The city of Halifax is the stronghold of British power in North America, and is said to be, with the exception of Gibraltar, the best fortified outpost of the British empire. It is a fortress and naval station of magnificent development upon an unrivalled harbor. This is an arm of the sea, thrust for sixteen miles up into the land, and the Indians called it Chebucto, meaning the "chief haven." A thousand ships can be accommodated on its spacious anchorages. Its Northwest Arm, a narrow waterway opening on the western shore just inside the entrance, makes a long peninsula with water on either side, which in the centre rises into Citadel Hill, two hundred and fifty-six feet high. Upon its eastern slopes, running down to the harbor and spreading two or three miles along it, is the narrow and elongated town, having the Queen's Dockyard at the northern end. Covering the broad hilltop is the spacious granite Citadel of Fort George, its green slopes, covered with luxuriant grass, being now devoted to the peaceful usefulness of a cow-pasture. Along the harbor and across in the suburb of Dartmouth are the streets and buildings of the town, containing forty thousand people. To the southward is the modern green-covered Fort Charlotte on St. George's Island, commanding the entrance and looking not unlike a sugar-loaf hat, and both shores are lined with powerful batteries and forts that make the position impregnable. The Citadel was begun by the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father, when he commanded the British forces in Canada in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and it has since been enlarged and strengthened. At the entrance gate, grim memorials of the past, are mounted two old mortars, captured at the downfall of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton, in 1758.
Halifax did not have an early settlement, though in the Colonial times the French came into Chebucto to refit their ships. The Massachusetts Puritans, who had long been fighting the French and Indians, first recognized its importance, and in 1748 they sent a petition to Parliament urging the establishment of a post there, and $200,000 was voted for a colonizing expedition, of which the English "Lords of Trade," George Montagu, Earl of Halifax, being the chief, took charge, hoping for commercial as well as military advantage. Lord Edward Cornwallis commanded the expedition, which brought twenty-five hundred colonists, largely disbanded soldiers, into Chebucto, landing June 21, 1749, and founding Halifax, named in honor of the Chief Lord of Trade. They were soon attacked by the French and Indians, the suburbs being burnt, and they were harassed in many ways, leading to the erection of stockades and forts for defense; but they held the place, and it was the control of this fine harbor which finally enabled the British to secure Canada. The fleets and armies were concentrated here that took and destroyed the famous fortress of Louisbourg, which, with Quebec, held the Dominion for the French, and here was also organized the subsequent expedition under Wolfe that captured Quebec and ended a century and a half of warfare by the cession of Canada to England. In the American Revolution, Halifax was a chief base of the British operations, and when that war ended, large numbers of American loyalists exiled themselves to Halifax. There is now maintained a garrison of two thousand men and a strong fleet at Halifax, and the sailor and the soldier are picturesque features of the streets. The city has pleasant parks and suburbs, but everything is subordinated to the grim necessities of the fortress, although in all its noted career Halifax has never been the scene of actual warfare.
The Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia is indented by numerous bays that are good harbors, most of them having small towns and fishery stations. The western portal of Halifax harbor is Chebucto Head and Cape Sambro, with dangerous shoals beyond. There have been many serious wrecks in steering for this entrance during fogs, one of the most awful being the loss of the steamship "Atlantic" in 1873, when five hundred and thirty-five persons were drowned. Westward from Sambro are the broad St. Margaret's and Mahone Bays, and beyond, Lunenburg on its spacious harbor, a shipping and fishery town of four thousand people. To the westward are Bridgewater, Liverpool and Shelburne, with Cape Sable Island at the southwestern extremity of Nova Scotia, having behind it Barrington within a deep harbor. Off shore is Seal Island, with its great white guiding light, this being called, from its position, the "Elbow of the Bay of Fundy," and then around the "Elbow" is reached the broad estuary of the Tusket River and the beautiful archipelago of the Tusket Islands. The Tusket is one of the noted angling and sporting districts of the Province, this river draining a large part of the lake region of southwestern Nova Scotia, and having a succession of lakes connected by rapids and carrying a large amount of water down to the sea. There are eighty of these lakes of varying sizes. The salmon in the spring run up numerously, and the trout seek the cool recesses of the forests, while the rapids, the many islands and the charming woodlands are all attractive. In the archipelago of the estuary are some three hundred islands, the group extending out into the sea and having the powerful tidal currents flowing through their tortuous passages with the greatest velocity. These islands vary from small and barren rocks up to larger ones rising grandly from the water and thickly covered with trees, the channels between being narrow and deep. Among these islands are some of the best lobster fisheries in America.
Eastward from Halifax are more deep bays and good harbors, but the shores are only sparsely peopled, being mostly a wilderness yet to be permanently occupied, though the venturesome fishermen have their huts dropped about in pleasant nooks. Here are Musquidoboit and Ship harbors, with Sherbrooke village in Isaac's harbor. Beyond, the long projecting peninsula of Guysborough terminates in the famous Cape Canso, the eastern extremity of Nova Scotia. This peninsula was named in honor of Sir Guy Carleton, and has the deep indentation of Chedabucto Bay on its northern side. Here is a village of a few hundred sailors and fishermen, where the French had a fort in the seventeenth century, until the Puritans under Sir William Phips came from Boston in 1690, drove them out and burnt it. Off this coast and ninety miles out at sea to the southward is the dreaded Sable Island, a long and narrow sandspit without trees, producing nothing but salt grass and cranberries. A lighthouse stands at either end, and there are three flagstaffs for signals at intervals between them, with also a life-saving station, and the bleaching bones of many a wreck imbedded in the sands. It has few visitors, excepting those who are cast away, and everyone avoids it. Yet, strangely enough, the first American explorers were infatuated with the idea of planting a colony on this bleak and barren sandbar, and its history has mainly been a record of wrecks. Cabot originally saw this island, and in 1508 the first futile attempt was made to settle it, the colony being soon abandoned, though some live-stock were left there. Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583 lost his ship "Delight" here, with a hundred men, and going home on her consort, he lost his own life on the Azores. It was on this fateful voyage that Sir Humphrey, on his storm-tossed vessel "Squirrel," sweeping past the other, shouted to her crew: "Courage, my lads, we are as near Heaven by sea as by land." In 1598 a colony of forty French convicts was placed on the island and forgotten for seven years, when they were hunted up and twelve survivors found, whom the King pardoned, and they were then carried back to France dressed in seal-skins and described as "gaunt, squalid and long-bearded." This seems to have ended the attempts to colonize Sable Island. The Spaniards sent out an expedition to settle Cape Breton, but the fleet was dashed to pieces on this island. The great French Armada, sailing to punish the Puritans for capturing Louisbourg, suffered severely on its shoals. The French afterwards lost there the frigate "L'Africaine," and later the steamer "Georgia" was wrecked. It is a long, narrow island, bent in the form of a bow, spreading twenty-six miles including the terminating bars, and nowhere over a mile wide. A long, shallow lake extends for thirteen miles in the centre. There is the French Garden, the traditionary spot where the convicts suffered during their exile, and a graveyard where the shipwrecked are buried. Wild ponies gallop about, the descendants of those left by the first settlers, seals bask on the sands, and ducks swim the lake. Such to-day is Sable Island.
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.
From Halifax a railroad leads northward across Nova Scotia to Pictou. It passes through the gold-digging regions of Waverley, Oldham and Renfrew, then over the rich red soils of the head of the Bay of Fundy and down the Shubenacadie River, meaning the "place of wild potatoes," and reaches Truro, an active manufacturing town of over five thousand people near the head of Cobequid Bay. Beyond, through forests and hills, it crosses the peninsula to the Pictou coal-fields and comes out on Northumberland Strait at Pictou harbor. The coal is sent here for shipment, the name having come from the Indian word Pictook, meaning "bubbling or gas exploding," in allusion to the boiling of the waters near the coal-beds. Over across the Strait is Prince Edward Island, its red bluff shores along the edge of the horizon surmounted by a fringe of green foliage. The Micmacs recognized its peculiarity, calling it Epayquit, or "Anchored on the Wave." It is one hundred and thirty miles long and rather narrow, having deep bays, sometimes almost bisecting the island. The surface is low and undulating, with fertile soils mostly derived from the old red sandstone. The French first called it the Isle de St. Jean, but after the cession to England an effort was made to call it New Ireland, as Nova Scotia was New Scotland, and finally in 1800 it was given the present name in honor of Queen Victoria's father. It raises horses, oats, eggs and potatoes, and relatively to size is the best populated of all the Maritime Provinces. Charlottetown, inside of Hillsborough Bay,—called popularly "Ch-town," for short,—is the capital, a quiet place with about eleven thousand population, the Parliament House being its best building. A narrow-gauge railway is constructed through the island, near its western terminal being Summerside, on Bedeque Bay, where there is a little trade and three thousand people, probably its most active port.
THE ARM OF GOLD.
The eastern boundary of Nova Scotia is the Canso Strait, separating it from Cape Breton Island. At Canso, its southern entrance, various Atlantic cables are landed, while others go off southward to New York. This strait is a picturesque waterway, fifteen miles long and about a mile wide, a highway of commerce for the shipping desirous of avoiding the long passage around Cape Breton, and it is called by its admirers "The Golden Gate of the St. Lawrence Gulf." The geologists describe it as a narrow transverse valley excavated by the powerful currents of the drift period. As it leads directly from the Atlantic Ocean into the Gulf, more vessels are said to pass it than any other strait excepting Gibraltar. It has several villages upon the shores, mainly with Scottish inhabitants, the chief being Port Hawkesbury, Port Mulgrave and Port Hastings, the latter a point for gypsum export. Cape Breton Island is about one hundred miles long and eighty miles wide, its greatest natural feature being the famous "Arm of Gold," thus named in admiration by the early French explorers. Nearly one-half the surface of the island is occupied by the lakes and swamps of this "Bras d'Or," an extensive and almost tideless inland sea of salt water, ramifying with deep bays and long arms through the centre, having two large openings into the sea at its northeastern end, and almost communicating with the Atlantic on its southwestern corner. This "Arm of Gold" has fine scenery, and presents within the rocky confines of the island a large lake, the Great Bras d'Or, where the mariner gets almost out of sight of land. To the southward of Cape Breton Island is Arichat, or the Isle Madame, having the Lennox Passage between, this Isle being inhabited by a colony of French Acadian fishermen. Originally this region was colonized by the Count de Fronsac, Sieur Denys, the first French Governor of Cape Breton, in whose honor they always called the Canso Strait the Passage Fronsac, though since then its present title was adopted, being derived from the Micmac name of Camsoke, meaning "facing the frowning cliffs." Each little French settlement here, as on the St. Lawrence, has the white cottages clustering around the church with the tall spire, and the curé's house not far away, usually the most elaborate in the settlement. From the Lennox Passage a short canal has been cut through the rocks into the southwestern extremity of the Bras d'Or, thus actually dividing Cape Breton into two islands.
The village of "St. Peter at the Gate" is passed, and the lake entered at St. Peter's Inlet, a beautiful waterway filled with islands making narrow winding channels. Several of these islands are a Government reservation for a remnant of the Micmacs, and they have a small white church upon Chapel Island, where they gather from all parts of Cape Breton for their annual festival on St. Anne's Day. Beyond, the Great Bras d'Or broadens, an inland sea, the opposite shore almost out of vision, for the lake is eighteen miles across and fully fifty miles long. The banks come together at the Grand Narrows, making the contracted Strait of Barra, and then they expand again into another lake, neither so long nor so wide, the Little Bras d'Or to the northeastward, but still nearly fifty miles long, including its northeastern prolongation of St. Andrew Channel. This in turn opens by a wider strait into yet another lake to the northward, upon the farther shore of which is Baddeck. To the westward this lake spreads into St. Patrick's Channel, and to the northeastward there are thrust out in parallel lines the two "Arms of Gold" connecting with the sea. An island over thirty miles long and varying in width separates these two curious arms. These strangely-fashioned lakes present varied scenery; the shores in some places are low meadows, in others gently-swelling hills, and elsewhere they rise into forest-clad mountains. In the pellucid waters swim jelly-fish of exquisite tints. The atmosphere blends the outlines and colors so well that it smoothes the roughness of the wilder regions, and casts a softness over the scene which adds to its charms. Beyond the bordering mountains, to the northward, is a dreary and almost uninhabited table-land stretching to the Atlantic Ocean, where the long projection of remote Cape North stands in silent grandeur within seventy-five miles of Newfoundland.
Upon the verge of the northern Bras d'Or Lake, in a charming situation, is the little town of Baddeck, its houses scattered over the sloping hillsides and the church spires rising among the trees. A pretty island stands out in front as a protective breakwater, for storms often sweep wildly across the broad waters. This is the chief settlement of the lake district, the Highland Scottish inhabitants having twisted its present name out of the original French title of Bedique, there being a population of about one thousand. At the eastern extremity of Cape Breton Island, on an inlet from the Atlantic, and near the terminating arms of the Bras d'Or, is the coal-shipping port of Sydney, with a population of twenty-five hundred, though excepting coal-piers and colliers there is not much there to see. This is the port for the Sydney coal-fields, covering nearly three hundred square miles of the island, and the mine-galleries being prolonged in various places under the ocean. These were the first coal deposits worked in America, the French having got coal out of them in the seventeenth century. They are now all controlled by the wealthy Dominion Coal Company of Boston. Sydney, C. B., is a seaport known from its coaling facilities throughout the world, and while prosaic enough now, it saw stirring scenes in the Colonial times. The early name for its admirable harbor was Spanish Bay, because Spanish fishermen gathered there. It was a favorite anchorage for both French and English fleets in their preparations, as the tide of battle turned, for attacking New England or Acadia in the long struggle for supremacy. In 1696 the French assembled in Spanish Bay for a foray upon Pemaquid. In 1711 Admiral Hovenden Walker, returning from his unsuccessful expedition against Quebec, his ships having been dispersed by a storm, collected in this capacious roadstead the most formidable fleet it had seen, forty-two vessels. The doughty British Admiral felt so good about it that he set up on shore a large signboard made by his carpenters, whereon was inscribed a pompous proclamation claiming possession of the whole country in honor of his sovereign Queen Anne. The French soon came along, however, and smashed his signboard, built their fortress of Louisbourg, and there was a half-century of warfare before the proclamation was made good and England had undisputed possession. The settlement on Spanish Bay was not named after Lord Sydney and made the Cape Breton capital until 1784, when exiled loyalists came from the United States to inhabit it.