The Legless Castaway

There are many reasons why fiction enjoys reasonably high esteem in Canada, and one of the most significant of them is that in most areas of even our recent history, we are a country without written documentation—this not just in the aboriginal sphere, but in that of our settling peoples too. Making home, not writing anything down, was the preoccupation of most pioneers, many of whom were illiterate, and so great swaths of the country must depend, as the Saskatoon novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe wrote in the epigraph to his novel The Last Crossing, “on all those local historians who keep the particulars of our past alive.”

Even in Nova Scotia—the seat, in 1758, of the country’s first parliamentary assembly, of good universities and a superior historical tradition—much of the memory of the region is anecdotal, the stories of the place conveyed orally.

One such story, close to the heart of many Nova Scotians, is that of Jerome, a castaway who, in 1863...