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Nova Scotia Quotes

Perhaps some of our readers may remember having read in the newspapers of the result of last year's (1890) Derby (horse race) having been sent from Epsom (Epsom Downs Racecourse near London, England) to New York in fifteen seconds, and may be interested to know how it was done.  A telegraph wire was laid from near the winning-post on the racecourse to the cable company's office in London, and a telegraph operator was at the instrument ready to signal the two or three letters previously arranged upon for each horse immediately the winner had passed the post.  When the race began, the cable company suspended work on all the telegraph lines from London to New York and kept operators at the Irish and Nova Scotian Stations ready to transmit the letters representing the winning horse immediately, and without having the message written out in the usual way.  When the race was finished, the operator at Epsom at once sent the letters representing the winner, and before he had finished the third letter, the operator in London had started the first one to Ireland.  The clerk in Ireland immediately on hearing the first signal from London passed it on to Nova Scotia, from whence it was again passed on to New York.  The result being that the name of the winner was actually known in New York before the horses had pulled up after passing the judge.  It seems almost incredible that such information could be transmitted such a great distance in fifteen seconds, but when we get behind the scenes and see exactly how it is accomplished, and see how the labour and time of signalling can be economised, we can easily realise the fact...

Hardwicke's science-gossip : an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature, volume XXVII, 1891. Published annually.
Printed by William Clowes and Sons Limited, London, England

Surfers looking for a good book to carry with them to the beach should paddle out to Nova Scotia, Canada, where lies one of the first online bookstores. Roswell Computer Books announced its new electronic presence with national and international ordering, browsing, and inquiry services supported by a database of over 7,000 titles.  And, if you're after a title they don't carry, Roswell will even accept special orders via e-mail, phone, or fax. Their digital "alter" is available via gopher at nstn.ns.ca : At the first menu, select 11; at the second, select 7; then you're on your way.  Queries can be directed to roswell@fox.nstn.ns.ca.

Can't Judge a Book by Its .SIG File Wired magazine, Issue 2.01, January 1994

Cape Breton Island, analogous to the highlands of Scotland, is something of a remote landscape that makes for unforgettable driving routes along the coast.  In addition to the hiking and other recreation at the island's best attraction, the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, there are other sights to check out like the Louisbourg fort, the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site and the Highland Village Museum.

David G. Allan in The New York Times, 18 June 2009

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

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.

...In 1762, the state (Massachusetts) raised a regiment of men to go to Halifax.  It was commanded by Col. Jonathan Hoar, and Maj. Winslow was Lieut. Colonel under him.  As there was no recruiting officer near him, Col. Winslow persuaded me to enlist once more into the service.  I had orders to enlist what men I could; and having obtained a number of recruits, I proceeded with them to join the Regiment at the Castle, near Boston, and was directed to enter Capt. Abel Cain's company.  Here I was appointed a sergeant.  We shipped for Halifax, arrived there without any occurrence of note, and encamped a little out of the town, in tents.  We were employed in wheeling off the top of Citadel Hill, so called, in order to erect a fort upon it.  Our duty was pretty hard, but then we worked without any apprehensions of being fired upon by an enemy.

There is one thing I would here notice, which shows a specimen of British cruelty without a parallel, I could hope, in the history of that nation.  Three men, for some trifling offence which I do not recollect, were tied up to be whipped.  One of them was to receive eight hundred lashes, the others five hundred apiece.  By the time they had received three hundred lashes, the flesh appeared to be entirely whipped from their shoulders, and they hung as mute and motionless as though they had been long since deprived of life.  But this was not enough. The doctor stood by with a vial of sharp stuff, which he would ever and anon apply to their noses, and finding, by the pain it gave them, that some signs of life remained, he would tell them, "d-mn you, you can bear it yet" – and then the whipping would commence again.  It was the most cruel punishment I ever saw inflicted, or had ever conceived of before – by far worse than death. I felt at the time as though I could have taken summary vengeance on those who were the authors of it, on the spot, had it been in my power to do it.

Recollections of an Old Soldier by Capt. David Perry, born in 1741 in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and died in 1826 at Ira, Vermont.  Capt. Perry wrote Recollections of An Old Soldier in 1819, at age 78.  It was originally published in 1822 by Republican & Yeoman Printing Office, Windsor, Vermont; reprinted in 1971 by Polyanthos Press Inc., Cottonport, Louisiana.  The above quote is from the 1998 electronic edition by D.G. Jones, Centerville, Utah.
    http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~dagjones/captdavidperry/chapter05.html

#5 – John Lee Seaman belonging to the Falkland, tried on board the said Ship at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 15th of November 1760, for neglect of Duty and contempt to his Officers, sentenced to receive two hundred and fifty Lashes.
#6 – William Read Seaman belonging to the Devonshire, tried on board her at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 15th of November 1760, for Desertion. Sentenced to receive four hundred Lashes.
#7 – John Harris alias Harrison Marine belonging to the Devonshire tried on board her at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 1st of December 1760, for selling stolen Goods, etc. Sentenced to receive four hundred Lashes.
#8 – Robert Smyth Seaman belonging to the Penzance, tried on board the Devonshire at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 17th. of December 1760, for selling stolen Goods, etc., Sentenced to receive three hundred Lashes.
#9 – William Williams Seaman of the Penzance tried on board the Devonshire at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 17th of December 1760, for secreting stolen Money knowing it to be so, Sentenced to receive two hundred Lashes.
#10 – Nicholas Goodinson and Robert Cock Marines belonging to the Falkland tried on board the Devonshire at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 23d. of Jan'ry, for secreting stolen Slops, the first acquitted and the latter Sentenced to receive Fifty Lashes.
#11 – Nicholas Goodinson Marine, and Charles Goosta Seaman, belonging to the Falkland tried on board her at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 7th of February 1761, for selling Slop Cloaths, the first Sentenced to receive three hundred, and the latter fifty Lashes.
#12 – Nathaniel Nanster Marine of the Penzance tried on board the Devonshire at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 27th of February 1761, for Theft, Sentenced to receive five hundred Lashes.
#13 – Nathaniel Levi alias George Cooper belonging to the Devonshire tried on board her at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 27th of February 1761, for Theft, Sentenced to be hanged untill he is Dead.
#14 – Edward Lovely Seaman of the Northumberland tried on board the Devonshire at Halifax by Captain Legge on the 30th of March 1761, for leaving his Duty on Shore, to receive three hundred Lashes.
#15 – Vincent Dunnevan Seaman belonging to the Norwich, tried on board the Northumberland at Halifax by Captain Darby on the 6th of August 1761, for Desertion, Sentenced to receive five hundred Lashes.
#16 – Edward Lovely Seaman belonging to the Northumberland tried on board her at Halifax by Captain Darby on the 6th of August 1761, for absenting himself from his Duty etc., Sentenced to receive six hundred Lashes.
#17 – Thomas Elmore and Thomas Wheeler Seamen belonging to the Bedford, tried on board her in St. John's Harbour by Captain Pallisser on the 28th of September 1762, for Mutinous Behaviour, Sentenced to receive two hundred and fifty Lashes each.
#18 – Matthew Hay Seaman of the Minerva tried on board the Shrewsbury in St. John's Harbour by Captain Pallisser on the 30th of September 1762, for Desertion, Sentenced to receive six hundred Lashes.
#19 – Thomas Lewin Seaman of the Superb tried on board the Shrewsbury in St. John's Harbour by Captain Pallisser on the 30th of September 1762, for Desertion, Sentenced to be Hanged untill he be Dead.
– All these Sentences were executed, except No. 18 on Matthew Hay belonging to the Minerva...

Source:—  Dispatches of Rear-Admiral, Lord Colville, 1761-1762
The Recapture of Saint John's September 1762

Reference: The Articles of War - 1749
The Articles of War on board a Royal Navy ship assumed the proportions and gravity of holy writ.  The Articles were originally established in the 1650s, amended in 1749 and again in 1757.  It is an amazing document to ponder, especially the number and degree of offenses which were punishable by death...

Reference: Royal Navy Articles of War - 1757
The Articles of War were read publicly at the commissioning of new ships, at least once a month, usually when church was rigged on Sunday, when an offender's punishment warrant was read to the ship's company and at timely intervals by the Captain to the Ship's Company.  In the British Navy during the age of sail, flogging was the most common of all punishments...

"When the mines closed down that winter. He had nothing left to eat. And he starved, he starved, I tell you, On your dirty damned street." A rough-hewn alcoholic poet named Dawn Fraser wrote those lines more than 80 years ago – but in evoking the trauma of the Cape Breton miners strike of 1922, his words retain a stark bitter immediacy.  Or as Halifax journalist John DeMont puts it in his new book, Coal Black Heart, published this week, the poems that Fraser produced during that turbulent time "read like fragments of a dark age..."  Fraser is only one among a gallery of colourful characters – some inspiring, some monstrous – who inhabit DeMont's elegiac, scrupulously researched but often shocking history of the Nova Scotia coal industry... Coal Black Heart often reads like a personal history – despite the fact that DeMont's coal saga extends 300 million years into the past, ponders the early explorations of men like Samuel de Champlain and John Cabot, casts light on the unexpected role played by King George III in the development of a Nova Scotia coal industry, examines a 19th-century coal culture where "the rich built palaces and the poor went shoeless"... Coal was an important but neglected part of Canadian history. "More people died in the coal mines than died in the battlefields of World War I.  That's not well known – even here in Nova Scotia.  Cape Breton coal fuelled the factories and ran the steel mills and armed the troops for World War I and World War II... It was hugely important to the growth of the country. It's almost a sidebar and asterisk in Canadian history, yet it was such an important industry – really important to the form that Nova Scotia has taken, in terms of what areas were settled and the kind of people that arrived there and the kind of society that has grown up." Coal Black Heart abounds in vivid prose snapshots of the way things were: the "perpetual servitude" imposed on the mining community by the company store; Glace Bay's infant mortality rate of 306 per 1,000 babies at a time when the national average was 88; the terrors that haunted Joe MacDonald, a miner who slept with a nightlight for the rest of his life after being trapped underground in a mine disaster; the ghastly plight of the ponies that worked in the mines...

Nova Scotia's Black Heart, a review by Jamie Portman in The Ottawa Citizen, 10 May 2009, of the book Coal Black Heart by John DeMont, published by Doubleday Canada in May 2009.

Source:— Complete text of Mr. Portman's review in the Ottawa Citizen, 10 May 2009.

Joe Howe in my family was kind of a hero.  It's not a blood connection ... but my great-grandfather was a contemporary of Joe Howe, revered Joe Howe and disagreed with Joe about Confederation.  My great-grandfather, who was the pastor of St. Matthew's in Halifax, was a great proponent of Confederation and Mr. Howe was an opponent, but that didn't stop my great-grandfather from writing a very admiring biography of Joe Howe at the end of his life.  Nor did it stop his son, my grandfather, from writing another biography, so we are pretty keen on Joe Howe in my house.

Federal Liberal Leader Michael Grant Ignatieff as quoted in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 12 January 2009.  The two biographies mentioned by Mr. Ignatieff are:

Joseph Howe by George Munro Grant (1835-1902)
published in Halifax, 1904; 2nd edition 1906.

The Tribune of Nova Scotia: A Chronicle of Joseph Howe
by William Lawson Grant (1872-1935), published in Toronto 1915
The Tribune of Nova Scotia: A Chronicle of Joseph Howe (complete text)
Project Gutenberg

(In the early 1870s, Sanford Fleming of Halifax, and a few associates) had the crazy idea of being the first Canadians to journey ocean to ocean.  Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had secured British Columbia's entry into Confederation with the promise of a railway, and Fleming was determined to be the man to build it.  He had got himself appointed as engineer in chief and wanted to survey the line himself... (In those days) crossing Canada was a risky scheme.  Just consider what such a journey involved in the summer of 1872.  You'd begin with a train from Halifax to Pictou on the Northumberland Strait.  From there, a steamer would take you up the St. Lawrence to Trois Rivières.  From there you transferred to the Grand Trunk Railway, which took you to Montreal, then to Toronto and finally to Collingwood on the southern shore of Lake Huron.  That was where Canada ended, at least as far as the railway was concerned.  From Collingwood, a steamer would take you through the Great Lakes to Port Arthur at the western tip of Lake Superior.  At this point, just halfway across the continent, modern forms of transportation gave way to the horse, cart or canoe.  Ahead of you stretched a thousand miles of the Canadian Shield's best swamp, forest and rapids.  After that, the cliff faces of the Rockies barred your way to the ocean.  If you wanted to create a country, this was what you had to conquer...

Michael Ignatieff in True Patriot Love, ISBN 9780670069729, published 2009 by Penguin Group (Canada), Toronto.

I've been going to the south shore of Nova Scotia every summer for more than 35 years... I like to arrive on Canada Day, July first, so that the bands will be playing music for me... I stay until a few days after Labour Day...

Calvin Trillin interviewed on As It Happens, broadcast on CBC Radio One at 6:40pm, 16 January 2009. 

Calvin Trillin Wikipedia

Since I live in Nova Scotia in July and August — one-sixth of the year — I have long maintained that (one-sixth of my books should be counted as Canadian content)...

Calvin Trillin in The New York Times Magazine, 12 July 1998.  Trillin made his reputation as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has a summer home at Port Medway, Queens County.  He continued:

In making this claim, I've taken the low-key approach that might be expected from a literary figure in Canada.  I've simply laid out the math at the heart of it and said, in effect, 'How about it, guys?'

(Lunenburg sausage from Nova Scotia) is strong on the herb summer savory and can be grilled like a hot dog or eaten with Lunenburg County sauerkraut or crumbled in a pasta dish that has always been called at our house spagatini Lunenburgesa.

Calvin Trillin in his book Feeding a Yen: Local Specialties from Kansas City to Cuzco, as quoted in a review by Stevie Cameron in The Globe & Mail, 24 May 2003, page D4

Canada over the last thirty years has been the best place to live since the dawn of humankind.  The best, of all time, anywhere...

Peter and Terry March, in their weekly Ask a Philosopher column in the Halifax Daily News, 7 June 1999. They continued:

These things are hard to judge, and it all depends upon what you value.  We value a society that provides for the physical and emotional welfare of its citizens.  On that scale Canada is not just the best place in the world right now, it's probably the best place ever ... We'll go further: Halifax is among the best cities in Canada in which to live...

Peter March teaches philosophy at Saint Mary's University in Halifax; Terry March is a philosophical counsellor.  Their column this week is titled: "Society Is Not Collapsing, The Evidence Suggests We're Not Going Anywhere in a Handbasket."

I no longer know where I live.

A letter in the Bridgewater Bulletin, 9 December 2008.  The letter is signed as follows:

WENDELL EISENER
62 Eisnor/Eisner Loop Road or
62 Old Trunk 3 or
62 Eisner Diversion or
62 Isner Diversion
Italy Cross (we think)
Lunenburg County (as far as anyone can tell)
NS (most likely)
B4V 0P3 (maybe, although it could still be B0J 1V0 as far as we know)

The first sign on our little leftover loop of old Highway 3 in Italy Cross said "Eisnor Loop Road" on one end and "Eisner Loop Road" on the other.  This was later changed to matching signs saying "Old Trunk 3."  (This, incidentally, is where Canada Post seems to think I live, although the only sign within five miles that actually says "Old Trunk 3" any more is to the north of us in Hebbs Cross, identifying what the locals (and Canada Post) call the "Dixie Road.")  The name of our road was then changed one day to "Eisner Diversion," and now I see we have a beautiful, brand-new sign indicating "Isner Diversion." To recap: the highway sign says "Isner Diversion," Canada Post calls it "Old Trunk 3," my EHS map book still calls it "Eisnor Loop Road."  And, by the way, my assessment forms from the Municipality of Lunenburg call it something else again such as "Old Trunk Highway 3."  All these names are for a little road full of potholes and protruding rocks that has seen no significant maintenance in abut 35 years...

Source:— Complete text of Mr. Eisener's letter in the Bridgewater Bulletin, 9 December 2008

Wendell Eisener has lived in the same house in Italy Cross for 13 years but isn't quite sure where he lives.  That's because the name of his Lunenburg County road has been changed five times in recent years.  All but one of those names includes the last name of the three Eisener families who live there, but not one of the three variations actually matches how the family spells it.  Not only that, the provincial Transportation Department, municipal assessment records, Canada Post and federal tax department all use different names for the road.  At one point, the road name was spelled differently on the signs at either end of the road... Mr. Eisener said he feels "daft" using two different spellings of his last name every time he has to write down his name and address...

Source:—  "Where's Wendell Live?  He's Not Sure" in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 30 December 2008

Eiseehauer, Eisener, Eisenham, Eisenhaur, Eisenhaurer, Eisenhaver, Eisenor, Eisinor, Eisnenhauer, Eisnenor, Eisner, Eisnor, Eissenhauer, Eysenhouser, Ischauver, Isenhauer, Isenhauffer, Isenhaur, Isenhauser, Iisenhauver, Senhauwer, Isenhoffer, Isenhor, Isner, Isnor, Issenhaur, Ysendha, Ysendhaa

These are 28 spelling variations of the family name EISENHAUER that are found in the history of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, as reported in Lunenburg Family Names: Spelling Variants.  "...To add to the confusion, many names may be spelled with different first letters.  Upon a closer look these variations do not alter the pronunciation by much..."

Eisener (52), Eisenhaur (6), Eisenor (5)
Eisner (53), Eisnor (119)
Isenor (225), Isner (16), Isnor (101)
These names are currently (January 2009) reported by the Canada 411 telephone directory.  The numbers in parentheses are the number of times each name appears in the Canada 411 directory for Nova Scotia.  Note: The spelling "Isenor" is the most frequent variation reported by Canada 411, but it does not appear in the Lunenburg Family Names: Spelling Variants list.

M. Dion, the economy is now the issue in the campaign, and on that issue, you've said that today that Mr. Harper has offered nothing to put Canadians' minds at ease and offers no vision for the country.  We have to act now, you say; doing nothing is not an option.  If you were Prime Minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?

This was one of the questions asked by a CTV journalist during the taping of a television interview – pre-recorded in Halifax in the late afternoon of October 9th, five days before the federal election of 14 October 2008, and broadcast about ninety minutes later – with Stephane Dion, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, as reported in Peter Duffy's regular column in the Halifax Sunday Herald, 26 October 2008.

(1) Text of the Dion interview...
(2) Full Text of Dion-Murphy Interview

As a native English speaker, the question is clear to me.  Dion, however, appeared to have so much trouble understanding the time element involved that it had to be put three times and even then, he never gave a clear answer.

Comment by Peter Duffy in his regular column in the Halifax Sunday Herald, 26 October 2008.

All languages deal with counterfactual statements, especially backward-looking ones, a little differently. The subjunctive mood is a basic requirement for claiming the mastery of a foreign language – but it is usually the last of the basic requirements to be learned, and one of the hardest to acquire, because we all discuss counterfactuals in our own mother tongue without ever consciously considering the ontological complexity behind them.  Close examination of the CTV footage suggests that Stephane Dion was not really the victim of some notional hearing problem or a noisy room; he was asked a question in a way that might seem relatively straightforward to native speakers of English, but which actually presented special dangers for him as a non-native speaker...

Comment by Colby Cosh in "Understanding CTV's Dion-Murphy debacle" in the National Post, 10 October 2008.

Full Text of Colby Cosh's comment

More than two weeks after broadcasting the infamous fumbled interview featuring Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, CTV network news executives are still explaining themselves.  There's a certain cosmic justice in this, as for Coleridge's ancient mariner who was condemned to wander the world relating the terrible curse that resulted from his shooting of the albatross.  Officially, the network stands by its decision to air the interview restarts in which Dion wrestles with a hypothetical question about economic policy from ATV's Halifax news anchor, Steve Murphy... Video of the interview restarts, which occurred a mere five days before the federal election, was quickly posted to YouTube.  The exchange goes on for several awkward minutes but the key part is Murphy's initial question which concluded: "If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?" Dion is confused by the time elements: "If I had been prime minister 2½ years ago?"  Murphy replies: "If you were the prime minister right now." It gets worse before it gets better. CTV Atlantic vice-president and general manager Michael Elgie has noted that network executives, in reviewing the tape, considered "whether or not there was a problem with the phrasing of the question." Oddly, he doesn't tell us what, if anything, they concluded on that point and we are left to wonder whether they fully appreciated the subtle difficulty the question likely posed for Dion, who has learned English as a second language.  The best analysis of the linguistic difficulty is by the National Post's Colby Cosh who notes that the "subjunctive mood," the grammatical gremlin at issue here, is the hardest verb form to master in a second language.  "You almost have to have wrestled with a second language as an adult, or at least studied one in some depth, to see what went wrong," he explains.  Of course, a native English speaker glides over the grammatical complexity and takes a meaning from Murphy's question because in colloquial language we patch things up unconsciously and hardly notice conversational ambiguities.  So it was a question of language for Dion but one of considerable subtlety.  It shows that his English is acquired as opposed to absorbed, which we knew, but not that it's weak by any fair measure.  His mistake was that instead of bulling ahead with some rough interpretation of the question he tried to understand it precisely.  In playback, unfortunately, he looks like a doofus, and few TV viewers would be able to grasp at one viewing (or even several) why he got tied up in knots by a question that to the English ear sounds fairly straightforward even if technically it isn't...

"Dion interview refuses to die"
Editorial in the Cape Breton Post, 29 October 2008
Source:—  http://www.capebretonpost.com/index.cfm?sid=184516&sc=151

The subjunctive in Modern English is easily distinguished in a great variety of contexts where the sense is past tense, but the form of the subjunctive verb required is present...  The subjunctive is not uniform in all varieties of spoken English.  However, it is preserved in speech, at least in North American English and in many dialects of British English.  While use of the subjunctive in natural, informal speech is almost universal among educated speakers, its use is becoming very infrequent among large portions of the population...

Source: Subjunctive mood: The subjunctive in English Wikipedia

The usage "If you were..." is not unusual in modern English. A Google search on the phrase "if you were" (with the quotes as shown) returns more than thirty million hits.

Would you put millions of dollars into a project with no chance of a return if you were a developer?

If you were in an orchestra, what instrument would match your personality?

If you were a wind turbine, isn't this what you would say?

If you were there when they signed the constitution...

What would you do for the environment if you were Prime Minister?

If you were Prime Minister of Canada, what policies or laws would you enact to make the country a better place?

If you were the Prime Minister of Canada, what would you do to improve the living standard and unify the country?

If you were in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's shoes would you accede to Mexican President Vicente Fox's request to permit more Mexican workers into Canada?

If you were Prime Minister of Japan for a day, what would you like to do?

If you were selected as an Ontario cabinet minister, which ministry would you want to be responsible for?

If you were to become the head of the whole Civil Service, would you then think there would be any...

...In the interview, which was recorded live to tape, anchor Steve Murphy asked Dion this question: "If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?"...
The tale of the Dion tape The Ottawa Citizen, 16 June 2009

Little systematic attention has been given to the identification of the large number of long-standing and still-bearing fruit trees in Inverness County.  According to the record kept by John McKeen of Clayton Farm nursery in Mabou, more than four thousand apple trees (as well as many hundreds of plum trees and berry bushes and ornamental shrubs and rose bushes) were distributed in the years 1884, 1885 and 1886.  The names of the purchasers and their addresses are listed as well as the names of the varieties.  For instance, J.E. MacFarlane, the railway station agent at Orangedale, purchased twelve trees including three crabs. Four of those trees, including two of the crabs, bore much fruit this year (2008) one hundred and twenty-three years after their planting... 

"Sitting Under the Apple Trees" by Jim St. Clair in his regular weekly column "Then and Now: The Heritage of Inverness County " in The Inverness Oran, 5 November 2008.

To handle the large volumes of fruit produced on Annapolis Valley farms by the late 1800s, farmers began turning some of them into cider and dried apples.  Lakeville (Kings County) is known to have had two evaporators, or three, if you count twice the one that burned down and was rebuilt.  Evaporators were major employers during the late fall and winter.  Their basic function was to dry apples, preserving the fruit for later use... Dried apples required no refrigeration or special care, were comparatively lightweight, and found a ready market in remote logging camps, outports, and in the armed forces... (George Chase's evaporator, in Lakeville), ran five kilns, and a packing crew of six men getting apples ready for the overseas market.  We handled over forty thousand barrels of apples there that...season (1916)... In 1929 the evaporator burned down, as most of them did periodically...

Sheltered by the North Mountain: A History of Lakeville, Kings County, Nova Scotia, 230 pages, by Anne van Arragon Hutten. Published by Anne van Arragon Hutten, Kentville, 1995.

I've been called a fridge magnate.

Scott Brison, MP — elected five times to the House of Commons to represent Kings-Hants, both as a Progressive-Conservative and as a Liberal — in an interview with Jim Nunn on Nunn On One, broadcast on CBC TV Halifax at 1:00am on 19 December 2008.

I started my first business at nineteen.  My first year I had 180 refrigerators rented to students.  In my fourth year at Dal I had a thousand fridges rented...

Scott Brison Wikipedia
Kings-Hants Wikipedia
Nunn On One CBC
Jim Nunn King's Journalism Review

Resolution: Commemorating the development of the charge-coupled device:
Whereas the charge-coupled device (commonly referred to as 'CCD') technology revolutionized imaging equipment and has significantly affected society by improving quality of life and the technological capabilities of everyday tools and equipment;
Whereas CCD is widely used in technology, including digital cameras, video recorders, space-based telescopes, satellites, and medical imaging devices;
Whereas Willard S. ' of Halifax, Nova Scotia , and George E. Smith of New Barnegat, New Jersey, have advanced society through their development of the CCD while working at the Murray Hill, New Jersey, Bell Labs site in 1969; and
Whereas Mr. Boyle and Mr. Smith have been awarded the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering and inducted into the Nation Inventors Hall of Fame for their invention;
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Senate commemorates the development of the charge-coupled device.

United States Senate resolution 478 15 May 2006
Complete text of U.S. Senate resolution 478
    http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/record/2006/2006_S04555.pdf

The perception that Nova Scotia is somewhere in the Arctic Circle is wrong.  Summers are warm and there are long, mild autumn months to savour and enjoy...  It may come as a surprise, but the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia lies on the same latitude as Milan, enjoys temperatures of up to 29 degrees in summer and is just six hours' flying time from the UK.  But there is one big difference from Europe – here a country estate costs around the same as a one-bedroom apartment in Paris or studio flat in London...  One charming three-bedroom family home set in 25 acres, including a salmon fishing river, meadows and woodland, on the Saltspring estate, 90 minutes from Halifax, is on the market for $249,000 Canadian Dollars (£115,336)...  Nova Scotia has yet to be discovered by British property buyers, but many celebrities reportedly have second homes here, including Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore.  Despite the influx of huge wealth, cottages can still be bought for £30,000 and even at the luxury end of the market, fine coastal homes cost under £750,000.  With a pristine natural environment, the province is perfect for outdoor types.  Nova Scotia has many lakes and rivers, and a dramatic coastline with empty beaches and sheltered bays for sailing and kayaking.  In winter, activities such as snowmobiling, skating and cross-country skiing are popular.  There are also a number of small ski centres...

"Great Green Escape" in the Daily Express, London, 3 October 2007

We can't produce more of what we produced ten years ago.

Lauchie MacLean, president of Glenora Distillery, as quoted in "Glenora benefiting from whiskey shortage" in the Cape Breton Post, 8 November 2008, commenting on the economic opportunity offered by the current worldwide shortage of single malt whiskey.
Complete article: http://www.capebretonpost.com/index.cfm?sid=188108&sc=145

A good single malt takes time.  "You have to remember we have to age our product for 10-15 years so we are (now selling whiskey) which we produced from 1990 to 2000..."  "We still field calls about once a week from big buyers – big producers – that want to buy our bulk whiskey.  Anything we have extra they will buy it and they want to pay a premium for it.  Obviously we don't have a whole lot of aged stocks because we are small compared to the large guys but anything we have, they will buy."  The worldwide shortage has also created a different type of demand for Glenora.  "We've over the last year and a half had four offers, unsolicited, to purchase us.  We love being an independent going concern on Cape Breton Island and have no desire to sell or anything else.  We want to grow in our community and be a continued success..."

My aunt Joyce Barkhouse of Nova Scotia, who is now ninety-five, tells the following story involving a pawnshop.  When my brother was born, in mid-February 1937 – in the depths of the Great Depression – there was a special Valentine's Day excursion price on the train from Nova Scotia to Montreal.  It cost ten dollars.  My aunt and a girlfriend scraped together the ten dollars each and went to Montreal to help out my mother with her newborn baby.  When they got there, my mother was still in the hospital, because my father hadn't received his monthly paycheque and thus couldn't pay the bill and bail her out, hospitals at that time having a lot in common with debtors' prisons.  My father was finally able to spring my mother, but paying the hospital bill – ninety-nine dollars, as I found from looking in my mother's account book – used up all of the paycheque.  My parents didn't have a bean at that time, so my father had no cash reserves, and he pawned his fountain pen in order to take my aunt out for a thank-you lunch.  (The fact that he felt the need to do this shows that he understood the need for a gift of gratitude in return for a gift of care and service, which was what my aunt had bestowed.)  When my aunt and her friend took the train back to Nova Scotia, they were also given two valuable going-away presents: a bunch of grapes and a small box of Laura Secord chocolates – and this is all they had to eat during the train ride.  They had no berths, so they had to sit up the whole time, and this was uncomfortable; but a man was renting pillows for twenty-five cents each.  Alas, they had only forty-eight cents between the two of them, but they offered the forty-eight cents and two of the chocolates – fluttering their eyelashes, said my aunt – and their offer was accepted.  Thus they slept in comfort.  When I heard this story as a child, I rejoiced at the successful securing of the pillows, and remembered the lesson of the haggling procedure: if you don't offer a deal, you won't get one...

Extract from " Payback" by Margaret Atwood in The Times, London, 26 September 2008

...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 William Jefferson 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

We're not trying to give them a guilt trip.  We're trying to create wealth the same way they are... How we think today will determine how our kids will grow into adults.  They will either grow into poverty and be angry, or we can create an environment that can foster any kid's dream...

Lawyer Bernd Christmas, former CEO of Membertou First Nation, as quoted in Report on Business, page B7, Globe and Mail, 12 December 2008

"Open for Business," page B7, Report on Business
Globe and Mail, 12 December 2008

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 v1 n9 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 on 3 July 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

Field's reference to "the Governors of the five North American Provinces" meant the Governors of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Canada (Quebec and Ontario).  In 1862, these were five separate colonies, independent of each other.

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

Imagine a place two-thirds the size of Scotland, with less than a fifth the number of people.  It has more space and less traffic on the roads.  Imagine the Highlands, with smaller mountains and cheaper hotels.  Nova Scotia in Canada is far more Scottish than over here in many ways...  We looked at Canadian property online back in July, starting in Toronto, where my mother-in-law lives.  Then one of us remembered hearing that Nova Scotia was "nice".  We can't remember where or from whom: It truly was as vague and inconsequential as that.  So we directed the web-browser to Nova Scotia.  It's beautiful!  And cheap as chips!  Actually given the way food prices have shot through the roof, that's not far off the truth.  As a comparison: 500 square metres in Elgin, Scotland, without a house costs you £120,000.  Four acres of coastland in the nicest bit of Nova Scotia costs you half that.  A five-bedroom house with nine acres of land in the country outside Glasgow or Edinburgh will set you back £800,000.  Our version of that house in Nova Scotia cost half again.  So I quit my job at Talk107, got flights for all the family, set up twenty properties to look at and went over there for three weeks.  Which became four weeks because I tried to save money by flying with Zoom airlines...  We came.  We saw.  We bought.  In the space of 19 days.  Every day I spent there felt like I'd come up for air after being underwater for the last ten years...

Source: " Dominik Diamond heading to Nova Scotia" in The Sunday Times, London, 21 September 2008

Dominik Diamond Wikipedia

I only got to Nova Scotia a week ago Thursday... Earlier this month, I upped sticks from Scotland to move to Lunenburg County.  Five months ago, I spent a few weeks here with my family, but before then, I could not have picked out Nova Scotia on a map... Let's go back slightly further.  It's July 2008, and I'm moaning to said wife about how cutbacks mean I'm now having to fill four hours a day of speech radio with no producer, researcher or anybody to answer the phone and if I carry on like this, the stress will give me the kind of meltdown that makes Peter Finch in Network look like the Dalai Lama... I'm not naive.  I know it's not perfect in Nova Scotia.  I've been reading this newspaper online for a while now.  You have roads blocked with snow, you have the odd local bad boy, you have a prime minister who shuts down the whole Parliament to stop a vote taking place that would kick him out.  But in the U.K., the whole transport system grinds to a halt over a single snowflake...

Dominik Diamond in the Halifax Sunday Herald 18 January 2009

A Diamond in the N.S. rough

When I told people I was going to Nova Scotia, several said: "Exactly where is that?"  With its engaging blend of cultures, glorious scenery, fine hospitality and value for money, Nova Scotia won't be off anyone's tourist map for much longer... Fancy spending a night in a caboose or spotting a moose?  How about watching eagles swoop or driving for miles along traffic-free coastal roads?  I've just done all that in Nova Scotia (and a caboose, by the way, is a railway guard's van, of which more later).  Nova Scotia is a province on the eastern seaboard of Canada.  It got its name, which means New Scotland, after Highland immigrants landed there more than two centuries ago and saw a landscape amazingly similar to home.  The influence of the auld country is still strong, with shops selling kilts and road signs in both English and Gaelic.  But Nova Scotia is a melting pot of other cultures too – native American, English and French all blending into modern Canadian...  In the World Heritage site of Lunenburg, a perfect example of an early colonial town, we had our first taste of Nova Scotian seafood.  At the trendy Fleur de Sel restaurant, owned by a chef trained in Ireland, the pan-fried scallops were out of this world.  From then on it was lobster, scallops, clams and crab all the way – sometimes with pasta, sometimes in chowder; always good and surprisingly cheap...  Crossing into Cape Breton we drove along the winding Cabot Trail, which circles the island for almost 200 miles and is named after the explorer John Cabot.  From cliff-top viewing areas no binoculars were needed to spot pilot and minke whales frolicking in the waves, so close were they to the shore.  Later, on a bird-watching trip to St Ann's Bay in a boat called Highland Lass, skipper John MacAskill suddenly pointed skywards at a mighty bald eagle.  After circling us a few times it swooped to catch a fish in its great talons – a heart-stopping moment.  As well as these magnificent raptors, puffins, razorbills and kittiwakes are also regularly spotted.  Back on the glorious Cabot Trail, voted one of the world's premier scenic routes, we came across a moose grazing by the side of the road – sightings of the giant beasts are rare, as most confine themselves to forests.  The moose allowed us to take a picture before nonchalantly wandering back into the trees.  I recalled that when my children were small I read them a story about a moose with a loose tooth, who put a rope around it and tied it to a caboose.  In Nova Scotia, I saw both moose and caboose!  The latter was at the Train Station Inn at Tatamagouche, where 13 old goods vans and cabooses awaited their next guests.  Ours had been built for the Grand Trunk Railway, and though the exterior is unchanged, inside is a modern bedroom, sitting room and shower.  We relaxed in an elegant lounge car used 100 years ago by Governor General Earl Grey, of tea fame.  As well as such novelties, Nova Scotia has some of the finest inns I have ever known with some of the comfiest beds...

" Super Nova Scotia" in the Daily Express, London, 9 August 2008

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 in The Times, London, 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

In 1907, Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
making him the first English language writer to receive the prize,
and he remains today its youngest-ever recipient.

Go To:   Project Gutenberg, online text of Captains Courageous
    http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/cptcr11.txt

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

Fig. 1	Fig. 2
Fig. 3	Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

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.

Reference: The Colbert Report by Wikipedia

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

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 com