“For a hundred and seventy years the Holding Place of the British against the power of enemies and the forces of nature”—so the present Prince of Wales in his first speech on landing in Canada in 1919. As he arrived at the quay the guns of the British, French, and Italian warships fired the salute and the echoes reverberated among the hills that surround the town, so that it was hard to tell which was the gun and which the echo. Symbolic, this echo of a Port that has always been a receiving station—an invitation rather than a command.
Looking down from the Citadel one sees the ancient town set on a sort of peninsula; a triangle, with its base to the east making a main harbour, the two sides formed by Bedford Basin, twenty miles in circumference, and by the North-West Arm, a three mile strip of water.
The Micmacs saw the harbour first and called it Chebucto—‘Great’—and after the Indians, true to Canadian history, came the French. Champlain named it Baie Saine or ‘Safe Harbour.’ [page 59]
The earliest history and romance of Halifax lies about this Harbour whose magnificence and safety decided her being. “Here gathered the Armadas for the reduction of Louisbourg in 1757-8,” says Professor Archibald MacMechan. “Loudon, Amherst, Boscawen, Rodney, Wolfe, Cook, saw the old Halifax of Short’s Drawings, with its stone-faced batteries lining the waterside and the old flag flying from the top of Citadel Hill, as it does this day. Here came Howe with his defeated regulars after being clawed by the buckskins at Boston. Here floated safe at last the thousands of Loyalists from New York who preferred exile to renouncing their ancient allegiance. In the bitter winter of 1783-4, delicately nurtured women lived in the floating transports while others huddled in the cabooses taken from the ships and pitched like wigwams all along Granville Street. Then during the long wars with the French Republic and with Napoleon the waters of the Harbour never rested from the stirring of keels coming and going. Ships of the line, frigates with intelligence, privateers, prizes; cartels with exchange of prisoners, transports with licence to make war on King George’s enemies. In the war of 1812 there were one hundred and six ships of war on this station. On Sunday, June 6th, 1813, there came a procession of two ships—the little Shannon, proudly [page 61] leading her prize, the Chesapeake, up to the anchorage by the dockyard. All yards were manned; the bands played; the good folk on the wharves cheered like mad, for at last the stain was cleansed from the flag which Dacres had hauled down on the Guerrière.”
Tales of the blockade runners during the American Civil War, notably the episode of the Confederate cruiser, Tallahassee, which three Federal warships [page 61] watched while she safely escaped by the Eastern passage, are also material for romance.
But these adventures were only a prelude for the mighty drama begun in 1914. Hereafter for five years Halifax perpetually echoed to the tramping feet of thousands upon thousands of Canadian soldiers, who will never forget her welcomes and farewells.
Founded in 1749 by the Hon. Edward Cornwallis as a rival to the French town of Louisburg in Cape Breton, Halifax (named after the second Earl of Halifax) superseded Annapolis as the capital of the province. St. Paul’s Church recalls the early days, in vaults where lie those whose names made the early history of Halifax. Among them are Lieutenant-Governor Lawrence, 1760; Admiral Durell, 1766; Baron Kniphausen, Lieutenant-Governor Wilmot, Baron de Seitz, Michael Francklin, some time Lieutenant-Governor, 1782; Lord Charles Grenville Montagu, son of the Duke of Manchester; Chief Justice Jonathan Belcher and others.
Government House has seen many illustrious inmates but never a gayer period than that of the administration of Sir John Wentworth, 1792-1808, when His Royal Highness, Prince Edward, fourth son of King George III, was stationed in Halifax as “Commander of the Troops on the North American Station.” It [page 62] was during his stay in Nova Scotia that he was created Duke of Kent.
The records of those rough, warm, full-blooded times come with a heady flavour and an old-world tang to the thin asceticism of to-day.
Halifax from the first contained two predominating elements, Scotch and New England. To this add a dash of English blood and manners. Dr. Arthur W. H. Eaton in his ‘History of Halifax’ gives sidelights on the stir caused in the breasts of estimable and aristocratic New Englanders by the doings of Royalty in the Eighteenth Century. Royalty in the old days was rampant in Halifax. Yet no New Englander among them was more democratic than the son of plain ‘Farmer George’ who used often in Halifax “to put his own hand to the jack-plane and drive the cross-cut saw.”
The Duke of Kent, was not, however, a stern observer of the rules of his mother who, Thackeray says, regarded all deviation from the strict path of conventional morality with disfavour and “hated poor sinners with a rancour such as virtue sometimes has.”
The Duke loved his neighbour as himself, and remained the friend as well as the steady patron of Nova Scotians until his death. His estate was a veritable feudal village, and his lasting public memorial in [page 63] Halifax is the Citadel, and the Harbour forts which he built and made well-nigh impregnable. But his residence was illuminated by a romance which his godly mother and his virtuous daughter, Queen Victoria, could not but deplore. It had to do with a lady who accompanied him from the West Indies when he came to Halifax, and, “as much as she was permitted by society, shared his social responsibilities and, sincerely attached to his interests and to his person, assiduously ministered to his wants.” In Martinique, the Prince found Madame Alphonsine Therese Bernardine Julie de Montgenet de St. Laurent, Baronne de Fortisson. This noble French woman was his companion during his stay at Halifax, and afterwards until nearly the time of his marriage to the widow who was to become the mother of Queen Victoria.
Soon after the Prince came to Halifax he leased from Sir John Wentworth a small villa set in a beautiful property several miles out of town and quite near the post-road which winds around Bedford Basin. This he beautified and adorned until it became a spacious residence after the Italian style, the gardens containing “charming surprises;” an artificial lake, several Chinese pagodas and Greek and Italian imitation temples. A little Rotunda, containing a single room, richly decorated and hung with paintings, was [page 64] the special joy of the Prince. It was built for dancing.
Now, all that remains of the gay feudal village called “Prince’s Lodge” is this Rotunda, made over as a dwelling-house, in some prosaic after-time, and now no longer occupied. As early as 1828, Haliburton says: “It is impossible to visit this spot without the most melancholy feelings. The tottering fence, the prostrate gates, the ruined grottoes, the long and winding avenues cut out of the forest, overgrown by rank grass and occasional shrubs, and the silence and desolation that reign around, all recall to mind the untimely fate of its noble and lamented owner, and tell of affecting pleasures and the transitory nature of all earthly things…A few years more and all trace of it will have disappeared forever. The forest is fast reclaiming its own, and the lawns and ornamental gardens, annually sown with seeds scattered by the winds from the surrounding woods, are relapsing into a state of nature.”
The social brilliancy of the days of the Wentworths is still a legend in Halifax. We hear of splendid and “most exclusive” entertainments at Government House. “Royal guests and the officers of the army and navy assembled for sumptuous entertainments”, says the Halifax Gazette of 1795. “Cotillions above stairs and during the dancing refreshments of ice, orgeat, capillaire, [page 66] and a variety of other things…supper at twelve…Among other table ornaments which were altogether superb, were exact representations of Hartshorne and Tremain’s new flour mill, and of the windmill on the Common. The model of the lighthouse at Shelburne was incomparable, and the tract of the new road from Pictou was delineated in the most ingenious and surprising manner, as was the representation of our fisheries, that great source of wealth in this country.”
The name of Joseph Howe is bound up with the history of his native town. He was born in a cottage on the Arm. His father was a United Empire Loyalist, who became King’s Printer and Post-Master General of Nova Scotia. Young Joseph was early sent to a printer’s office, and later became a journalist, a politician and a Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. He led his province through the stormy period of the fight for responsible government, without bloodshed. In his “Speeches and Public Letters” much of the history of his day and generation is to be found. In 1835, when he owned and edited The Nova Scotian, the celebrated “Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick” began to appear.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton was a native of Windsor, N.S., and a student of King’s College, but Joseph Howe and Halifax beckoned him. In his [page 66] delineation of Sam Slick, type of the Yankee pedlar who perambulated Nova Scotia in those days, Haliburton became not only the founder of Canadian but also of American humour. The wit that sparkles through the quaint series of volumes published in London and Halifax in the ’30’s has been copied by a generation of authors less honest than himself.
Marshall Saunders, Macdonald Oxley, Grace D. MacL. Rogers, Dr. J. D. Logan, poet and critic, are all associated with Halifax through birth and habitation.
Robert Norwood, the poet, now of New York, loves the old city as a part of his youth, and so does Basil King the novelist. They are both King’s College men, and something of the mellowness of that sweet old place remains in their memories. Robert Norwood found great joy as a child in the wharves and shipping up and down the Harbour. “Water Street has always held for me a rare charm,” he says. “I would walk up and down it, turning in at every quaint wharf just to hear the men talking and to watch them at their tasks. I loved colour, and the effect of the sun on the wharves with their bales of merchandise lives in lines in my poem ‘Paul to Timothy:’ ‘Tall, Bacchic amphora, and the perfumed bales of Tyrian purple along the quay; the men with arms like anchor cables in their strength.’ The Hill with its Fort and guns was also a [page 67] place of dreams. The Citadel was a great slope of green that melted at last into the sooty houses below, but beyond the roofs was the sea and the islands, and ships moving up and down the Harbour.”
Speaking of his residence here some years ago when he was rector of St. Luke’s Cathedral, Basil King calls Halifax “one of mankind’s free ports.”
“It is in contact with the great big world to a degree not surpassed by New York, San Francisco, Liverpool or Yokohama. It has a settled life, it is true; but its chief life is that of magnificent touch-and-go, with a splendid variety of contacts. Going out to dine, your neighbor on one side might be from Gibraltar and on the other side from North Dakota. You could never tell, or speculate beforehand. Varieties of friendship were on the same scale. Somewhat like those formed on board ship, they were quick, warm, impulsive, and short-lived. There was too much of the here-to-day and gone-to-morrow in all life to give much social permanence; but in compensation there was much of rapid exchange…It was not so much Halifax that impressed itself on me during the years I spent there; it was first the British Empire; and then it was the world. What I drew from my life there was a world-view through lens of the British Empire. In some ways it is the gift of supreme importance in my life.” [page 68]
Dr. Archibald MacMechan of Dalhousie College has written much of storied Halifax, and Mr. Henry Piers calls attention to the fact that as early as 1830 there were Art Exhibitions in what was, at that time, a small town.
But there is the record that above all others is written in terms of heroic deeds and great sacrifices that followed the overwhelming disaster caused by the explosion of munitions of war in the harbour in December 1917.
The Wagwaeltic Club on the North-West Arm—mysteriously beautiful is the Arm with its old trees banked down to the water’s edge—the Public Gardens, the drives through the Parks over roads made when the British Regulars were established at the barracks, are a part of modern Halifax, but there are also moats and cannon, subterranean casements, hidden tunnels and secret defences concealing what mystery! Here something crouches, ready to spring forward at a word, though the attitude of dear, dilapidated Halifax is beautifully careless. One could hardly expect, and certainly would not desire her to be neat. For she keeps perpetual open house for many and strange guests. When the sea-doors of Quebec and Montreal are locked she is busiest. The Naval Institute is the second largest in America, and to its friendly doors, [page 69] year in and year out, come all sorts of seamen, many of them sailors in distress, for Halifax is often a ‘port of missing men.’ |
