Nova Scotia (16 page)

   
Cornwallis wanted to get the town underway.
Realizing he couldn’t rely solely upon those who had come with him,
he brought in builders from Annapolis and elsewhere and even hired
Acadians from the Minas area. For the first winter, however, only
temporary barricades of logs and branches were in place. Yet in a
letter from a new citizen of Halifax to
Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle
dated December 7, 1749, the writer
asserts, “there are already about 400 habitable houses within the
fortifications and not less than 200 without.” That was probably
putting a good spin on a bad situation. Two hundred and
thirty-seven people died that first winter ck– at least that was
the number recorded. The true total was probably much
higher.

   
The hospital wasn’t established until March of 1750 and by
then it was long overdue. This hospital, nonetheless, predates
those in Philadelphia and New York. The ever-vigilant Lords of
Trade were concerned that the cost of the hospital – as well as the
cost of the whole colony – was simply too high. They were afraid
that Cornwallis was not being lean and mean enough so they let him
know it. As a result, in February he got rid of some of the
hospital staff to cut overhead. The Lords were more concerned with
the bottom line than with lives lost, although this probably came
back to haunt them since it was so expensive and time-consuming to
find new settlers.

   
Hugh Davidson, treasurer for the colony, was called on the
carpet back in London to explain why the tab had run up to nearly
£77,000 instead of the £40,000 allotted. Halifax was just proving
itself to be more expensive than it was worth.

A Botched Opportunity for
Peace

Gorham’s Rangers proved themselves
to be the “best” defence to the town. They were cruel and ruthless
and some of their company, of Mohawk descent, knew how to track
down, harass and murder the Mi’kmaq whose homeland had been
invaded. Cornwallis admitted to his confidantes that he thought the
Rangers were barbaric and he was happy to see them out of town –
sent on missions to kill the Mi’kmaq. He knew that the Mi’kmaq who
gathered along the harbour had come from the interior, probably
paddling their canoes down the Sackville River. So he sent the
bloodthirsty Gorham and his crew to build a fort near where the
river emptied into the basin. The Mi’kmaq, however, had an
alternate route, a traditional avenue down the lakes through
Dartmouth. Cornwallis and his men had not really made a thorough
exploration of both sides of the harbour where the English had
settled so, quite often, the Mi’kmaq arrived near Halifax
undetected.

   
Thomas Raddall believes Cornwallis to have been a diligent
leader with good intentions who really wanted peace. He ordered
Captain How to various Native communities to ask the chiefs to come
to Halifax to work out a treaty. Three did come from the Fundy
area, from the Saint John River area and from Passamaquoddy. Most
of the Mi’kmaq from around Halifax, or Chebucto as they called it,
had already wisely moved away after the ravages of MEuropean
diseases had taken their toll. Cornwallis could not seem to draw
them back into the treaty process. After the murderous acts of
Gorham’s Rangers, this should have surprised no
one.

   
The three chiefs and their nine warriors were
greeted aboard the
Beaufort
with a
seventeen-gun salute. The interpreter was a Frenchman named Andre
who may or may not have been providing a legitimate interpretation.
Foolishly, the English had not spent any great effort in training
their own interpreters for such important business but instead were
willing to rely on a man who may have had allegiances to their
enemy.

   
Cornwallis tried to get the point across that His Majesty
wanted friendship with the Native people (despite how things had
appeared in the past), and he was even willing to provide them with
protection. Protection from ewhom? they must have wondered. Native
leaders probably saw the redcoats themselves as a bit of a joke.
They had little understanding of the wilderness and were so poorly
prepared for survival in Nova Scotia. How could they protect even
themselves? And what had the English done to prove their
friendship? Certainly the presence of Gorham and his rangers would
appear to run counter to any attempts at
friendship.

   
If these Mi’kmaq and Maliseet leaders showed any sign of
amusement, it was interpreted by the English as drunkenness. The
chiefs, however, signed the document (not necessarily cognizant of
what they were signing) and left with presents accompanied by
another seventeen-gun salute. Cornwallis had probably missed his
best opportunity to establish communication and goodwill. Both
Gorham and How should have been worldly-wise enough to see the sham
of the event, but then not everyone wanted peace with the Native
people.

   
To make a treaty official from the Mi’kmaq point
of view, there should have been a ritual of washing away war paint,
and burying the hatchet. Apparently Native leaders had gone so far
as to perform a war dance right on the deck of the
Sphinx
, but Cornwallis had interpreted this as another act of
drunkenness. And so, like many treaties to follow, this one would
be a sham and within months, the English and Native people would be
killing each other again.

Salt Meat and Hardtack

Cornwallis was hoping for peace
with everyone but even in his own front yard, he was having trouble
keeping all the new troops in some kind of order. Along with the
garrison of men from Louisbourg came the riff-raff who followed the
troops to sell them rum. Drinking establishments (well, huts)
blossomed on the waterfront area that would evolve into Water
Street. The buildings would become more permanent, but the
commodity of consumption would remain the same for well over a
century.

   
Booze led to violence and the record of the
first murder of an Englishman by an Englishman took place on
the
Beaufort
itself, which was the veritable
centre of Nova Scotia government. A man killed the boatswain’s mate
and wounded two others. The criminal was promptly
hanged.

   
Discipline was slack everywhere in the new colony and
especially among military men. Cornwallis saw problems both close
to home and farther afield. He sent stern orders to the regiment
leaders in the Annapolis Valley to get things under control.
Dissidents were promptly shot or hanged and that worked well enough
in quieting those individuals but, in Halifax and elsewhere, it
didn’t seem to improve the overall problem.

   
History is wont to record the cheery times, the moments of
bliss or sense of accomplishment felt by the new settlers. Suffice
it to say that there were plenty of bad decisions and a general
lack of understanding of the new environment and the Native people.
That first winter in Halifax set a bad precedent. Despite what had
seemed to be elaborate planning, it was a tough season for the
human spirit. Most people lived in crude wooden hu*ts or remained
on the ships in claustrophobic quarters. Salt meat and hardtack was
the menu for existence. Why hadn’t they harvested at least a good
supply of edible wild fish, meat and vegetation during the summer?
you might wonder. In those first two years, maybe a thousand died
of typhus, taking a big bite out of the colony. Raddall suggests
that the epidemic may have been a positive way of weeding out “the
unclean, the drunken, the shiftless, the physical dregs.” That
would certainly be putting a positive spin on a pretty bad
situation.

   
The arrival of “hard-working” New Englanders helped to
eventually improve life in Halifax, as many of them signed on to
the rations list to accept the hand-outs of food previously
allocated to those who were now dead.

A Question of Savages

Near the end of 1749, a Mi’kmaq
“war party” came down through the Dartmouth lakes waterway and
killed four men at a sawmill in Dartmouth. Other problems with the
Mi’kmaq convinced Cornwallis that maybe the treaty wasn’t working
out after all. His council would not commit itself to an outright
war with the Mi’kmaq, “as that would be to own them a free people,
whereas they ought to be looked upon as rebels to H.M. Government
or as banditti ruffians.” An order went out then to take Mi’kmaq
prisoners and/or kill them wherever they were to be found. It was a
heartless decree of genocide and there was no concern for
retribution against specific individuals who may have committed
grievances against any Englishman. Instead, ten guineas was offered
for every Native person, living or dead, or for his or her scalp.
As money was paid for the scalps, it was rarely questioned whether
it came from man, woman, child or possibly even a Frenchman or an
Acadian. Cornwallis and his council had unleashed an irrevocable
horror on the new land that they hoped to settle. As Mi’kmaq
historian Dan Paul rightfully questions, “Who exactly were the
savages here?”

   
In the summer of 1750, 795 more settlers arrived
on three ships and by the fall of that year the population had
grown to 3,200 souls. Not all of the arriving ships had been
modernized with ventilation. The
Ann
, arriving from
Rotterdam, was one of them, bringing many more sick and dying
immigrants to add to the health problems of the town. Between
August of 1750 and March of 1751 an average of forty-two people a
month died. Winter was a particularly popular time to die in the
early days of Halifax.

   
The summer of 1750, however, also saw the
arrival of the
Alderney
with more
than 350 passengers who set up house on the Dartmouth side of the
harbour to create another community. Conflict arose with the
Mi’kmaq more oftren there. Nearly twenty were killed or taken by
the Native population, but the official records don’t document what
English grievances and murders/scalpings may have prompted these
acts. Dartmouth, in its earliest days, was a town of fear. When
the
Speedwell
arrived in July with 212 passengers,
Cornwallis had work begun to build a picket fortification wall
along the wilderness side of Dartmouth. The
Speedwell
and
three other ships brought new immigrants and new blood – nearly
1,000 Protestants from Switzerland and Germany who were supposed to
set up in Dartmouth (probably in hopes that the Mi’kmaq would
attack them first instead of thee English in Halifax). The new
arrivals, however, ended up in Halifax anyway due to the fears of
what lay in wait on the other side of the
harbour.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Built-in Poverty

With so many parents dying of
disease in Halifax, Cornwallis had to figure out what to do with
all the orphaned children, so on June 8, 1752, an orphanage opened
and the lucky woman to get the job of head matron was Mrs. Ann
Wenman, who was paid three pence per day per orphan. Cornwallis
optimistically calculated that the kids could be maintained by the
public purse until they were old enough to work for local fishermen
and earn their own keep.

   
In 1752 Mrs. Wenman had fifty-five orphans under her
guidance, although there most certainly must have been more
unattended urchins running around the primitive town. At about the
same time, the hospital, never short of patients, had forty-nine
citizens under its care and in August it was deemed necessary to
open a section for the sickly folks who were prisoners of debt.
Halifax was a city born with a kind of built-in poverty and no easy
solutions, although there was some small degree of compassion as
illustrated by the orphanage and the poorhouse medical
care.

   
More ships arrived in 1752, many with Foreign Protestants.
Hopson replaced Cornwallis as governor and by the end of that year
the population had swelled to 5,250, of which at least 2,000 were
soldiers.

   
Cornwallis had begged the Lords of Trade to send him more
hard-working immigrants. He considered the Cockney settlers to be
lazy and not much good for anything. Cornwallis thought highly of
the Germans, however, and the Swiss (although these were probably
immigrants from the foothills of the French Alps). Together they
were referred to as the “Deutsche” or simply and incorrectly as the
Dutch. The English had a way of homogenizing foreign,ers into
various groupings and once a label was established, it stuck. So
the “Dutch” settled on streets they named Brunswick and Gottingen
and were later given some land on the peninsula itself. Blockhouses
were set up for their protection. As expected, the Germans proved
themselves good farmers, but they couldn’t produce enough to
support the whole town and food had to continue to be imported from
Europe.

Hard Workers and an Assortment of
Adventurers

In September of 1752, the
Shubenacadie Mi’kmaq signed a peace treaty with the English
governor that would allow the establishment of a second colony to
be called Lunenburg. Unfortunately, the actual founding of the town
was set back by an incident in which two Natives on the Eastern
Shore supposedly killed a pair of settlers and captured two men,
John Connor and James Grace, who escaped to report back to Halifax
with six Mi’kmaq scalps. Dan Paul points out that there is strong
evidence to prove that Connor and Grace had probably attempted to
plunder a Mi’kmaq settlement. They were captured and, in escaping,
murdered a woman and a child along with Mi’kmaq warriors before
fleeing to Halifax in a canoe.