portraits but actually to gain information concerning those in the household. The British Museum cherishes a collection of these cero-ceramic silhouettes which in many ways is not so representative as the one held for over a century in the Gilpin family of John Gilpin renown.
Votaries of shrines historic will cross from Annapolis to Granville Ferry and drive six miles down the west side of the Basin to the spot on the shore nearly opposite Goat Island where rose the first permanent dwellings built by white men on this continent north of Florida. Here within the stockade of Port Royal, the Knights of the Order of Good Times met daily to feast in the common dining-hall. Lescarbot, first man of letters to reside in North America, describes the banquets and ceremonies of North America's pioneer social club in the Fourth Book of his Chronicles. The membership of fifteen included Lescarbot, Baron Poutrincourt, Champlain and Hébert, founders of Quebec, and the physician Daniel Hay. Bear, otter, hare, moose, caribou, deer, wild cats, game and fish appeared upon the bill of fare. Each member served in turn as steward. A frequent guest at the board was Membertou, the Micmac chief who claimed to have been present when Cartier landed at Gaspé in 1534. He was one of the first among the Indians to be baptised into the Catholic faith. In 1611 he died, aged a hundred years, and was buried near the Granville fort amid fair scenes to which, in the words of an Annapolis poetaster of 1720,
Should angels turn their sight,
Angels might stand astonished with delight.
Annapolis is a convenient portal to a wild forest land that rivals Finland in the number and beauty of its lakes. Sportsmen seek them for their pools and tributary streams, for the furred and feathered game in adjacent woods, and for the paddle-ways that stray hither and yon through a virgin wilderness. Kedgemakoogee, or Fairy Lake, has already been referred to as a body of water especially prolific in natural charms. Under "Hotels," mention has been made of the Club House whose accommodations are open to transients. The club motor-car meets guests at Annapolis if the manager is previously advised on what day it will be required.[3]
The wagon-road from Annapolis to the Lake passes out the main street to open fields, where great boulders pour down the slopes as if out of a Titan's cornucopia. Grey monoliths mark turns of the highway as the automobile draws near the lakes drained by the Liverpool River. Canoes leaving the sportsmen's colony at Milford descend by a wonderful inter-linking water-way of lakes and rivers to the Atlantic coast, the trip consuming about three days. Long vistas of woodland extend on either side as the road to "Kedgee" rises little by little to the haunts of forest monarchs. If it is the season for moose-hunting, barn doors will be embellished with drying pelts; there will be groups on store steps adjudicating the merits of a pair of antlers lately "brought out" by a long-limbed guide and a "guest," and within the store a carcass of venison trussed to the beams. At the cross-ways beyond, the motor swerves to avoid collision with a wagon-load of tackle and provisions, and chauffeur and oxman pull up for a moment's gossip as to the party going "in."
For nine miles the road runs through the deep woods without passing a habitation. Then rough farms appear amid fields of stumpage, succeeded by a little realm of cultivated orchards and flowering lawns, a transformation confusing enough after the wilderness just traversed, and the still denser woods waiting to engulf the car. To the left there are fleeting glints of blue where the lake chain uncoils. A dark green way finally stops at a landing on the Maitland River. Here the automobile is exchanged for the Island Scout, with "Locky" at the helm. The pilot guides the launch between low tufted banks to the Kejimikujik of the Micmacs. As the channel follows among fields of lily pads, the lake is more and more disclosed to sight. Beyond are islands round as sailor hats, trimmed to the brim with trees and set flat on the glassy water, and yet other islands that rise in graceful mounds and are banked with white pebbles, or edged with a valance of pure sand.
This Lake of the Fairies, its three hundred islands and the acres fronting it were until recent years the resort of Micmac families. Their chief lived on Big Meuse Island and fables of their tribe invest stream and cove and the huge grey rocks that near certain shores rise uncannily out of the water. When the Indians wandered away from Kejimikujik, the Provincial Government offered their lands for lease. The Rod and Gun Club, organised in 1909 by sportsmen from Annapolis and elsewhere in Nova Scotia and the United States, took a lease for ninety-nine years of 1500 acres of forest land and a number of islands, on a few of which retreats have already been built by members.[4] There are other cottages on a high bank near the landing. Beyond a grove of birches, a fair grouping of slim white trunks patched grey like a rattle-snake's skin and astir with quivering leaves, is the knoll where Jim Charles used to farm on a point that projects into the lake. Jim Charles was an Indian of quarrelsome habits who slew a rival, and in escaping from his pursuers stumbled upon a deposit of rich gold quartz whose location he would never divulge, not even to Tom Canning who trapped and hunted with him. After he had stayed with his mine three months, he could not refrain from coming out to sell the gold he had dug, and so was captured. But a lenient jury acquitted him because of the extenuating circumstance of a squaw's coquetry. Where the Club House stands he used to hoe and plant in Micmac fashion, and it was he who sowed the clearing between house and lake. Windows and broad piazza survey an island colony with blue channels between. In the dusky wood that flanks the lawn on either side are more cabins of log or painted wood. Some of these may be occupied by non-members at a slight increase in cost over the twelve dollars a week asked for board with a room in the modern Club House. There is a gentility in the service of kitchen, dining-hall and chambers which makes this lodge in the wilds the pleasantest sort of place for wives to stay while their husbands go a-hunting. Sometimes the wives go too, and sleep on a bed of boughs, and rise before dawn to watch the baiting of the moose on stealthy barrens, and in the day, whip the streams for wily trout, or trudge the portages from lake to lake.
The canoe lures through George's Run and on to Liverpool by Indian Gardens, or down Shelburne River to Lake Rossignol and back to Kedgee, a ten-day outing. Baskets are provisioned according to the number in the party and the probable duration of the trip. On hunting expeditions a guide usually accompanies each guest. He "packs" the baskets, "carries" the canoe, and if a moose is killed, brings out the meat as stipulated under the rather severe Nova Scotia laws.
Angling-parties go up West River for the day, a motor-boat conveying the canoe train to the mouth of the river and calling again at night. Trouting is best in the spring and fall. There are longer fishing trips to Frozen Ocean, so named because the ice breaks there late in the spring, and to Peskuwes, and Peskuwaw, and Pebbie Loggitch, two lakes and a Short Carry on the west side of Kedgemakoogee. In the same direction are famous moose pastures. Red Lake, near Peskuwaw, abounds in black duck. There are other regions equally renowned for partridge, snipe and woodcock. Curiously enough, sea gulls flock in the spring to nest about these inland waters.
The country southwest of Kedgemakoogee has a grotesque physiognomy. A high mossy plain unwatered by lake or river is a-tilt with boulders, the largest of which attain the height of good-sized houses. Some are peaked like tents, others are shaped like carts or crouching animals. Little rocks grow on bigger ones like warts on a grey-beard's nose. Here is a fallen pillar and there a tumbled throne. It might be an abandoned Sodom ossified for its sins. Few men, white or brown, have trodden this mossy pavement and but one woman, Mrs. J. Olin Howe of Connecticut, who explored this region a few years ago with her husband and a guide.
To the strands and groves of lake islands one may paddle a club canoe, or idly evinrude, or mayhap hoist an umbrella sail and drift from shore to shore. Haul the boat up on the pebbles and listen to sounds in the wilderness . . . fish leaping in the pools . . . a porcupine setting ratlike teeth in the bark of a canoe birch . . . black loons mourning . . . the bark of a fox far-away on the mainland.
With care one may steal upon Br'er Porcupine and surprise him at his work. Arrow-pointed bristles cover the broad back and upper side of his tail. He will probably climb a tree at the crackle of steps, or lumber off as fast as a cumbersome body will permit. If he shows a disposition to lie on his belly and roll himself into a ball, beware of lunging quills and a thrashing tail. This rodent does not throw out his bristles as commonly supposed, but imbeds them in the flesh of the enemy by contact, though a few quills may fly wide during the assault. A brisk tap on the skull will despatch a troublesome porcupine, but it may require several shots from a gun to kill him.
The chromatic wail of the Northern Diver sets the echoes moaning about the lake. What sound so grievous as a loon's complaint? Lampman has put into verse their legend:
Once …
Wherever Glooscap's gentle feet might stray
… ye lay
Floating at rest; but that was long of yore.
He was too good for earthly men; he bore
Their bitter deeds for many a patient day,
And then at last he took his unseen way.
He was your friend, and ye might rest no more.
And now …
… among the desolate northern meres
Still must ye search and wander querulously
Crying for Glooscap, still bemoan the light
With weird entreaties, and in agony
With awful laughter pierce the lonely night.
The Indians attribute to these birds miraculous powers of prophecy and believe they give notice of a change in the weather by their scream. In the Micmac legend, The Loon Magician, many untoward things occur or are avoided through disobedience or obedience to the warning of a loon. In appearance, these great water-fowl are eerie as their cry. Their long white-feathered necks are wound with a band black and soft as ebony velvet. They live entirely on or under the water. They can stand erect only by using their tail "like the third leg of a tripod," and they cannot walk at all. Their wings they use under the water as in the air, to propel them forward. They are master divers and of all the creatures that live in these untamed waters fear only the otter. If we imitate their descending lament they will answer, perhaps believing it the call of Glooscap, the departed deity who taught them to summon him when in need. Sometimes the soft dipping of the paddle does not alarm until the canoe's prow is within close sight of them. Then a plunge into protecting deeps . . . a swift winnowing of wings, and at a long distance, the uprearing of confident heads above the gloss of ribboned necks.
The road from Annapolis Royal to Digby keeps in view the Basin which Champlain described as "one of the most beautiful ports which I had seen on these coasts, where two thousand vessels could be anchored in safety." Small passenger craft which serve the towns along the inlet pass close to Goat Island where Poutrincourt had his fort. The view matures in beauty as the haven broadens. At the mouth of Bear River ravine "the Gap" appears. Beyond the rift which opens to the Bay of Fundy the North Wall takes up its interrupted course and continues toward the south.
There are bevies of hotels and vacation cabins in the vicinity of Deep Brook, Bear River and Smith's Cove. The rails cross a trestle over the water beyond the latter station and by a detour which brings into range the shore we have just travelled, and the hills which encompass the harbour, arrive in the centre of Digby.
Digby's attractions have to do with scenery, climate and summer pastimes. Early settlers passed by its site. There are no wars or monuments to make it famous. Sam Slick called it a small but beautiful village "where the people of New Brunswick take refuge from the unrelenting fogs, hopeless sterility and calcareous waters of St. John." Travellers from the States find it a cool retreat from the heat and dusty winds of less favoured places. Here "the blue air winks with life like beaded wine." The green of barricading heights glows darkly against the clear Nova Scotia sky; the bay which the Frenchmen's ships first ploughed seeks restlessly the solution of the tides, yet makes a level course for cat-boat, launch and fishers' smack to scud upon. On the warmest days one may walk comfortably along the main road of the village without hat or parasol. Fans are de trop in Digby. Æolus and Triton sit at her gate to pull the punkawallah.
A fleet of transports found its way through the stern-walled portal of the roadstead just a hundred and thirty years ago. Fifteen hundred refugees from New England who had forsworn comfort and goods in order to remain under British rule established a settlement five miles within the Basin, and called it Digby for the Admiral who commanded their British convoy, the Atalanta. Some were descendants of Mayflower pilgrims. Later came other Loyalists from the South and brought black servants with them who had fought for Britain. The negro who polishes boots or sells Bear River cherries is descended from these "Black Pioneers" and probably lives in the African village of Jordantown, a mile out of Digby.
The Loyalist grave-yard shows some archaic head-stones. One of them bears the punctilious inscription,
DAVID WILLIAM FANNING
Died in 1810
Aged 16 years, 11 months, 11 days, 37 minutes
and some seconds.
The ready mathematician will quickly perceive that had the youth lived but 18 or 19 days and 1403 minutes longer—less some seconds, he would have completed his seventeenth year.
Old Trinity is the historic church of the town. In former times, sittings, to be retained, had to be occupied at least once in three months by the owner. The aisles were so narrow, records a local scribe, that pews were shortened when crinolines came into fashion, which so embroiled the congregation that, as a consequence, many forswore the Anglican for a radically different faith.
On the water-front is a quaint book-shop whose outer walls are pasted with the eccentric protests of its owner against acts of the councillors and the conduct of village affairs. "Miss Cousins' forum," the Digby folk call it. The Paul Yates studio is on the opposite side of the street. To its restoring breezes Digby owes the presence of this chemist skilled in the science of light, this amateur of nature whose discerning lens has perpetuated the contrasting landscapes of the peninsula. Mr. Yates came to Digby to convalesce in this bracing environment. Inspired by the views about him and by the opportunities for healthful living he remained to establish himself as the premier scenic photographer of the Provinces.
One's own camera is tempted by varied pictures among the flakes and wharves of Digby. At the dock of the Maritime Fish Company a trawler just in from the haddock banks at the mouth of the St. Lawrence burrows her keel in the mud and rests from her labours. Her English crew spears the long shining fish from the hold into baskets that swing out to the pier. When the haddock have been headed and cleaned they are subjected to a mild pickling and hung for fifteen hours in a smoke-house to steep in the oily vapour of burning ash or maple. The amber result is a finnan haddie, the smoked haddock of the breakfast table, which has usurped the dried herring in the Digby market.
The company to which the trawler's fare is consigned annually packs 10,000,000 pounds of fish at its Digby and Canso stations. The sailing fleet of local merchants comprises ten vessels which fish off Cape Sable and in the Bay of Fundy. If absent five to fifteen days a catch of many thousand tons of haddock, cod, hake, pollock, cusk and halibut will enrich the owners. The profitable cod is laid to dry on the rough benches or "flakes" that cover sections of the beach. Until the sun process is complete the stiff triangular forms are spread each morning, and each night are piled in corpulent ricks under a tarpaulin. Each stack contains several thousand pounds of evaporated fish. The odour of the drying cod drifts like salty incense across the lower town and saturates the nostrils. Even the flowers before the cottages lose their fragrance in the permeating breath.
Most of Digby's cod goes to the West Indies. Thousands of barrels of lobsters, clams, mussels and winkles, and tons of dulse are also shipped from this port.
Summer visitors angle in the Basin or venture through the Gut for deep-sea sport. Tournaments and regattas enliven the vacation months. The new Lour Lodge has its own courts and bathing-beach. Other tourist hotels also provide outdoor diversions for their patrons. The roads round-about are among the best in the province. One leads to the beauteous vale of Bear River, a name corrupted from that of Simon Imbert, a Frenchman who commanded a relief ship for Port Royal in 1612. A beautiful natural highway penetrates a gentle valley known for its wealth of acacia trees, More rugged excursions are made by carriage or automobile along the harbour shore to the outlet six miles away, and over the surf-bound cliffs of Fundy to the coast beyond Point Prim Light. A road continues 20 miles down Digby Neck to Centreville, Sandy Cove and Little River on St, Mary's Bay. Another motor-way passes along the east side of the Bay to Weymouth, and on through Clare "municipality" to Brazil Lake and Yarmouth.
Twice a day, Sunday excepted, Canadian Pacific steamers leave Digby for St. Jolin, 47 miles across the Bay of Fundy, where connection may be made for Boston, Fredericton, Moncton, Prince Edward Island and Montreal.
Digby—Weymouth, 21 miles.
Weymouth is mainly interesting to the tourist as a basic point for excursions on St. Mary's Bay, and through the country of the returned Acadians as far as Church Point. The town about the railway station is properly called Weymouth Bridge. Two miles distant is Weymouth Village at the mouth of the River Wey, which the Indians named Sissiboo, possibly a contraction of siks hibou, "six owls."
On the shady corner near the station is "Goodwin's," an inn patronised for its chicken dinners and generous country fare.
Sissiboo Falls, two miles above Weymouth Bridge, and the lakes about New Tusket are attractive goals for drives with horse or motor.
The little craft which conveys passengers, freight 
AN ACADIAN SAWMILL
and farm wagons 5 miles across the long straight Bay of St. Mary adjusts its schedule according to the tide. Little River is the first landing made on Digby Neck. At this point Fundy is about a mile to the west across North Mountain. The steamer proceeds to Mink Cove and Sandy Cove further up the peninsula. The latter town is at the head of a small round basin. On the natural terrace of its embankment are contented white houses with pointed gables and, in their midst, square-steepled churches brooding their clustering grave-yards. From the bluff behind this idyll of a village an untrammelled prospect is revealed of the two bays, the one broad and often tumultuous, the other confined between tranquil parallel shores. Beaches fronting both bodies of salt water offer excellent bathing. Sandy Cove is in a double sense a seaside resort.
There are three houses here which give comfortable accommodation at a dollar a day, or less by the week.
North of Sandy Cove is Centreville on the wagon-road to Digby. From Sea-wall Hill, two miles beyond, there is another marine view worth a climb to see.
South of Sandy Cove and Little River the road continues to East Ferry, at the end of the Neck. The ferry-launch across Petit Passage to Tiverton on Long Island is summoned by ringing a bell. At the other extremity of the island strip is Freeport, ten miles distant. Ferrying the three miles across the Grand Passage we arrive on Brier Island, an irrelated fragment which receives the winds and breakers of both bays, and the Atlantic to boot. Westport, the chief settlement, depends upon the sea for its livelihood in common with all the villages on the spit that bars St. Mary's from the Bay of Fundy, and affords a thoroughly unconventional environment for vacationists to whom rest, good air and a banquet of sea food spells summer enjoyment. The people of this remote shore from Rossway to Westport are silent, kind and uncurious, like folk the world over who have "kinship with the sea."
Little steamers connect Tiverton, Freeport and Westport with Yarmouth, but those who have in mind a pilgrimage through the Acadia of to-day will return to Weymouth, and go south later by rail.
In the autumn of 1604 the Acadie cast anchor in the bay which de Monts named for the Virgin. The commander "noted that there was no shelter for large vessels, but that numerous little bays and innumerable coves offered a haven to ships of light draught." He admired the forests which covered all the country, and the soil which he esteemed easily adaptable to cultivation.
The first Acadians to find asylum on these shores were fugitives from Annapolis who had escaped through the woods on the arrival of English transports. When the Treaty of Paris was signed, many exiles returned from the colonies and formed settlements feeble enough then, but a joyful refuge for these wanderers fleeing back to the land which had banished them and away from the malice of their unwilling hosts.
In December, 1767, Governor Franklin presented to his Council the petition of the Acadians of Nova Scotia that a grant of land be made them along the edge of St. Mary's Bay. In addressing the Council, Franklin made known that he had "received the order of His Majesty to give the Acadians ample assurance of his royal favour and protection. On his own part he disavowed any intention of compelling them to bear arms outside of the province; he gave his word that they should be treated at all times with the same degree of indulgence and protection that His Majesty manifested toward his other subjects, and that they should not be disquieted on the subject of their religion." In July, 1768, John Morrison was commissioned to survey the lands between Sissiboo and the northern border of the County of Yarmouth; this tract was to form a communal territory bearing the name of Clare. Behold, says an Acadian historian,[5] the birth certificate of the French municipality of la baie Sainte-Marie. Only such brief references as this to the refounding of Acadie are contained in the provincial archives.
In September, 1768, Joseph Dugas mounted his wife and his child Isabelle, aged four years, upon the horse "that constituted the most appreciable part of his fortune," and placed behind them provisions for the journey and implements necessary to the establishment of a home in the wilderness. They departed from Annapolis by the path known hitherto only to the Indians, and thus blazoned a trail for others who followed, mourning the lands to which they had first returned and had found in the hands of English colonists. More Acadians arrived soon from New England, having walked north through the woods, or come by frail barks to the haven of St. Mary. Among the heads of families who joined Joseph Dugas were Prudent Robichaud, Jean Belliveau, René Saulnier, Yves Thibault, Pierre Mélanson, Joseph Comeau, Joseph Gaudet and Pierre Doucet. In 1771, says Father Dagnaud, there were in the municipality of Clare twenty-four families, comprising ninety-eight persons, all of them dwelling in the neighbourhood of Leblanc Cove. Church Point received its first colonists a year later. Thus,
... a few ...
Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom.
"Who remembers Acadie?" asked a French writer in 1859. The author of Jacques et Marie, a tale of the dérangement published a few years later, told his readers that Providence had let the Acadians disappear. For a hundred years, the French of southwestern Nova Scotia were unchronicled in history. "God is too high and France too far!" they cried, when ignored by the Canadian Government and by organisations of the Church. In 1864 there were 85,000 French in the Maritime Provinces.[6]
In his sympathetic biography of Père Lefebvre, first missionary to the Acadians after the eviction, Pascal Poirier, a senator at Ottawa, describes the convention called in 1880 to discuss Acadian affairs. There was great rejoicing because this assemblage signified the re-uniting of a long-divided people. A flag and a national fete day were adopted. Three years later a company of Acadians returning from a second convention on Prince Edward Island, wept with joy to see their flag saluted by English vessels as it flew from the mast of their ship.
In 1890 the College of St. Anne was founded by the Eudist Fathers at Pointe de I'Église, eight miles below Weymouth by the shore road. Church Point is the heart of the Clare District. The tall church with its beautiful spire is the centre of community life. Grouped about it are the buildings of the Convent, College and Presbytery.
Like all the villages of Clare, Church Point consists of a single row of houses on either side of an unpaved street, with gardens and ploughed acres behind. The dwellings are not different in character from other Nova Scotia houses. Within they are invariably ornamented by religious pictures and images.
Nothing remains of the old costume but the shawl and the black headkerchief worn by the women. Little spinning or weaving is done in this day of near-by markets and good roads, but nearly every garret holds its flax-comber, distaff and wheel. But one man in the community is addressed as Monsieur, and he the priest. All others are called by their Christian names, or if strangers, by their family names. Un français de France is most esteemed and best welcomed. The language of the people is a corruption of the tongue of their Breton ancestors,[7] but students acquire from their teachers, most of whom are priests from the mother country, a pure accent and a knowledge of French traditions.
The men are occupied with logging, farming, boat-building and the catching and preparation of fish. Oxen are their draught animals. Carts with heavy wooden wheels are used in summer, crude sledges in the winter-time.
The Acadians of Clare are a serious and unromantic people, reverent in their church observances, modest in their social relations, and diligent about the homely duties that fill their lives. That they do not forget the travail of their ancestors is proven by the words they sing to their national air:
Un Acadien errant,
Banni de ses foyers,
Parcourait en pleurant
Des pays étrangers.
Un jour triste et pensif,
Assis aux bords des flots,
Au courant fugitif
II adressait ces mots:
Si tu vols mon pays,
Mon pays malheureux,
Va dire à, mes amis
Que je me souviens d'eux.
Pour jamais separé
Des amis de mon coeur,
Hélas! où je mourrai,
Je mourrai de douleur.
Church Point Village is distant a short drive from the station of that name; beyond are Saulnierville and Meteghan. In all of these settlements there are Acadian homes open to travellers.
Weymouth—Yarmouth, 45 miles. Below Meteghan and Hectanooga, both known for the good fishing in near-by waters, the railway passes near Lake Annis, and between Lake George and Brazil Lake. The latter is the station for Kemptville, 12 miles by stage or carriage. A chaos of rivers, lakes and small streams radiate from Kemptville. Cabins, guides, tents, boats and tackle are available at reasonable rates. The Tusket River rises in this region and provides excellent salmon and trout fishing in season. The moose barrens about Kemptville are also a favourite resort of hunters.
Brazil Lake — Yarmouth, 12 miles.
- ↑ D'Aunay, with the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, attempted to deprive Charles La Tour of his proprietary rights in Acadia. La Tour was a Huguenot and the victim of intrigue at the court of France. By a confusion of grants the domains of the rivals were subject to claim and counter-claim which ended only with the surrender of La Tour's fort at the mouth of the River St. John. Charnisay was drowned from a canoe in the Annapolis River, 1650. La Tour married his widow and became Lord of Acadie.
- ↑ The Deserted Village was Auburn, England.
- ↑ As letter delivery is slow in so remote a region, it is wise to write a considerable time in advance, or to use the telephone from Annapolis. Fare, Annapolis—Lake, $5 each way, or $3.50 each for two or more persons in the car. Distance, 35 m. Kedgemakoogee may also be reached by way of New Germany and Caledonia on the Halifax and Southwestern. Carriage, Caledonia—Lake, $2.50 per person each way. Distance, 12 m. Tourists arriving without having previously notified the management should telephone from Milford or Maitland for the launch to meet them at the terminus of the road, a short way from the Club House.
- ↑ The initiation fee of $100 entitles members to a cabin plot on the water-front.
- ↑ Les Français du Sud-Ouest de la Nouvelle Écosse, by Father Dagnaud of the College of St. Anne, Church Point.
- ↑ The French population of Nova Scotia is 52,000 by the 1911 census, and of the Maritime Provinces, 150,000.
- ↑ See under "Language," Chapter I.