Campobello: An Historical SketchWells, Kate Gannett
History
Campobello: An Historical Sketch
Wells, Kate Gannett
Campobello Island (N.B.)
=Smugglers' Cave.= The inhabitants themselves were rather enterprising
in business; for rum and lumber were exchangeable quantities with the
venturesome Campobello captains, who traded with the southern ports and
West Indies, and carried Nova Scotia grindstones to the States. Bolder,
but the quieter in action, were the smugglers, who, deep amid the woods,
near the only fresh-water pond of the Island, alternately came and
vanished. Much of their spare time was spent in digging for an iron
chest of Spanish doubloons, buried by ancient buccaneers. The Admiral
and his family often rode through the woods to watch the men in their
hopeless work, and to obtain their share of treasure-trove if ever it
were found. One bright morning every digger had fled, leaving a deep
excavation in the ground; but far down on its side, marked out by the
iron rust which had clung to the earth, the outlines of a chest were
visible. A cart track and the ruins of four or five huts are all that
now remain of the site of this mysterious activity. With the departure
of these smugglers disappeared the steady excitement of years, the
perpetual topic of conversation. Thereafter the people could only
question each other about the strange wreck whose rotting timbers were
old a century before. Its last remnants have now been carved into love
tokens.
Saddest were the days when the Admiral strode up and down his imaginary
quarter-deck, his empire a fishing settlement, where boys' wages had
once been three cents a day. Eastport still owned the islands around it.
The people brought in their fish, and sold it for groceries and other
articles at stores where it was credited to them. The little vessels
crossing the bay made it gay for the Admiral's eyes. But his spirit
sank, as he fancied that some boat might be drifting around an inlet,
with its owner frozen to the mast amid the supplies he was bringing to
his family, who were waiting in vain for the father to return; or as he
thought of the burden of this ever-increasing debit and credit system,
or of the perils of the smugglers.
Later, when the duties were taken off by the United States, smuggling
disappeared, and Campobello business went down. Could it ever have been
said to exist? A few persons possessed enough ready money to build the
picturesque weirs which fringe the Island with their stakes, driven
three or four feet apart, and ribboned together with small round poles.
The dried foliage and the dripping seaweed clinging to them give a
ghastly beauty to this living mausoleum of the herring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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