Saturday Aug. 13, South Shore of Nova Scotia
We visited lots of little and medium sized outports as we drove along the coast of Nova Scotia south of Halifax. This area looks much like towns on the coastlines of New England with lots of antique shops, gift shops, seafood restaurants, etc.
Our first stop was Peggy’s Cove which is the most visited and most photographed fishing village in Nova Scotia. The reason for that is that it is only 45 minutes from Halifax, and it is a very picturesque, tiny village that looks like it came from the past, and every tourist guidebook recommends a stop there. It has been declared an historic district, so nothing can be added to it to make it look more modern. I feel sorry for the people who live there (about 40 residents) because they have a constant parade of outsiders in their village. Actually I think most of the original residents have moved away to be replaced by a few small tourist type businesses. It is not much different from other outports we saw, with the exception that Peggy’s has an accessible lighthouse and huge rocks for climbing on, or falling off from if one is not careful!
We passed several equally picturesque villages before stopping at Mahone Bay which seems to be a fairly upscale place with lots of condos on the bay, sailboats in the harbor, etc. It is definitely not a fishing village any more! It’s claim to fame are three beautiful churches lined up along the bay.
From there we went to Lunenburg, a much larger place with perhaps a population of 2,000.It is still a major port and fishing harbor. Most of the houses and businesses date to the 1800s and they, and the town, have been well preserved, giving it the distinction of being a UNESCO World Heritage Town. Many of the houses have ornate Victorian trim on them, several have widow’s walks, and several have a bumped out window above the front door, which is now called the “Lunenburg Bump. “ Many of them are brightly painted with orange, teal, magenta, purple, green, bright blue, and lots of other shades. There were also some unique metal sea creature signs hanging along the street: lobster, mackeral, scallops, squid, etc. The town was originally settled by German farmers to help supply fresh meat and produce to Halifax.
Sunday, Aug. 14 The Acadian Area of Nova Scotia
Today we learned what it really means to say everyone in your town is related. There are 1500 residents of a town called West Publico. 800 of them have the last name of D’Entremont and are all descendants of the first French settler here 12 generations ago! Those whose last name is different are also related! On the whole peninsula which includes two or three other towns, there are 400 entries in the phone book for the last name D’Entremont! There are so many people with the same first and last names that they often have to include the father’s or even grandfather’s names as a preface when they are talking about someone, like Joseph D’Entremont, son of Pierre, grandson of Henri.
Acadians are of French descent, and came to Nova Scotia and other provinces to settle as early as the 1600s. They called what later became Nova Scotia Acadia after the word the Micmac Indians used for it which was Kady.
Then England and France kept fighting over the land, and when England won the land, they decided in 1755 that people of French descent could no longer live here. That was the time of what they call the Great Upheaval when the French, called Acadians here, were removed from the land and sent back to France, England, or the American colonies. Some fled the area, a lot settling in what we now call the Cajun (slurring of the word Acadian) country in southern Louisiana, many in Quebec, and some went to other areas. Over the next ten years almost half of the original Acadian nation was lost at sea or died from famine and disease. In 1765, a mere 1,600 survivors was left in Nova Scotia, and most did not get their original land back.
The original D’Entremont was much luckier. He had fled to Boston where he stayed for 9 years. After that time, the English were allowing the French back into Nova Scotia, and Mr. D’Entremont was given his land back, an entire peninsula sticking out on the southern coast of Nova Scotia. Through the years, the D’Entremont family multiplied many times over! Now the Acadian culture is once again strong in Nova Scotia in three or four main areas. In the Acadian communities the children attend French speaking schools and learn about their culture. They do take courses in English so that they can function in a land where most of the people speak English.
The people here are mostly fishermen who have a much easier time making a living than the fisherman in Newfoundland. For one thing, the lobster season here is six months long, not two as in Newfoundland. Also, they can fish most of the year for other types of fish. Many of the fishermen here band together in co-ops to form their own fish processing plants, and some stay independent.
We learned a lot about lobstering from Olin D’Entremont who works at the Acadian Village, a recreated village, during the months when he is not lobstering. Olin clearly loves both of his jobs, and loves to talk about them. He has a license for 375 lobster traps and employs two men, one being his son, to help him. He does not like going far out to sea to get his lobster, preferring to stay only 3 to 12 miles from shore. He is fussy about his bait, wanting the freshest he can get, and preferring fat herring that have eaten a certain kind of red krill-like food. He feels that he gets more lobster with this kind of bait. Here, like in Maine, the lobster must be a certain size to be kept, and they can not be a female carrying any visible eggs. Unlike Maine, however, there is no upper limit to weight. He showed us lobster claws from lobsters that had been 19 or 20 pounds! His wife said that the big lobsters were not any better than the small ones, and often didn’t have as much meat in them as you would think they would have. Olin went on to say that one really needs to keep up with technology to be a good fisherman these days, so he had spend a lot of time learning to use the computer that aids his navigation.
At the village Olin shows the crafts related to fishing that every good fisherman must know. He showed us how he makes and repairs nets for bait bags, lobster traps, and fishing nets. He is also making a dory in the boat shop there using the methods they would have used in the 1920s. Yesterday he and the blacksmith at the village created a part to fix the 1915 Model T truck they have there.
They had cod there being salted as we have learned about in other places. After the cod is caught, it is gutted, cleaned, and then split so it will lay flat. Then it is layered in a wooden box with salt covering each layer. Surprisingly, a lot of water leeches out of the cod creating a brine. The salted cod is then laid on a flake, or rack, to dry. Olin said the best conditions for drying would be a northwest wind and slightly overcast sky. If it is too sunny, the cod might begin to cook, and that is not what they want. After it is dried, they pull off all of the bones and skin it. In olden days they would make a kind of glue from the skin using vinegar and something else. Other fish are often salted and dried in the same manner.
Shirl, Olin’s wife, explained that when one cooks salt cod, they usually soak it for several hours, changing the water frequently to get most of the salt out of it. They often use salt cod when making fish cakes or brewis. She said that she doesn’t deep fry fish any more as it is not healthy, but she sometimes panfries mackeral. When she cooks cod she dips it lightly in flour, then in a mixture of egg, milk, salt and pepper, then rolls it in cracker crumbs and bakes it.
Shirl, who also works at the village, was cooking a typical Sunday brunch for them over a wood fire. She was making bacon and baked beans to go with their eggs. During the time when they have no guests coming to the village, she keeps busy doing crafts like women would have done in the 1920s. She is braiding rags to use for rag rugs and sewing quilt squares together for quilts that will be sold in the village shop. She is also hand quilting a quilt for a Children’s hospital in Halifax.
There are two old houses in the village. The larger one, which had a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms downstairs, and an unfinished attic, was once home to two families which between them had 21 children! The smaller house had a kitchen, living room, two small downstairs bedrooms, and an unfinished attic where their ten boys slept. Their three daughters slept downstairs!
We had a great visit with both Olin and Shirl, and ended up with their email address, so will probably continue to correspond with them.
They told us to make sure that we went down to the local wharf because they were sure we’d be able to buy some fresh fish right off the boat. So off we went to Dennis Point Wharf, the homeport of at least 100 fishing boats, one of the busiest fishing ports in Canada. The boats range in size from 25 feet to over 100 feet in length. This fleet keeps about 350 fishermen in business and generates over $40 million a year. They keep six fish processing plants busy which employ another 300 people. So you can see that fishing is the life-blood of this community.
At the wharf several men dressed in colorful rainsuits were offloading their catch of haddock from a large boat with rainbow colored buoys hanging off the side.. They had about 80,000 pounds of haddock just today! They use drag nets to catch the haddock, and at times catch other kinds of fish in their nets. The fish were kept on ice in the boat in plastic bins. When they got back to port the bins were stacked four high and lifted off the boat with a winch to a platform from which two men would dump them into a trough. The trough was connect to a conveyor. The purpose of that was to remove as much water and ice as they could from their catch since the catch is weighed and they didn’t want to include the extra weight in their tallies. Occasionally a fish that was not haddock would come through, and one of the men would get it out of the bin and throw it into another bin to be sorted out later.
The haddock went down the conveyor belt landing in a large bin that contained about a foot of slushy ice in it. Each of these bins could hold about 1500 pounds of fish. When the bin was full, it was covered with more ice and a plastic cover, weighed, then taken by forklift to the back of a waiting tractor trailer. There were two trucks waiting there. One was hauling east toward Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and the other was hauling west toward Digby.
We asked to buy a cod fish which had been accidentally caught in their net, so they picked out a fish weighing about 10 pounds and charged us $5! They gutted it for us, then Bob filleted it, and we’ll get a few meals out of it. We have been eating seafood of some kind every day as it is so fresh and so cheap here to buy.
The Acadians live in villages all along the shore here. It seems like one might be traveling in France when driving through, because all of the signs are in French and there are Acadian flags everywhere. They look just like the French flag except they have a yellow star in the upper left corner. The children speak French and English in school, and probably just French at home.
We camped on the beach at Saulnier and had panfried cod for dinner along with some fresh vegetables we picked up at the farmer’s market in one of the little fishing villages we went through yesterday. The village was having a celebration and there was supposed to be a parade of decorated boats and fireworks on the beach, but the fog was so bad those things were cancelled. We had a nice campfire on the beach and listened to the music of the waves coming ashore.
Monday, Aug. 15 Acadian Area of Nova Scotia
We started at Eglise de Sainte-Marie, the largest and tallest wooden church in North America. It dwarfs everything around it, and one must look several times to see that it is not a stone church, but built entirely of wood. It took only two years to build, between 1903 and 1905, with the help of 1,500 volunteers using only handsaws and hammers! The priest in residence at the time was from Reims, France, and wanted to build a church like the one in his hometown. Plans for the church were sent from France, and a master carpenter in the area, though illiterate, was able to understand the plans and direct the massive undertaking. In today’s dollars, the church would have cost a little over a million dollars.
The church was originally 200 feet tall, but in 1914 lightning struck the steeple and started it on fire. Rain soon put out the fire, and when the parishioners rebuilt the steeple they made it 15 feet shorter due to their superstition that God started the fire because the steeple was too tall!
The stones collected from digging the basement were used to erect a thick foundation. It was long, hard labor done with only picks and shovels. Since the building is so large and so high, lots of large timbers were used in the construction to protect it from strong winds and storms. 40 tons of ballast help anchor the steeple in high winds.
Inside the church 70 foot columns, each made from an entire Norwegian Red Spruce tree trunk covered in plaster, support the arched ceiling. The religious paintings on the ceiling were painted by an artist who hated heights, so along with his paints, he brought a huge bottle of wine! The walls and ceiling are covered with canvas painted white. There are 41 beautiful stained glass windows that were shipped from France in crates of molasses to protect them.
We also visited Port-Royal National Historic Site. This is a reconstructed fort using the original plans for the French settlement built in 1605 when Samuel de Champlain and several others started the first French settlement here. The rustic buildings form a rectangle around a courtyard within a walled compound. There was a priest’s house, a governor’s house, a bakery, guardroom, trading room, sail loft, artisan’s area, etc. Several firsts happened here including Canada’s first play written and produced here, the continent’s first social club, called l’Ordre de Bon Temps, and the New World’s first grain mill.
In 1613 while the members of the village were several miles away harvesting their wheat, settlers from the Jamestown Colony in Virginia came ashore, pillaging and burning the settlement. The French settlers were saved by their strong alliance with the MicMac Indians who gave them shelter and food for months until their supply ship arrived and they left the area for good.
We stopped in Digby to eat some scallops because Digby scallops are supposed to be the best. We were not impressed, thinking Digby scallops taste no different from other scallops. They did, however, taste a lot better than the dinner of seal flipper we ate later. We bought the seal in Newfoundland, and cooked it all day as had been advised. That really didn’t help it, either. It tasted very gamey with a taste like beef that has been soaked in seafood. Neither Bob nor I could finish the seal, but at least we can say we gave it a try!
Tuesday morning - We passed through lots of farm country on our way to the ferry to PEI.
Click here to see pictures.
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