Nova Scotia (35 page)

   
Slocum’s wife and children settled into life
ashore in East Boston, but Joshua was feeling unsettled and
depressed over the loss of his first wife, the wreck of his ship
and his faltering finances. In 1892, he got his hands on an old
sloop and decided to rebuild it into something that would be
uniquely his own. He also got it into his head that he should sail
it around the world, with no one but himself on board. Eleven
metres long and four metres wide, the
Spray
was
designed to be a ship that could pretty well sail itself for long
stretches at a time.

   
So this very confident, somewhat alienated fifty-one-year-old
master mariner set sail from Massachusetts in April, five years
before the turn of the centuty. “A thrilling pulse beat high in
me,” he wrote. He also admitted, “I had taken little advice from
anyone for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining
to the sea.” The obvious advice he was ignoring from everyone was
that he would be completely crazy to undertake such a treacherous
adventure.

   
Slocum took his time getting adjusted to his craft and sailed
first to Gloucester, where he bought an old dory which he cut in
half to use as a dinghy. Next he went home to Westport in Nova
Scotia and on to Yarmouth for final provisions, including a tin
clock with a smashed glass that he bought for a dollar. It would be
his only man-made reference point for time on the
trip.

   
Slocum had no particular interest in the shortest, fastest
route around the world. First he sailed from Nova Scotia to
Gibraltar. On his way he stopped in the Azores, where he contracted
some form of food poisoning. Sick at sea, he had a vision of
Christopher Columbus guiding him on. After Europe he sailed back
across the Atlantic to South America. He probably figured a couple
of trans-Atlantic crossings was a good warm-up for what would come
next. He nearly drowned off the coast of Uruguay trying to get his
vessel unstuck from a reef. Keep in mind that, like so many Nova
Scotian sailors who spent their working lives at sea, Slocum had
never learned to swim.

   
Passing through the Strait of Magellan, he had a rough time
tacking through the stormy and difficult passage. He was also
boarded by some of the local Native population who failed to sneak
up on him asleep because he had mined the deck with carpet tacks as
protection against intruders. He claimed that the leg from Thursday
Island to the Keeling Cocos Islands, a distance of 4,300
kilometres, was accomplished with the need for only one hour
manning the helm. His design of a sailing ship that could very
nearly sail itself had paid off. As he arrived at ports in the
South Pacific he was often treated royally by governors and kings
and given presents of food and supplies.

   
On July 3, 1898, he sailed back into harbour at Fairhaven,
Massachusetts, but there was no one there to make a fuss over his
return home. When he finally made it ashore, people asked him who
he was and where he had come from.

   
Joshua Slocum must have had a hard time
readjusting to landlocked life as he moved into an apartment in New
York City and then back to East Boston. He sold his story of
sailing alone around the world to the magazines and then book
publishers and tried to settle into a small farm on Martha’s
Vineyard. A few trips sailing south didn’t seem to cheer him up
enough and he grew cranky and silent. In November of 1909 he set
sail from Martha’s Vineyard in the
Spray
, an aging,
out-of-shape vessel with an aging and unhealthy captain. He was
never seen again.

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Yarmouth’s Unsung
Inventor

Nova Scotia has often been fertile
ground for inventions, particularly those related to ships and
shipping. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was common
practice for someone to simply dream up some new, innArovative
device for a practical purpose and then build it for himself or
share it with his neighbours. Patents were rarely considered, often
because the patent office was too far away or because the formality
was too es xpensive for a fisherman or sailor. Occasionally, a Nova
Scotian sailor or shipbuilder would create an ingenious improvement
in ship design or fashion a completely unique maritime device. If
either worked well, it found its way into sailing technology
worldwide without any great rewards for the inventor.

   
Such was the case for John Patch of Yarmouth,
who invented the marine screw propeller, a major advance in ship
technology. Patch had also come up with some improvements for steam
engines and paddle wheels, but it was the propeller device that
would revolutionize the shipping industry. Patch had created a
wooden model of his screw propeller as early as 1833. It was
powered by a hand crank that turned wooden gears. Patch tried it
out at night in Yarmouth Harbour with a handful of witnesses nearby
to watch him propel himself across the water by turning a hand
crank that in turn rotated a prop at the back of his boat. In 1834,
his new-fangled propulsion system was installed in the
schooner
Royal
George
, and the grateful
captain, Silas Kelly, found that he could now move his boat around
even when the wind had gone dead on him. Patch went off to New York
to apply for a patent but was denied. He was told his invention was
worthless and that he would just be wasting his money. He tried
again in Washington but was turned down there as
well.

   
It was probable that the patent offices were manned by
corrupt employees who took advantage of their positions to seize on
a good idea and try to make money by getting a patent for
themselves. Patch was an uneducated seafaring Nova Scotian who
looked like an easy mark to the shrewd American patent
officers.

   
The patent design finally did get registered in England but
not by Patch. It’s possible that this English design was invented
quite independently of Patch. This doesn’t change the fact that the
Yarmouth resident had come up with the idea on his own, had tried
to register what had previously not been registered and was turned
down. By 1858 poor old John was seventy-seven, crippled, broke and
living in the Yarmouth poorhouse. The good folks of that port had
watched John’s invention become a vital tool of marine technology
and they were outraged that Patch had not received credit or money.
They made a solid case to the Nova Scotia legislature fork
compensation, but it was turned down and so John Patch went to his
grave without ever getting much in the way of credit or cash for
his invention or his inventiveness.

The Deep Divers of
Pictou

Another more worldly-wise Nova
Scotian inventor was John Fraser of Pictou County. While his
brother, Dr. J.D.B. Fraser, was the first physician to make use of
chloroform in Canada, John was the first man to use a diver’s
helmet in North America. While this may not sound like a monumental
“first” to a landlubber, it was a pretty big deal in the salvage
industry. As the stories in this book reveal, a multitude of
sailing ships and uncountable tons of valuable cargo ended up on
the bottom of the sea, and any means available to return such goods
above sea level would earn significant rewards. o

   
Fraser had been doing salvage work for Lloyds of
London off the European coast. When he came home to Nova Scotia in
the summer of 1842, he had the gear necessary to descend to the
bottom of the sea while still breathing air. Along with another
Pictonian, Alexander Munro, he set off to Cape Bear, P.E.I., where,
in 1839, the
Mallabar
had once floundered, dumping her
seventy-four guns and tons of valuable “shot” to the bottom. Munro
and Fraser were able to raise thirty-five of the cannons and a few
tons of the shot to produce a good profit for themselves. After
that they set up operations in Pictou, where they demonstrated
their bizarre-looking new equipment to the wide-eyed fishermen and
townspeople. The diving device was large and unwieldy, weighed down
by ninety kilograms of lead. The hood had three windows and the
“suit” was made of India rubber. Air was pumped into the helmet by
way of a long tube. To the amazement of the Pictou crowd, Munro
stayed under for more than a half hour and then went down a second
time to bring up some ornaments – an anchor and a chain – to show
off.

Undersea Messages to
Europe

In 1849, Nova Scotian Frederick
Gisbourne thought that the island of Newfoundland should have a
more dependable communication link with his own province and the
outside world. His plan involved a land cable and a steamboat
connection to Cape Breton. The Newfoundland legislature gave him
£500 to perform a survey of the land route which would carry the
cable from St. John’s to Cape Ray. That venture in itself was
dangerous, leading to the death of one man and near-starvation for
the rest of the crew.

   
Not one to be discouraged in pursuit of profit and better
communication, Gisbourne went to New York to find investors to back
him for yet another project, the first successful North American
submarine communications cable. In the summer of 1852, it would
link P.E.I. to New Brunswick, giving Charlottetown instant
telegraph communication with the mainland for the first
time.

   
The troublesome Newfoundland project, however, eventually led
to bankruptcy for Gisbourne, but he didn’t let that get him down.
Instead, he enlisted the support of big money man Cyrus Field, and
together they decided to finish the Newfoundland project, complete
with an underwater cable to Cape Breton. Next, they grew more
ambitious and proposed putting in a submarine cable all the way
from St. John’s to Europe. Gisbourne liked big projects and this
was an enormous one which took thirteen years to finish and five
times the money originally expected. Field and Gisbourne had also
enlisted other investors and the help of Samuel Morse, inventor of
the electric telegraph.

   
In the summer of 1854, 600 men were at work on the land leg
of the Newfoundland route, cutting a swath a mere two and a half
metres wide through the rugged terrain. The first try at putting
down the undersea cable from Cape Ray to Cape Breton across the
Cabot Strait was scrubbed when a storm walloped the sailing ship
that was trying to lay the cable. In the process they lost
seventy-two kilometres of costly cable. The next year they
succeeded with a steamship to get the insulated strand-core copper
wire in place and the telegraph link came into
service.

   
More money was raised, including $70,000 from the U.S.
government, and the Atlantic Telegraph Company continued on its way
to forge the undersea link with Europe. There were still plenty of
setbacks, including cable lost or damaged by storms, and accidents,
but by 1866 the transatlantic cable was pulled ashore at Heart’s
Content, Newfoundland, and Gisbourne saw his vision
fulfilled.

King of Kerosene

While Frederick Gisbourne was
concerned with improving communication by laying cables, geologist
Abraham Gesner would hope to supply something even more
fundamental: a better way to provide light in the darkness of one’s
own home. Gesner was born in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, in
1797. He studied in London to become a doctor, but he also had a
lifelong passionate interest in geology. In 1836 he published a
book about the rocks of Nova Scotia, then moved to New Brunswick to
act as provincial geologist. When he was fired from that job, he
opened a museum of natural history. It turned out not to be a very
good way to make a living, so he returned to Nova Scotia where, in
his disappointment, he started to study coal.

   
During those days many people provided night-time lighting by
burning smoky and smelly oil from plants or animals, including
whales. The lighting itself was quite dim and the fuel sometimes
expensive. When Gesner met the British commander, the Earl of
Dundonald, he found a kindred spirit interested in the possibility
of providing light from coal. Burning a chunk of coal for light in
itself would be a smelly, unsatisfying business but, with
Dundonald’s encouragement, Gesner figured out how to distil oil
from coal. He made a big demonstration of it in a church in
Charlottetown and the event was a huge success.

   
The new synthetic fuel, called kerosene, was adopted for use
in illuminating lighthouses. Gesner started the Kerosene Gaslight
Company to light the streets of Halifax but there were a few snags
in getting the business running smoothly. Gesner’s new fuel was
still somewhat smelly as it burned but was a major improvement over
the past. Kerosene would go on to be used for cooking, lighting,
heating and even to fuel jets, but in his day Gesner never made a
big profit from it and moved on to teach natural history at
Dalhousie University.

The Bells of Baddeck

In 1885, the greatest of all
inventors associated with this province, Alexander Graham Bell,
took a vacation in Cape Breton and became hooked on the place. For
the next thirty-three years, Bell lived from the spring into the
fall at Beinn Bhreagh, his home near Baddeck. For Bell, Cape Breton
would be just the place to ambitiously explore new technological
possibilities that would help change the world. *