An Impossible Dream

When American filmmakers remade The Scarlet Letter in 1995, they chose the waterfront in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, to depict the colonial simplicity of tiny Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. To mask any evidence of anachronistic development three centuries later, just a few cosmetic touches were needed. This was heavily ironic, because once upon a time, very briefly, as briefly as a fairy tale, Shelburne could claim to be the biggest city in British North America—the future Canada—and imagine itself surpassing New York. How it rose and fell into decline is a gritty and bitter tale and the fairy behind it must have been malevolent indeed. Seldom has so much brave but misconceived human endeavour been so quickly dissipated.

The simple version of Canadian history my generation imbibed at school in the 1940s nodded approvingly at the United Empire Loyalists. Since loyalty to Britain was almost a religion to us, we thought people who fled the ruffians of the American revolution deserved high marks on that scorecard. Just as praiseworthy, we learned that the 35,000 to 50,000 Loyalists were educated and cultured, the largest migration of such people in British history. Their reported gentility made their privations more pitiable, and it suited our sense of Canada to know that so many “nice” people had shaped our fortunes.

That comforting notion gets quite a going-over in Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, 1783– 1792, Stephen Kimber’s bracing and demythifying account of the 10,000 or so Loyalists whom the British government delivered to Nova Scotia beginning in 1783.

Nice or not, whatever their social status, they had been torn from the relatively civilized amenities of the American colonies, fleeing the enmity and often violence of the victorious Americans, their houses and property confiscated. Now they had to become shock pioneers in a part of Nova Scotia that was still largely wilderness. Educated and cultured some of them may have been, but they were bitter and angry. In the end, they were not even that loyal, since four fifths of them eventually crept back to the United States. Kimber writes: “Shelburne was born out of the anger, fear, bitterness and chaos—especially chaos—of the tail end of the American revolution.”

He tells this tale vividly, bringing real actors in this tragedy to life through their own extraordinary journals, diaries and papers. The result is to give us an uncommonly tangible and palpable account of the daily travails of men and women displaced by the revolution, and the human cost to those who chose, often to their bitter regret, to stay loyal to George III.

On May 4, 1783, 30 British ships arrived at the place then known as Port Roseway, some 322 kilometres southwest of Halifax. They entered an empty harbour, so grand it had inspired dreams of a town that would be “a new and better New York—more exclusive, more sophisticated” that “would become ‘an ornament to the British Empire,’ a beacon of hope in a bleak time.” That town existed only in the imaginations of a group of Loyalists huddled in still-British New York City in the last days of the war. Kimber gives a fine description of the wild scenes in New York with Loyalist families desperate to escape, forced to sell precious belongings on the street, British soldiers posted on every corner to prevent looting. One group formed the Port Roseway Associates and signed up more than 200 subscribers plus their families and servants. They were encouraged by British authorities in Nova Scotia, who extolled the Port Roseway location as an ideal stopover point for ships passing to and from American ports, thousands of acres of wild timberland ripe for future trade in lumber and the best conditions for fishing, farming and the fur trade in the province.

However, no one had gone ahead to survey the townsite or lay out lots for homes. Thirteen kilometres in from the Atlantic, the ships anchored and discharged a bewildered cargo of some 3,000 men, women and children onto a rocky and forested shoreline where nothing was prepared. The first women ashore sat on the rocks and wept.

As his title implies, Kimber chooses to emphasize the sheer folly of this enterprise, the lack of planning, the insolence of British government officials, the fecklessness and arrogance of some settlers. Resentment at Britain for losing the war boiled over in fury when the town was named after Lord Shelburne, the prime minister sympathetic to the Americans, who had opposed the war and had only just now accepted the defeat. In their anger some took the mother country for every shilling they could. But this grim general sentiment should not obscure the courage and achievement of those who in a few desperate months hacked a town out of virgin forest, felling trees, laying out streets among the fresh stumps and erecting hundreds of houses. By December 1783, John Parr, the governor of Nova Scotia, boasted to London that 800 houses had been finished, 600 more were “in great forwardness” and a further several hundred begun. The first houses were simple log cabins but soon those with means to pay carpenters imported from Halifax were erecting substantial houses and trying to entertain as grandly as they had before the revolution.

Kimber’s star witness to all this is the man who may well have inspired this book, since it leans so heavily on his remarkable journals. Benjamin Marston III was a Harvard graduate, successful merchant, landowner, upstanding citizen, a moderator of town meetings in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was a cousin to two Mayflower descendants and an inveterate letter writer and diarist.

Outspoken in support of the rights of the British officialdom in the disputes with the colonists, he was branded a Tory. In November 1775, a mob battered down his door and, leaving his wife behind, Benjamin escaped in a small boat to Boston. When the British army evacuated Boston by sea, Benjamin was among the Loyalists who sailed with them to Halifax. Eight years later, after hair-raising adventures on land and sea, his wife dead and his Marblehead property seized, he was appointed a deputy surveyor at Port Roseway. Benjamin was there living in a tent when the first transports arrived.

Within days, he was at work surveying streets and building lots only to face immediate squabbling among different groups of settlers. He complained to his diary: “This cursed republican town meeting spirit has been the ruin of us already and, unless checked by stricter form of government, will overset the prospect which now presents itself of retrieving our affairs.”

He found the settlers “very unfit for undertakings which require hardiness, resolution, industry and patience.” While some submitted cheerfully, they were “justly exasperated by the insolence and impertinence” of others. Marston was disgusted by “the ignorance, stupidity and mercilessness of the bulk of the collection here.” So much for the educated and cultured Loyalists we were encouraged to admire in school!

But worse was to come, “the very worst yet,” Marston wrote when an autumn fleet arrived with more settlers, including unruly disbanded soldiers. “They murmur and grumble because they can’t get located as advantageously as those who have been working hard these four months.” In fact, the numbers were overwhelming the enterprise. Private vessels were arriving almost daily and by fall there were close to 7,500 settlers, eventually rising to nearly 10,000. Those unexpected numbers caused frustration at every turn and delays in delivering basic provisions the British had promised. Each family was entitled to a tent, blankets, basic clothing, tools, muskets and full military food rations, including salt pork and hard tack, all drawn from huge stores amassed for the American war.

In a rare benign mood, Benjamin Marston attended a party in a house “where six months ago there was almost impenetrable swamp … So great has been the exertions of the settlers in this new world. The room was commodious and warm, though in the rough” and the evening “was conducted with good humor and general satisfaction.”

Yet some of the first arrivals, disillusioned by the conditions, were already leaving, some for Halifax, some to the United States, where southern states were beginning to welcome them back. American newspapers reported this gleefully, the Boston Gazette calling Shelburne refugees “the most miserable set of beings that it is possible to conceive of.”

The black slaves, freed for supporting the king, had been given land in a cove three and a half kilometres to the west of Shelburne, which they named Birchtown (incidentally mislocated by several kilometres on the accompanying map in Kimber’s book). More destitute than the whites, they drifted into Shelburne for work, where they were paid less, punished by public lashing for small offences and virtually re-enslaved. Renegade ex-soldiers staged a riot and ran them out of town. Some conspired to seize the lands granted the blacks. Finally, led by charismatic preachers, they asked to go to Africa and the British shipped 1,196 of them to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Among them was Thomas Washington, one of George Washington’s own slaves, who had defected to the British to win his freedom.

With much confusion, speculation, favouritism and bribery corrupting the land distribution, Benjamin Marston was the unpopular focus of many disputes. The riot of ex-soldiers so alarmed the governor that he made Marston a scapegoat and dismissed him. After many further adventures he, too, found a place in Sierra Leone, where he died of malaria. For a graphic picture of one man’s life in the 18th century, Marston is worth a book in himself.

The defections from Shelburne accelerated. What no one had properly foreseen was that, once the white settlers had exhausted their savings, most could not support themselves. There were too few women of marriageable age to make the community viable. The men were not organized to fish on an adequate scale, for farming the local soil was thin and stony, the winters were harsh, and there were droughts and forest fires. There were no roads out to anywhere else. People came and went only by sea, and now mostly went. Soon hundreds of houses stood empty, some still full of fine furniture. When the British stopped sending provisions in 1787, it was the last straw for most. The next year Prince William Henry, King George’s third son, came visiting and an officer on the ship described the town as having as “poor an appearance as anything I ever saw.” By 1816, there were just 374 settlers left.

Kimber quotes the writer Thomas Chandler Haliburton describing the town in 1826: “The houses were still standing, though untenanted. It was difficult to imagine that the place was deserted. The idea of repose more readily suggested itself than that of decay.”

So many Loyalists wanted to come to Nova Scotia that the colony was divided and the province of New Brunswick created. Loyalists who settled there fared better. But then Benjamin Marston, who tried his luck there as well, noted that, unlike Shelburne, most of Saint John’s leading citizens had “numbered among the gentry of the old thirteen colonies.” Perhaps they were the nice folk we were told about as school children.

One Loyalist enterprise did survive in Nova Scotia: the former King’s College of New York, chartered by George II. The Loyalist faction moved, first to Windsor, then to Halifax where it now thrives as the University of King’s College, and where Stephen Kimber has a chair in the journalism school. The part left behind in New York gets by today as Columbia University.

Shelburne has had its mild revivals and declines since then. Between the wars there was substantial wooden shipbuilding and some famous racing yachts were Shelburne designed and built. In World War Two, merchant ships awaiting protective convoys to Britain often assembled in the vast harbour. During the Cold War, at the harbour entrance, American and Canadian naval personnel listened to the sounds of Soviet submarines on part of the world-wide underwater detection network. Since then the base has served as a film studio and there have been attempts to make it a resort. As on most of the East Coast, except for lobstering, which thrives, fishing is much reduced.

The permanent population is now roughly 2,000. Loyalist themes nourish the tourist industry and keep the motels open for visitors attracted by the period houses that survive, their charming old world gardens, the shady streets and the handsome waterfront, which lures many cruising yachtsmen.

There are annual rumours of a ferry service to Gloucester, Massachusetts … or somewhere—but they are only rumours. The town still feels as though it is waiting for something, perhaps someone else with imagination, if on a more modest scale than the dreams of 1783.

Joseph Howe, the 19th-century journalist-politician who fought to keep Nova Scotia out of Confederation, once described the province as an extra limb on a body wearing a conventional coat, without enough cloth to cover it. Over the century and a half since then, many Nova Scotians have felt that nakedness economically and have drifted off to “the Boston States” to make a living. But in this 21st century of mounting population pressures, inexorable urbanization and environmental anxieties, remote and pristine places like Nova Scotia are coming into their own because, increasingly, they are valued for the very qualities that drove the Shelburne Loyalists away: they are too close to Nature and too far from Mammon.