CHAPTER III
NEW SCOTLAND’S CHARACTERISTICS
One finds it difficult, briefly by means of analogy, to describe this peninsula of New Scotland. Yet it may not unfairly be compared to Old Scotland. Many of the features of the land are the same, nor is the climate unlike. But when we come to the human element we have no difficulty at all. Mixed as the population is, the Scots predominate. The late Lieutenant-Governor was a Fraser. The present holder of the office is a Macgregor, the Premier is a Murray, the Mayor of Halifax is a Chisholm. The Frasers, Macdonalds, M’Gillivrays, Wallaces, and M’Inneses furnish forth the bench, the bar, journalism, and the learned professions; and it is perhaps needless to tell you that the Scot here, as elsewhere in Canada, more than holds his own—“and maybe that of ither folk”—in the commercial world.
But this is not saying enough about New Scotland considered as a transatlantic habitation and hunting-ground of the Old Scot. Here are still Gaelic communities where the Sassenach tongue is not heard. On the eve of the American Revolution a tide of emigration had set in from the old Scotland to the new, the first to arrive being a shipload of Highlanders in 1773. For many years, despite the terrible conditions of an ocean passage in those days, the tide flowed on. Emigrants, in the old days, were forced to spend weeks or even months on the voyage, pent like cattle in ships frequently infected by small-pox and scurvy.
Some 25,000 Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while numbers landed on the shores of Northumberland Strait, in the counties now known as Pictou and Antigonish. Their hardships were not over when they landed; but with indomitable pluck they persevered until they had carved homes for themselves out of the forest.
From one end of the peninsula to the other the cemeteries are filled with the tombs of the Frasers and the Macdonalds, the Macleans and the M’Nabs. At Shelburne, that “dead city” of the Loyalists, I copied out a lengthy inscription on a granite stone to a Loyalist heroine:
THE WIFE OF JOHN MACLEAN
WHO DIED 28TH MARCH, 1791, AGED 32 YEARS
She left her native country, Scotland, and numerous friends and companions, to follow the fortunes of her husband during the war with America in 1780. And when New York became no longer an asylum to loyalty, she joined him again on the rugged shore of Nova Scotia as an affectionate and faithful wife, a cheerful and social friend, humane and charitable, and pious as became a good Christian.
Another elsewhere oddly records that: “Here lies Angus M’Donald and his five sons, who lived ever on the side of the King, and died on this side of the Ocean.”
No; New Scotland is no misnomer; and the Patron Saint of the Province is—and may it long continue so to be—St. Andrew.
Although the Scots thus prevail, the other inhabitants of the Province are an eighteenth century mixture of the Old and New Worlds—of three great European races. Cape Breton and the eastern part of the peninsula is Scotch, the extreme west is French-Acadian, there is a settlement of Germans in the middle, and the rest of the population, save for a small sprinkling of aboriginal Micmacs, is English—the fruit of the Loyalist immigration from America.
Nova Scotia, which is connected with the North American Continent by a narrow isthmus, lies roughly within the same degrees north latitude as the territory between the Pyrenees and Lake Geneva. It is 360 miles long, with an average breadth of 65 miles, and covers an area of 20,900 square miles, i.e. over two-thirds that of Scotland. No part of the entire peninsula is more than thirty miles from the sea. The surface of the country is very undulating, though not mountainous, the highest ridge not being 1200 feet in height. Yet the Province boasts several of these ridges or chains of hills, to which it gives the name of mountains, generally running parallel to its length. Its picturesqueness is chiefly attributable to its numerous and beautiful lakes, its harbours dotted with islands, its rivers and streams, and a pleasing variety of highland and valley. Looked at from the Atlantic side, the country seems barren and rocky.
The seaward coast of the Province has been likened to a granite wall, indented by innumerable bays, fiords, and inlets. Wide and sandy beaches sweep gradually towards the firm soil, from headland to headland; quaint and quiet fishing villages and hamlets underlie the rocks, sentinelled by countless islands along the coast. At every point, too, history and legend are here to throw a mantle over the scene—to mingle its rays with those of the sun and moon. Here are tales of French and English adventure, of Indian raid, storm, wreck, of buccaneers and buried treasure, all the way from Cape North to Cape Sable. But if the Atlantic shore is seemingly sterile and iron-bound, bearing in this respect a striking resemblance to the east coast of Old Scotland, it is far otherwise with the interior. The peach and the grape ripen in the open air, and the growth of maize and root crops might well excite the envy of a farmer in Perthshire or Elgin. Even in those districts where the scorched and leafless stems of giant pines rear their arms upward as if in appeal to Heaven, if the traveller will leave the railway and penetrate to the land beneath, he will see a vegetation almost rank, of raspberry, wild rhododendron, alder and crimson sumach, telling of the fertility of the soil. Where the surface is not fertile, the riches are beneath, in the form of coal, iron, gypsum, and other minerals: but there are few parts of the Province where grass suitable for sheep and cattle raising does not abound.
Then when we get on the North, or “Fundy Side,” of the peninsula, we meet the broad alluvial plains, intersected by tortuous rivers or indented by wide and crooked basins, floored with red mud which the ebb-tide reveals, as though each were a ruddy gash in the bosom of Mother Earth. This is the land of the monstrous Fundy tides, whose high-mounting, foaming “bore,” or tidal wave, sweeps irresistibly shoreward, making the smallest creeks to fill like turbulent rivers, but met and baffled along the low-lying shore by the “dykes” which were first reared by the Norman peasants three centuries ago, reclaiming the rich marsh land from the salt tide, and only here and there permitting the fertilising ocean to trickle in at certain seasons to reinvigorate the soil. Here is situated, too, that “hundred miles of apple-blossoms,” otherwise known as the Annapolis Valley, sheltered between the North and South Mountains, and also the famous marshes of Tantramar.
At the other and eastern end of this peninsula stands Cape Breton Island, a province in itself, cut off by the Strait of Causo, one of the most picturesque of regions, itself reversing, as has been said, the definition of an island, inasmuch as it is land surrounding a body of water. That golden arm of the sea—the Bras d’Or lakes—nearly divides the land into two halves—both rich in the natural diversifications of hill and dale, crag and fell, forest and moor, and many streams and islets.
Everywhere are the shores indented, often to the extent of several miles, with harbours, rivers, coves, and bays, usually connecting with the interior waters. The loftiest cliffs, about 500 feet high, lie on the coast between Mahone and Margaret’s Bay, and is generally the first land descried by voyagers from Europe or the West Indies. From the summit of Ardoise Hill, between Halifax and Windsor, which is 700 feet high, one may command a prospect of Windsor, Falmouth, Newport, Wolfeville, and the basin of Minas country. Further on to the west are the Horton Mountains, running nearly north and south, and twenty miles beyond begins another chain of hills, traversing east and west, the North Mountain and the South Mountain, the former of which is washed by the Bay of Fundy. Between these two ridges lie the fertile Annapolis and Cornwallis valleys.