Nova Scotia (22 page)

   
Fear of another French invasion spread in 1762 and Halifax
again prepared itself for war, but nothing came of it. The Treaty
of Paris in 1763 gave Britain control of all lands that had once
been held by the French in North America. France held on to St.
Pierre and Miquelon and some fishing rights in the North Atlantic.
As terms of the agreement, Britain would grant a very limited
degree of religious freedom for the first time in Nova Scotia.
George III, who had recently succeeded his father, George II,
issued a royal proclamation which established a set of rights and
freedoms for First Nations people in Canada. Today, this
proclamation rris still part of the debate on the fundamental
issues of fishing and land claims such as the one in Oka. It did,
however, establish English dominance over what had once been Native
land.

   
All of the Maritime provinces were then known as Nova Scotia,
but the English settlers of the renamed St. John’s Island (Prince
Edward lsland) petitioned to become a separate province and
succeeded. They had successfully complained that it just took too
damn long to get word back and forth from Halifax. Even after the
breakaway, the first governor, Walter Patterson, started up a
birchbark canoe mail service between his island and the mainland to
try toc improve communication between the two
provinces.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

The Return of the
Acadians

In 1764, after it was decreed that
Acadians would be permitted to return to Nova Scotia, the battered
refugees trickled back slowly. It was a difficult journey home from
the American colonies along the seaboard to the south and many came
on foot or undertook a harrowing journey in cramped quarters on
sailing ships.

   
The government in Halifax was pushing to populate more of the
land in Nova Scotia and now that the French had been defeated, the
Acadians were not considered to be of any significant danger. In
1768, the British asserted that non-Protestants could now own land,
but the law wasn’t officially applied until the last decade of the
century. Meanwhile, ownership of land by Catholic Acadians would be
tenuous at best, making it difficult for a family to feel settled.
All the best Acadian lands had been commandeered, given away to
British and New England settlers. Acadians returned to Pubnico and
Îles Madame and then settled other communities where the fishing
and farming could be developed: Digby, various Yarmouth County
harbours, Minudie, Nappan, Maccan, Cheticamp, Pomquet, Tracadie,
Havre-Boucher and Chezzetcook. The return from exile continued
slowly until the 1820s.

Not Quite New England

Up until 1758, New Englanders
generally didn’t see Nova Scotia as a particularly desirable place.
Halifax was considered a rather degenerate little seaport town.
Representational government ? – democracy – was coming along very
slowly, hostilities between English and Mi’kmaq continued and it
was anyone’s guess when the power struggle with France might flare
up again. The climate was harsher, the farming in general was not
nearly as good as in the New England river valleys and the black
flies were debilitating in summer. So why would any New Englander
in his right mind want to give up the family homestead and set off
north for a new life there?

   
Well, after Louisbourg was captured, the immediate French
threat diminished and a token near-democratic government was set up
in Halifax. These two factors still would not have been enough to
attract New Englanders. Governor Lawrence, however, was giving away
the rich farmlands stolen from the Acadians and throwing in some
further incentives as well. There would be freedom of religion –
for all Protestants anyway. Dissenters would be excused from paying
taxes collected by the Church of England. The English were
promising protection from the French or the Mi’kmaq or anyone else
a settler might consider threatening. After all, the place was
crawling wit*h under-utilized military men with nothing but time on
their hands. Lawrence also claimed that the government and legal
systems were pretty much like what they were used to at
home.

   
At first, only a handful of New Englanders went north to
check things out. They indeed saw the fertile Acadian dyked
farmlands and the attractive possibilities, but all the other
negative firsthand reports delayed immigration. From 1760 to 1763,
however, at least 5,000 people had been persuaded to give up New
England for Nova Scotia. Known as the Planters, the settlers were
not only farmers, but some were fishermen. Many had come from
cMassachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where conflicts were
arising over the use of “common” ground. The idea of private,
available land for the asking was a great temptation. Many were
Congregationalists and they saw the move as an opportunity to
spread their brand of religion.

   
While the farmers came mostly from Connecticut and Rhode
Island, the fishermen came from coastal Massachusetts. Some of the
latter may still have held a grudge against the Nova Scotian
British for not having given Massachusetts credit for the part her
people had played in defeating the French at Louisbourg. New
Englanders had also suffered at the hands of the French military.
Fishing schooners had been captured by French privateers during the
Seven Years’ War and New England fishing ports had, in many cases,
been destroyed. On the more positive side, many coastal New
Englanders would feel at home in villages along the shores of Nova
Scotia and were happy to make a fresh start. This was not
unfamiliar territory to them; many had sailed here to fish during
the summers. Now they were closer to the Grand Banks as well, which
gave them at least one advantage over the fishermen they left
behind in New England. Yarmouth, Barrington, Liverpool and Chester
became home to many of the arrivals.

   
Not everyone who came to Nova Scotia, however, stayed on.
They discovered it wasn’t all as grand as Lawrence had proclaimed.
Nonetheless, there were other settlers from elsewhere ready to be
lured to Nova Scotia.

McNutt’s Grand Scheme

After the 1763 Treaty of Paris,
George III thought it wise to “reward” the Highland Scots for their
help in the war with France. Handing out land grants wasn’t exactly
taxing on the Empire. It was still considerably difficult to
persuade people to leave their homes and undertake the arduous
journey across the Atlantic to a rough and rugged land.

   
Five hundred more families came to Nova Scotia in the spring
of 1760, including Scots and Ulstermen who eventually settled in
Onslow, Londonderry and the Pictou Harbour area. Land was being
readily doled out and a land boom was underway as the new influx of
settlers continued. American speculators, who had already found
ways of cashing in on land grabs in the new territories opening in
the west, saw a chance to profit in Nova Scotia as well. Land
companies were formed and big tracts of land were bought up. The
ambitious and bold Virginian Colonel Alexander McNutt had a grand
scheme to establish a city called Jerusalem where Shelburne now
stands on the South Shore. He proposed to the Board of Trade the
importation of 8,000 Ulstermen, thus creating instant civilization
in an undeveloped part of Nova Scotia. The Board of Trade saw
problems with schemes like this. They worried that if the scheme
worked, McNutt and other entrepreneurs like him might well succeed
in depopulating Great Britain. Cheap labour was needed at home for
farming as well as industry and it would be unwise to let everyone
skip off to start a new life across the Atlantic.

   
The board members need not have worried. McNutt only
succeeded in getting 400 immigrants onto a boat and settling them
in Truro and the Minas Basin area. He was a great schemer but a bad
planner, more interested in profit than in the survival of the
folks he deposited on the shores of Nova Scotia. His passengers
suffered food shortages and destitution as they tried to settle in
and McNutt was unwilling to help. Nova Scotian Governor Belcher,
hearing of the problem, sent some seed grain, but by 1762 tough
times were still hampering residents of the Onslow area. Things in
Truro and Londonderry, however, started to
improve.

   
Despite his lack of concern for the client
immigrants whom he had deposited here, McNutt continued to exploit
the potential for profit in Nova Scotia. Through the Philadelphia
Company, he established himself as landholder of a big chunk of
property around Pictou Harbour. The company took control of the
land in 1766 and was obliged (to the Halifax government) to plant
250 settlers there within a year. Here was an early example of
government privatization of a job it would rather not undertake.
The company leased a ship called the *
Betsey
but had a
difficult time enticing wary Philadelphians into believing that
there was a better life to be had so far to the north. Only six
families signed on and there were forty passengers in
all.

   
The captain figured he’d sail to Halifax and
then ask for directions to this Pictou Harbour that he’d never
seen. He was a bit off course and headed toward Newfoundland when
another sailing ship’s captain pointed the
Betsey
in the
right direction to Pictou. Lo and behold, when they pulled into the
harbour at night, they saw bonfires on the shore, which conjured up
scary pictures in their minds of wild savages waiting to devour
them. The
Betsey
waited offshore until morning to
have a good look and when the captain decided the coast was clear,
they came ashore to find that the wild savages were only a bunch of
friendly souls from Truro, trying to welcome them and guide their
ship in. Once everyone was safely ashore, the
Betsey
surreptitiously slipped away under cover of night so that
no ship would be there to carry the immigrants back to Pennsylvania
should they deci de that the deal wasn’t as sweet as the ignoble
Philadelphia Company had let on. This was, after all, another one
of those false Nova Scotia promises. For there was no rich, cleared
farmland and no organized community with a democratic government.
Nonetheless, by now there were nearly 700 settlers in the Cobequid
townships with other growing communities in Amherst to the west and
on the Canso peninsula isolated far to the east.
”

   
The nearby Pictou Mi’kmaq were known as the Pectougwac. The
word “Pectou” itself probably derived from the Mi’kmaq term for the
gas bubbles that arose in ponds and streams – methane gases that
would later suggest the richness of coal deposits beneath. In one
of the treaties, the Pectougwac had been promised a return of their
lands along the Northumberland Strait, promises which the Halifax
government had withdrawn. For good reason, the Pectougwac wanted to
stem the flow of more white settlers into their homelands. There
were uneasy feelings but the Mi’kmaq were not openly hostile. On
occasion, hunters might show up at a settler’s doorstep asking for
food but often they were willing to help the newcomers in return
with their own hunting skills.

The Highlanders of the
Hector

The
Philadelphia Company had not succeeded in getting nearly enough
settlers for Pictou. One of the original six families had already
left. They shipped in nine more families in 1769 but couldn’t
muster more interest and it seemed like a losing proposition all
around. Shopping about for people less fortunate and more willing
to take chances, they commissioned the
Hector
to sail
with a shipload of Scots from Loch Broom. The passengers were poor
people who could barely pay the price of passage, but the
Philadelphia Company willingly took the cash. These were Scots
fleeing poverty, unfair rent increases by landlords, famine and
various kinds of trouble with the law. They were a desperate lot,
eager for a chance to make a go of it in some place where the dream
of owning their own land would become a reality.

   
The
Hector
was not
terribly fit for sea duty. She had rot that the passengers might
poke through with their fingers or pick apart with their
fingernails. But the wily American had put a good paint job on it,
making it *look like a warship that could ward off pirates. Aboard
were 200 passengers, mostly Gaelic-speaking
Highlanders.

   
The voyage started out smoothly enough. Passengers cooked
food in fires contained in sandboxes on deck and if an oatcake or
two looked mouldy it would be tossed out. With such smooth sailing,
days could be spent in the warm fresh air up on deck. Everyone but
Hugh MacLeod, it seemed, was expecting an easy voyage. MacLeod
predicted trouble ahead but was laughed at for hoarding away all
the unwanted food scraps he could get his hands on. He had plans
for a rainy day.

   
And plenty of rainy days were to come. The seas grew stormy,
the fog thickened and almost everyone succumbed to seasickness.
Navigation became mere guesswork, as seasickness gave way to
smallpox and eighteen children and a few adults died. Less than two
weeks away from arriving in Pictou, a storm hit that drove them far
off course; many thought the frail ship was being driven back to
Scotland. Food was now at a premium. Some salt meat was left but
the fresh water was nearly gone and the bread supply had been
drenched and ruined. The story goes that it was then that Hugh
MacLeod hauled out his stash of hoarded food scraps to share,
saving them all from starvation.