Nova Scotia (42 page)

   
In 1922, the
Henry Ford
was up
against the
Bluenose
. Named for
the famous car manufacturer, it hadn’t completed the full fishing
season by race time but was allowed to race anyway. The first race
was thrown out, the
Ford
won the second,
but the
Bluenose
went on to win the third and
necessary fourth race. More bitter squabbling attended this series
of races, though, as a great deal of money was riding in bets.
Angus Walters’s nephew Bert (Boodle) Demone made the mistake of
going ashore to celebrate and he was later found dead, drowned in
the harbour. The
Bluenose
sailed home
with her flag at half mast.

   
The 1923 series was also marred by bad feelings.
The American entry, the
Columbia
, had been
struck by a trawler and later hit a rock ledge before she even made
it to the race. She, too, was not a regular working sailing ship
but was allowed to race. In the first race, the
Columbia
forced the
Bluenose
into the
dangerous Sambro ledges and the
Bluenose
’s main boom
jammed into the
Columbia
’s rigging.
Nonetheless, the
Bluenose
won the
first and second race and held her title, only to have it
challenged by the Americans who protested over which side of the
marker buoys the
Bluenose
had passed
on. The International Race Committee then gave the title to
the
Columbia
, causing
Angus Walters to lose his cool and tell them all to go to hell as
he walked away. The befuddled committee told the
Columbia
captain to simply sail the course one more time and be
declared the winner. Instead, the
Columbia
’s Captain
Pine set sail for home. The $5,000 prize money ended up being split
between the two ships as a compromise.

Back to the Grand Banks

The
Halifax interests were angry at Angus Walters for leaving the race
and asked Bill Roue to build a new ship that could beat the
Bluenose
. Roue constructed the
Haligonian
in
Shelburne, but in 1926 it was defeated twice by the
Bluenose
.

   
The
Bluenose
continued to
work the Grand Banks through the rest of the decade. While owners
and fish dealers were making reasonable profits, the lowly
fishermen averaged something less than $1,000 a year. Big storms in
’26 and ’27 hammered the fishing fleets, and in 1930 the
Bluenose
herself ran aground due to pilot error in Placentia
Bay and languished for a few days on a gravel beach near Argentia.
Later that same year, after repairs, she was back in the race at
Gloucester, sailing against the
Gertrude L. Thebaud
,
owned by a French-Canadian who lived part of the year in
Gloucester. The races were plagued by light winds, then rain. The
“American” ship was declared the winner but Angus Walters claimed
he wasn’t beaten. The next year when the race was held off Halifax,
Walters whipped the
Gertrude
L. Thebaud
, taking the prize.
The two ships wouldn’t compete together again until
1938.

   
In the intervening years of the Depression, the fishing
industry went bad as markets for salt fish shrank and nearly
everything went bust. Angus Walters had kept on in the fishing
business, however, and, later in that decade as president of the
fishermen’s union, lobbied in Halifax for a small
one-quarter-cent-per-pound increase in fish
prices.

   
The
Bluenose
sailed to
the Great Lakes to represent Canada in the 1933 World’s Fair in
Chicago. Arriving with great fanfare, the ship soon became ensnared
in a series of legal wrangles. She was sued, she was charged with
customs infractions and her crew found a bullet-ridden body
alongside. An article in
Cosmopolitan
would
later even suggest that Angus Walters lost his composure when a
female sightseer touched the wheel of the schooner and he swore at
her for having “violated” his ship.

   
Despite a few controversies, the
Bluenose
earned respect in many ports for her racing
achievements and in 1935 she participated in the Silver Jubilee
Sailpast before King George and Queen Elizabeth at Spithead,
England. Walters did his diplomatic deed, met the king and
proceeded to sail home, only to get slammed by a severe storm that
keeled the
Bluenose
over, nearly sinking the great
ship.

The Sinking of a Legend

She
was already appearing on a Canadian fifty-cent stamp when her image
was adopted for the new 1937 ten-cent coin, a little piece of Nova
Scotia sailing history jingling around in the pockets of every
Canadian. Her last international event was a five-race series off
Gloucester, this time with fewer restrictions on sails and crew.
The
Bluenose
was in rough shape and showed it.
The
Thebaud
took the first race, and the
Bluenose
the second. In the end, the
Bluenose
won the
event and, as in the past, there was a furor over how the races
were run. Angus Walters said he’d never race in the U.S. after
that.

   
By 1939, the
Bluenose
was an
obsolete vessel and considered too vulnerable to submarine attacks.
Her owners saw no future or profit left in the ship and Walters
bought what was left of the once-grand schooner for $7,200*. He
tried to raise money to preserve this national treasure but no
government office or organization thought it of much concern.
Instead, war was on everyone’s mind. The East India Trading Company
bought the ship in 1942 and Walters reluctantly sent her off to ply
the waters of the Caribbean as a coastal trading ship. On January
28, 1946, she hit a reef off Haiti. The crew got off and the ship
held together long enough for her engines to be salvaged but after
that, she was left to her fate.

   
In 1963, Walters drove the ceremonial spike for
the keel of the
Bluenose
II
with a bit more accuracy
than the Duke of Devonshire had for the original, but he had stated
more than once that “The wood is not grown yet, that will build a
boat which will beat the
Bluenose
.” Walters
died in 1968.

   
In his book
Once Upon a Schooner
,
Silver Donald Cameron notes that “fully half the Gloucester fleet
was manned by Nova Scotians . . . the Gloucester crews were just
about as ‘American’ as a CFL football team is ‘Canadian.’’’ He
points out that these races were competitions between men who were
mostly Nova Scotian and that all the bickering was the result of
politicians, financial backers and publicity
hacks.

   
Despite the fact that no one seemed to care very
much when the
Bluenose
was sent to an ignominious job in
the south, her image lives on in the psyche of this province. To
many Nova Scotians, the d
Bluenose
represents
the grandeur of the great days of sailing ships and the spirit of a
province integrally tied to the sea.

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

Maritime Rights and Marginalized
People

The 1920s were a time of economic
ruin and rebellion for Nova Scotia. Saint Mary’s University
historian John G. Reid suggests that the Great Depression which
swept the country in the 1930s began much earlier in the Maritimes,
as early as 1920, and lasted right through the Thirties. Nova
Scotians were familiar with hard times, but for that new breed of
worker totally dependent on mining and industrial jobs there would
be a whole new dimension to the hardships inflicted on them by an
economic slump.

   
Nova Scotians, however, didn’t take the punishment lying
down. They worked hard to survive and, when necessary, fought back
to protect their meagre earnings and their rights. It was a
watershed period which shaped attitudes and government policy for
many years to follow.

   
With the end of World War I, the country was readjusting to
peace time. For Halifax, this meant continued recovery from the
great explosion of 1917, which, despite its devastation, had set in
motion relief programs that were the basis for significant social
reform. There was a brief postwar boom that quickly fizzled and,
because of the new economic changes in Nova Scotia, it looked as
though the people here would not have much control over their own
destiny.

   
Between 1922 and 1925, the Maritime Rights movement
flourished, fuelled by grievances shared by the three provinces.
The Maritimes were suffering as a result of changes in railroad
rates and other stumbling blocks impeding the economy of the East.
Dartmouth writer H.S. Congdon, a leading exponent of the Maritime
Rights movement, put Upper Canada fully at fault for trying to
“have these provinces destroyed.” Prime Minister Mackenzie King was
slow to recognize the inherent truth in what was being put forward
by the Maritime Rights activists and, for a while, turned a deaf
ear. As a result of mutual problems, the 1920s was very much a time
of solidaritey for New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia as a
strong regional identity emerged.

   
Not everyone was to share in this feeling of unity, however,
especially the marginalized Blacks, Mi’kmaq and, to a lesser
degree, Nova Scotian Acadians. Mi’kmaqs were still left isolated on
reserves and Blacks continued to go to segregated schools in
accordance with the less-than-enlightened 1918 Nova Scotian
Education Act.

   
Although women had received the vote in 1918, significant
barriers to equality still stood in their way. Lower-class women
worked for very low wages and employers hoped to keep it that way.
Like their male counterparts, these workers would not always
quietly acquiesce to the boss’s demands. In 1925, for example,
Halifax telephone operators went on strike for better wages.
Inequality in the workplace existed almost everywhere, including
Dalhousie University where highly qualified women were relegated to
lower-paying jobs than their male counterparts.

“In Terror of
Revolution”

Historian T.W. Acheson points out
that, as early as 1914, the Maritimes had become a branch-plant
economy. It was not unlike the early days of British occupation
when major economic decisions were made far away in London. Now,
important economic decisions about Nova Scotia would be corporate
ones made in boardrooms well outside the province. When companies
begin to cut back, they tend to protect their operations close to
home and shut down branches farther away. Nova Scotia was very much
on the periphery of North American industrial development and jobs
here were considered expendable.

   
More hard times were in store for Nova Scotia. There were
problems with the province’s coal and troubles in the steel
industry. Railroads were not expanding as expected and so there was
a smaller market for Nova Scotia rails. Nova Scotia had lost
considerable political power as well. By 1921, the entire Maritime
region accounted for less than twelve percent of the country’s
population, whereas, at the time of Confederation, it had bee*n
nearly twenty percent. Nova Scotians simply had a weaker voice in
Parliament and diminished means to insure that the federal
government made decisions favourable to them.

   
A change in the National Policy, for example, reduced a
tariff on imported coal that had once protected jobs and kept mines
in production on Cape Breton. Freight subsidies that allowed all
manner of goods from this region to move cheaply toward Central
Canada were also chopped.

   
Government policy and outside control of industry led to a
crisis in employment: almost half of the manufacturing jobs in the
region disappeared during the first six years of the decade. The
export of fish remained steaÿdy for a while, but that too was to
decline.

   
Between the two great wars, another sort of war erupted in
Nova Scotia, particularly in Cape Breton. It was a battle between
workers and employers and it had its greatest impact on the lives
of miners. When the Canadian government reduced the import tariffs
on coal, the owners of the mines began to lower the wages for
workers. Dominion Coal and Nova Scotia Steel and Coal companies,
major employers in Cape Breton, had been merged into BESCO, the
British Empire Steel Corporation, headquartered in Montreal but run
by directors in Montreal, London, Toronto and New York. The company
pretty well had a monopoly on coal and steel in Nova Scotia. They
were calling the shots.

   
BESCO had probably not completely considered the depth of the
frustration and the convictions of the highly organized Cape Breton
coal miners as they began slashing wages. Under the banner of the
United Mine Workers of America, militant leaders like J.B.
McLachlan were prepared to cause the mine owners some serious
grief, if they were ready to short-change these men for the hard
work that was at the centre of their lives.