Nova Scotia (17 page)

   
Early on, a church for Halifax became a priority and timber
was shipped in from Boston for this purpose. St. Paul’s opened in
1750 with no pews. In many respects, the church was quite liberal
for such an uptight garrison town. “Dissenters,” Mi’kmaq people and
Hessian soldiers were allowed to hold services there in their own
languages in the off-peak Sunday hours. Catholics, however, were
given no such privilege.

   
Along with religion came street lights. Money was found for
400 lanterns to be hung on posts along streets and near the
landings. It was a noble effort at civilizing the wilderness but,
unfortunately, it became a popular pastime for Haligonians to steal
or smash the lanterns, so the project turned out to be a
failure.

   
Halifax attracted an odd assortment of settlers, some of them
American traders and fishermen. One naval captain by the name of
Bloss built a mansion of sorts in Halifax and kept sixteen Black
slaves. Another infamous chearacter was Joshua Mauger, who also had
his own personal Black slaves. He made his money in the West Indies
slave trade with ships run by slave labour. Mauger had been on hand
to pillage Louisbourg in 1745 and then moved with the crowd to
Halifax to make it big as an entrepreneur, with a fishing station
on McNab’s Island. You can still swim at Mauger’s Beach on the
island today, if you don’t mind the pollution. The wily Mauger was
warehousing rum in town as well. He provided food for His Majesty’s
fleet at a good profit and traded with the Mi’kmaq. Cornwallis was
more than a little miffed that Mauger had a healthy smuggling
business going on with the French at Louisbourg, but the man was
too rich to tamper with.

Burned at the Crossroads

Bartholomew Green set up the first printing press on
Grafton Street in 1751 and the next year, his partner, John
Bushell, published the first edition of
The Halifax Gazette
– the first newspaper in Canada. The local content was
mostly advertisements and it carried old news garnered from
month-old English papers.

   
Raddall envisions early Halifax as a thriving town with
hotels, blacksmiths, stores, at least one “academy,” teachers of
dance, artisans and everything necessary for bringing English
civilization to this uncomfortable 'rustic place. The less polite
side of this city involved things like Joshua Mauger’s slave trade
run out of Major Lockman’s store and other fashionable locales
where Black men, women and children were bought and sold. The price
for a Mi’kmaq scalp had risen as high as £30 in Halifax before the
so-called raids diminished along the Halifax and Dartmouth
frontier. Even if the French, or possibly even the Mohawk, were
responsible for sucth raids, it would be the Mi’kmaq who paid with
their scalps and their lives.

Streets of Stumps, Rocks and
Occasional Riots

So what exactly did early Halifax
look like? Well, the streets were pretty bumpy with tree stumps and
rocks. They were muddy in spring and fall and dusty in the summer.
Human waste and garbage pails were emptied into the street gutters
or anywhere convenient, which gave the town an aroma that
Haligonians learned to adjust to. (Even at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, Halifax dumped its human waste untreated into
the harbour.) Those who couldn’t adjust to life in town would move
into the wilderness or south to New England. For many who stayed
on, the filth bred diseases that would kill them.

   
The rough log walls of early Halifax homes were beginning to
shape up with coverings of sawed boards and wood shingles. Some
frame houses were now being built and all manner of shops were
being set up, mostly in the front of homes.

   
Probably one of the weirdest days of the year in Halifax was
November 5, Gunpowder Plot Day, better known now as Guy Fawkes Day.
One group of rowdy effigy-toting Haligonians would set itself up
against another band of rivals. They cursed, fought, drank heavily
and had a bloody, merry time trying to beat the living daylights
out of each other as they attempted to capture the opposition’s
effigies. d

   
However, authorities did their best to maintain some
semblance of order, usually of the military variety. Every male
between sixteen and sixty was required to serve in the military.
The “regulars” lived in wooden barracks to the south of Citadel
Hill and to the north, near today’s corner of Brunswick and
Cogswell. The road between them, Brunswick Street, was also called
Barrack Street and it was well-known for its liquor dealers, pimps
and prostitutes. It would suffice to call it a slum. Its rival slum
kwas on Water Street, another boozy place that catered to the
earthly pleasures, vices and the degeneration of sailors, soldiers
and anyone else willing to pay the price. Fights and riots spiced
up the night life of Water Street and no decree from the Council
seemed to greatly alter the character of these two colourful
sectors of Halifax.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Wanted: Hard-working
Protestants

After the arrival of the
Alderney
, more ships
kept coming with European immigrants for the new homeland.
The
Speedwell
, the
Gale
, the
Pearl
and the
Murdoch
all
arrived, each with two to three hundred passengers hoping to start
a new life. For military and political reasons it made sense to get
loyal subjects settled into a territory bthat might once again be
in dispute with France. But why so many foreigners? All of these
ships, with the exception of the
Alderney
, were
arriving from Rotterdam with Foreign Protestants. Englishmen, for
the most part, wanted to stay at home during this time. And for
good reason. Agriculture was in a golden age and there was no war
on the home soil. Those exported to the colonies were generally
somewhat undesirable – war veterans who could not easily fit back
into civilian life and the unemployed from the cities. The working
poor, however, were needed at home to keep industry and agriculture
moving, so they were not encouraged to leave.

   
Cornwallis had long since recognized that the English coming
to Halifax were lazy and he pushed for people with a stronger work
ethic, no matter where they came from. It was no less than a matter
of survival. Young, unmarried men were the most desirable
immigrants, or so Cornwallis thought. In truth, they were more
likely to head off for more adventure or a better life
elsewhere.

Exploiting the
Immigrants

The whole business of immigration
was rife with exploitation. The British agent in charge of bringing
in foreign settlers in 1749 was a merchant named John Dick. A
Scotsman from a distinguished family, he had a reputation as a
heartless scoundrel. He helped a guy named Count Orloff in a
complicated marriage scam that conned for himself a knighthood in
Russia. He had decided to call himself Sir John Dick and argued
that he was the descendant of good old Sir William, one of the
Knight Baronets.

   
Dick promised other Europeans the same deal as
the English in settling, but they had to pay their own way across
the Atlantic and Dick often profited in the wheelings and dealings
that would get them to Nova Scotia. The journey for the Germans was
inevitably more dangerous than for the English. Take, for example,
the case of those who came over on the
Ann
.
Transportation arranged by John Dick was supposed to be on hand
when the emigrants arrived at the Prussian border. However, Dick’s
competitor, a Mr. Steadman, arrived at the meeting place to
persuade the voyagers to come with him. He pretended he was Dick
and when Dick’s own agents said otherwise, Steadman tried to get
revenge by convincing the crowd that Nova Scotia was a barren,
inhospitable land and the Germans were only wanted as soldiers
against the French and Indians. The crowd rioted against Steadman
and drove him off. Later Steadman returned and entreated some of
the poor confused peasants to take passage to Philadelphia. Some
were nearly kidnapped and the whole thing was a snarled mess,
probably representative of the pur e chaos that marked most of
these early efforts at immigration.* The skirmish also created bad
press for Dick on the continent and discouraged some would-be
settlers who had concluded that the English were simply
insane.

   
Most of the passengers who did board the
Ann
were “redemptioners” – that is, they couldn’t afford the
ticket and would have to pay off the bill with their own labour.
This system led to further human exploitation as people sold
themselves and their families to the agents who actually resold
them to the highest bidders upon their arrival. If a debtor tried
to run off or in any way refuse servitude, he was put in prison or
otherwise punished. The only financial problem here for Dick and
his business was that there simply weren’t enough people with money
in Nova Scotia to buy the immigrants. His best shot was to sell
them off to the Board of Trade. Then it became the governor’s
headache to figure out how they would work off the debt – partly by
helping to build Halifax. So the redemptioners were sent to work,
putting money back in Mr. Dick’s pocket and giving Halifax the
labour force it so desperately needed.

   
What was it like for those passengers on
the
Ann
with a man like Mr. Dick in charge of their
comfort and their fate? The ship was crowded and unventilated to
begin with. On their arrival, Cornwallis wrote that the passeungers
were “very sickly and many dead. They were, in general, old
miserable wretches and complain much of their passages not being
paid as the Swiss were.” He was also much distressed to discover
some Roman Catholics and had immediate intentions of having them
booted out of Nova Scotia.

   
When Hopson took over in 1752, he received some complaints
about John Dick, who was accused of overcrowding his ships, of
making passengers sleep on bare wooden decks and transporting
unsuitable immigrants who were old or already infirm. Mr. Dick
countered that he would never allow his passengers to be less than
comfortable and attributed the many deaths to bad weather. He
argued that the elderly were on board because he felt bad about
breaking up families. In the end, Dick was given the boot by the
Board of Trade and lost his monopoly on human freight and, to a
degree, slavery.

   
But there were other complaints as well and not all of them
aimed at Dick. The land-grant arrangement simply wasn’t what was
promised. The government was also supposed to provide implements
for farming and raising anim*als to help establish the new citizens
as farmers and herdsmen. The Germans, because of a faulty
translation, thought they would also get household items like pots,
bedding and enough tools to really start off with a household. But
this was not to be. They felt cheated and so developed a grudge
with a lifespan of several generations.

   
When all those “foreigners” arrived in Halifax, they went
right to work to begin paying off their debts. The government set
the wages artificially low. This also meant that pay could be
lowered, in the name of “fairness,” for those already working in
Halifax. You either had to work for low pay or get out of Halifax.
It seems that nobody in power figured there could possibly be any
complaints. But they figured wrong. The Germans began to protest.
They may have been hard workers but they were nobody’s
fools.

   
This set Cornwallis thinking about the original plan to
establish secondary settlements away from Halifax. The town needed
food anyway and it would be a good idea to set up a farming
community to provide for her needs. So most of the Foreign
Protestants would be sent off, along with about 300 English
settlers, to get some farming going. But where to send them? The
Fundy area was fertile but there were still those nagging worries
about the French influence and, of course, fears about the Mi’kmaq,
who were friendly with the Acadians and therefore considered
dangerous.

   
Well, something had to be done with Dartmouth on
the other side of the harbour, so the immigrants from the
Speedwell
would put up the picket wall over there and build up
the settlement that had been abandoned after the previous
hostilities with the Mi’kmaq. Immigrants from the
Gale
would settle further up on Bedford Basin. Cornwallis
eventually handed the worrisome matters of settlement over to
Hopson,o who didn’t like the idea of granting any land around
Halifax Harbour to these foreigners. Still, the problem lingered as
to where to put them all. England was continuing to foot the bill
for their food and that was draining the purse. Such
headaches.

   
Some of the foreigners saw the bad deal that was going down
and left to live with the French. Many of these deserters were
returned, although the Catholics stayed on with the French. The
Germans were getting more and more uncomfortable with the situation
in Halifax. Hopson tried to import a Lutheran minister in hopes
that a little religion would act as a pacifier but that proved
unsuccessful.