Nova Scotia Quotes
...He recounts the fates of black loyalists (the runaways and freemen who fought for George III in the American revolution, trusting in "British freedom" to abolish slavery) and the few heroic white men who tried to help them. He follows the most wretched refugees on their retreat into Nova Scotia after the war had been lost, and then on their remarkable convoy in 1792 to found a new African homeland, in modern-day Freetown in Sierra Leone... The epic exodus at the centre of Schama's book, made in 1792 by 1,196 black former slaves in 16 ships from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, was organised and led by Lieutenant John Clarkson, the brother of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. The sight of the fleet leaving Halifax harbour was, says Schama, "a spectacle to make the heart leap and one that deserves remembering in the annals of African-American history"...
Review by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto of "Rough Crossings" by Simon Schama,
Sunday Times, London, 25 Sep 2005
...In Scotland (then a separate kingdom), baronets of Nova Scotia were first created in 1625 to support settlement of that colony, paying 1,000 merks for a theoretical grant of 16,000 acres and 2,000 merks to support six settlers there for two years. A merk was two thirds of a pound Scots and the rate was 12 pounds Scots to one pound sterling, so they paid £166 13s 4d sterling – perhaps around £20,000 today. As Nova Scotia was ceded to France in 1631 it was a poor bargain...
Honours for a modest fee
by Hugh Peskett, Scottish Editor, Burkes Peerage & Baronetage
The Times, London, 14 November 2006
The first court of judicature, administering English common law, within what is now the Dominion of Canada, was established at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, on the 20th day of April, 1721... to administer justice "by the same manner and proceedings as the general court" in Virginia... For several decades of that century the "lawes of Virginia" were the model and pattern for the new court in Nova Scotia... Probably no other town in North America was so long and so often the prize for which the forces of two great nations contended. The little town of Annapolis Royal, known as Port Royal in the days of French occupation, is situate at the northeastern end of Annapolis Basin, a beautiful sheet of water some eighteen miles in length and three or four miles wide... The brave De Monts with his little flotilla entered the basin in 1604 to put into effect his great scheme to colonize Acadia, by which name Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the greater part of the State of Maine were for a long time known...
Virginia and Nova Scotia: An Historical Note by Hon. Justice Chisholm of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, The Virginia Law Register, New Series v6 n10 February 1921, page 744
...Canada's oldest town street...
Queen Anne's town: Annapolis Royal anchors Nova Scotia's colonial history; in the Calgary Herald, 5 August 2006, referring to St. George Street, in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.
The argument can be made that the Valley is the birthplace of Canada, with the French settling Port Royal in 1605 and the region being a battle-ground in the numerous wars between the French and English for colonial supremacy.
Mike Parker, author of Historic Annapolis Valley: Rural Life Remembered, 162 pages, Nimbus Publishing, Halifax, 2006, as quoted in Jeffrey Simpson's review of that book in the NovaScotian, a section in the Halifax Sunday Herald, 24 December 2006.
There are many valleys in Nova Scotia but there is only one Valley. It is widely known that when one speaks of the Valley or goes to the Valley or is from the Valley, it is the Annapolis Valley. No other valley in Nova Scotia can lay claim to that.
The British conquest of Acadia in 1710 is not an event that figures largely in standard histories of Canada. Historically, it has not been considered significant either for Acadia (today's Nova Scotia) or for Canada as a whole, being regarded as simply a stepping stone to the decisive 1760 conquest, when Canada became part of the British Empire. The authors of the nine studies that make up this book think otherwise... The British takeover was not well organized and was marked by inaction and a laissez-faire attitude. In the midst of imperial rivalries and administrative ineptitude, private commercial ventures expanded rapidly, mostly from New England... the result was that Acadia devolved into being neither entirely a colony nor entirely a commercial outpost...
Review in The American Historical Review, February 2005, of (book) The "Conquest" of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions, by John G. Reid, William Wicken, Geoffrey Plank, Barry Moody, Maurice Basque, Elizabeth Mancke, University of Toronto Press, 2003, 297 pages.
My kin got run out of this place sometime in the 1700s.
High-profile American political consultant James Carville, an outspoken political junkie from Louisiana, referring to the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 by the British government. Mr. Carville was in Halifax on 25 January 2007 to deliver a speech before a meeting of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party, as reported in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald the next day. Mr. Carville, the legendary "ragin' Cajun" who ran Bill Clinton's election campaigns, said he had never before been to Nova Scotia – his "ancestral homeland." (Cajun is a Louisiana variation of Acadian.)
Samuel Penhallow, in his History (Boston, 1726), p. 51, speaking of "Port Royal and Nova Scotia," says of the last, that its "first seizure was by Sir Sebastian Cobbet for the crown of Great Britain, in the reign of King Henry VII.; but lay dormant till the year 1621," when Sir William Alexander got a patent of it, and possessed it some years; and afterward Sir David Kirk was proprietor of it, but erelong, "to the surprise of all thinking men, it was given up unto the French."
Henry David Thoreau in his 1865 book Cape Cod
Cape Cod Appendix B: Historical Notes for Chapter 10 (note 12)
Samuel Penhallow by Wikipedia
Samuel Penhallow, chief justice of New Hampshire, wrote History of the War of New England... published in 1726, which probably is Thoreau's source.
Dr. Charles T. Jackson tells me that, in the course of a geological survey in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, on Goat Island, opposite Annapolis (Port Royal), in Nova Scotia, bearing a Masonic coat-of-arms and the date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier than the landing of the Pilgrims. This was left in the possession of Judge Haliburton, of Nova Scotia...
Henry David Thoreau in his 1865 book Cape Cod
Cape Cod Appendix B: Historical Notes for Chapter 10 (note 5)
Does anyone know if this very early (in North America) European gravestone still exists?
My first stop after sorting was at the Seniors' complex in Mabou, then Northeast Mabou, Mabou Harbour, Mountain Road, Mabou Mines, North of Mabou, Glenora Falls, Highway 19 to Glenville, back through Blackstone to the Mount Young Road, Smithville, Glendyer, and back through the village of Mabou to the crossroads... The route was a particularly challenging one with some of the worst hills in the area... More than a hundred kilometres a day in all seasons and all kinds of weather... The mail had to be delivered despite weather conditions or whether you were sick or not... Murphy started the job back when a number of people on his route still didn't have vehicles. You might get a grocery list or an order for a bottle or more of liquor and you'd deliver it. It was different times then, and some of the local people just saw it as part of your job... Sometimes he found more than mail in the mailbox. One farmer used to mail his horseshoes to have them prepared for winter... There was the time he kept finding a stubborn blackbird nesting in a mailbox. The owner of the mailbox kept putting it out of the box, and it kept coming back. Murphy knew the blackbird finally won the battle when he found baby birds in the letter box one day. The owner finally left the birds alone...
"Canada Post rural driver retires after 33 years of service," in The Inverness Oran 5 December 2007, recalling the rural mail delivery route operated by Danford Murphy from 1974 until his last run on 30 November 2007.
When I phoned to get Maritimes stories of hauntings, it almost seemed like if you didn't have a ghost, your house wasn't much of a home...
Barbara Smith, of British Columbia, author of more than a dozen books of ghost stories, as quoted in a CanWest News Service report of the results of a national survey of 1,000 adults, commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global Television and conducted by pollster Ipsos Reid in December 2007. The article was printed in the Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald on 29 December 2007, and in the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Winnipeg Free Press, and the Victoria Times-Colonist on 30 December 2007.
If you're not in by 7:30 pm, I'll lock you out.
The warning given by the warden of the local jail in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in the early 1930s, who – legend says – often let prisoners out on hot days "as long as you're back by 7:30 pm," as recounted by Max Haines in his book The Spitting Champion of the World: Memories of Antigonish, 288 pages, published in March 2007. In this book, Max tells of the Nova Scotia of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, where there were no traffic lights, no mail delivery, and no numbers on doors, and if you wanted to call, Max's family's phone number was simply 9. Max Haines was born in Antigonish, and is best known for his "Crime Flashback" column, which made its debut in the Toronto Sun in 1972, and ran in the Sun each week until his last column appeared in the 23 July 2006 issue. His column was syndicated around the world and in more than forty newspapers across Canada. The column had a weekly readership of more than three million and has been translated into Spanish, French, and Chinese. Haines is also the author of twenty-seven bestselling anthologies of crime vignettes, including Unnatural Causes, Canadian Crimes, Murder Most Foul, and Instruments of Murder.
Port Williams is in the Annapolis Valley at the mouth of the Cornwallis River. At one time
it was a busy port especially in the fall of the year when loads of apples and potatoes
were shipped to far away places. The Danish vessel Sally Maersk lifted the largest cargo
of apples out of the port. She lifted 32,283 barrels on September 19th, 1935... This cargo was loaded in 22 hours and consisted of 600 truck loads... 1935 must have been a good apple year. Following close on the wake of MV Sally Maersk was the second largest vessel to lift apples from Port Williams. SS Schurbek came complete with her Nazi swastika flying... In 1975 the German ship Antares the widest ship ever to dock here and with a carrying capacity of 6,000 tons brought a cargo of soybean meal from Chicago...
Source:
The Largest Apple Cargo Out of Port Williams, Nova Scotia by Spurgeon G. Roscoe
When I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are: What is right? What is just?
What is for the public good?
Joseph Howe as quoted in Town of Canso Governance Study, 2007, written by Gordon MacInnis, vice-president of finance and operations at Cape Breton University. The quotation appears twice in this report, first at page 4 of Part One, and again at page 37 of Part Two.
Source:
Town of Canso Governance Study, Part One 25 November 2007
Town of Canso Governance Study, Part Two 25 November 2007
...The city (of Halifax) lies upon an even side hill, like an inclined plane, affording natural sewerage in every part; crowning the hill is the citadel, or fortress, a work of great extent, commanding the city and bay... The business part, as might be supposed, is along the wharves and the two or three streets parallel with them. The better-looking residences are at the south and north ends and west of the citadel. The heart, or centre, though with a sprinkling of more respectable elements, is squalid and hopeless, beyond description. Standing at the entrance of one of these long streets, dingy, dusty, arid and endless – Albemarle street, for example – one thinks, involuntarily, that such might be the streets of hell, and wishes for another Dante to take in the scene. Unpaved, except by a sort of macadamizing, flat from side to side, and without walks, built closely with one and two-storey houses, uniformly the same color with the ground they stand on; the houses without pretence of steps, stoop, plazza or basement, but opening upon a dead level with the roadway, totally devoid of architectural ornament, and without a blade of grass, a shrub or tree, as far as the eye can reach; with squalid children, playing in a kind of helpless manner – nothing more forlorn, more comfortless or hopeless can be conceived. A kind of diabolic enchantment pervades the scene, under this hot August sun; and when one turns toward the glorious expanse of the bay and catches the vivifying breeze, the juxtaposition seems unnatural and impossible... The residence of the Governor, called the Government House, is exceptional, and is quite an imposing old structure of brick and stone... It is guarded by red-coated sentinels, as all Government property is; and as Government property is everywhere, so red-coats are everywhere... There are three thousand soldiers here...
"From the Provinces, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, The City of Halifax...",
datelined Halifax, 25 August 1867
New York Times, 7 September 1867
As part of our 35th anniversary celebrations, the Heritage Canada Foundation will be launching Heritage 2008: Work that Endures: Careers in Built Heritage. The online resource will highlight the stories of more than a dozen Canadians whose varied and interesting careers are all connected to heritage conservation and promotion. Whether tradespeople, educators, professionals or volunteers they have contributed their skills and knowledge to restoring, researching, maintaining and teaching about heritage places. People featured include Norbert and Helga Sattler, stained glass artisans from West LaHave, Nova Scotia, who restored the twenty-four stained glass windows of the historic St. John's Anglican Church in Lunenburg and established the Maritime Stained Glass Registry – a photographic archives and database for 150 churches; Donald Luxton, Victoria based heritage consultant, author and educator, who is an expert on historic paint colours and technology and Steve Barber, a senior heritage planner in B.C. who helped set up a Tax Incentive Program to encourage investment in the residential conversion of historic properties. Of the dozens of volunteer groups in the country, Work that Endures chose to focus on the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society, and Les Amis de la residence de Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine...
From an announcement by Heritage Canada Foundation, sent out to the Internet mailing list list@list.heritagecanada.org on 10 January 2008.
The Heritage 2008: Work that Endures: Careers in Built Heritage resource will be available on the Foundation's website in advance of Heritage Day, February 18, 2008.
References:
Heritage Day 2008 Heritage Canada Foundation
Sattler Stained Glass Studio
Through his fictional character Sam Slick, Thomas Chandler Haliburton coined such phrases as "he drank like a fish," "the early bird gets the worm," "it's raining cats and dogs," "you can't get blood out of a stone," "as quick as a wink," and "six of one and half a dozen of the other." Haliburton captured the English-speaking world with his wit, humour, and satire.
J.M.S. Careless in his
biographical note about Haliburton, a lawyer, judge, author, member of the Nova Scotia Legislature and long-time resident of Windsor, Nova Scotia: "The insightful wit of the Sam Slick series was assembled and published in one well-received volume in 1836, followed by two more series published in two more volumes in 1838 and 1840; by which time the wandering clockmaker (Slick) was known, and quoted, not only in the British North American provinces but also from Boston and New York to London."
So I reached down, lifted the oars from where they lay in the icy water on the boat's bottom, and squeezed my fingers with all the remaining strength left in them, into a curved position around the oar handles. My object was to let my hands freeze in that way, so that, after they became rigid, it would still be possible for me to manage the oars.
Captain Howard Blackburn, born on February 17, 1858, in Port Medway, Queens County, Nova Scotia, describing how he narrowly survived the storm of January 25, 1883, on Burgeo Bank; reprinted in shunpiking volume 1 number 9 November 1996.
...This is a gripping story about two men and a cold, angry sea. The fishing vessel (mother ship) was the Grace L Fear, a Banks sea-going, two-master out of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, captained by Johnny Griffin. The two men involved were Harold Blackburn of Dock Cove, Port Medway and his dory partner, Tom Welch, a Newfoundlander. The time was Jan. 25, 1883, and it was so dark the two young men could only see outlines of their dory's thwarts and the gun'les through the driving snow. Frozen sleet slashed at their faces and spray-ice glazed their 20-foot dory. Every few minutes the dory shipped water and they had great difficulty keeping afloat. The seriousness of the moment kept them from thinking too much about the fact that they were 30 miles [50km] off shore, out of sight of the Grace L. Fear, in a howling mid-winter gale, and completely lost... They'd given up all hope of rowing back to the schooner. After pulling desperately at the oars until they were totally exhausted, they had seen the Grace L. Fear's riding light disappear into the distance. The dory was now icing badly and the duo was being soaked by raging combers... They bailed endlessly... For eight straight hours the sturdy dory struggled up the top of one giant wave after another. The cold became unbearable and bailing was agony. Out of desperation, Blackburn decided to make one last try to row toward the coast... The wind and seas worsened so Blackburn decided to break open one of the sturdy, oaken trawl kegs to provide some further drag and serve as a sea anchor. This action was for naught and in the process one oar was lost overboard – and Blackburn's heavy wool mittens went with it. It was not long before Blackburn's hands were white, seemingly bloodless and without feeling as he knocked them against the gunwale. He made a fearless decision, quickly knowing he must stay ready to row. With much effort he picked up two oars and, pressing his fingers against his knees, forced them to curl around the handle ends until they held tight. Then he dipped both hands and handles in the icy water in the bottom of the dory and held them up to the freezing wind. In about 15 minutes he had a solid grip – his hands were frozen to the oars... Near dawn of the third day the wind began to drop and by sunrise it was nearly warm. But by now Blackburn had little hope, feverish through lack of fresh water, no food for 48 hours and hands frozen into claws. Yet, after a few minutes of rest, he positioned his frozen claws to the oar handles, got his oars in those pins and began to row...
"Shipbuilding in Queens County 1760-1925," by Armand Wigglesworth in the Queens County Advance, 16 and 23 January 2008
(In the United States) the rapid extension of the telegraph system has no parallel in history. Since 1844, we have erected and put in operation about 35,000 miles of line. The wires are to be found on almost every traveled road, giving telegraphic communication to some 800 towns and cities. In fact, every town and city in the United States has telegraphic connection with New York. Citizens, as a general thing, have no conception of the amount of business daily transacted over the wires. Contracts to buy and sell, pledges of indebtedness, balancing of accounts, all involving millions of dollars, are entered into freely and without fear. From morning till night, day in and day out, are the trembling wires busy with the concerns of an entire nation. How great must be that influence, so quietly, so unobtrusively at work, annihilating time and space, and bringing our distant cities in close relationship for the transaction of business and interchange of the social attentions and courtesies of civil life! Our longest line is from Halifax to New Orleans, a distance following the wires of about 2,400 miles about 3800 km; and it is over this line the steamship's news is sent to all the principal cities.
Marshall Lefferts in his paper The Electric Telegraph; its Influence and Geographical Distribution, read at the meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society in New York City on 24 April 1856. In 1849 Lefferts became president of the New York & New England Telegraph Company, and he remained one of the leading figures in the American telegraph industry until his death in 1876.
Source:
The Electric Telegraph; its Influence and Geographical Distribution
by Marshall Lefferts, April 1856
I hold in my hand a letter from the War Office in London, stating that a message sent from there on the 31st of August, 1858, was delivered the same day at Halifax, which message prevented the embarkation of troops for India; and I have been informed that it saved the English Government over $200,000. The benefits of an Atlantic cable to England, by enabling the Government to be in daily communication with its Ambassador at Washington, and all the British Consuls in this country (United States), and the Governors of the five North American Provinces, and its naval and military forces in America, can hardly be estimated.
Cyrus Field in his speech on Prospects of the Atlantic Telegraph given at the meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society in New York City on 1 May 1862.
Source:
Prospects of the Atlantic Telegraph
by Cyrus W. Field, 1 May 1862
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How much is that $200,000 in today's money?
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Cyrus Field's Best Argument
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Just a question, Your Worship: Where has everybody been for the last 86 years?
Bob Harvey, Lower Sackville councillor, speaking to Mayor Walter Fitzgerald during a meeting of the Halifax Regional Municipal Council, as reported in the Halifax Daily News, 20 April 1998. Now that the movie has made the Titanic fashionable, three levels of government are investing $600,000 in restoring the victims' Halifax graves and maintaining related exhibits, after 86 years of official neglect.
I was churning out the photocopies. Two historians came over and they started to cry.
Marine historian David Flemming, former director of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, quoted in the Halifax Daily News 24 December 1997, talking about the log handwritten by Marconi operator Robert Hunston in an isolated radio shack in southeastern Newfoundland in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, as radio messages arrived from the sinking Titanic and other ships in the vicinity. The original log, previously known only to members of the Hunston family, was recently donated to the museum by Molly Russell of Halifax, Hunston's daughter.
How this glorious steamer wallops, and gallops, and flounders along!
Thomas Chandler Haliburton's description, written on board on 3rd April 1839, of the motion of the steamship Great Western at sea, published in Letter-Bag of The Great Western, or Life in a Steamer, William H. Colyer, New York, 1840. In the Preface, Haliburton mentions "personally suggesting the propriety and discussing the feasibility of establishing a steam connection" between England and Nova Scotia.
Haliburton's full text is available online at http://www.canadiana.org/
This bit of Canada is a national treasure ... The Digby Neck, the thin split of land on the Bay of Fundy that has splintered away from Nova Scotia's southwestern shore, is a place of remarkable contentment, with somewhere around 1,000 year-round residents ... At four summers, my own bunch are still very much newcomers here, but we are no less welcome for it. Maritime hospitality is legendary. We stay in a charming, working fishing village halfway down the Digby Neck, in this part of Nova Scotia that has been generally overlooked. It's hard to get to, for a start, and the swells stay down in Chester, Lunenburg and the other pretty villages on the south shore, where New Yorker writers and U.S.-based Canadian broadcasters go. No such action here. The Neck is known, by and large, for Fundy's dramatic tides, the whale-watching tours that locals run, and the scallops and lobster you'll find in the bone-chilling waters here, the best in the world and the backbone of the local economy...
Noah Richler in his regular column in the National Post, 1 August 2002. This also appeared in the Halifax Sunday Herald, 11 August 2002.
Map of Digby Neck Nova Scotia government
http://www.gov.ns.ca/snsmr/muns/info/mapping/DIGBJ.stm
Map of Digby Neck Digby Neck Community Development Association
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/6253/NECK.html
The political equivalent of a spike in global warming comes in the very feebly-disguised straight-out war between the NDP and the Greens, all attended with manifest confusion among the Liberals. Take last week's so-called "deal" between Elizabeth May and Stephane Dion. Well, what have we got here, really? May's decision not to field someone against Stephane in his Montreal riding – while it may be a sweet gesture, the political equivalent of a Valentine's Day card – is, in practical terms, a pure nullity. It does nothing. In Central Nova the situation is quite different. In the last election, in that riding, the Liberals had 24% compared to a mighty tide of two for the Greens. It's difficult to see the strategy here. Why does a party with a beachhead of 24, give a pass to the one with two? It's one of the many puzzlements of the new way of doing politics. Well, you may characterize the May-Dion pact any way you will, as strange, confusing, novel or charming, but one thing it is not – a matter disturbing the sleep, or wearing the nerves, of Stephen Harper. The NDP however have gone nuclear on the subject. It's a cynical backroom deal according to Jack Layton, which comes interestingly from the mouth of one who virtually recrafted a federal budget in a hotel room with Paul Martin present and Buzz Hargrove on a speaker-phone. Senior NDP statesman Ed Broadbent blasted the enterprise with great vigour last week, and let the country in on the nefarious news that Elizabeth May may even have taken to calling Stephen Lewis to see if some similar arrangement between the Greens and the NDP could be worked out. The recourse to calling Mr. Lewis – we're given to understand – was only because she couldn't get through to Mr. Layton; he wouldn't call back. Well save me a planet. If, as the common wisdom has it, the May-Dion noncompete pact has some Liberals second-guessing their leader, doesn't offer much beyond a token tribute to the Greens, puts May at odds with some in her own party – her chief advisor has resigned, and she's had to put the boot to one prospective candidate – why are the NDP in such a lather? Well, it's very like the great frictions and factions that tormented the Reform, Alliance, and the now-departed Progressive Conservatives, back in those rosy days when the Liberals and Mr. Chretien owned Canadian politics. The so-called "right" was a nest of impotent schisms, odd alliances and scorching infighting, which is why these days ... Stephen Harper must be enjoying the spectacle of the so-called "left" doing such a perfect impression of what kept his bunch out of office for over a decade.
Rex Murphy on CBC's The National 18 April 2007, commenting on the
recent announcement, at a joint news conference held by Liberal Leader Stephane Dion and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in Stellarton, in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova, on Friday, 13 April 2007, that they have agreed not to run a candidate in each other's riding in the next federal election.
In the two days following its publication, the
CBC's story on the Stellarton announcement drew an unusually active response, more than 140
citizen comments, and they were (IMO) generally of an unusually high quality.
We're high above the point where the Bay of Fundy runs into the Minas channel and yet, the clifftops of Cape D'Or tower over us. Winding down and around the jagged cliffs and thick forest, a rough road resembling a logging trail ends at a ledge that juts out into the Bay. Perched on this ledge, the Lighthouse of Cape D'Or overlooks the hauntingly remote panorama of the Fundy shoreline. Our arrival at the lighthouse turned bed and breakfast was a scheduled lunch stop on a two-day driving program – a Canadian press launch for General Motors new Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks... We'd reached our rest stop via the harrowing forest road, bordered only by a battered guardrail. Parking our trucks and making our way to the edge of the cliff, more than one person remarked that it could just be the end of the earth...
Source: 2007 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra First Impressions by Lesley Wimbush, Auto123.com, 24 November 2006
http://www.auto123.com/en/info/news/roadtest,view,GMC.spy?artid=72860
The Mi'kmaq knew that they might look about as threatening as a parent-teacher association when they sat down with Georgia-Pacific. The company boasts of $27-billion (U.S.) in annual revenue and 85,000 employees, making it bigger than the four combined governments of Atlantic Canada... Head office in Atlanta, Georgia had been warned about Canada, not that the people there needed to be told. For half a century, the company had helped to build America's suburbs with gypsum from Cape Breton. Getting its way with the Nova Scotia government was seldom a problem. But this time, as Georgia-Pacific prepared to open its third mine on the island, the Atlanta-based multinational with more annual revenue than all but two African countries was warned of two new realities up north: the Greens and the natives...
Source: How the Mi'kmaq Profit from Fear, by John Stackhouse, in The Globe & Mail, 6 November 2001
After months of research, in 1986 they visited Cape Breton, an island connected by a causeway to the Nova Scotia mainland. It's a four-hour drive from Halifax (and an hour-and-a-half flight from Boston). A year later (they) found their Walden: a cozy three-room cabin on the banks of Cape Breton's Margaree River, some of the finest Atlantic salmon water in North America. The Moores got in early on Cape Breton, the long-overlooked, easternmost part of the peninsular province of Nova Scotia, whose mainland has been a hot real estate ticket since the early 1990s. Mainland Nova Scotia was said to feel like New England fifty years ago, a friendly, uncrowded maritime paradise with vast tracts of cheap, desirable land. It was discovered by wealthy Americans and Europeans (mostly Germans), who showed up in droves to buy waterfront property for $200,000 an acre in Chester and other tony shore towns west of Halifax. But those mainland bargains are harder to find now, as prices have risen to $850,000 a waterfront acre for prime locations... Cape Breton today is where Nova Scotia was a decade ago. Its oceanfront acreage, compared with the mainland's, goes for less than half the price; and a mile or two inland, it's cheaper still. Lots on the Margaree River are available for $850 an acre... perhaps the most famous early settler was Alexander Graham Bell, who fell in love with Cape Breton because it reminded him of his home country of Scotland. Weary of telephone patent battles in the U.S., Bell and his wife, Mabel, in 1893 built a 37-room summer home styled after a French chateau. Beinn Bhreagh (pronounced "ben vreyah", Gaelic for "beautiful mountain") still stands on a promontory that juts into the Bras d'Or Lakes near the village of Baddeck...
Source:
Eden at a Discount by Monte Burke, Forbes, 28 November 2005
I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty Cape Breton outrivals them all.
Alexander Graham Bell
I have been privileged to travel freely around the world... Few places around the world are still pristine. None comes close to the Bras d'Or Lakes.
Gilbert Grosvenor, Chairman of the National Geographic Society and great-grandson of A.G. Bell, speaking at the Bell Museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on 18 October 1996.
Driving along Cape Breton's world famous scenic drive, the Cabot Trail, I'd seen kilometres of rocky cliffs trail down to empty beaches. Outside small villages, houses stood far apart, strung infrequently along the shoreline. Fishing boats bobbed at small piers. In wet, misty spots the narrow, winding road disappeared when I drove through a very low cloud. I half expected to see a leprechaun leaping out of the smoky whirls twined with the thick forest. And beyond, whales spouted offshore in white caps under a low, damp, grey sky that rarely revealed the sun. It had a stormy black and white beauty, and it was clearly not a propserous place. I had glanced at a local paper and noticed homes selling for $14,000; Cape Breton may be the only place in North America where you can buy an oceanfront home on your VISA card.
Steve Cohen in The Globe and Mail, 10 August 2002, page R12
The largest of the so-called "small isles" of the Inner Hebrides, Rum has a history of banishing human beings. Almost 200 years ago, the then landowner, Maclean of Coll, shipped the entire population to Nova Scotia and replaced them with 8,000 black-faced sheep...
Rum hangs out the welcome banner, London Times, 11 May 2008
Four centuries after the debut of the first play written in North America, its portrayal of aboriginals in what is now Nova Scotia has outraged a theatre troupe enough to stage a protest – literally. Written and first performed on 14 November 1606, the Theatre of Neptune in New France includes the god of the sea and four Tritons as characters, as well as four Mi'kmaq, who are referred to as "savages." The four natives confirm their allegiance to the French crown and express their joy that the French have returned to the French settlement at Port Royal, now a national historic park in Nova Scotia...
Marc Lescarbot wrote the Theatre of Neptune in New France in 1606. Lescarbot, a lawyer from Paris, had been put in charge of the French settlement at Port Royal while the leader of the colony searched for a more inviting site for the settlers. When Governor Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt's ship appeared on the horizon on 14 November 1606, a theatre troupe went out to meet the vessel to perform the play.
It was the first published theatrical script produced in North America.
Source:
400-year-old play stirs controversy in Nova Scotia CBC News, 14 November 2006
Port Royal, 1606 — The settlers were restless. Even the natives were restless. Poutrincourt and Champlain, the leaders had been away almost three months exploring the eastern seaboard. In the only ship, the settler's only link to France. The previous two winters, more than half the settlers had died of scurvy, and now, a new winter was upon them.
Marc Lescarbot – the settlement's historian, a disillusioned lawyer and passionate writer, had a brainstorm. Let's put on a play: a surprise reception for the ship's return. A morale booster. The rehearsals and set production would keep everyone occupied.
Thus, November 14th, 1606, the history of theatre in Canada began. Marc Lescarbot's Le Theatre de Neptune en la Nouvelle France / The Theatre of Neptune in New France was mounted, welcoming Poutrincourt. It was the first written, first performed play in Canada and in the continental North America, north of the Spanish settlements in Mexico. A signature moment...
Source:
Nova Scotia: Birthplace of Canadian Theatre, 1606-2006 by Ken Pinto, Atlantic Fringe Festival
(Marc Lescarbot's) Theatre de Neptune...is a kind of nautical spectacle, organized to celebrate Poutrincourt's return to Port Royal. The god Neptune comes in a bark to bid the traveller welcome; he is surrounded by a court of Tritons and Indians, who recite in turn, in French, Gascon, and Souriquois verse, the praises of the leaders of the colony, and then sing in chorus the, glory of the king, while trumpets sound and cannon are fired. This performance, a mixture of barbarism and mythology, in the impressive setting of the Port Royal basin, was the first theatrical presentation, and no ordinary one, in North America.
Excerpted from
Marc Lescarbot in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
2006 marks the four hundredth anniversary of a major theatrical event in the history of North American drama. The Theatre of Neptune in New France by lawyer, poet and historian Marc Lescarbot was a masque of welcome performed on the Bay of Fundy by members of the tiny French colony of Port Royal on 14 November 1606. It celebrated the return of the ship bearing the Sieur de Poutrincourt and navigator-explorer Samuel de Champlain from their travels along the coastline as far south as Cape Cod in search of a more temperate site for the colony...
— Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot's Theatre of Neptune in New France (400th Anniversary Commemorative Edition)
http://www.talonbooks.com/index.cfm?event=titleDetails&ISBN=0889225478
by Jerry Wasserman, Professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia
Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Talonbooks, Vancouver (2006)
ISBN: 0889225478
John and George Maxwell were identical twins. The only language they spoke and understood was "the Gaidhlig" – Scots' Gaelic. The Maxwells were black. They may have been the only black Gaelic-speaking "Highlanders" in the world. For sure, there were no other Gaelic-speaking blacks in Nova Scotia. The Maxwell twins were born June 18, 1864, on Cameron Island in Bras d'Or Lake in the West Bay-Marble Mountain area of Cape Breton Island. Their father was the son of a West Indies slave who emigrated to Halifax from the United States after the American War of Independence. George met Rudyard Kipling in the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Kipling had many fixed addresses. He was born in India but lived in England, Burma, South Africa, Canada and the United States... His wife was from Gloucester and he was living there when he met George... Kipling was quite fascinated by George Maxwell and they spent several evenings together. At the time, Kipling was researching and writing Captains Courageous, a novel about Gloucester fishermen on Newfoundland's Grand Banks. He decided to add a black character. So, George Maxwell became the cook on the fishing schooner...
Pat MacAdam in The Ottawa Sun, 29 October 2006
The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes
Harvey had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and
dumb-show invitations to eat more.
"See, Harvey," said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, "it's
jest as I said. The young an' handsome men – like me an' Pennsy
an' you an' Manuel – we're second ha'af, an' we eats when the
first ha'af are through. They're the old fish; and they're mean
an' humpy, an' their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come
first, which they don't deserve. Ain't that so, doctor?" The cook nodded.
"Can't he talk?" said Harvey, in a whisper.
" 'Nough to git along. Not much o' anything we know. His natural
tongue's kinder curious. Comes from the in'ards of Cape Breton, he
does, where the farmers speak home-made Scotch... "That is not Scotch," said "Pennsylvania." "That is Gaelic. So I read in a book."
Rudyard Kipling in Captains Courageous, published 1896
Less than three per cent of Canada's population lives in Nova Scotia, but more than 16 per cent of Canada's soldiers killed in Afghanistan came from this province. Seven of the 42 Canadian soldiers killed in the war-torn country since 2002 came from this province. Only Ontario, with more than 13 times the population, has seen a higher death toll.
Page A1, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 23 October 2006
...It took a two-hour flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia, this week, followed by a 90-minute motorcade north up Highway 102 to Pictou County, for (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice to find herself linked to someone with similar star appeal: Peter MacKay of Canada, the single, sophisticated foreign minister, routinely named Canada's sexiest M.P. by The Hill Times in Ottawa, and the closest thing to eye candy on the diplomatic circuit. Tall, athletic, young, blond and recently dumped by his girlfriend, a fellow member of Parliament, Belinda Stronach, who parted with him when she switched parties, Mr. MacKay does not look like your usual foreign minister. He has a tan and the build of someone who spends his time on the rugby field, not holed up reading G-8 communiques. Sure, at 40 years old, he is younger than Ms. Rice, who is 51, but that did not stop gossips from engaging in baseless speculating ...Mr. MacKay, wearing a pearl gray suit, pink and blue striped tie ...mentioned Nova Scotia's rich black history, citing the "black loyalist community, Canada's oldest community of African heritage"...
"Dance of Diplomacy Provides Grist for the Gossip Mill", New York Times, 13 September 2006
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Figs. 1 to 4: Screenshots from The Colbert Report, 14 Sep 2006.
Figs. 1 and 3: Stephen Colbert discusses the article "Dance of Diplomacy Provides Grist for the Gossip Mill", New York Times, 13 Sep 2006.
Fig. 2: View of the article "Dance of Diplomacy Provides Grist for the Gossip Mill", New York Times, 13 Sep 2006.
Fig. 4: The Colbert Report shows a shot (from CNN, 13 Sep. 2006) of Peter MacKay and Condoleezza Rice in front of the steam locomotive Albion in the Museum of Industry, Stellarton, Nova Scotia.
Compare fig. 4 with figs. 5 and 6, showing partial views, photographed on 28 Mar 2006, of the steam locomotive Albion in the Museum of Industry, Stellarton, Nova Scotia.
Remarks With Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay At the Museum of Industry
by Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Stellarton, Canada, September 12, 2006
Remarks at the Museum of Industry
by Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Stellarton, Nova Scotia, Canada, September 12, 2006
Remarks at 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony With Citizens of Halifax
by Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax NS, Canada, September 11, 2006
Remarks to Halifax International Airport Officials and Staff
by Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Halifax International Airport, Halifax NS, Canada, September 11, 2006
The fact that she chose, on the anniversary of nine-eleven, to be here in Halifax, here in Nova Scotia, I think says a great deal about the fact they do appreciate what Canada, and what Nova Scotia has done... The fact that she came here on that anniversary – she could have gone anywhere else in the world – to me sends a very powerful message...
Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald, speaking about the two-day visit by United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Nova Scotia, 11-12 September 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. This was part of Mr. MacDonald's 2006 year-end interview broadcast on CPAC (Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel), a cable television channel distributed all over Canada. The interview was broadcast on CPAC several times in late December 2006, and at 12:15am AST 2 January 2007.
We have been diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. All airspace in North America has been closed.
The pilot of Delta flight 777 from London Gatwick, England, to Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, speaking on the plane's intercom to the passengers, halfway across the North Atlantic, as described by passenger Don Tooker, in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 15 September 2001. D.K. Tooker received his navy wings and commission in April 1947 and later served with the United States Marine Corps, retiring in 1968 as a Lieutenant Colonel. In 1950 he graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara. In Korea he logged 133 combat missions in Corsairs and jets. In the early 1950s he flew helicopters and observation aircraft, but went back to jets in the 1960s, flying the F8 Crusader and commanding the VMF-323 (Marine Fighter) squadron. From 1966 to 1968 he commanded VVMO-5, flying the Iroquois and the Bronco. His decorations include two Distinguished Flying Crosses, ten Air Medals, two Navy Commendation Medals, and the Presidential Unit Citation. His book, The Second Luckiest Pilot: Adventures in Military Aviation, ISBN 1557508216 was published in May 2000 by the Naval Institute Press, in Annapolis, Maryland.
Last Tuesday [September 11, 2001] my wife, Peri, and I were headed home to California from London. Midway on our flight from Gatwick to Atlanta, our Delta flight captain made the following solemn announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have some terrible news. The Pentagon and the two World Trade Center towers have been hit by terrorists who've apparently hijacked four commercial jets. The two towers have collapsed and are no more."
A moment's silence, then, "We have been diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. All airspace in North America has been closed." Not since the shocking Pearl Harbor news [7 December 1941] had I ever been more stunned...
In all some forty aircraft were parked (at the Halifax airport) on an alternate runway; our Delta 777 was No. 39... Some seventeen hours after the London takeoff, we clambered down the jet stairway and into transit vehicles, then through Customs and into school buses, headed for a place called Shearwater Naval Base... To all Canadians, especially you Nova Scotians, you've done well! You've done a fantastic job on short notice, a service that none of us will ever forget...
42 planes parked at Halifax International Airport, 11 September 2001
They were carrying 9,080 people, passengers and crew.
Source: Halifax Daily News, 11 September 2002
Stranded passengers flood Canadian airports CBC News, 11 September 2001
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2001/09/11/can_travel010911
This past week, I was an unintentional visitor to Halifax, a traveller aboard an Air France flight bound for Philadelphia and diverted to your city. The traumatic and tragic events which took place in the United States occasioned a poignant and emotional experience for me in Canada, which I would like to describe to you Canadians with my heartfelt appreciation and my awe at your outpouring of support for us ... It was a challenge of major proportions to every aspect of your cities and, in my view, you shone ... Authorities at Halifax Airport were efficient, cautious and professional ... I happened to arrive at Exhibition Park, along with 1,500 other travellers. What followed was a demonstration of volunteerism that you should be tremendously proud of.
I have vivid memories of young people with smiles on their faces, pumping away to get those mattresses ready. Bravo to their generation! I was told that some 800 Halifax residents came by the facility to offer their homes for overnights stays or for us to take showers and to simply relax away from the press of people ... You displayed behavior that we should all aspire to in the face of human tragedies. Thank you, officials of Halifax. Thank you, Exhibition Park. Thank you, Canadian Red Cross. Thank you, Canadian Salvation Army. Thank you, all the private citizens of Halifax who gave your time and yourselves.
Alan G. Ringgold, in a letter dated 15 September 2001, addressed to "Dear Canadians" and sent to Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, as reported on the front page of the Halifax Sunday Daily News, 16 September 2001. Alan Ringgold, formerly a deputy assistant director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was one of 1,500 passengers who slept on a cot at Halifax's Exhibition Park when his Air France flight to Philadelphia was diverted to Halifax on September 11th. Before he retired, Ringgold was the agent overseeing all FBI law enforcement outside the United States. He appeared numerous times before committees of the United States Congress, updating politicians on FBI operations in cases such as the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. soldiers. He now lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
May it be recorded; may it be inscribed forever in the Book of Life: Bless the good people of Halifax...
From "An Ode to Human Decency" by Stephen Jay Gould, in The Globe and Mail, 20 September 2001. His flight from Milan to New York was one of 45 diverted to Halifax on September 11th. Dr. Gould is among the best known and widely read scientists of our present generation. He is currently the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and adjunct member of the Department of the History of Science. He has established a reputation as one of Harvard's most visible and engaging instructors, offering courses in paleontology, biology, geology, and the history of science. Since 1996, he also has been Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University and now divides his time between New York and Cambridge.
...My first actual encounter with Maritime Canada, as a teenager on a family motor trip in the mid-1950s, sparked nothing but pleasure and fascination, as I figured out the illusion of Moncton's Magnetic Hill, marvelled at the tidal phenomena of the Bay of Fundy (especially the reversing rapids of Saint John and the tidal bore of Moncton), found peace of spirit at Peggy's Cove and learned some history in the old streets of Halifax. I have been back, always with eagerness and fulfilment, a few times since, for reasons both recreational and professional ...
My latest visit among you, however, was entirely involuntary and maximally stressful ... I live in lower Manhattan, just a mile from the burial ground of the Twin Towers. As they fell victim to evil and insanity on Tuesday, September 11, during the morning after my sixtieth birthday, my wife and I, enroute from Milan to New York, flew over Titanic's resting place and then followed the route of her recovered dead to Halifax. We sat on the airport tarmac for eight hours and eventually proceeded to the cots of Dartmouth's sports complex, then upgraded to the adjacent Holiday Inn.
On Friday, September 14, at three o'clock in the morning, Alitalia brought us back to the airport, only to inform us that their plane would return to Milan. We rented one of the last two cars available and drove, with an intense mixture of grief and relief, back home...
Halifax sat on the invisible periphery of a New York epicenter, with 45 planes, mostly chock full of poor strangers from strange lands, arrayed in two lines on the tarmac, and holding 9,000 passengers to house, feed, and especially to comfort. May it be recorded; may it be inscribed forever in the Book of Life: Bless the good people of Halifax who did not sleep, who took strangers into their homes, who opened their hearts and shelters, who rushed in enough food and clothing to supply an army, who offered tours of their beautiful city and, above all, who listened with a simple empathy that brought this tough and fully grown man to tears, over and over again. I heard not a single harsh word, saw not the slightest gesture of frustration, and felt nothing but pure and honest welcome ... We, 9,000 strong, are forever in your debt, and all humanity glows in the light of your unselfish goodness...
And so Canada, although you are not my home or native land, we will always share this bond of your unstinting hospitality to people who descended upon you as frightened strangers, and received nothing but solace and solidarity in your embrace of goodness...
Stephen Jay Gould has written more than twenty books, including:
- Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1977)
- The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980)
- The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
- Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (1983)
- The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985)
- Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Ecological Time (1987)
- An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books (1987)
- Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989)
- Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991)
- The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth (1993)
- Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (1993)
- Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History (1995)
- Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (1996)
- Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History (1998)
- Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999)
- The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (2000)
I was flying from Frankfurt to New York for a vacation, but landed in heaven.
A quote from an anonymous passenger on one of the transatlantic airplane flights diverted on short notice to land in Halifax on September 11th, 2001. It is inscribed on a plaque presented to Halifax and its citizens by Dennis Holland, national director of the Canadian Red Cross, to commemorate their "humanitarian efforts" in coping with the sudden emergency. "You can imagine the magnitude of caring for eight thousand people who came to dinner unexpectedly, that takes quite a significant amount to effort," Holland said at a meeting of Halifax Regional Council where the plaque was presented, as reported in the Halifax Daily News, 4 October 2001.
Mr. Dennis Holland, President, and Mr. John Byrne, Regional Director, Canadian Red Cross,
made a presentation to Council to thank HRM (Halifax Regional Municipality) and to recognize the community at large for their assistance during the U.S. Disaster. In their presentation, Mr. Byrne made the following
points:
• 8,666 people were displaced over a twelve hour period.
• Over a four day period, 1,622 volunteers assisted in the efforts.
• 72,000 meals were served in four days.
• 18 comfort shelters as well as numerous private homes were offered to accommodate the displaced passengers.
In response, Mayor Kelly thanked the Red Cross for their work.
Quoted from Halifax Regional Council minutes, 2 October 2001
http://www.halifax.ca/council/Minutes/2001/c011002.PDF
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, as word spread of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, 224 commercial planes were immediately diverted to 17 airports across this country: to British Columbia and Alberta, to Yukon and the Northwest Territories, to Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec – but mostly here, to runways across Atlantic Canada. These aircraft carried some 33,000 people. Most of them were Americans – some heading off on business trips or vacations, others bound for home. Many were told that they would be setting down in Halifax or in St. John's, in Moncton or Stephenville, in Goose Bay or in Gander. These were places that many aboard had never heard of. They are now places that few of the passengers will ever forget.
Prime Minister Paul Martin, in a speech delivered at Pier 21 in Halifax on 1 December 2004, with United States President George W. Bush present.
In Windsor, one of the great dreams of my life – to serve as a soldier in a Jewish Unit to fight for the liberation of the Land of Israel (as we always called Palestine) – became a reality, and I will never forget Windsor, where I received my first training as a soldier and where I became a corporal.
David Green, a.k.a. David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), in a hand-written letter – now held by the West Hants Historical Society – addressed to "Mayor, Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada" and dated at Haifa "3 7 66" (1966) when Ben-Gurion was eighty years old, as described in The Valley Today (daily newspaper) 12 January 2007. Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of Israel 1949 to 1963, except for a period of two years 1954-1955. Israel's largest airport, Ben Gurion International is named in his honour. During World War One, 1914-1918, the British Army used Fort Edward in Windsor for training Jewish men to fight in Palestine against the Ottoman Turks, then fighting in the war on the German side. Photographs and first-hand accounts of the time indicate that the men lived in tents on the hillside below the Fort Edward blockhouse. More than a thousand non-commissioned officers were trained in Windsor.
Glace Bay? A little fishing village. My father had Simon's Dairy, a grocery with a candy counter. In the back he cut kosher meat. As a family, five kids, we all worked in the store, and my father taught us work ethics, how to treat people and work with people. My father, he was probably not a good businessman, but I've seen him with people who owed him money – he'd give credit, and if we didn't have milk in the store that evening, he would take money out of the cash register, because they had young kids, so they could go to another store to buy milk. On the other hand, I would look at my father as a businessman, and I'd say, "Why aren't you doing this, why aren't you expanding, why aren't you ...?" Even at 13, 14 years old. But my father wasn't a risk taker, and that held him back. You know, if anything, today I think taking a risk is always something I'm willing to do, and that's probably from seeing what my father didn't do in life. He was a loved man, but there were times when I was a kid and I made $2,000 in the summer, cutting grass – in Glace Bay it wasn't a long summer. I would have to help my father out with that couple thousand dollars when he was overdrawn at the bank ... At 17 I'm off to school in Halifax, St. Mary's University, and I wanted to go there because it was good and it was small. I could be effective, and just like in high school I was a B and C student but very involved – student council, senate, ran for president. I was paying for my schooling with campus-police jobs and desk-clerk jobs and I became a don in residence, in charge of a dorm, so that was free housing, and being a don, the Moosehead Brewery rep used to give me like ten cases of beer each week to give out as samples. I said, "Wait a minute, I can't give this away..."
Irwin Simon Chairman and CEO of
Hain Celestial Group Inc., as quoted in
The Apprenticeship of Irwin Simon by Hesh Kestin, Inc magazine, March 2002
— Source:
The Apprenticeship of Irwin Simon
Now, admit it. A good 57.9 percent of you didn't know your Nova Scotia from your focaccia until the Penguins lucked out and landed the hockey player of the millennium, Sidney Crosby of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. If you're geographically handicapped, Nova Scotia is a beautiful island northeast of Maine...
The Morning File by
Peter Leo in the Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 25 August 2005
I imagine that the good people of Nova Scotia will be rather surprised to find that their province is an island (except for those from Cape Breton, which IS an island.) It would appear that being 'geographically handicapped' is an ironic condition.
Kent A. Harries Ph.D, letter in the Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 26 August 2005
To the zealots who would ban smoking in all public places: there was a man who loved dogs and children and abhorred smoking and drinking. There was another man who had a weak whiskey with his breakfast, gradually progressing throughout the day to postprandial strong brandy. Their names, respectively, were Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill.
Harry Flemming, well-known commentator on current events in Nova Scotia, in the Halifax Daily News, 23 October 2002.
With his criss-crossing of narratives and careful research, Kimber has given Haligonians, Nova Scotians and all Canadians a history of events as they can finally be agreed upon.
David Bentley, in his review in the National Post, 12 October 2002, of Stephen Kimber's book Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War, published in October 2002 by Doubleday Canada, a history of Halifax during the Second World War.
The war was over. They'd done all anyone had asked of them, and more. They'd won the Battle of the Atlantic. They's seen friends die. And now, on the very day when they should have been celebrating with their comrades and thanking whatever gods there are for Allied victory and their own survival, the ungrateful, narrow-minded, mean-spirited burghers of this godforsaken city had shut down the liquor stores, shuttered the movie theatres, boarded up the shops, stopped serving dinner.
Stephen Kimber, commenting on the Halifax VE-Day riots of May 1945 in his book Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War, quoted with approval by Brian Flemming in his review of Kimber's book in the Halifax Daily News, 16 October 2002.
Q: What's your favorite rail trip?
A: I'd have to say from Port Hawkesbury on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia to Inverness, on Canadian National, CNR. When I was a kid, I used to ride with the conductor, a friend of the family, who would take me on the overnight trip. We'd go to Inverness and spend the night; I'd sleep in the caboose, get up in the morning, and come back. I guess that's probably the start of all this.
Q: Are you retired for good this time?
A: Who knows? I still love trains: It's my life.
David Gunn, former President and CEO of Amtrak, in an interview with Carolyn Kleiner Butler, by telephone from his family home in Nova Scotia, published as "Still In Love With Railroads", in U.S. News and World Report, 5 December 2005.
David Gunn served as President and CEO of Amtrak
for 1243 days, from 15 May 2002 to 9 November 2005.
What is Amtrak?
The U.S. Congress created Amtrak – National Railroad Passenger Corporation is the official name of the company – in 1971 to provide intercity passenger railroad service. During Mr. Gunn's time, Amtrak carried about two million passengers each month, to more than 500 destinations in 46 states over a system covering about 22,000 miles [35,000 km]. Amtrak owns about 730 route miles of track in the Northeast Corridor (Washington - Baltimore - Philadelphia - New York - Boston, including the Corridor branches to Springfield, Atlantic City, and Harrisburg); the remainder of the track used by Amtrak trains is owned by various freight railroads. Like most passenger carriers around the world, Amtrak is unable to pay its way wholly from fares, and requires financial assistance each year, partly from states but mostly from the federal government, to cover operating losses and capital investment. Amtrak spent close to $60 million each week during Mr. Gunn's time in charge.
(Congress) put Amtrak on this fanciful search for self-sufficiency. There's not a rail passenger system in the world that doesn't require government subsidy for either capital or operating or both ... I believe in this thing (Amtrak). I didn't come from Nova Scotia to Washington (to preside over the closure of Amtrak)...
David Gunn, President and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Amtrak (National Railroad Passenger Corporation) in response to a question from Jim Lehrer on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, aired at 7:40pm ADT, 13 June 2002, from WGBH, the PBS (Public Broadcasting System) television station in Boston. Mr. Gunn told Mr. Lehrer that Amtrak operates 265 trains each day, carrying 60,000 passengers. The complete transcript of the interview is available at
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/transportation/jan-june02/gunn_6-13.html
Amtrak Board Chairman John Robert Smith today (26 April 2002) announced the appointment of David L. Gunn as President and CEO of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) effective May 15, 2002. Gunn has previously headed up both the largest transit system in the United States and in Canada, serving as President of the New York City Transit Agency from 1984 to 1990 and as Chief General Manager of the Toronto Transit Commission from 1995 to 1999...
Source: National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) press release, 26 April 2002
http://www.amtrak.com/press/atk20020426065.html
...Gunn also said he will propose a massive reorganization of Amtrak management today to the Amtrak board of directors, reducing the number of "vice president" titles in the company from 84 to about 20 and eliminating three business units while concentrating management in Washington in a "traditional railroad structure." As a part of the process, he said he is establishing a policy of total openness on Amtrak's finances, with detailed monthly updates that will be open to the public ... Gunn's rapid and sweeping moves – and his candor – are consistent with a management philosophy which in the past has created trouble for him in political circles. But he said bold moves are necessary to put Amtrak back on a sound footing, and if the political system decides that it doesn't like what he's doing, he can return to retirement in Nova Scotia.
News item in the Washington Post, 6 June 2002
I'm excited to join. This is the most exciting job I've ever had. I have every incentive to tell the truth. If they can't handle it, well – I'll just return to my home in Nova Scotia. Here's how we're organizing planning at Amtrak: Short Term and Long Term. Everything Short Term is before July 1, 2002. Everything long term is after July 1, 2002...
David Gunn, President and CEO of Amtrak, speaking at the APTA (American Public Transportation Association) Commuter Rail Conference in Baltimore, 12 June, 2002.
http://www.trainweb.com/news/2002/2002f14c.html
David L. Gunn's Nova Scotia home is at St. Georges Channel,
Richmond County, on Cape Breton Island.
Online map: http://www.geocities.com/PicketFence/1286/roadmap.html
I want to dispel any notion...that I can just shut down our operations and happily return home to Cape Breton. You can depend on me to do everything possible to keep our operations going – that's my commitment to you. I did not take this job to shut down our railroad.
David Gunn, President and CEO of Amtrak — on the job for all of five weeks — in his fifth letter to Amtrak employees, distributed by e-mail and fax on June 24th, 2002.
http://www.nationalcorridors.org/df06272002.shtml
Oh, no. I'm not going to resign. You've got to fire me.
David Gunn, President and CEO of Amtrak — during a meeting in Washington at 8:30am, 9 November 2005, with David Laney, Chairman of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak), and Floyd Hall, a member of Amtrak's Board of Directors, as quoted in "Throw David Gunn From The Trains: His Amtrak Sack" by Matthew Schuerman, in The New York Observer, 12 December 2005.
Mr. Schuerman's article continues:
...So at age 68, Mr. Gunn, who has run the Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., transportation systems and received praise on all fronts, was cut loose in the wilderness – the wilderness of Nova Scotia, where he is living on his ancestral farm, splitting kindling and taking calls from the occasional reporter... Mr. Gunn will remain primarily in Cape Breton, though he will also have an office in Washington, D.C...
Those Were the Days
Letter, Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 20 July 2005
[The plaintiff's position was that] the flats in question were and are part of an arm of the sea called Annapolis Basin, which was and is a common and public and navigable arm of the sea in which the tides and waters of the sea flow and reflow, and therefore all the King's subjects had and have a right to fish therein and to carry away the fish taken, and the plaintiff, a British subject, in the exercise of such right, did on or about the 30th of August, 1904, and at other times, fish for and dig clams on said flats between high and low water mark and carry a quantity of them away, doing no injury to the soil of said flats and remaining no longer than was necessary for the purpose aforesaid.
[The judge wrote:] The distance between high and low water mark on the flats is apparently in the neighbourhood of three hundred yards [three hundred metres] or more. The clams were dug by the plaintiff about two hundred feet [sixty metres] from low water mark, and from there to the line of ordinary high tides is upwards of three hundred feet [one hundred metres]. In an average tide there is twenty to thirty feet [six to nine metres] of water, when the tide is in, at the 200 feet [60 metres] line mentioned.
[The judge quoted a standard legal reference:] Although, prima facie, every subject is entitled to fish in the sea and tidal waters yet, prior to Magna Carta, the Crown could, by its prerogative, exclude the public from such prima facie right and grant the exclusive right of fishery to a private individual ... The Great Charter restrained this prerogative for the future, but left untouched all fisheries which were made several to the exclusion of the public by act of the Crown not later than the reign of Henry II...
[The judge wrote:] I assess the value of the clams taken by the defendants at the sum of two dollars.
From the decision, January 4th, 1907, of Justice Meagher in Nova Scotia court in the case of Donnelly versus Vroom, which dealt with such questions as the public right to take shell fish from the mud flats between high and low tide, and who owns these flats, as reported on pages 358-364 of the Eastern Law Reporter, volume II number 8, 1 March 1907, published by the Carswell Company, Toronto.
I could not resist this — it isn't often that one finds an
authoritative quote that includes an explicit application of
the
Magna Carta (signed by King John on 15 June 1215),
not to mention King Henry II (reigned 1154-1189),
to a court case in Nova Scotia.
To hell with that, we'll get our own.
Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, Chief of the Naval Staff of the Royal Canadian Navy, 28 April 1942, responding to an acute shortage of oil on Canada's east coast – stocks of fuel at Halifax and St. John's had dwindled to a meagre 45,000 tons, only fifteen days supply, a serious threat to operations of Allied warships, including transatlantic convoys, at the height of World War Two.
— Source:
"We'll Get Our Own": Canada and the Oil Shipping Crisis of 1942 by Robert C. Fisher
http://www.familyheritage.ca/Articles/oilarticle.html
By any measure the Canadian oil convoys (of 1942) enjoyed great success. Some 2.5 million barrels of petroleum were shipped to the refineries of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and Montreal for domestic consumption. Another 1.5 million barrels arrived in Canada for trans-shipment to Britain. The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) escorted fourteen convoys, including seventy-six tankers, between Halifax and the West Indies without the loss of a single vessel, despite the heavy concentration of U-boats in these waters. During the months from May to August 1942, when U-boats ravaged the waters of the western Atlantic mercilessly, the Canadian oil convoys escaped attack. Given the high number of independent ships sunk in these waters, it is clear that without these convoys several Canadian tankers would have been lost...
— Source:
"We'll Get Our Own": Canada and the Oil Shipping Crisis of 1942 by Robert C. Fisher
http://www.familyheritage.ca/Articles/oilarticle.html
When Admiral Doenitz launched Operation Paukenschlag (Drumbeat) in December of 1941, the five U-boats – U-125, U-123, U-66, U-130, U-109 – of the initial wave sent against the United States found the east coast, for all practical purposes, undefended. This was a vast area extending from the St. Lawrence River down to North Carolina. The Paukenschlag boats arriving on the United States east coast in January 1942 found the merchant fleet sailing unescorted and with lights on at night. There was no radio discipline; ship and shore stations operated as if in peace time, broadcasting time signals and weather reports. Shoreside cities blazed with lights at night. The U-boats, hardly believing the bonanza offered them, rampaged up and down the coast with impunity, sinking everything in sight. Operation Paukenschlag lasted but ten days, during which 25 ships totaling about 200,000 tons were sunk. Not a U-boat was damaged much less sunk. Those five boats were only about 12 percent of the U-boats at sea but they accounted for 70 percent of the Allied shipping sunk in January 1942.
Excerpted from the uboat.net website operated by Gudmundur Helgason of Iceland.
Source:
Operation Paukenschlag – U-boats off the East Coast of the U.S.
http://www.uboat.net/allies/ships/us_10thfleet.htm
Early in 1942, Admiral King made the decision not to request blackouts on the United States eastern seaboard and not to convoy ships. As a result of this, the attack by the German U-boats on U.S. costal shipping during the Second Battle of the Atlantic became known by the U-boat crews as the "second happy time". It was not until convoys were introduced in May 1942 that the "second happy time" came to an end, with the loss of seven U-boats.
Excerpted from the answers.com and nationmaster.com websites.
Sources:
King, Ernest Joseph http://www.answers.com/topic/ernest-king
King, Ernest http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ernest-King
Within recent months German submarines have been very active on the Atlantic seaboard, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Occasional figures have been published covering shipping losses generally, but little information about tanker losses has been made public. I regret to say these losses have been colossal. At one period, the submarine situation was so grave that all tankers were held in port for twelve consecutive days. There were times when we had no crude oil at all in storage at either Halifax or Portland, Maine, a most alarming situation. We were so hard-pressed that we had to use every available railway tank car to haul fuel oil from Sarnia and Montreal to Halifax, in order to keep our navy and the convoys operating.
Munitions Minister C.D. Howe, in a speech carried over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) national radio network on 17 September 1942, as reported in the Toronto Globe & Mail, 18 September 1942.
When the Sydney to Port aux Basques ferry Caribou was torpedoed in 1942, Canadian censorship kept the news from the Canadian people for three days. Lord Haw-Haw broke the news the same day the ferry was sunk.
Pat MacAdam in The Ottawa Sun, 31 July 2005.
William Joyce, an American with a British passport, was a supporter of Alolf Hitler. He lived in Berlin during World War Two, and delivered in English a daily radio program that the German government broadcast all over the world on a high-power radio transmitter, of propaganda – selected news items and commentary favourable to Germany and highly critical of Great Britain and the United States. Joyce was known throughout the British Empire as Lord Haw-Haw. A third of the population of England listened to Lord Haw-Haw every day. In January 1946, Joyce was hanged by the British.
A lot of the boys were hurt leaving the ship. Some had broken legs and arms. Others had chunks of flesh actually torn from their bodies by the suction of the ship going down. Men went down with the ship and came up again cut to pieces. Most of the injured men soon became weak and drowned. They drowned right in front of us, but there was little we could do. It was all we could do to keep ourselves out of danger. We were all covered in oil, and half blind with it in our eyes. Most of us soon became seasick and swallowed a lot of salt water, which didn't help much...
Private Bill Marks of Amherst, Nova Scotia, who served in the British Army during World War Two, describing the conditions he endured after his ship was torpedoed in mid-September 1944 in the South China Sea, as told in "For Days, He Clung to a Raft in the Sea" in the Halifax Daily News, 5 November 2007.
Tonto is the Lone Ranger's partner and friend. He is clean-cut and well-groomed and, although he speaks a form of broken English, he is neither dumb nor stupid. For the most part, other native Americans in the series are treated in a demeaning and disrespectful manner. While Tonto is sometimes so treated by others, he is never so treated by the Lone Ranger.
Justice David Chipman of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, writing in a 6 October 2004 summary of the ruling of an independent Board of Inquiry set up by the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, as reported on page A1 (the front page) of the National Post, 2 November 2004. The Board was investigating a complaint dating back to October 1999, that the repeated use of the term "kemosabe" – Tonto's word for his white friend the Lone Ranger – by a white employer in Sydney, Cape Breton, when speaking to a Mi'kmaq employee, was offensive. The Board of Inquiry spent a whole day watching Lone Ranger episodes before deciding that being called kemosabe did not demean the Mi'kmaq woman, a resident of Membertou, Nova Scotia. Several Mi'kmaq witnesses who testified about the word's meaning were divided on whether it was offensive. The Board's conclusions, handed down on 17 February 2004, were upheld by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal.
What does Kemo Sabe mean?
http://www.write101.com/kemosabe.htm
It is quite plausible that 'giimoozaabi' means something like 'scout'.
'Giimoozaabi' is pronounced pretty much the same as 'kemosabe'...
The Lone Ranger started as a radio series in Detroit in January 1933. The long-running radio series is said to have extended to 2,596 episodes. Beginning in 1937 a series of short films were made to be shown in movie theatres before the main feature. The Lone Ranger came to television as a series of half-hour shows on the ABC TV network – episode 1 ran on 15 September 1949, and the final episode 221 ran on 6 June 1957. Another Lone Ranger series of 30 episodes ran on CBS TV from September 1966 to March 1968. From the 1930s to the 1960s there were many newspaper strips and comic books, and a series of books. There was a feature film in 1981...
(There was even a series of bank commercials whose central character was the Loan Arranger.)
National Post, page A10, 23 December 2004
One perspective on "kemosabe" can be found in The Far Side, Gary Larson's series of cartoons that often features Western themes. In one memorable cartoon, the Lone Ranger discovered the true meaning of "kemosabe". Tonto had always intimated that it was a term of endearment and great respect. In the end, though, it actually described the south end of a northbound horse...
Letter in The Globe & Mail, 28 December 2004
The acquaintance who first told me the story said, "Governor Griffin invited the survivors to recuperate on Jekyll Island, but the last man out was black." I was instantly captivated – a black miner? Insulted by white supremacist Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin? When I learned the disaster had occurred in a Nova Scotia coal mine, my esthetic interest was piqued even more: if I understood correctly, a black man, an Afro-Canadian coal-miner, had been treated as an equal by his white comrades during the disaster, in the coal-black pure darkness of the pit; but, when rescued, and treated to a vacation on the sunniest spot on earth, whites saw him again as a Negro, a "mulatto," or worse, and he was segregated.
Black/white, darkness/light, inner light/inner darkness. Where men were blinded by darkness, they behaved as if Maurice Ruddick were their equal; where sunlight lit up the scene, they allowed race politics to isolate him. A friend of mine, who happens to be a federal judge, imagined what Griffin would have said: "Boy," he imagined him drawling, [pronouncing it "Bwa"], "Boy, you thought being in that PIT was bad..."
Melissa Fay Greene, author of Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster, the compelling story of a group of men who spent nine days trapped inside a coal mine at Springhill, Nova Scotia, that collapsed on 23 Octover 1958, trapping 174 miners underground; 75 died.
Source:
Melissa Fay Greene Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction
http://etude.uoregon.edu/spring2003/greene/
Reference:
Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster by Melissa Fay Greene
http://www.melissafaygreene.com/pages/lastmanout.html
...The story gets interesting after the rescue of 19 men, who are subsequently exploited by various factions, including the media and the public relations aide to a segregationist U.S. governor, who arranges to fly the survivors and their families to a beach resort the governor's state is looking to promote. The presumed PR goes horribly awry when it's learned that one miner is black, as are his 12 children...
Excerpted from a book review in Publishers Weekly
I name this ship Queen Mary 2. May God bless her and all who sail in her.
Queen Elizabeth II as she officially launched Queen Mary 2, the world's longest, widest, highest and largest cruise liner, on 8 January 2004 in Southampton, England. The Queen blessed the ship in the traditional way by breaking a bottle of champagne against its hull. QM2 was built in France for the historic Cunard Line, founded in 1839 by Samuel Cunard of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the first time in more than thirty years that a new trans-Atlantic liner had been launched and the first time since 1967 that the Queen had christened a ship. About 2000 invited guests attended the ceremony. Accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen toured the 150,000-tonne liner that stands as tall as a 23-storey building. It is twice the size of her predecessor, the Queen Elizabeth II, which was launched in 1967. QM2 carries 2620 passengers. It has six restaurants, five swimming pools, a theatre, a cinema and a swimming pool. Cunard Line Limited is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, the world's biggest cruise line. Carnival Corp. is incorporated in Panama, with its head office in Miami, Florida.
No transoceanic navigational undertaking has been conducted with more ability, no business dealings have been crowned with greater success. In twenty-six years Cunard ships have made 2,000 Atlantic crossings without so much as a voyage canceled, a delay recorded, a man, a craft, or even a letter lost.
Jules Verne in Chapter One, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, published 1869. Translated from the original French by Frederick P. Walter.
No one is unaware of the name of that famous English shipowner, Cunard. In 1840 this shrewd industrialist founded a postal service between Liverpool and Halifax, featuring three wooden ships with 400-horsepower paddle wheels and a burden of 1,162 metric tons. Eight years later, the company's assets were increased by four 650-horsepower ships at 1,820 metric tons, and in two more years, by two other vessels of still greater power and tonnage. In 1853 the Cunard Company, whose mail-carrying charter had just been renewed, successively added to its assets the Arabia, the Persia, the China, the Scotia, the Java, and the Russia, all ships of top speed and, after the Great Eastern, the biggest ever to plow the seas. So in 1867 this company owned twelve ships, eight with paddle wheels and four with propellers.
Slide #24
Major North Atlantic steamship disasters before 1912
Source: http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/titanic/NDIA/24_disaster.html
Here's a ledger the accountants didn't keep. I've listed only the major deaths on Atlantic steamship lines, to capital ships, or we'd be here all night. The question of safety of design was really the least of it – a lot of these ships were lost in disasters like going onto rocks, that no design would have survived. Speed was a major competitive advantage, and also a matter of great pride, so they often went at full speed in bad weather. Everyone wanted to fly the coveted Blue Riband, signifying the current record-holder for the crossing.
You will note that the Cunard line is not mentioned here. They are the good guys in this story: Samuel Cunard, (born in Halifax, Canada, in 1790) and all his successors were adamant that speed was important, but could be sacrificed to safety – it's all in the nuance of how you instruct your captains. They were the classic Victorian British: stodgy, careful, conservative. The line survives to this day, and has yet to lose a passenger to a wreck in peacetime. [boldface emphasis added]
An American line run by Edward Knight Collins in the 1850s was the opposite. They briefly seized half of Cunard's business by beating them with glamour and speed. They drove their ships near to breakdown, wasting fuel to cut half a day off the trip. Newspapers lionized them and made fun of stodgy old Cunard. In 1854, the Collins steamer Arctic had a collision running at full speed in the fog, and only 52 of 330 on board survived. Among the dead were Collins' wife, son and daughter...
Risk Management by Roy Brander, presented to the National Defense Industrial Association Conference, Vancouver, 29 February 2000
Source:
Slide 24: Disaster List
http://web.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_essay/NDIA/NDIA_lecture.html
We are entirely unacquainted with the cost of a steamboat, and would not like to embark in a business of which we are quite ignorant.
Samuel Cunard, in a letter dated at Halifax, October 28th, 1829. The letter, declining an offer to participate in a steamship enterprise, addressed to Messrs. Ross and Primrose of Pictou, Nova Scotia, and signed S. Cunard and Company, as quoted in Spanning the Atlantic, (a history of the Cunard Steamhip Company) by F. Lawrence Babcock, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931. Ten years later, in 1839, Samuel Cunard established the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company — usually known as the Cunard Line — principally to carry the Royal Mail to Canada and the USA. Cunard's company operated independently and continuously for 131 years, until 1971, when it was taken over by Trafalgar House PLC. In 1996, Trafalgar House, parent company of Cunard, was bought by the Norwegian business group Kvaerner for £850,000,000. In 1998, it was taken over by Carnival Cruise Lines of Miami.
The Cunard Steamship Company is planning to place orders in the United States for 114 passenger steam ships, at a cost of $120,000,000, according to an announcement by the company's agents in Philadelphia on April 1st, 1917. The new ships, it was said, will mostly be from 8,000 to 17,000 tons in size.
Flashback (25 Years Ago) in The Halifax Herald, 1 April 1942.
Work started in a French shipyard yesterday [16 January 2002] on the world's biggest cruise liner — Queen Mary 2, a345-metre-long behemoth that will cocoon 2,620 passengers in 1930s luxury with modern high-tech underpinnings. Pamela Conover, president of Miami-based Cunard Line, was on hand as the keel of the 150,000-tonne vessel was laid by Chantiers de l'Atlantique workers in the port city of St. Nazaire, western France. The new $1,200,000,000 ship is Cunard's first luxury liner to be built in a generation. She will be the fourth in the dynasty launched by the British company in the 1930s, with the first Queen Mary, and continued with Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2. But her origins go even further back to Britannia, built in 1840 for Canadian businessman Samuel Cunard to carry mail between Britain and North America. When finished, Queen Mary 2 will be the height of a 23-storey building and will contain some of the most luxurious accomodations ever seen afloat ... There will be 1,250 crew members...
News item: "Construction Begins on World's Largest Luxury Cruise Ship," in the National Post, 17 January 2002. [Boldfaced emphasis added]
Cunard is a luxury brand (in the cruise-ship business) with new ships worth US$1.2-billion on order, including Queen Mary 2, which will be the largest passenger vessel ever built ... When it enters service in January 2004, Queen Mary 2 will be the first transatlantic liner built in more than three decades, (with accomodations for) 2,620 passengers...
News item in the National Post, 28 May 2002
Carnival's Cunard Line is a unique, global, internationally recognized premium and luxury cruise operator that provides a sophisticated, upscale cruise experience aboard its vessels, Caronia and the world famous Queen Elizabeth 2. Cunard currently has under construction two new vessels; the 150,000 gross-registered-ton Queen Mary 2, which will be the world's largest passenger ship and the first transatlantic liner constructed in more than three decades, scheduled to enter service in January 2004, and an as-yet-unnamed 85,000-ton ship scheduled for delivery in January 2005. These two vessels represent a $1,200,000,000 investment in the future of Cunard Line and demonstrate Carnival's full commitment to growing this world recognized brand...
Carnival Corporation press release, 27 May 2002
http://www.carnivalcorp.com/
http://www.cunardline.com/
http://www.cunard.com/
http://www.cunardline.com.au/
http://www.cunardline.com.au/britannia.html
http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html (see archive below)
http://www.cunardline.com.au/cunard_firsts.html
Cunard Line Limited is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, the world's biggest cruise line. Carnival Corp. is incorporated in Panama, with its head office in Miami, Florida.
|
The Wayback Machine has archived copies of this webpage:
Cunard Heritage: Sir Samuel Cunard
http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
Archived: 2001 April 11
http://web.archive.org/web/20010411025122/http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
Archived: 2001 December 25
http://web.archive.org/web/20011225065517/http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
Archived: 2002 June 15
http://web.archive.org/web/20020615110824/http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
Archived: 2002 December 18
http://web.archive.org/web/20021218051428/http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
Archived: 2003 June 24
http://web.archive.org/web/20030624054300/http://www.cunardline.com.au/sir_samuel_cunard.html
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It was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope ... the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the opposition declared there never was such a bad one...
Charles Dickens' description of the official ceremonies marking the opening of the Nova Scotia Legislature in Halifax on 20th January 1842. Dickens was travelling from Liverpool to the United States on Samuel Cunard's steamship Britannia. Under the terms of the Admiralty contract, each trip of Cunard's transatlantic steamship service between England and the United States stopped at Halifax briefly, to refuel and to drop and pick up passengers and mail. On this trip, Britannia happened to be in Halifax for a few hours just at the time when the Nova Scotia Legislature was starting its annual session, and Dickens seized the opportunity to go ashore and look around. The Legislature met in Province House, only a couple of blocks from the Cunard wharf. The complete paragraph reads as follows:
It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and General Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the commencement of a new Session of Parliament in England were so closely copied, and so gravely presented on a small scale, that it was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope. The Governor, as her Majesty's representative, delivered what may be called the Speech from the Throne. He said what he had to say manfully and well. The military band outside the building struck up "God Save the Queen" with great vigour before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the in's rubbed their hands; the out's shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a great deal among themselves and do a little: and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.
Complete text of chapter 2 of American Notes, by Charles Dickens, which contains this paragraph on the Nova Scotia Legislature.
http://alts.net/ns1625/dickens1842.html
Thanks to J. Murray Beck, who located this piece and quoted it in his book The Government of Nova Scotia, University of Toronto Press, 1957.
It is a frozen country down here — drab and desolate; a country of scrub and second growth; of rock — rock — relentless, hard, cruel-hard. It is against rock of this sort that miners for the past week have fought and fought, grim-lipped, determined. And they're winning their fight — inch by inch the rock is retreating...
Excerpted from the transcript of one of the live radio broadcasts made by J. Frank Willis in April 1936, from the site of the Moose River Gold Mine in Halifax County, Nova Scotia. This was rebroadcast on 25 July 2003 by NPR (United States National Public Radio) in an audio documentary titled People in Holes. "History tells us that the public will
always respond to stories about people trapped in holes..."
People in Holes is available online, in RealAudio format. The above excerpt, recorded live as Frank Willis delivered it, appears 2 minutes 35 seconds into this audio documentary. A second clip, by Willis, appears 3 minutes 10 seconds in. These clips, especially the first, give us an idea why Frank Willis' special reporting style turned the Moose River disaster into the biggest radio story in North America before 1940.
Source:
People in Holes 25 July 2003
http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts/transcripts_072503_holes.html
The Frank Willis clips also appear in:
Baby Jessica Anniversary 18 October 2002
http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts/transcripts_101802_babyjessica.html
The most memorable CRBC program achievement was the coverage of the Moose River
Mine Disaster in April 1936 in Nova Scotia ... The CRBC made Frank Willis's reports
available to all Canadian radio stations and over 650 stations in the U. S. as well
as the BBC in Great Britain...
Source:
The Birth and Death of The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (1932-1936)
http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/networks/networks_CRBC.html
Frank Willis' hourly updates jump-started the Canadian radio industry. And his reporting style turned the Moose River disaster into the biggest radio story of the first half of the twentieth century...
Shirley Collingridge in Ten Days in Hell: The 1936 Moose River Mine Disaster
Source:
Ten Days in Hell: The 1936 Moose River Mine Disaster by Shirley Collingridge
http://www.shirleycollingridge.com/mooseriver.htm
Moose River Gold Mine memorial
http://ns1763.ca/hfxrm/moosegoldm.html
J. Frank Willis: biography
http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/personalities/personalities.php?id=30
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