"island tales," next Thursday night

This event was scheduled long ago, before we ever dreamed we'd be leaving the island. But maybe it's not bad timing after all. Sometimes things have an odd way of working out.

teen age graffiti artists at Cape Roseway

Here are a few of the inscriptions you can find up at Cape Roseway Lighthouse. I've added whatever I was able to find about these names, mostly by going to the Vital Statistics at the NSARM, which is a fabulous resource. I think that most of these particular inscriptions were made by students at Alexander Hood Cocken's school. Cocken, the second lighthouse keeper, retired in 1860. So the graffiti artists would have been hanging out at the rocks during recess, chiselling away, before that. A few of their inscriptions are dated.

J. Locke, 1856. The Locke family was very connected to McNutt's Island. In the early nineteenth century at least two inter-related Locke households were on the island, among its very first settlers, when they brought their children for baptism at the Anglican Church in Shelburne. Mostly the Lockes lived around and in nearby Lockeport and Ragged Islands, with easy access to McNutt's Island by water, just as it is today.
Robert Miller was likely a son of The Rev. George Miller (an important Methodist preacher of the era, mostly connected with the church in Halifax) and Alexander Hood Cocken's sister Frances Cocken Miller. He would have been Alexander Hood Cocken's nephew.

John Alexander Fraser Purney was born about 1845, son of a Shelburne merchant and his wife. He married Angela Muir in 1872 and became a physician in Shelburne.
J.B. Vernon.Vernon is a significant name on McNutt's Island. Captain Nathaniel Vernon of Tarleton's Legion bought the old McNutt property at the northern end of the island, as well as other lots around the island. This may be the son of Nathaniel's son, Augustus Vernon.

I haven't found anything about J.T. Morrow, though he certainly did a nice job with his name.
J.Gibbons, 1856. There is a John Gibbons who was born in Sandy Point and was a schoolteacher, married to an Annie Perry, and living at the village of Roseway, on the western shore of Shelburne Harbour directly across the False Passage from McNutt's, in 1864.

Joseph Homer, a sea captain, was born about 1842, and married in Barrington in 1870. If he was a student at Alexander Hood Cocken's school at the lighthouse, he would have inscribed his name in the late 1850s.Tottie is a well-known name in Shelburne, because of Tottie's Store, which remains on Dock Street.

You can find more graffiti here, here, and here. I have always wanted to make a map of the rocks, showing where all the inscriptions are located. But I have not gotten around to it.

unrestored daguerreotype

When we first saw the house in the fall of 2006, there was a small cased daguerreotype sitting on the pump organ. I thought about that old picture quite a lot. When we bought the house it was filled with such things, large and small. But this one photograph drew me back to it over and over. I wondered why it was still here. Elizabeth Hyde had once written that when she bought the house in 1961 many of the things inside it were already here. She wrote that it was as if the previous owners had simply gotten up and left one day, leaving their things behind. Could this photograph have been one of those things? Could it have actually been here since the house was built? The thought seemed both incredible and plausible, and it's odd, when you think about it, that a thought could be both.

But then after we moved in, Elizabeth's daughter told us that Elizabeth had actually bought most of the things that were now in the house at auctions here and there, over the years. But Elizabeth's daughter was just a small child when Elizabeth first moved in. So there really wasn't any way to know if this old photograph -- or any of the other stuff -- had already been here. Though I do think that the families who lived here before, first the Perrys, then the Gouldens, and last the Demings, would have taken their things with them when they left the island. It would seem so un-Nova Scotian to just leave things behind like that. But I couldn't know, really, whether the photograph had been a part of the house for a long time, or not.

If the daguerreotype had been here, then it could have been from the Perry family. William and his father Jonathan built this house in the mid-nineteenth century, and well before that the Perrys lived in an earlier house, down below the lower apple orchard, a place that's a ruined rock foundation now. There were several Perry daughters. Could these have been two of them? And yet, the styles in the photograph are from a generation earlier. The young women I was thinking of wouldn't have worn their hair like this, not in the late nineteenth century. It seemed more likely that Elizabeth had bought the photographs in some dusty antique store somewhere. And now they were here, two young women, sisters, maybe twins, from who knew where, gazing out at me. But they could not speak, because nobody knew who they were.

During our first year here I was beginning to research the history of the house and learn about the Perry family and Nova Scotia life in general in the time when the house was built. I returned to the picture over and over. It had such a hold on me. Could it be a window into the very world I was learning about? It was a mystery I wouldn't be able to resolve. But I did write a poem.

Unrestored Daguerreotype

Two young women are identically dressed in mourning.

They seem not interested in having their picture taken

and sit looking as if they'd rather be someplace else.

Their hair is curled in complicated ringlets

likely out of style by then

in Boston and Halifax and other centres of fashion.

The someplace else could be home again --

this wild fir-tipped island,

this house where they grew up,

a Nova Scotia fisherman's daughters.

The picture sits here still, slowly dissolving into its elements.

Their caught faces float pale on the surface glass

while all dark detail of hair and dresses and eyes has slipped away

to reveal a stippled disintegrating painted black background

layered underneath.

Nebulae wink in the folds of their sleeves,

comets arc through their heads

and if you look closely into their eyes you can see all the way to

the vast swirling night sky that reels above this place forever.

a hand-made life

Here's a wonderful picture of Otis Orchard, the lighthouse keeper. Myrtle Goulden Demings took it when she lived at the lighthouse as a young woman, with her first husband, George Gribble, who was the assistant lighthouse keeper in the early 1950s.

Because they lived so remotely, and because their government salaries were insufficient, the lighthouse keepers had to homestead as well as care for the light. They kept vegetable gardens and their sheep roamed the island; and they would have kept a cow and ox as well. Otis would have cut this hay with a scythe, and now he's carrying it up to the barn. All these old buildings (except the foghorn building) were destroyed after the original lighthouse burned in 1959 and a new complex of lighthouse and buildings replaced the old.

In 1860, as he approached retirement, Alexander Hood Cocken described his nearly fifty years as lightkeeper and homesteader on the island. Otis Orchard's life would not have been very different from Alexander Hood Cocken's when this picture was taken nearly a century later.

Thanks to Myrtle Goulden (Gribble) Demings for sharing this picture. To understand the picture's context, I strongly recommend Evelyn Richardson's We Keep a Light (Ryerson Press, 1945) -- the classic description of a Nova Scotia lightkeeper's life in the first half of the twentieth century. And yes, it is very good to be home again, about which more soon.

a delightful spot

Here's a notice published in The Shelburne Budget on September 1, 1904.
People who lived on the island, and their friends and relatives, would have their own ways of getting across the harbour back then just as they do now. So this notice was directed at potential tourists -- guests -- who would stay at the island's hotel. It's intriguing to wonder who would have visited back then, and why they came. I imagine they came to see the lighthouse, or just for the adventure of visiting an offshore island. At any rate, the McNutt's Island Hotel & Excursion Company could promise them a few days in a delightful spot.

And even in the olden days, before cell phones, there were clever ways to communicate.

Thanks to Kim Robertson Walker, Archivist at the Shelburne County Archives & Genealogical Society, for sharing this notice.

smuggler's landing

A letter from Shelburne merchant George Ross to the captain of his schooner, about to return to Shelburne from Philadelphia:

You will endeavour to enter this harbour in the Evening and should you have goods not fit to be brought up to the Town you will put them on shore at our store on McNutt's Island taking care to be gone from thence before daylight.

Anything with high duties attached to it would have been "not fit" to be brought into Shelburne, where customs officers awaited each ship's arrival.

So it may be that, in the dark of night, George Ross's schooner entered Shelburne Harbour's eastern passage, rounded the Horseshoe and silently made for Ross's Landing. Quietly she dropped her anchor in the cove, and quietly a crew member rowed from schooner to land. Asleep in his house close to the shore, Ross's tenant Andrew Lightbody awoke to quiet knocking at his door. It would be a few hours' work to unload the ship's cargo of goods not fit to be brought into town --West Indian rum, perhaps -- and to hide it in the well-made cellar below the store-house. Well before early light the schooner would have resumed its journey, to land innocently at Shelburne Town an hour or so later.

Remember that McNutt's Island -- sitting way off in the outer harbour -- can't be seen from Shelburne. It's an invisible island, really. How handy is that.

Letter Book, G & R Ross, privately owned, quoted in Marian Robertson, King's Bounty: a history of early Shelburne Nova Scotia (Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum, 1983), p. 238. So, I'm hopeful I can track down this Letter Book and see what else it says about the McNutt's Island branch of the Ross business.

boundaries, ghosts, witches

It was a beautiful day. In the afternoon I walked south along the shore of the cove. I wanted to visit the boundary rock again.It marks the boundary of the original Lot 1. I wonder whether there are other boundary rocks on the island.
The boundary rock is in the foreground. North of it is the shore line that was a part of Lot 1. The first grantee, Moses Pitcher, sold this lot to Shelburne merchant George Ross in 1787. Ross owned it for about thirty years. A few days before he died, in 1816, he sold it to Dorcas Thomson, who was the wife of his business partner. There was a landing here called, not surprisingly, Ross's Landing.
I was gawking over the rock when I glimpsed the tiniest movement in the nearby woods. The sheep stand very still like statues and hope you don't see them.
They become ghost sheep.
Then when they think you are not looking they melt away and come out in another place entirely, looking remarkably like the stones along the shore. The magical properties of sheep are not widely recognized.
Since I began by walking along the shore, I took the more civilized path homeward, along the lower road. Still, you never know who you'll meet. I heard some deer warning each other to fly away. A raven sailed through the forest with an urgent message but it wasn't for me.
Witch's Butter. Mmmm. Looks delicious.

wanted: fifty hogsheads of lime

An announcement in the local newspaper at the beginning of 1787 requests bids to build the lightkeeper's dwelling house at Cape Roseway. There's also a request for proposals for fifty hogsheads of lime delivered to the Landing-place on McNutt's Island. I think that this is the same landing place that would come to be called Ross's Landing. Shelburne merchant George Ross bought Lot No. 1 from Loyalist grantee Moses Pitcher a few months later, as the work on the lighthouse was gearing up. The provincially funded lighthouse project would have been a boon to Shelburne's economy at a time when the fortunes of the town were already receding.

This image is courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management. To read more, visit NSARM's virtual exhibit of Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers.

a burial ground in the back orchard

Myrtle Goulden Demings, who lives directly across the western channel in Carleton Village, grew up in this house and has so many interesting memories about the island. She could write a book! Her parents bought this property around 1910 and her family lived here until the 1950s. Myrtle married a young soldier who was stationed at Fort McNutt, George Gribble. After the war, George became the assistant lightkeeper at Cape Roseway, and Myrtle and George and their infant daughter Bernice lived at the lighthouse.

Myrtle told me that there are some old graves here, where we now live. Her father always told the children not to play in the southeastern corner of the back orchard, because people were buried there. But even back when Myrtle was a child, there were no obvious markings for any graves, she told me. They had been worn away long before that, I guess.

It helps to date the graves that they are inside the boundary of the stone wall. Moses Pitcher was granted this land in 1785, and when he sold it to George Ross in 1787, for nineteen pounds and eight shillings and four pence, it was sold with improvements and the buildings erected thereon. In those days anyone who was granted land was expected to make improvements within a specified amount of time, or else they could lose their grant. One of the main improvements would have been clearing stones, and one way you cleared stones was to build walls out of them. (Another way was just to throw them into piles off to the side of a field for the time being. We have some of those, too.)

It was not uncommon in the Shelburne area to bury the dead on the land where they died. Cemeteries were few and far between in those days. And people were not so squeamish about death. It was more an integrated part of life back then than it is today.

So this small burial ground -- maybe containing one or two people -- is likely to date from sometime after Moses Pitcher made improvements to his fifty acres. After George Ross bought the property in 1787 this place was called Ross's Landing. Ross may have used it as a staging and storage place for supplies that were brought onto the island, and maybe as a fish-drying place. Ross was a Shelburne merchant and one of the few who stayed in business after the town went downhill. Just before his death in 1816 he sold this property to Dorcas Thomson, the wife of his business partner.

Neither George Ross nor Dorcas Thomson would have lived on McNutt's. Their business was conducted from town. But Andrew Lightbody did live here, from the late 1780s probably until his death in 1816. An 1823 deed says that Andrew Lightbody was "in possession" of the property before Thomas and Mary Barrow owned it.

Andrew may have been a disbanded soldier of the 42nd Highland Regiment of Foot, a Scot like Ross. It may have been Andrew and his wife Mary and young daughter Margaret who settled here in 1787 or thereabouts, to oversee the Ross concerns on the island and to continue to clear and improve this property as tenant farmers.

The building of the lighthouse began in 1788, a few months after Ross bought this property. The lighthouse was completed in late 1790. Andrew could well have been the man who made sure that supplies reached the lighthouse site from Ross's Landing. He received a substantial payment of over fifteen pounds on January 7, 1790 from its builders for having taken care of the lighthouse "to this day."

Andrew died in 1816, and sometime soon afterward Thomas and Mary Barrow became the property owners. They lived here as farmers until the early 1830s when Jonathan and Martha Perry came to live and raise their brood of children.

Until I'm able to do more research I can only guess that someone from the Lightbody or Barrow households is buried in that corner of the back orchard. I'm certain there will be another chapter to this story as I find out more. But for now, I'm so grateful to Myrtle for sharing this amazing piece of knowledge, which I never could have known about otherwise.

looking for a place in Halifax for January to March

Dear Reader,

Greg and I are hoping we can find some sort of house-sitting situation in Halifax for January to March, or some part of that time. Maybe you might know of a place.

I would use that time at the Public Archives to work on a history of the lighthouse. Being in Halifax for an extended time is really necessary for this project, which I am passionate about. Greg would probably spend the time writing and revising his manuscript for a next book about our island life. So you see we would be very quiet and well-behaved house-sitters. We can also walk dogs and care for cats and water plants and forward mail, and we are, for the most part, fairly responsible people. Although we are island hermits we are able to clean ourselves up sufficiently to pass muster in the big city.

I would love to find something near enough to the Archives (at University and Robie) to be able to walk there. But really we would be delighted with any situation in town, since I'm sure there's a bus.

If you can think of any leads I hope you'll let me know, at anne.yarbrough@gmail.com.

cheers,

Anne

the black pilots who went to Sierra Leone from Birchtown

In late 1791, John Clarkson arrived in Birchtown from London to tell that community -- then the largest community of free blacks in North America -- about the prospect of resettlement in Sierra Leone. The response was enormous. Life in Nova Scotia had not been kind for these former slaves who had already overcome such extraordinary barriers in their quest for freedom. Perhaps what the Sierra Leone Company was offering them would, at last, be the realization of that goal they had already risked everything to gain. To many people of Birchtown, Clarkson's offer was worth making another huge leap of faith, leaving behind again anything they had so labouriously put together for themselves over nearly a decade of back breaking work and sailing again across the sea, this time for the west coast of Africa.

The names of the heads of household are inscribed in a document entitled "List of the blacks in Birch Town who gave in their names for Sierra Leone in November, 1791."
The name of well-known religious leader David George heads the list. It's likely that the following names are in some order of precedence or association. David George was the leader of the Baptist congregation in Shelburne, and it is possible that those households listed beneath his are also members of that congregation.

James Robertson, one of the four black pilots who had been granted Lot 23 on McNutt's Island, is listed as number seventeen. Here he describes himself as being 52 years old, born in Virginia, and travelling to Sierra Leone with his wife. But although James and Betsey had traveled to Nova Scotia in 1783 with a son, James Robertson, age two and a half, described in The Book of Negroes as a "small boy," no children are going with them to Sierra Leone. It's most likely that in November 1791 young James lies in the common burying ground at Birchtown.

When asked his occupation, James the elder describes himself as both a pilot and a farmer. It's possible that he has continued to work as a pilot in Shelburne Harbour. None of the pilots was listed in the 1784 Muster Book of Free Blacks in Birchtown, a list intended to provide accurate information for the distribution of the King's Bounty at a time when widespread hardship required the material support of basic food supplies for both black and white. That the pilots were not listed in the muster roll suggests that they were not in need then. Remember that the four pilots and their families had arrived in Shelburne in May of 1783, in one of the first ships, under the wing of the influential and powerful Captain Henry Mowat.

In November 1791 James is the owner of a fifty acre lot, well improved, with a house. He will need to sell this property before he and Betsey leave Shelburne, though the price of such property will be depressed by the number of people who are in the same situation. It will be a buyer's market. James will have little room to negotiate, and likely it will be Stephen Skinner (or some other astute local businessman) who picks up the property for a very good price.

On the last of the five pages we find Richard Leach, age 38, born in Virginia, travelling with his wife and three children. Dick/Richard Leich/Leach was another of the four pilots who traveled together to Shelburne with their extended families, all under the patronage of Captain Mowat, and who were granted a share in Lot 23 on McNutt's Island.

Richard Leach here gives his occupation as farmer. He owns no land, though, so he was probably working as a tenant farmer for some large landowner such as Gideon White. A few months after the exodus White complained that eight black tenant families have left him to go to Sierra Leone.

It's an extraordinarily moving experience to look at the names of these two pilots as they prepare to seize this unexpected chance at a better life for themselves and their families, in Africa. I still don't know whether they ever lived on McNutt's Island. But I imagine they did, at least, come over to walk the bounds of Lot 23, and to look out at the sea from that great height along the island's southeastern edge, that small slice of rocky Nova Scotia ground which was, for a little while anyway, their own.

"List of the blacks in Birch Town who gave in their names for Sierra Leone in November 1791" can be viewed along with other documents at the website of Cassandra Pybus, author of Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. The Pybus website does not give basic resource information about the document. It looks as if it is to be found at CO 217/63, f.361 ff.

For more on the black pilots and their historical context, you can go to the label "black pilots" and read through.

remembering our house renovation

The September 2010 issue of The Griffin, Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia's quarterly, has the second part of my story about our house. You can read it here. You can also download the June 2010 issue, which contained the first part of the article. It's terrific to have The Griffin delivered via Internet. If you want to keep up with Nova Scotia historic preservation, you can subscribe to The Griffin and you will receive email notification when each new issue is available for downloading.

more faces from the past

Here's another photograph from the island in days gone by. Melinda and Arthur Snow lived in what is called the Hemeon house, or Louie's, and which was built by Benjamin McNutt in the 1760s. It was the oldest house on the island until it was destroyed by fire in the early 1990s. Like most of the men who lived on the island, Arthur was a fisherman. He was born in 1862, and his wife Melinda Dexter was a year younger than he. They married in 1889, when he was 26 and she was 25.

We don't know exactly when they moved to the island after their marriage. They weren't listed among the island's residents in the 1891 census, but they were living here by 1901, along with their children Bertha, Dexter, Mary, Samuel, and Mabel. When the census was taken a decade later in 1911 they had seven children living at home, including three additional daughters: Bernice, Annie and Ruby. By then their oldest child, Bertha, had married James Goulden and begun married life in our house.

According to their death certificates, Arthur Snow died in 1942 at age 79. Melinda died two years later at age 81. They both were still living on McNutt's Island when they died, near daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. For nearly half a century they had been a central part of the island's life.

This photograph was taken just across the path from their house in a field that is still recognizable, although it is now overgrown.

Thanks to both Bernice Smith and Dan Goulden for sharing this photograph. Other sources are the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses, and vital statistics at NSARM.

the old Hyde place

Brian Race loaned me this photograph of our house, which was taken in 1985. You can see Brian at the left of the picture. He is making and installing the wood-framed storm windows that we still use. At the right is Elizabeth Hyde, who bought the house in the early 1960s and set about restoring it. As is the way of old houses, once it was restored it needed constant maintaining. It was a never-ending process for Elizabeth, who spent summers here for decades (as well as two winters) until her death in 1993.

faces from the past

Beatrice Gribble Smith, who was born in this house, sent me some beautiful photographs of her grandparents and great-grandparents, all of whom lived on McNutt's Island. Beatrice is the daughter of Myrtle (Goulden) Gribble Demings and George Gribble. Beatrice's mother Myrtle was born in this house, too. You can read more about the Goulden family on McNutt's here.Here are Beatrice's grandparents, Bertha (Snow) Goulden and James Goulden. I think the narrow sliver of white along the left edge of the picture is the southwest corner of this house. Behind Bertha and James I think I can see the clothesline that was attached near the side door in the earlier photograph. So I'm pretty sure the picture itself was taken on McNutt's, at this house.

Here's the notation Beatrice made on the back of the photograph:
I'm writing this in exactly the same space where Beatrice was born, even though it's lost two of its walls and is now a part of the living room instead of a separate bedroom. I wonder who else was born or died in what used to be this small room, or just slept here over the years.

I'm hoping other photographs and documents will float my way and that eventually we will have patched together a picture of life on the island in the first half of the twentieth century, which already feels so long ago.

the lightkeeper's tale, part one

Alexander Hood Cocken was born in Shelburne after his parents came here in 1783 on the Loyalist tide. His father, Alexander Cocken, was one of the Port Roseway Associates, that group of Loyalists who organized themselves in New York, intending to get the best deal they could in Nova Scotia by negotiating as a body. Alas, there turned out to be not that much to negotiate about.

Sometimes we forget how traumatic things must have been for the people who arrived on the shore of Port Roseway in 1783. They had lost whatever it was they had in America, though at first they hoped to somehow get back what they had lost, or be compensated for it. Inconceivably for them, England had lost the war. And now England was cutting them loose. The Crown, reeling from its costly defeat, was not appreciative of their great sacrifices and failed to share their vision of a great city carved out of wilderness. Soon enough it became clear that Shelburne would not after all replace Halifax as the North American center of the English empire. Most of the refugees left this foggy, ice-bound shore as soon as they could manage it.

But some adapted, and stayed, and among them were Alexander Cocken and his wife Catherine. Alexander the father was a Scot, born in Glasgow, a mariner. His wife Catherine was a New Englander, from Massachusetts.

Alexander and Catherine had five children, and the oldest was Alexander the son. He was christened at Christ Church Shelburne in 1787, before the permanent church was even built. Of the five Cocken children christened, it's likely that only he and his two sisters lived to adulthood, and that his two younger brothers died early, since nothing more is known of them except their christenings. Their mother died in 1799, when Alexander was twelve and his sisters were five years old and an infant.

The lighthouse on McNutt's was completed in 1790, and actually lit in 1792. Cocken had already been appointed lightkeeper, and he was responsible for the building materials needed for the light and the various necessary buildings and the house for the keeper's family.

The Cocken family and all their possessions were taken out to the island in late 1789, once they had a place to live. The Archives has a bill for their transport. They moved into the new house out there at the southern end of McNutt's Island. If we remember the letter that the elder Alexander wrote in 1801 about the absence of a road across the island, maybe we can imagine how isolated and difficult life was for a family living in that harsh, exposed place.

The young Alexander was a toddler when the family moved into its new house on the wind-swept cape, surrounded on three sides by ocean waves pounding against rocky cliffs. This was a difficult time for the family. Between 1790 and 1793 his father, the first lightkeeper, wrote a series of petitions to the House of Assembly, pleading that he might be paid the salary owed to him. In a 1790 petition he describes his family as large. But in 1792 he calls his family small. Probably the two younger boys, christened in 1788 and 1789, had died by 1792, when his family has become "small." In an escalating voice of desperation, the elder Cocken writes that he faces financial ruin because his salary has not been paid and his indebtedness for the basic necessities of life so great. In his earliest years, then, young Alexander experienced the death of his brothers and the grief of his parents, as well as financial anxiety and the harsh conditions of the family's isolated and lonely life.

After a few years the elder Cocken's condition of employment changed. He was given an annual contract, out of which he was expected to manage the lighthouse, but he was not expected to actually live there full time. Maybe the Cocken family moved back to Shelburne or to one of the villages along the western shore during the winter months then, leaving an assistant to care for the light. Maybe these years were easier ones for the family. Certainly they were less isolated.

In 1811, the year before his father died, Alexander Hood Cocken became the assistant lighthouse keeper. His father, who was seventy two years old that year, was in a very feeble state of health. The son -- then twenty four years old --would have stayed at the light full time that year. When his father died, Alexander Hood Cocken was appointed in his place. He may have sub-contracted out the lightkeeping duties between 1812 and 1816, not living at the light full time, but always responsible for its daily maintenance and nightly operation.

In 1816 a law was passed that once again required the lightkeeper to actually live at the light and perform the duties himself. So for the next forty-four years he was at the light, on the island, permanently and full time.

From another source entirely, we learn that in 1821 Alexander Hood Cocken underwent an intense religious experience. James Mann, a beloved British Methodist clergyman who served the area for many years, had a great influence on Alexander. Mann's death that year occasioned a soul-searching as Cocken reached what would then have been thought of as middle age. He began to play a significant role in the local circuit of the Methodist Church, which connected villages along the western shore, on nearby Cape Negro Island and at Northeast Harbour. Eventually he became a local preacher, a position of importance at a time when regularly ordained pastors were rare. There was a small Methodist congregation on McNutt's, a part of the local circuit, around now, and the lightkeeper would have led the services there.

In 1822 he married Jannet McKenna of Carleton Village, directly across the harbour from the island. Jannet was part of a large extended family, Scots like the Cockens. Though Alexander and Jannet had no children, they had many nieces and nephews. There would have been much coming and going between the western shore of the harbour and the island, just as there still is, though they rowed and now folks start up a motor.

Here's how Alexander Hood Cocken describes life at the lighthouse: "From the great inconvenience of procuring my supplies on this island -- generally paying double, if not treble freight for almost every necessary of life brought here, and having to pay very extravagant wages to an assistant --men considering it a great privation to live in so secluded a spot and the labour being of a toilsome nature, particularly during the winter months requiring attention at all times of night, obliged me to pay extraordinary wages; and for the last 20 years of it, it has taken full half of my allowance to meet this item alone, including the person's board. Since the prosecution of the fishery on a more regular and extensive scale, it is scarcely possible to procure an assistant that can be relied on at any price."

Although he has economized wherever possible, he goes on to say, he has not been able to save enough money from his salary to support himself and his "aged partner" in their old age, though he has been lightkeeper for forty eight years now, suffers from infirmities, and wants to retire.

He has, he notes, had a school at the lighthouse for the past twenty four years. There he taught boys reading, writing, orthography, arithmetic, English grammar, history and geography. He was, it seems from all the evidence, an educated man. He charged twenty pounds per student, and, he says, this additional income helped to pay for the assistant lightkeeper. And each year at least a few boys -- say five or six -- were also living at the light. They would need to be fed and housed as well as taught. They would need to be kept busy when not at school. So there was more work, probably done by his wife Jannet. The school would have been something they took on together, for added income.

Cocken also reports that he has brought some land under sufficient cultivation to provide winter hay for a handful of cattle; he has "any number" of sheep running wild; and a vegetable garden and potato field. The initial clearing may have been done by his father, but he has continued the work.

Was there help out here, or were Alexander and Jannet doing all this work by themselves? There were other families settling on the island, not far from the lighthouse, in the early 1800s. But those families would have needed to clear their own lands, provide for their own cattle, dig their own vegetable gardens. The 1827 census tells us that Jannet and Alexander's household at the lighthouse included a servant. No doubt the scholars had chores. But it would have been a hands-on enterprise.

An official assessment conducted in 1857 described the lighthouse as barely functioning and the keeper's house as "wretched," owing not to the negligence of the keeper but to the lack of material support by the province. Repairs were recommended, and they must have been made. Cocken refers to this in his 1860 letter: "Through strong representations to the Government for some years, and delayed owing to pressing calls at other stations, the premises not long since were put, and are now, in good substantial order -- as well the Light House, as dwelling house, store & Barn ...." Until the recent repairs, the Cockens had for many years endured life with a drafty house, a leaky roof, and a poorly functioning light.

In his application for a pension Alexander Hood Cocken did not mention that over the years he had bought up a few of the island lots originally granted to Loyalists. He bought the lot we live on for instance, rented it out for a number of years, then sold it. There were at least two others. There could have been a small income stream from his island properties, or more likely maybe the rents were paid in fish and apples. Maybe Alexander Hood Cocken was not as entirely poor as he wished to appear when he crafted his appeal for a pension. Still, he had not become a wealthy man.

Eleanor Robertson Smith and Kim Robertson Walker, Founders of Shelburne, Nova Scotia: Who Came, 1783-1793, and Stayed (Shelburne: Shelburne County Archives & Genealogical Society, 2008), 30-31, 150-151; the series of petitions from Alexander Cocken to the House of Assembly can be read online in the NSARM virtual exhibit Voices of the People; T. Watson Smith, The History of the Methodist Church in Eastern British America (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Methodist Book Room, 1877), 111; NSARM, RG 7, Vol. 43, Alexander H. Cocken to Joseph Howe, Shelburne, June 1, 1860; 1827 Census of Nova Scotia; Register of Deeds, Shelburne & Shelburne County & Indexes 1784-1880.

a day for the birds

Sue Abbott of Bird Studies Canada and Jane Alexander came to the island to make a count of varieties for the Maritimes Breeding Bird Atlas. They were also scouting possible breeding sites for the endangered Roseate Tern and Piping Plover. Warren Nickerson brought Sue and Jane by outboard skiff from Lockeport. They motored around the southern tip of McNutt's and stopped at Gray's Island, then came into the cove. From there we all went off down the main road toward the Government Wharf to look and listen. After our walk across the island, Jane and Sue and Warren went up the cove in Warren's boat to the Horseshoe, then around the eastern side of the island and back to Lockeport.
Greg and I learned so much we never knew. From Jane and Sue, we learned to identify a Winter Wren, a bird whose remarkably operetta-like song we have often heard but never identified. We learned that the tiny birds with flashes of yellow I had thought were some kind of warbler over near the McNutt House (the area called back of Louie's, in local lingo) are Kinglets. We learned the song of the Yellowthroat Warbler: wichity wichity wichity. We learned that the island has Cedar Waxwing and Swainson's Thrush.

From Warren, we learned that he's related to the Goulden family who used to own the old hotel next door, that his grandfather Nelson Goulden was one of the lightkeepers, how to look for Irish Moss, and a better way to plant bush beans.

All in all it was a most exciting day.

the lightkeeper's tale, introduction

In the year 1860, Cape Roseway's aged lightkeeper sat down at his wooden desk by the sea and began to write a letter.* Over three pages long, it was a letter of great potential consequence to him, and it was addressed to an important person. Indeed, some would say the intended recipient was the single most important person in all of Nova Scotia. I imagine the lightkeeper revised his letter several times before he was satisfied enough to make the final copy, the one in his beautiful handwriting, bearing a few inkblots but no mistakes, that's now kept in the Nova Scotia Archives.

His letter had a clear purpose. Alexander Hood Cocken wished to retire from his lightkeeping duties, and he wished to be given a sufficient pension upon his retirement. After all, he had been keeping the light on McNutt's Island for the past forty-eight years, since the death of his father (the former lightkeeper) in 1812. Cocken also wanted to explain why, from his annual lightkeeper's salary, he had not been able to save enough money to provide for himself and his wife in their old age, and why the province might feel obliged to make up the gap. The case needed to be argued with some care not to alienate the powers that be. Details must be supplied.

You can read this letter in different ways, from different angles, asking different questions of it and learning different things. Since it is such a rich letter, I'll look at it in four parts -- a mini-series -- over the next few weeks.

The first will be Alexander Hood Cocken's own story as he chooses to tell it within his letter. I have come across a few other fragments that shed light on him, and I'll be sharing them later. But for now we will focus on what he tells us about himself here.

The second perspective will be the early history of Nova Scotia lighthouses. The letter offers a fascinating account of how the earliest lighthouses were managed and supplied by the province in the years before Confederation. Since Alexander Hood Cocken's father was the first keeper of the Shelburne light, and since the Shelburne light was one of Nova Scotia's first lighthouses, his brief review of provincial policies, laws, and practices runs all the way back to the beginning.

The third angle is what the letter tells us about the island's agriculture and community during the early part of the nineteenth century.

Finally, I'll write about what happened as a result of the lightkeeper's letter. Was he allowed to retire, and did he receive a pension? None of that was automatic in those days. And the light could not be simply abandoned, not even for one night. Even at his ripe old age, Alexander Hood Cocken could not leave his post until a new man was brought on. But who want to take up such an arduous position? How was the next lightkeeper appointed? And who was it who made these decisions?

* Letter from Alexander Hood Cocken to Joseph Howe, 1 June 1860, NSARM, RG 7, Vol. 43.

honeysuckle from the old hotel

The first summer we were here I saw a honeysuckle vine dangling above the ruins of the old hotel in the field next to our place. Maybe the Perrys planted it there once upon a time, when they had the hotel. (Folks say it was more of a bunkhouse, really.) Or maybe it was planted by the Rennehans, who lived there after that.

The next summer I went back and took some cuttings. I rooted them over the winter, and planted them in the new wildflower garden. They didn't do very well, but one of the cuttings at least didn't die.

The next winter I re-read Evelyn Richardson's classic We Keep A Light, about her life in the 1930s on the island of Bon Portage, which is not far from here. She wrote that she carefully placed a honeysuckle in a patch of soil at the top of a big boulder, out of the way of harm, and later spied a lamb who had climbed up onto the boulder nibbling away at it. Ah ha! I thought.

So I stuck alder branches along the outside of the fence. Last summer they kept the lambs from reaching inside the fence and eating the asters. I hoped they would be equally effective for honeysuckle.

This year the honeysuckle is doing beautifully. I'm glad that it's a honeysuckle that's native to Atlantic Canada.

I can't really identify which of the many varieties of wild honeysuckle this is, but as you can see, it's quite fancy.

In the meantime, the honeysuckle is flourishing over at the old hotel, in places where no lamb could ever safely go. High up in a spruce tree, for instance. Deep down in the ancient cellar.

I have tried to take photographs of the old hotel before but they never came out very well. I have discovered that it's a challenge to photograph a jumbled pile of rotting boards, which is pretty much what remains. You need a focus.

A contrast.
Some tiny story, maybe of how a vine can plant itself in nothing and blossom where you least expect it, or will keep coming up year after year even when everything around it has collapsed and even when there's nobody left to admire it.
Though we are admiring it now.

pirates in the cove, 288 years ago today

" Upon Friday, June 15th, 1722. After I had been out for some time in the Schooner Milton, upon the Fishing grounds, off Cape Sable Shoar, among others I came to sail in company with Nicholas Merritt, in a shallop, and stood in for Port Rosaway, designing to harbour there, till the sabbath was over; where we arrived about four of the clock in the afternoon. When we came into the harbour, where several of our fishing vessels had arrived before us, we spied among them a brigantine, which we supposed to have been an inward bound vessel from the West Indies, and had no apprehension of any danger from her; but by that time we had been at anchor two or three hours, a boat from the brigantine, with four hands, came along side of us, and the men jumped in upon our deck, without our suspecting anything but that they were friends, come on board to visit, or inquire what news; till they drew out their cutlasses and pistols from under their clothes, and cocked the one and brandished the other, and began to curse and swear at us, and demanded a surrender of ourselves and our vessel to them ...

When the boat went off from our vessel, they carried me on board the brigantine, and who should it prove but the infamous Ned Low, the pirate, with about 40 hands, 2 great guns, and 4 swivel guns. You may imagine how I looked, and felt, when too late to prevent it, I found myself fallen into the hands of such a mad, roaring, mischievous crew...." *

So begins the tale of Philip Ashton, a young fisherman from Marblehead Massachusetts who had the misfortune to be captured by the nefarious pirate Ned Low in Port Roseway (now Shelburne Harbour) on June 15, 1722. Local folks say Low's piratical ambush took place here, in the island's sheltered cove along the western channel. There's no way to know the exact location for sure. It's interesting, though, that Marblehead fishermen were in the habit of using Port Roseway as a harbour at least as early as 1722. And it could have happened here in the cove ...

You can read more about the island's connection with the pirate Ned Low in Greg's book...

* From Ashton's Memorial. An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances, of Mr. Philip Ashton, Who, after he had made his Escape from the Pirates, liv'd alone on a Desolate Island for about Sixteen Months, &c. (Boston, 1725), reprinted in Donald P. Wharton, ed., In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766 (Greenwood Press, 1979), 171-210.

image of Ned Low's flag from Wikipedia