The Speares

Today's flight is from Charlottetown clear across Enmigtaqamu'g or the Acadian Peninsula as some call it. We're on our way to Lunenburg, a sleepy little community on the south coast. We'll be actually landing at Bridgewater, because Lunenburg is too tiny to have its own airport. But at one time it was quite the bustling place.

Acadians started settling in what they called Mirliguèche (a corruption of a Mi'kmaq word meaning Whitecaps) as early as 1620. The land was, of course, owned by the Mi'kmaq, but the French settlers easily got around that problem by taking Mi'kmaq wives. So by the time the British governor, in the person of one Edward Cornwallis, came to inspect the potential harbour they had acquired through the Treaty of Utrecht he found eight families living in comfortable houses, in perfect harmony with the local indigenous population, and by all accounts doing well. So he sent the 20 gun sloop Sphinx there and had the village destroyed.

Meanwhile, the rest of Nova Scotia was not submitting to British rule quietly. There were constant threats of trouble from the Acadians, the Mi'kmaq, and in particular the French. So Fort George was built and a new town to go with it, Halifax. Of course, a new town requires inhabitants. And of course they would be Protestants, because the French and therefore the Acadians were Catholic. Luckily, Europe was crammed full of Protestants anxious to leave their homes and Catholic persecution. So the British lured a bunch of Lutherans, Calvinists and Zwinglians from France, Germany and Switzerland to the new world with promises of land.

Now the trouble with the land in Nova Scotia was that it was naturally acidic, low in organic matter and largely infertile. And recently acquired, so titles were a work in progress, especially if you were to ask the Mi'kmaq. There was good land to be sure, but there were also upwards of 14,000 French Catholic Acadians who were living on it. So even though there were vast sweeps of land, none of it was necessarily available in a timely manner. A lot of the "Foreign Protestants" ended up languishing in the shanty town of Halifax. They were being put to work building the town, and they were paying exorbitant rents for that honour. So they were angry. And they were causing trouble. Which made Governor Cornwallis think of the idyllic little village of Mirliguèche. And of getting rid of the foreigners. I mean, Halifax was mostly built anyway.

And so, in 1753, 1,400 Foreign Protestants were resettled from Halifax to Mirliguèche, renamed Lunenburg in honour of the Duke of Braunschweig-Lünenburg, otherwise known as King George II of Great Britain. They were accompanied by 160 soldiers to provide protection from the French to some degree, but mostly the Mi'kmaq, who were upset about towns going up, in clear violation of the 1752 treaty negotiated with Chief Jean-Baptiste Cope. So just under 1,600 people set about building blockhouses and palisades to keep them alive during the upcoming winter. Which meant they weren't farming or fishing. Which meant it was going to be a hard winter. Which meant that the foreigners were becoming "inconceivably turbulent, I might have said mutinous" according to the officer in charge.

By December, only six months after their arrival, the settlers of Lunenburg were so displeased with their treatment at the hands of the British, and so positively incensed about a purported letter from London that said they were not getting all of the support authorized by parliament, that they rebelled. They joined forces with Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre, the spiritual and military leader of the local Acadians and Mi'kmaq, against the British. One of the British army captains, John Hoffman, led the settlers and so this incident became known as the Hoffman Insurrection. The rebels declared a republic which was exactly the wrong thing to do and the rebellion was quite firmly ended by British troops, who then set about seriously considering the Acadian problem.

Two years later came the brutal Acadian Expulsion. 11,500 Acadians were forcefully removed from their lands and expelled, safely or not, to almost anywhere else but the former Acadia. Some went to the New England colonies; some to Louisiana; some went to France; some even went to Britain. But they all went. And this left a lot of empty land.

This time, rather than recruit foreigners to claim the land, it was decided to attract New Englanders. 8,000 New England Planters (a later term) arrived in Nova Scotia, 2,000 families, in the early 1760s. They would be shortly joined by over 35,000 Loyalists, refugees of the American Revolution. Now, generally speaking, Loyalists did not get along well with Planters. Planters were considered "neutral Yankees" but they still suffered from a mob rule mentality, as far as the Loyalists were concerned. It is unclear what the Planters thought of Loyalists, but they were likely considered to be provincial, so to speak. In any event, political lines were drawn between the two and the Reverend Jacob Bailey, a loyalist clergyman of the era, complained of the "violent contentions between the Loyalists and the old inhabitants called blue noses." This contention was so severe that the province of New Brunswick was hived off of Nova Scotia so that the Loyalists could go there and leave the Nova Scotia peninsula exclusively to the bluenosers.

The origins of the term Blue Nose have been lost over time. It is possible it refers to a type of spotted blue potato being grown in Annapolis Valley at the time. In any event, today's definition is "a puritanical person who tries to impose a strict moral code on others" according to the Collins Dictionary. According to the Urban Dictionary, a Bluenoser is simply a Nova Scotian.

Calling someone a Bluenoser became a term of endearment in short order, and Bluenose was a popular name for things. Like ships. There were seven ships named Bluenose in the 19th and early 20th centuries, generally schooners and generally part of the fishing fleet, plying the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. As one sank another would be christened, so there were was usually a Bluenose schooner somewhere. On November 14, 1919, the triple-masted schooner Bluenose, which had been built at Falmouth Nova Scotia, foundered off Peniche, Spain, with a cargo of dried fish. Which meant that the name Bluenose was available again.

The 1920s were a time of fishing and of fierce but friendly rivalry amongst fishermen, especially across the border. The Halifax Herald had sponsored a race of fishing schooners, and the Nova Scotian entry Delawana was defeated by the Massachusetts' Esperanto. So Smith and Rhuland, of Lunenburg, set about correcting that. They commissioned William James Roué, a self-taught naval architect, to come up with a radical new design for a fishing vessel that could also race. What he came up with was a racing vessel that could also fish.

The Bluenose raced and fished for 17 years, and was only defeated in one race (another was a tie). She also held the record for largest catch brought into Lunenburg harbour. She sailed the world as the "Queen of the North Atlantic", an ambassador for Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and also for Canada wherever she went. And then, after an illustrious early career and an ignominious latter she struck a reef in Haiti and was simply left to break apart, because by 1946 there was nothing quite so pathetic as an ex sailing schooner modified to be a diesel trawler ferrying bananas about the Caribbean.

Nonetheless, her legacy lives on. The dime bears her image, or, more accurately, a composite of her image and a couple of other schooners. She was featured on a stamp, and she was even inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame, a somewhat rare occurrence for a ship. In 1963, Smith and Rhuland built the Bluenose II in Lunenburg based on the original's plans. It was originally built for the Schooner Lager people as a marketing thing, but was later sold to the Nova Scotian Government for the sum of ten Canadian dimes, all bearing the likeness of her predecessor. Today, the newer Bluenose is mostly parked in her home port of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, which is a Unesco World Heritage Site, showcasing the best preserved example of a planned British colonial settlement in North America. And its sailing past.

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