Shelburne Nova Scotia Canada

Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club (Top 2 photos)

We had conducted all the required Customs and Immigration procedures whilst alongside the outer or the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club pontoons (the small marina complex is pictured above). However, the wind was blowing us onto the and so, after we had hosted Mike, the OCC Port Officer for Shelburne, on board for a beer, we moved out to a mooring buoy for our first night. Thereafter, we switched to swinging off our own anchor…

Shelburne waterfront from the anchorage

… which gave us a lovely view of the Shelburne waterfront.

Great Union Flag (1701-1801) of England and Scotland (right)

At the close of the American Revolution, those in favour of British rule, known as Loyalists, fled the United States and took refuge north of the border.  Several thousand chose Port Roseway as their port of refuge and in July 1783 the Nova Scotian Governor of the time, John Parr, renamed the port Shelburne Harbour, after Lord Shelburne, the Prime Minister of England, in honour of the Loyalists’ recent arrival.

At its peak, Shelburne’s population rose to over 16,000 making it one of largest cities in British North America. The boom however was not to last and as early as 1786 some of the Loyalists started to leave. By 1800 there were only 300 families left as many chose to settle in other parts of Canada.

A large group of Black Loyalists, former slaves, actually left the shores completely.  They had been treated very badly and, despite promises of good land, had only been allocated rocky acidic areas at nearby Birchtown.  Unable to farm the property they had been allocated, in 1792 they chartered a ship and sailed to Africa where they founded Freetown in Sierra Leone.

The majority of the people now living in Shelburne can trace their ancestry to one of more of the founding Loyalist Families of the late 18^thCentury.  They are extremely proud of their heritage and indicators of this period of their history are everywhere, including flying the period Great Union Flag (1701-1801) of England and Scotland.

Period homes in Shelburne

The Best of Boxwood concert in the Osprey Arts
Centre on the waterfront in Shelburne

We took a wander around Shelburne which is full of period homes dating from its heyday before meeting up with Mike and Barb.  They were fabulous hosts and not only invited us for dinner, but also drove us out to Barrington to food shop and took us on a tour of the area including Cape Sable island.

In the afternoon we joined them at the Osprey Arts Centre for a Gaelic music concert.  The talented musicians had played at the Boxwood music festival at Lunenburg and then run a series of lessons and school sessions before performing in Shelburne.  It was clear that the links between Scotland and Ireland, where many of the early settlers came from, were still strong.

Monday morning in the anchorage

Dinner with Mike and Barb, as well as Peter and Lynn whom we’d met at the concert, was a lovely affair at Mike and Barb’s home which dates from 1840.  It was constructed by a shipbuilder and has a great view down Charlotte Lane to the harbour. In between their own sailing expeditions, they are renovating the house in keeping with its Victorian ancestry.  It was such a good evening that we slept through our morning alarm clock call and emerged slightly late to a beautifully still anchorage.

George A Cox’s large store and warehouse (R) and the John C Williams Dory Shop (L)

The late start was not an issue because we had reserved the day for visiting the Shelburne museums.  Beside the dominant Cox’s warehouse on the waterfront is the John C Williams Dory Shop.  Here we bought a ticket for the 3 museums and started our tour downstairs learning about how dories were, and still are, made there.

These flat bottomed, ‘disposable’ wooden boats were stacked onto larger sailing vessels and sailed out to the off-lying fishing grounds.  Once in the right area, the dories were launched and the 2-man crew of each laid weighted lines with several hundred hooks to catch cod, haddock, pollack and flounder close to the seabed.  After a couple of hours, the lines were recovered and, hopefully, the dories loaded to capacity with the catch: 6” below the gunwale.  Recovering the fish and dories onto the larger sailing ship was sometimes fraught but if one of the dories was damaged, a new one could be built in well under a day at the dory shop and so no fishing was wasted.

Upstairs in the Dory workshop

Climbing upstairs we were engulfed by the delightful smells of fresh cut wood.  The craftsmen and women showed us around their fully functional workshop and explained the history, techniques and logic used in the construction of the dories.  Soft chamfered pine can be quickly bent to the right shape whilst hard wood is used for the frames.  There were many dory shops in Nova Scotia to match the fishing ships’ demands and each had its own slight differences.  Here in Shelburne they invented a metal clip to hold 3-piece oak frames together. That boosted production from one to 2 dories a day because it was quicker than selecting and shaping a bent piece of hardwood.  They still make dories to order in the workshop that we visited; long may that continue.

The Shelburne County Museum (L) and the Ross-Thompson House (R)

Across the road we visited the Shelburne County Museum which gave an insight into the history of the town. Fishing, lighthouses, sport, and the town’s early fire truck were all covered as well as an interesting piece on the impact of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.  The first European settlers who arrived in Nova Scotia were Acadians, colonists from France.  They had peaceful relations with the Mi’kmaq indigenous people and set up farms.  In 1713, following the War of Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht, Acadia changed from being a French colony to being a British one.  The Acadian way of life continued under British rule until the French and Indian War. Most Acadians refused to swear on oath of allegiance to the British crown because they did not want to fight the French.  As a result, in 1755, Le Grand Dérangement (the Great Expulsion) saw thousands of Acadians removed from their lands, their homes burnt and the people scattered.  That left a lot of empty land and so in 1759 Governor Lawrence invited colonists from New England to resettle the land. Generous amounts of land were allocated to ‘the Planters’ with no rent for 10 years.  The arrival of the loyalists (from 1783) diminished the political influence of the Planters but they still retained the importance of being the founders of numerous Nova Scotian communities.  Learning about this part of Canadian history we got a better insight into the French/English mix in modern day Canada; there’s still lots to learn though.

The final museum was the Ross-Thomson House (1785-1880).  This was actually a trading storehouse with a home on the side.  Expanded over the years we learnt how the Ross-Thomsons brothers had established a very successful trading company and were able to live in comparative affluence.  We were given an excellent and very informative guided tour of the house which gave a good idea of life in Shelburne during the 1800s.

Tuesday 31 July we devoted to maintenance and chores.  First up was restitching the Velcro patch on the genoa which covers the leech line. The patch had become partially detached because of UV-degradation of the stitching so we had to lower the sail and dig out the sewing machine from the machinery space.  With the machinery space emptied it made sense to do a full check on the now accessible generator, and I’m jolly glad that we did because we found that the capsule it lives in had a few litres of water swilling about in the bottom of it. A quick test run confirmed that the problem was with the seawater cooling water pump; the drive shaft seal had failed and it was leaking water at quite a rate.  That might also explain why we had some water in the bilge after our last passage when we ran the generator for a couple of hours.

I fixed the sail and we rehoisted it whilst it was still calm and then I put the other sewing jobs on hold for a couple of hours whilst I stripped the water pump and changed the shaft seal. Once it was all back together and it had passed a leak check I move onto replacing a whole load of plastic webbing connectors that we use to tie down the spinnaker jockey pole and bowsprit on deck. Like the genoa’s stitching, these had also failed due to the sunlight exposure.  Down below I reinforced a few weak points on the saloon sofa and then it was time to put everything back to restore the saloon to normality.  A quick canter up to the supermarket to get a few foody bits we’d missed the day before completed my list of chores.

Meanwhile, in between helping me with the tasks above, Nicky had gone ashore and run several washing machine loads to clear the dirty clothes pile and clean the bedding and towels.  More importantly, she had also cooked up a feast because we had invited Mike and Barb for dinner that evening as a farewell supper.

Hosting Mike and Barb on board BV

We were showered, and BV was back in order barely in time for the arranged dinghy taxi service for Mike and Barb at 1800hrs.  However, the day’s chores were worth the effort.  BV was ready to go again, and we had all of the food cooked for a lovely evening on board.  Mike and Barb been fabulous in looking after us during our stay in Shelburne and we had both really enjoyed their company.  Needless to say, the conversation flowed well into the evening and, as it should when with friends, the whisky collection got a good bashing.

Shelburne, Nova Scotia, Canada