The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.] — John Shaqi
The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
History
The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]
Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
American loyalists; United Empire loyalists
The most careful analysis of the Loyalist immigration into the Maritime
Provinces has placed the total number of immigrants at about 35,000.
These were in settlements scattered broadcast over the face of the map.
There was a colony of 3000 in Cape Breton, which afforded an ideal field
for settlement, since before 1783 the governor of Nova Scotia had been
precluded from granting lands there. In 1784 Cape Breton was erected
into a separate government, with a lieutenant-governor of its own; and
settlers flocked into it from Halifax, and even from Canada. Abraham
Cuyler, formerly mayor of Albany, led a considerable number down the
St Lawrence and through the Gulf to Cape Breton. On the mainland of
Nova Scotia there were settlements at Halifax, at Shelburne, at Fort
Cumberland, at Annapolis and Digby, at Port Mouton, and at other places.
In what is now New Brunswick there was a settlement at Passamaquoddy Bay,
and there were other settlements on the St John river extending from
the mouth up past what is now the city of Fredericton. In Prince Edward
Island, then called the Island of St John, there was a settlement which
is variously estimated in size, but which was comparatively unimportant.
The most interesting of these settlements was that at Shelburne, which is
situated at the south-west corner of Nova Scotia, on one of the finest
harbours of the Atlantic seaboard. The name of the harbour was originally
Port Razoir, but this was corrupted by the English settlers into Port
Roseway. The place had been settled previous to 1783. In 1775 Colonel
Alexander McNutt, a notable figure of the pre-Loyalist days in Nova
Scotia, had obtained a grant of 100,000 acres about the harbour, and had
induced about a dozen Scottish and Irish families to settle there. This
settlement he had dignified with the name of New Jerusalem. In a short
time, however, New Jerusalem languished and died, and when the Loyalists
arrived in May 1783, the only inhabitants of the place were two or three
fishermen and their families. It would have been well if the Loyalists
had listened to the testimony of one of these men, who, when he was asked
how he came to be there, replied that ‘poverty had brought him there, and
poverty had kept him there.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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