The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  There is no way of knowing. Just as there is no way of knowing that the simple sign a couple of clicks south of Shelburne that states “Birchtown, site of the black Loyalist landing in 1783” commemorates something truly special. Birchtown is not a village or a settlement; it is a sign with a few smallish houses and a population of about two dozen, a number of whom are black. That in itself is not unusual; Nova Scotia has a large black population. That so few of the residents of Birchtown are black is what is really odd. Once, when this was the first settlement of free blacks outside Africa, there were black people living there named Robert George Bridges, Boston King, Nathaniel Snowball, Isabel Gibbins, Cesar Perth, Cato Perkins and Moses Wilkinson. Once among their people were ship carpenters, boat builders, caulkers, anchorsmiths, sail-makers, labourers and rope makers; sawyers, millers, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, tanners and skinners; carpenters, painters, gardeners, farmers, fishermen, pilots, sailors, seamen, bakers, tailors and chimney sweeps; a seamstress, a clothier, a milliner, a coachman, a carman and a doctor. They had skills, schools for their children, and their own churches, including one ministered by David George, a Baptist minister who had founded the first black church in America a decade earlier. Most of all they had freedom, or at least a piece of paper saying they were free.

  Before that they were servants and slaves in the American South. Then came the Revolutionary War. No definitive record exists of how many served on either side in the conflict. But it is safe to say that more fought with the Loyalists, who promised them land, rations and independence, than stuck with the continental army. They fought valiantly for freedom, then landed in New York during the final days of the Revolution. The British were showing worrisome signs of reneging on their promises and handing the slaves back to the rebels. A commission was set up to sort out the conflicting claims. But Yankee slave owners took matters into their own hands. Wrote an anguished black refugee named Boston King: “We saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” George Washington insisted all the slaves be returned. Guy Carleton, the British governor-in-chief of North America, refused, agreeing only to compile a list of numbers so that compensation could be paid to the former owners. When the ships left New York harbour fully 2,775 of the 3,000 free black Loyalists selected for immigration headed for Nova Scotia and a place named Port Roseway.

  Immigration didn’t live up to expectations, not by a long shot. Most of the black Loyalists received no land at all. Instead they were left to work the rocky, barren soil near their shanty town or to work as servants to the white Loyalists at the nearby settlement of Shelburne, for wages as low as fifty or sixty dollars a year. “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life,” King recounted in his autobiography. “When they were parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets through hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.” In Shelburne, the indentured black servants were cheated of their rations, shackled and whipped for being idle or stubborn, and jailed merely for attending a “negro frolick” or dance. Trifling crimes were punished with brutal severity: a woman named Dianna, convicted for two petty larcenies (a theft under twelve pence) was sentenced to 200 lashes at high noon for the first offence and 150 lashes for the other; a man named Light Horse Jack was given 100 lashes at the hands of the common hangman—20 lashes in front of the jail, 20 lashes at the corner of King St., 20 at the corner of St. John’s St. and 20 each at the corners of Ann and St. George’s Streets; a man named Thomas stole two pieces of pork from a docked ship and was sentenced to two months of jail and hard labour and 12 lashes.

  Unable to work the boulder-strewn land, their services no longer in demand by Shelburne’s rapidly dwindling white population, the people of Birchtown sank into squalor and despair. The hapless whites in Shelburne claimed that the blacks had devalued their wages with cheap labour and blamed them for their own sorry lot. One summer day in 1784 hundreds of club-carrying whites ran the blacks into Birchtown, pulled down a bunch of their houses, then went home with that feeling of satisfaction that comes from a good day’s work. Visiting Birchtown a few years later, an aide to Prince William Henry (later King William IV) wrote back home that the place was “beyond description wretched, situated on the coast in the middle of barren rocks, and partly surrounded by a thick impenetrable wood. Their huts too miserable to guard against the inclemency of a Nova Scotia winter, and their existence almost depending on what they could lay up in summer … I think I never saw wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and the countenance of the human species as in these miserable outcasts.”

  Thomas Peters was fifty-three, an old man by the day’s standards. He escaped slavery in North Carolina during the Revolution, joined the British forces, rose to sergeant in a black regiment and sailed as a freeman with the first wave of Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia. Peters was uneducated, but possessed charisma and enough righteous indignation to speak for all the blacks who escaped from their rebel masters and came to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia expecting Britain to keep its promises. Between 1784 and 1790 Peters petitioned the crown three times for land on behalf of the blacks who settled in New Brunswick. When that got nowhere he organized a fourth petition on behalf of black families in the two provinces and made his way to London, where he planned to present it to the authorities in person.

  He landed in London at an ideal moment: liberal guilt over the slave trade was sweeping England; a group of British abolitionists had pooled their resources and obtained a grant of land to establish a free colony of blacks in Sierra Leone. Then Peters arrived with his disturbing accounts of the suffering and disappointment endured by the Loyalist blacks in Nova Scotia. The British Home Office decreed that agents be appointed to provide the dissatisfied black Loyalists with three options: stay in Canada and receive a comfortable settlement for their hardships; join the black army corps in the West Indies or accept free passage to Sierra Leone.

  Back in Nova Scotia, Peters and John Clarkson, the main recruiter for the Sierra Leone Company, met self-interested politicians, businessmen who concocted false debts to try to hold on to their cheap labour pool, and free blacks convinced that Sierra Leone was more delusion than opportunity. Ultimately the present was too awful, the future too alluring. By the new year, 600 blacks from Shelburne and Birchtown, 200 from Preston, near Halifax, 180 from the Annapolis Royal–Digby area and 200 from New Brunswick gathered in Halifax. At the insistence of Clarkson, the shipowners gave each captain written instructions to treat the blacks with the respect due all paying customers. One January day in 1792 he was rowed out to each of the fifteen vessels anchored in Halifax harbour to hand the black families assembled on deck signed certificates entitling them to Sierra Leone land. Five days later a favourable wind rose, and the convoy left behind the country that never showed them a moment’s decency.

  The voyage lasted nearly two months; sixty-five died in the crossing. Clarkson, who lay helpless for a month with a raging fever, almost joined them, then rebounded enough to make landfall. In wilting heat the boats continued up the broad estuary of the Sierra Leone River. They saw the low coastline, the crescendo of hills rising to, in Clarkson’s words, “lofty mountains crowned with perpetual verdure.” Finally, home. Yet there they met more frustration over land grants. Fearful of reliving the Birchtown experience, they took up arms. But the riot was quelled and the Nova Scotian influence waned in the new colony. Until, that is, 1992, when gunfire again rang through the streets of Freetown, and Valentine Strasser, a Creole descended from the Nova Scotians, became Sierra Leone’s president.

  Out of curiosity one day I called on Elizabeth Cromwell, who lived in Birchtown, and asked what had happened to the blacks who stayed behind. She told me the last of the elders had died a deca
de earlier. But since then a few descendants of the settlers had trickled back. Four black families in Birchtown could trace their roots to the great drama. They are the backbone of the local historical society, which pushed the province for the highway sign. They are the ones who cajoled the government into putting up the money for an archaeological survey of the site. It is our history, she explained.

  And it is mine too, even though I’m a white boy who grew up in the city. I hold on to the story of Birchtown, the ones who left, the ones who came back, for the same reason I hold on to the story of the Acadians and the other peoples who are patently not me. For in Nova Scotia there is history that exists in the air, floating high above our mundane existence of day-care, sinus headaches and the Goods and Services Tax. Forming us, becoming part of us. It is why we hear despair in the waves pounding the headland. And laughter in the wind.

  Three

  By the Rattly-Eyed Jesus

  LET’S ALLOW FOR A SECOND THAT MAYBE THE BIG THINKERS ARE RIGHT. MAYBE myth expresses life far better than history, science or any of the provable things. Doesn’t matter at all if they are true, just that they are your myths, your fables. I hear “the stories,” which seem carried along by the very light and the breeze, and I know they have meaning. They are the subconsciousness of home sure as landscape is the atmosphere, history the collective memory. Deconstruct them and you’ll reach some kind of essential truth about Nova Scotia’s inner vision. But to do so is the death of fun—like searching for signs of racial alienation in an Oscar Peterson solo. Or seeking to glimpse the scars of an overbearing parent in a Wayne Gretzky end-to-end rush.

  Some of the myths seem to have no real origin. It’s as though they existed before everything else. In the beginning, say the Mi’kmaqs, was Glooscap, their giant warrior hero whom the Great Spirit endowed with supernatural powers. At the dawn of civilization he lay on his back, head to the rising Sun, feet to the setting of the Sun, left hand to the south, right hand the north. After seventy times seven nights and days a bent old woman born that very day came to him—the grandmother who owed her existence to the dew on the rock. The next day at noon a young man came to Glooscap. He owed his existence to the beautiful foam on the waters, and Glooscap called him My Sister’s Son. The following noon another person appeared—the mother of all Mi’kmaqs.

  Before leaving for the Happy Hunting Grounds, Glooscap taught his people how to make canoes and he cleared rivers and streams for navigation. Once he was taking a bath in a trench dug out for him by Beaver. His friend Whale swam in and refused to leave until Glooscap walked to shore. Glooscap got up, and Whale swam away with such force that the great tides of the Bay of Fundy slosh back and forth to this day. Once Glooscap changed into a beaver, grew angry and slapped his tail on the waters of the Bay of Fundy five times with such force that five islands were created. Another time Beaver’s dam caused the waters to overflow into Glooscap’s garden. In anger, he hurled a stone but missed, instead cutting Digby Neck into the Bay of Fundy.

  These are the timeless stories that concretize the spiritual, creative essentials of our world. But along with the real myths of the natives a new land like Nova Scotia is infused with the old-world mythology and folk beliefs that came with the settlers. The very name, Acadia, with the hopes and expectations that go along with it, harkens back to those origins. So does an abiding belief in fore-runners, ghost ships, monsters lurking in lakes and woods and cloven-foot devils, tales that can be traced to the harbours of England, the dales of Scotland and the villages of Germany. Stories like these help the explainable harden into pure fact.

  Yet there are also stories that linger because they remain forever mysteries. The Mary Celeste was a wonder of workmanship, one in a long line of hardy vessels that rolled into the ocean at Spencer’s Island, another tiny Nova Scotia community that produced fantastic sailing ships during the last half of the nineteenth century. Christened the Amazon when she was launched in 1861, the brigantine changed her name seven years later after a freak accident in a gale. Some Americans salvaged her, and on the morning of November 7, 1872, Mary Celeste left New York for Genoa, loaded with a cargo of coal, hay and liquor. Onboard was master mariner Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife, Sara, two-year-old daughter Sophia, and a small crew of seven.

  On December 4 another brigantine, the Dei Grata, also Nova Scotia-built, was making her way to Gibraltar from New York. It had been a stormy crossing for the most part, and halfway between the Azores and Portugal the captain of the Dei Grata spotted sails on the horizon. It was the Mary Celeste. The seas were high but not dangerous. Three of the Dei Grata’s crewmen made it onboard. It was deserted. Two of the sails had blown away. Some of the rigging was gone. One of the lifeboats was missing but there was no sign that the tackle had been used to put it over the side. There was water in the hold, the binnacle was knocked over, the compass in the cabin smashed and the kitchen stove had been knocked out of place. Otherwise everything seemed orderly: gear stowed properly; plenty of still-warm food and water; the child’s toys and clothes scattered around an unmade bed. The captain’s sword was still under his bed. But his sextant, chronometer, navigation books and ship’s papers were missing. The final entry in the ship’s log read, “Monday, November 25. At 8 Eastern Point bore S.S.W. 6 miles distant.”

  It had sailed on for 378 miles with no one at the helm and no one aboard. Back ashore at least four men surfaced claiming to be survivors of the Mary Celeste, but knew none of the details of the voyage or the ship. Newspaper stories periodically speculated that it was all an elaborate murder plot; books postulated the whole thing was some kind of insurance scam. But no answers, just theories. So the story lives on, adding another layer to life here.

  Just knowing about it colours your view of the world, particularly when you sit eating your lunch on a log on the beach at Spencer’s Island, looking at the pillars of an old wharf where the Mary Celeste was once tied. I get the same odd feeling whenever I look west across Mahone Bay, which is usually how I view the province’s best-known island. To reach it you have to head down Route 324 and drive through Gold River and Western Shore until you see a sign for the Oak Island Inn (“Cable television, tennis courts, murder-mystery weekends”). Cross the causeway, pass a few anchored fishing skiffs and the kids splashing in the water, drive through a wooden gate with a misspelled sign bearing a skull and crossbones and stop in the clearing. Last time I was there two military tents snapped in the wind along the waterline. Twenty yards away a couple of men struggled to raise a giant inflatable Keith’s Beer can.

  I was excited. The first time anybody really got animated about Oak Island was in the summer of 1795, when a boy named Daniel McGinnis rowed out to it and walked about a mile through the woods to the eastern end. On the top of a small hill he found a tackle block hanging from the branches of an oak. Below the tree was a slight depression in the earth that looked as if it had been worked on some years earlier. In the late eighteenth century this part of the coast was well known as a pirate haunt. There was a persistent story of an old man who on his New England deathbed confessed to having been one of Captain Kidd’s crew and to helping bury “over two millions of money” beneath the soil of a secluded island east of Boston. So young Daniel raced home, got a couple of friends and some shovels and rowed back. Two feet down, the boys hit a layer of flagstones and under it found a 13-foot-wide shaft. Ten feet down, they found a layer of logs tightly pressed together. Ten feet deeper another log platform, and ten feet below it, another.

  At this point, exhausted, they marked the spot, covered the pit with trees and brush and quit, determined to return. They never did, unable to find anyone willing or able to help with the dig. The story lived on, though. A few years later some local businessmen dug down through the pit and discovered charcoal and coconut fibre and more log platforms at ten-foot intervals. Beyond ninety feet they found a stone inscribed with hieroglyphics that, according to one translation, said, “Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried.”
At 98 feet, they hit something hard, perhaps a treasure chest. They came back in the morning to find the shaft full of sea water. When they tried to bail it out, the water kept coming in. Whoever had dug the shaft had also dug at least two tunnels that filled the pit with water when the inscribed capstone was removed.

  The treasure hunters packed it in. Other groups took a whack at it, their drills bringing up links from a gold watch and tiny pieces of parchment—each new tantalizing hint touching off more speculation about the treasure’s origins. I particularly like the latest one: that it all has to do with the travels of Prince Henry Sinclair of the Orkney Islands back in the final days of the fourteenth century. Legend has it that after hearing about a strange but magnificent land teeming with fish and cannibals, he and a crew set sail for Newfoundland and what became the Maritime provinces. Sinclair was a supporter of the Knights Templar movement in Europe, to the point where he provided refuge in the Orkneys for Templars being persecuted on the continent by the ruling princes of Europe jealous of their wealth (the Templars were supposed to have become the custodians of the Holy Grail). There are those who think that Sinclair and his Templar friends may have buried the Grail in Nova Scotia—on Oak Island—which they intended to use as some kind of new refuge, a new Jerusalem. But there are also those who think that buried at the bottom of that impenetrable pit lies Marie Antoinette’s jewels, the secret stash of Sir Francis Drake, the long-lost manuscripts of Francis Bacon, the booty of Blackbeard or Morgan the Pirate.