Читать книгу Canadian Footprints - Melvin Ormond Hammond - Страница 11
ОглавлениеHighlanders’ Landing at Pictou
All hail to the day when the Britons came over,
And planted their standard with sea-foam still wet!
Around and above us their spirits still hover,
Rejoicing to mark how we honour it yet.
Beneath it the emblems they cherished are waving,
The Rose of Old England the roadside perfumes;
The Shamrock and Thistle the north winds are braving,
Securely the Mayflower blushes and blooms.
—Joseph Howe
THE little Dutch ship “Hector” brought to the shores of Nova Scotia in 1773 a precious cargo of two hundred Highlanders from Scotland, thus inaugurating the migration of a sturdy, thrifty race which has exercised immeasurable influence on succeeding generations. It was the “Mayflower” of Canada which sailed into Pictou Harbour on September 15, after eleven miserable weeks from Greenock and Loch Broom. Smallpox and dysentery, low provisions and scanty water, had depressed the high hopes with which they had set forth.
Hector Memorial, Pictou, N.S.
They had brought their own teacher, and as they departed a stowaway was observed and threatened by the Captain. The passengers found he was a piper, and on their pleading and promise of rations he was allowed to remain. When the landing at Pictou was opposed by the frightened Indians, the Highlanders donned their kilts, the piper skirled his loudest, and the red men fled to the woods, giving no further trouble.
There was already a tiny settlement, a remnant from the brig “Hope,” which had been sent from Philadelphia in 1767 by the Philadelphia Land Company, to aid in settling its grant of 200,000 acres in Pictou. These settlers and an unscrupulous agent had taken the best lands by the shore, and the Highlanders, their blood up, and their money exhausted, disarmed the Company’s storekeepers and helped themselves to provisions in their critical hour. They faced a dire winter, and all but seventy sought work in Truro, Halifax and elsewhere, only to return and take root in Pictou as conditions improved.
The colony of the “Hector” had been brought by John Ross, a smooth land agent of his day, but the venture prospered, thrift and education transformed the pioneer community, and successive parties followed after the American War, in the stirring years of the close of the eighteenth century.
The foundations were laid surely by these noble men and women who, as recorded on the memorial erected at Pictou in 1923, were the “vanguard of that army of Scottish immigrants whose intellectual ideals, moral worth and material achievement have contributed greatly to the good government and upbuilding of Canada.”
