After the evacuation of New York, therefore, the number of refugee Loyalists who came to Nova Scotia was small and insignificant. In 1784 and 1785 there arrived a few persons who had tried to take up the thread of their former life in the colonies, but had given up the attempt. And in August 1784 the _Sally_ transport from London cast anchor at Halifax with three hundred destitute refugees on board. ‘As if there was not a sufficiency of such distress’d objects already in this country,’ wrote Edward Winslow from Halifax, ‘the good people of England have collected a whole ship load of all kinds of vagrants from the streets of London, and sent them out to Nova Scotia. Great numbers died on the passage of various disorders—the miserable remnant are landed here and have now no covering but tents. Such as are able to crawl are begging for a proportion of provisions at my door.’ But the increase of population in Nova Scotia from immigration during the years immediately following 1783 was partly counterbalanced by the defections from the province. Many of the refugees quailed before the prospect of carving out a home in the wilderness. ‘It is, I think, the roughest land I ever saw’; ‘I am totally discouraged’; ‘I am sick of this Province’—such expressions as these abound in the journals and diaries of the settlers. There were complaints that deception had been practised. ‘All our golden promises,’ wrote a Long Island Loyalist, ‘are vanished in smoke. We were taught to believe this place was not barren and foggy as had been represented, but we find it ten times worse. We have nothing but his Majesty’s rotten pork and unbaked flour to subsist on.... It is the most inhospitable clime that ever mortal set foot on.’ At first there was great distress among the refugees. The immigration of 1783 had at one stroke trebled the population of Nova Scotia; and the resources of the province were inadequate to meet the demand on them. ‘Nova Scarcity’ was the nickname for the province invented by a New England wit. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that some who had set their hand to the plough turned back. Some of them went to Upper Canada; some to England; some to the states from which they had come; for within a few years the fury of the anti-Loyalist feeling died down, and not a few Loyalists took advantage of this to return to the place of their birth.