Travel back in time to the year 1753 and see Cape Breton Island through the eyes of Scottish exile the Chevalier de Johnstone. We will also bridge two very different eras in Cape Breton’s past – the French colonial period of the early 18th century, and the era of Scottish migration that took place in the 19th century.

SHOW NOTES – 

TRANSCRIPT

1. This is The Lost World of Cape Breton Island. It’s the aim of this project to reconstruct the lives of people long gone, walk roads that no longer exist, and retell events from Cape Breton’s history through the documentation left behind by those who saw it for themselves. These primary sources tell the stories of a long forgotten landscape – each one a thread in the tapestries of Cape Breton’s vivid and engrossing history. It’s our hope that these stories, some of them never before told outside of official documentation, bring back to life long forgotten moments from Cape Breton’s past.

2. We will pick up where the first part of this episode ended, with the Chevalier de Johnstone setting foot in “the worst country there is in the universe” – the French colony of Île Royale, known today as Cape Breton Island in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Johnstone had fled Great Britain for his life after the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, where he served for a time as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s aide-de-camp. He found refuge in France after being smuggled out of England by friend and noblewoman Lady Jane Douglas, joined the French army and was promptly sent to Louisbourg in 1750. At this point in history, Johnstone is very likely the only Scotsman living on Cape Breton Island. Little did he know that only 50 years later, the island would become the new home of thousands of people from his own native soil. 

3. A typical early-summer fog hangs over the busy harbour of Louisbourg. The muffled thumps of a distant fog gun ticks off the minutes of another day. In a secluded backlot tucked behind a bustling streetfront, the Chevalier de Johnstone is on his hands and knees, digging in the soil of the little raised garden that he had made below his rented apartment window. Johnstone once wrote that his garden in Louisbourg “served me as a place of recreation, when I was tired with reading, or when my eyes were fatigued.” After a supper of trout prepared by his servant, he sat down and opened up a book and before turning in for the night, threw another log on the fire. At the break of dawn, he would be awakened by the reveille – the same song that the whole town awoke to every day, played by the garrison’s drummers. Not long after, the town’s gates would be opened, and another day in Louisbourg would begin. 

4. This was a normal day for Johnstone as described in his memoirs, interspersed with complaints about the “rancid salt-butter and bad oil” he would receive with his rations. At first glance, it would seem that Johnstone only wrote about what historian T.A. Crowley describes as his “unhappy fate”, but there is more to his writings than meets the eye. With some added historical context, Johnstone’s writings figuratively transports us back in time over two hundred years to a very different Cape Breton than the one we know today – to a time when it was France’s “guardian of the cod fishery.” The people he encounters in Louisbourg are now considered historical figures, but to Johnstone they are simply individuals that he rubs shoulders with in his day to day routine. Historian J.S. MacLennan says about Johnstone’s writings, “One wishes that more of his literary remains, which were considerable, had been concerned with Louisbourg…to him we owe touches which let us see glimpses of the real life of the place which we do not find in official correspondence.” In this episode, we will allow Johnstone’s writings to show us “the real life of the place.” We will also use his writings to bridge two very different eras in Cape Breton’s history – the French colonial period of the early 18th century, and the era of Scottish migration which took place in the 19th century. 

5. When Johnstone was not on duty, he gardened (as previously mentioned), would go fishing in the rivers and lakes up behind the harbour with his servant, and he would read  – a hobby he picked up while on the run in Scotland. He says in his memoirs: “The bad climate of Louisbourg, where the sun is sometimes not visible for a whole month; the extreme wretchedness which prevailed there, as we could not have a morsel of fresh meat at any price; the society of the women of the country, very amiable no doubt, but who had cards continually in their hands, so that my pay would not allow me to be daily of their parties; all contributed to inspire me with a taste for reading and retirement, and a philosophic mode of life. I seldom quitted my chamber except to do my duty or to go a fishing for trout once or twice a week, with my servant St. Julien, who was an excellent Jack of all trades, for the purpose of supplying my table; the streams in the neighbourhood abounding in fish. The Roman History, Prince Eugene, Josephus, Vauban, and other books of the same kind, served to kill the time and to dissipate the gloomy ideas which, otherwise, would have thrown me into despair.”

6. Despite his disdain for Cape Breton, It didn’t take long for Johnstone to make friends with the people he met on the island. In 1750 aboard the dilapidated merchant ship that brought him to Louisbourg, he became friends with two other young officers that had also been posted to Louisbourg, the Chevalier de Montalembert and the Chevalier de Trion. It’s impossible to know the extent of Johnstone’s relationship with many of the people mentioned in his writings, but he evidently felt it was important to include the names of people like Mme Duhaget, Monsieur Loppinot and Monsieur Duchambon de Vergor. Interestingly, the residences of the Duhaget and Loppinot families have been reconstructed as part of the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site and can be visited today. Giving us not only an idea of his place in Louisbourg society but also the kind of values that he would have subscribed to, Johnstone’s signature appears on the baptism record for a fellow officer’s fifteen-year-old slave – essentially a certificate of ownership. His signature is found alongside those of other upper-class attendees, such as the De Thierry family and Aubert Courserac de Drucour, the wife of the last governor of Île Royale.  All in all, Johnstone says about the people he met in Louisbourg – “I enjoyed a real and complete satisfaction from the esteem and friendship of all my comrades, which it was no easy matter to retain.” 

7. He also made the acquaintance of the Count de Raymond, the governor of Louisbourg and Île Royale from 1751 to 1753. Raymond was an eccentric individual who was secretly mocked by those under his authority for his bizarre ideas and erratic behavior. Even the title of “count” was considered by some to be a product of his own imagination. During his two years as governor, Raymond would send an assortment of wildlife from Cape Breton back to France – from a squirrel to a pair of moose – and even partridge pies to the Palace of Versailles for Louis XV, which not surprisingly were putrid upon arrival. Perhaps another one of his eccentric ideas, Raymond seems to have taken pity on Johnstone, and naturally Johnstone developed this connection. As part of his official duties as governor in 1753, Raymond undertook a tour of the eastern coast of Cape Breton Island from Louisbourg to St. Ann’s, and Johnstone was invited to join him. 

8. Although portage routes had been used by the Mi’kmaq to travel across the island since time immemorial, overland travel for Europeans was impractical during the summer months in Cape Breton due to the lack of suitable roads, bridges and ferries, so it’s likely that Raymond undertook his tour of the island by ship. In accompanying the governor, Johnstone would have seen some of the oldest European settlements on the island  –  Fishing outports like Petit and Grand Lorembecs, now known as the Lorraines, La Baleine, now Balleen, and the Porte-Nove rocks where in 1725 a French ship named Le Chameau had been wrecked during a storm. In 1965, the shipwreck of Le Chameau was discovered by treasure hunter Alex Storm, and artifacts from the wreck are now on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

9. Although Johnstone wrote that he had seen “a vast number of beautiful natural meadows” and “many places capable of yielding rich harvests of all kinds of grain” during his tour of Cape Breton, he doesn’t seem to have kept a detailed record of the trip. Still, it is possible to get an idea of the things he saw from other 18th century documentation. As Johnstone and Raymond’s entourage continued northward from Scaterie Island, they would have followed the wall-like escarpments of Cape Breton’s eastern coast and would have observed the fishing settlements that had developed in the low lying bays in between – Mordienne, Miré and l’Indienne, now Port Morien, Mira Gut and Lingan. In what is now Glace Bay, the ruins of Fort William, a stockaded fort built by New Englanders after the fall of Louisbourg in 1745 to protect their coal mining operations, would have loomed large over the area now known today as Table Head. Not long after the island was re-occupied by the French in 1749, the mine in Glace Bay was set on fire by French mutineers, and the fort too went up in flames. Writing in the 1760s, British surveyor Samuel Holland says that the fire lit by the mutineers would continue to burn for another decade before finally going out. In 150 years time, coal mines up and down the very same coast would employ the sons, grandsons and great grandsons of those who had immigrated to Cape Breton from Scotland during the early 1800s.

10. After continuing west to today’s St. Ann’s Bay, the Governor and Johnstone would have arrived at the last stop on their tour – Port Dauphin. Port Dauphin was one of the best harbours in the entire colony – a large anchorage protected on all sides by the high, rolling mountains of the Cape Breton Highlands. After the fall of Louisbourg seven years earlier, some 40 houses along with a fort had been burned down when the British and New Englanders took possession of the island, giving us an idea of the population at the time, but at the time of Johnstone’s visit it had a population of about only 20. Once the island fell for the second and last time to the British in 1758, the area was once again depopulated and would not see European settlement until the end of the 18th century at the earliest. In the 1800s when Scottish families began to arrive in the area, the names of geographic features around the bay would begin to change. The mountains on the north shore of St. Ann’s, known to the French as Les Quatre Fils Aymond, would become Murray’s Mountain, and l’étang à Soubras, MacDonald’s Pond. The first Scottish families to set down roots in St Ann’s would stumble upon the relics of those by-gone French habitants – a rusted old sword dug up by the plow, bricks strewn across the rolling hills and shoreline, and countless numbers of cannonballs from all over the bay. Johnstone couldn’t have known it at the time, but this remote area of Cape Breton Island would be imprinted with an enduring legacy of Scottish tradition, so much so that in 1938 Saint Ann’s was chosen as the location of the Gaelic College, which was founded to preserve the traditions of those who had immigrated from the Highlands of Scotland to Cape Breton during the 19th century.

 11. But the 19th century was not the first time that Scots had set foot in either St. Ann’s or Cape Breton. In 1629 – 121 years before the Chevalier de Johnstone’s arrival and 173 years before the first ship carrying Scottish immigrants  arrived in Cape Breton – Sir James Stewart and about 60 other Scots landed at Baleine and planted a colony there in the name of Scotland. Only a few weeks later, a French captain by the name of Charles Daniel discovered the operation, captured the Scottish fort and burnt it to the ground. He took the 60 or so colonists prisoners and brought them to St. Ann’s – known in 1629 as “Cibou” – where he forced some of them to help construct a fort for the French before heading back to France. Even at that early date, it seems that there would always be a certain amount of struggle involved for the Scots who chose to make a new life in Cape Breton. 

 12. Later in the same year, 1753, the Count de Raymond would step down as governor and return to France, leaving Johnstone without any significant allies in Louisbourg. He says in his memoirs that he contemplated returning to France for good, but then in 1754 open conflict erupted between Great Britain’s American colonies and New France some 2,000 kilometres away beyond the Appalachian mountains. The war quickly spread across the rest of the continent and in a couple years would spread even to Europe. By 1755, French controlled Fort Beausejour, which sat at the frontier of British and French territory at the modern day border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would be captured by British troops from New England, and Nova Scotia would begin deporting its Acadian population from the province. The maritime region would be changed forever, and all of a sudden, Johnstone’s safety in Cape Breton seemed less assured. [END]