The Last Best Place (4 page)

Odd facts and stories were what stuck in our young minds: we knew about the stunted ponies that lived on Sable Island; we knew about Giant MacAskill, the strongman from Cape Breton, who died after imbedding a ship’s anchor in his shoulder while performing one of his amazing feats of strength; we knew that each year Halifax sent a great Christmas tree to Boston for the help it lent after the Halifax Explosion, the world’s largest before the atom bomb.

We knew that once the coal fields of Pictou County and Cape Breton had carried the province. And that long before today’s long flat line of economic stagnation—begun by Confederation and the trade policies that helped Central Canada while devastating the Maritimes—Nova Scotia had been a prosperous, self-sufficient crown colony with an economy built on the Golden Age of Sail. That there had been privateers and raiding parties that emerged from the fog and burned and looted the villages and settlements.
That there had been the ragged smugglers and pirates and honoured sea captains and boat builders. We knew that it had been the gateway to the continent, through which half the country seemed to have passed. We knew about wars and treaties and great rivalries and the great fortress of Louisbourg, which held the key to the continent. And we knew all about the pioneers, those baffled optimists, those hard-scrabble poor coming from nowhere to never-been, who stared out with awe, relief, dread and devotion from the decks as they made for harbour and this new place.

This was the history that shaped the land and the people. Nova Scotia cannot be measured by width and breadth. It has a third dimension: time. It is top-heavy with history. And if we did not have it committed to memory it was only because here the past so overlays the present that history is vibrant and alive. Children crave places like this, where heroes battle, time is jumbled together and little ships discover new places on the edge of the new creation. The house I grew up in was as old as the city of Calgary. In Nova Scotia time travel is still easy because progress hasn’t paved over the artifacts and ghosts. History lives on here, always tinged with that special melancholy—looking longingly forward or achingly back—that gives it the power to haunt.

It is overcast, low twenties with a nice breeze as Lisa, our four-year-old, Belle, newborn Sam and I circle the Annapolis Basin towards Port Royal. All I can think about is what a wonderful people Canadians really are. Don’t scoff. To get to Port Royal take an extension
off Highway 101 through a valley, past the herb farms, the galleries and the nice bed-and-breakfasts. I zip by Auberge sieur de Monts and the Champlain Motel. This is the cradle of Canada, for the entire continent. The place where it all started, as some local tourism bumf points out, “two years before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, three years before the founding of Quebec, and fifteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts.” Imagine if this were in the States. The road would be lined with DeMont’s Donuts, Champlain’s Exotic Dancing Palace, Marc Lescarbot’s Liquor and Firearm Emporium and crummy little curio shops selling Port Royal ashtrays. There would be a wax museum, the kind where every figure resembles Prince Charles, and a tacky playhouse where crack addicts and convicted junk bond dealers in period costume go on about the virtues of self-reliance and the capitalist system.

Instead, the Canadian government used a sketch Samuel de Champlain made of the layout of the original settlement to build a terrific replica on the site. I am way overdue here. No one on my father’s side of the family is actually certain how long people named DeMont have been around this province. But that small detail has never stopped us from claiming descendance from the Huguenot nobleman Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts, who was given the original charter to settle “the countries, territories, coasts and confines of La Cadie … from the 40th degree unto the 46th.” Which, if I’m not mistaken, makes him North America’s first franchisee.

He attracted the normal crew of downtrodden losers, deluded
adventurers and desperate strivers. There were masons and carpenters to clear the wilderness, interpreters to trade with the Indians, a few wild-eyed clerics to add to the converted, a scattering of gentlemen on the long downwards skid through French society. Towering over everyone was Jean de Biencourt, generally known as sieur de Poutrincourt, who fought on both sides of France’s religious wars and now, at forty-seven, was ready to start life over again, uprooting his wife and family from their seigneuries in Picardy and Champagne in the hope of adventure, honour and wealth. Penniless and embroiled in a snake’s nest of lawsuits back in France, he had the vaulting ambition of the privileged come down in the world. No little cabin in the woods for him. He envisioned a French domain—handsome manor houses surrounded by smiling fields and pastures, church bells ringing out, “the tawny skinned inhabitants,” as Elizabeth Jones wrote in her book
Gentlemen and Jesuits: Quests for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France
, “emerging devoutly from their wigwams to pray.”

They were at sea for two months in 1604, riding out brutal storms and a close call with icebergs. Then they saw here. Champlain, a soldier, sailor, writer, mapmaker and adventurer—a big-spirited renaissance man—called it “one of the finest harbours I have ever seen on all these coasts where a couple of thousand vessels could lie in safety.” But no doubt it was de Monts’s call. Prefiguring centuries of ill-fated family investment decisions, my alleged ancestor chose to settle on a godforsaken island on the
New Brunswick side of the Bay. The clouds of blackflies puffed the men’s faces up like soufflés. The cider froze and had to be hacked out of an icy amber block and weighed by the pound; the settlers took to drinking old dirty water and melted snow. Before long some of them began to feel their gums swell and the flesh thicken in their mouths. Champlain, the meticulous note-taker, gave a detailed account of what happened as the scurvy progressed:

You get the picture. Come winter break-up the survivors couldn’t get out of there fast enough. They beat it back across the basin, through Digby Gut to a spot with lots of trees for firewood, streams for water and hills for windbreak. There they founded North America.

I do feel a twinge of ancestral pride as I walk towards the log walls of Port Royal. I fantasize that the Parks Canada woman at the visitors gate takes one look at my face, notices the familial resemblance and lets me in for free. But I pay up, walk down the dirt driveway and around the outside of the fort for a while. I inspect the statue of Christ on the tall wooden cross standing in the mowed field marking the cemetery for the scurvy victims. I look at the woods from where first walked Membertou, the great Mi’kmaq sagamo—said to be over a hundred years old and described by one of the settlers as being “of prodigious size, and taller and stronger than most, bearded like a Frenchman while not one of the others had hair on his chin.” Then I step inside.

Lord, it is tiny: the storehouse, the chapel, the kitchen, the blacksmith shop, the small, modestly furnished gentlemen’s quarters all forming a rectangle around a central courtyard. The plan was sixteenth-century manoral Normandy. But it is all not much bigger than a suburban monster home in Etobicoke. Icy wind whistled through the cracks in the walls; unknown devilish terrors lurked in the woods and the waters, and the aristocrats back in Versailles wanted to pull the plug on the whole thing.

But I’ve always had a warmer, happier image of life in Port Royal.
I picture Champlain and the others returning from a voyage of exploration in November 1606 to find costumed colonists and Indians in canoes beginning the first performance of
Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France
, a play in verse written by Marc Lescarbot, the lawyer and dreamer for the occasion. And the Ordre de Bon Temps, the continent’s first dining club, designed to keep the troops healthy, happy and mutiny-free during the deep freeze. The chief steward leading off with a napkin over his shoulder, a special chain of office around his neck and a staff in his hand, the others following, each carrying a dish, which they placed with due formality upon the long high table set with gleaming pewter before a great stone fireplace. There sat the other gentlemen, Membertou and the other visiting Indian chiefs. The role of steward for the day rotated among the fifteen gentlemen members. Each hit the woods and waters in the hope of bringing back something exceptional to outdo the others. Everyone, as a result, ate like true trenchermen: wildfowl, sturgeon and moose in the fall; beaver, otter, wildcat and raccoon in winter. There was wine, peas, beans, rice, prunes, raisins, dry cod and oil and butter. A specialty for dessert sounds suspiciously like the first crabapple jelly—“certain small fruits like small apples coloured red, of which we made jelly,” wrote Lescarbot. And, there were toasts, lots and lots of toasts to go with the singing of folk songs and rounds that pushed the festivities deep into the night. “Whatever our gourmands at home may think,” observed Lescarbot, “we found as good cheer at Port-Royal as they in Paris and at a cheaper rate.”

Of course it couldn’t last. One day in 1608 they arose and noticed a small ship on the horizon. Bad news: de Monts’s monopoly had been cancelled. He had done nothing to establish the fur trade; worse, he and a few others may have defrauded the enterprise’s backers, which is something that
never
gets mentioned when someone in my family gets bragging. The company was dissolved and the lot of them were to return to France. Champlain and de Monts by then were already more interested in “Canada,” the St. Lawrence region where they would found Quebec.

Only Poutrincourt held on to his dream of turning Port Royal into a new world paradise. Back in Paris he presented the French monarch with some Canadian geese, corn, wheat, rye, barley and oats and showed him a knife made out of New World iron. He talked about Membertou’s interest in the French monarch and the native curiosity about the Christian faith. Henri bought it. Poutrincourt and his son took some Jesuit priests and returned to the habitation, which Membertou and his folk had been minding in the meantime.

For another four years they scratched out an existence. Meantime, on the strength of Cabot’s explorations, England claimed all lands north of Florida. In 1613 an English raiding party travelled the Atlantic seaboard, burning and plundering all the French settlements it could find. They arrived at Port Royal by moonlight with most of the inhabitants on work detail or visiting their Indian friends. With no opposition to stop them the Virginians rounded up pigs, horses and colts and herded them onto the
English ships They took hammer and pick to the huge boulder nearby, obliterating the carved fleurs-de-lys, the triangular hillocks of de Monts’s coat of arms and Poutrincourt’s family’s lion. When the French returned they found nothing but smouldering ruins.

I stand a few feet from where the Virginians sailed in, sucking on cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup while wondering what the whole futile effort meant. For that was pretty much it. Poutrincourt, still desperate for glory, died back in France, his sword drawn, shouting “Kill, kill! God save the King and Poutrincourt,” shot by one of his allies during a civil uprising. As for the habitation, Poutrincourt’s son kept it up for a while. Then he died. In the great French–English war over the continent that followed, French, English or Indian forces besieged the citadel innumerable times and it changed hands repeatedly. With British conquest in 1710, Port Royal became Annapolis Royal, the lovely little town that now stands nearby. Three years later a treaty gave mainland Nova Scotia to the English; the French kept Cape Breton Island.

This, of course, is history on the grand scale. The sort of thing you can’t escape in the school textbooks growing up. Important things had to happen here, midway between the New World and the Old. For everything after flowed from Port Royal. If, for instance, Biencourt had not asserted the French presence here, it is possible that this territory would not have been returned to France by the Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1632. Then the best-known event in Nova Scotia’s history would never have occurred.

I speak here about the Expulsion of the Acadians, the 1755 deportation of an entire French-speaking people to France, the West Indies and the French possessions along the Mississippi because they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. It is more than just a slice of history. The yarn of a Paradise Lost and its martyred people provides a proper context for a place through which a mist of sadness—a wisp of “what if”—habitually drifts. The irony is that the man responsible for the myth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was an American who never came here. But
Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie
was some of the best PR the province ever got.

Acadia, which back then meant an area roughly equivalent to the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, was not quite as sumptuous as the ancient Greek Vale of Arcady, that idyllic landscape where nymphs danced and shepherds piped. But the ten thousand French living mainly around the Bay of Fundy had turned it into something startlingly special: instead of clearing and cultivating the uplands they used their experience with the salt marshes of France to build an elaborate system of dykes that allowed excess fresh water to flow back to the Bay while protecting the land from the salt water flooding at high tide. So life by eighteenth-century standards was sweet: no famine, no drought, an adequate-enough diet to keep epidemic away. Longfellow made the place sound like the Garden of Eden and introduced the reader to Évangéline and Gabriel, whose romantic idyll was cruelly interrupted by the English deportation order. The lovers roamed
America searching for each other, only to be reunited when the prematurely old heroine ends her wandering and becomes a Sister of Mercy in Philadelphia, where she finds Gabriel, now dying in a hospital.