Marq de Villiers - Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic

Copyright 2004 by Jacobus Communications Corp.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers.

First published in the United States of America in 2004 by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

This paperback edition published by Walker in 2006

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

De Villiers, Marq.

Sable Island : the strange origins and curious history of a dune adrift in the Atlantic / Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

eISBN: 978-0-802-71939-3

1. Sable Island (N.S.)History. 2. Natural historyNova ScotiaSable Island. I. Hirtle, Sheila. II. Title.

F1039.S13D4 2004

971.6'99dc22

2004052049

Book design by Maura Fadden Rosenthal/mspace

Frontispiece map, Sable Island, Nova Scotia, Known Wrecks Since 1583, used by permission of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

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CONTENTS

The Mysterious Presence

A wild and forsaken (though fragile)dune, with a ferocious and romanticreputation

Its Disputed Discovery

Vikings and Basques appear,the first shipwreck is recorded, and"cattel & swyne" are deposited there

Its Glacial Origins

The island is mapped and placedin its ocean neighborhood, alongwith the curiosity called the Gully

Its Feckless Colonizers

Colonizers, hapless castaways, strandedships, curious apparitions, lurid tales,a mad monk

Its Serial Shipwrecks

The deadly effect of Sable's secretive andtreacherous nature, as well as its uniquelystrategic location

Its Tides and Complex Currents

Among the forces that sustain andtransform the island are massivemovements of water

Its Gales and Killer Waves

Deadly storms and storm-borne wavesform and reform the island, tearing atits structure

Its Human Drama

Several times owned and abandoned,Sable's once thriving"beeves" vanishfrom ken

Its Boston Connection

The Reverend Andrew Le Mercier andhis eminent network, the Faneuils andthe Hancocks

Its Acadian Roots

The horses finally appear on Sable,pay off for Hancock's help in expellingthe Acadians

Its Cerious Ecosystem

A surprisingly moderate climate whichallows the abundant presence of freshwater and horse fodder

Its Lurid Rumors

More shipwrecks, reports of wreckers,the sad tale of Mrs. Copeland's ring,the establishment of Sable Station

Its Eccentric Governors

The governors of the HumaneEstablishment, sequestered lunatics, andthe boundless goodwill of Dorothea Dix

Its Savage Storms

Appalling storms tear away at the island,and fishing fieets are battered by the furiousGales of August

Its Wild Creatures

The peculiar fauna of the island and itsocean neighborhood, and the now feralhorses, finally left to fend for themselves

Its Confusing Politics

The Establishment is shut down, Sable'susefulness is disputed, its governanceconfused, its future uncertain

Its very Existence at Risk

Sable may be growing, or it may beshrinking, but in the long term it isprobably doomed to disappear

Its Endless Gales

The horses are still there, humans comeand go, the gales still blow, the stormsstill wound, Sable endures

The Mysterious Presence

A wild and forsaken (though

fragile) dune, with a ferocious

and romantic reputation

Y ou fly into Sable Island when the weather is goodwhich it isn't very oftenin a little twin-prop fixed-wing with softened tires. You take off from Halifax International, waiting your turn in the lineup of 737s bound for Newark or Reykjavik and careful of their superheated turbulence. You peel away toward the city and its great harbor basin, where the British fleets gathered in the 1780s for their assaults on the rebel colonists to the south, and where the grim convoys gathered, Americans and British both, to take help to Nazi-threatened Europe. And then you head out to sea, facing the open ocean, and you see nothing below but a few Panamax container ships settling into their traffic lanesdown the Nova Scotia and Labrador Currents toward the eastern seaboard of the United States, or east to the Gulf Stream that they'll follow to Europe, a trade route now five hundred years old and more. If the timing is right, you may see a twin-rotor helicopter coming in from the deep-sea drilling rigs, but otherwise there's nothing but a few tiny fishing vessels, small specks of white on the sea, heading for the fishing grounds of Banquereau (or Quero, as it is called on the eastern seaboard) and the vanishing cod. The water below is neither blue nor green, but a kind of steely gray roiling sea that could just as easily be magma.

An hour out, the first smudge of Sable will appear over the hump of the nose, just a blurred line on the far horizon, slowly resolving from the brume. As it grows, the curious nature of the island becomes ever clearer. It is a crescent, a deep curve, with its arms, at the east and west, reaching out to the north, the bottom of the bowl sagging toward the equator. There is nothing else showing above the seanothing between you and Europe, nothing between you and the Caribbean but Bermuda, nothing between you and the Arctic but the bleak and windswept Rock of Newfoundland and the ancient ice sheets of Greenland, and the mass of continental North America to the north and west.

If you head in from the northwest, as you would flying from Halifax, the island at first gives an illusion of surprising massiveness. It is a hundred miles or so out into the ocean; the island itself is more than thirty miles long if you measure along the arc, and it is easy to interpret what you see as just the beach of a much larger smudge beyond. But with increasing resolution the illusion vanishes, and it becomes apparent that what you had seen as just a beach was, in fact, the whole island, less than a mile wide at its middle, and shading off into western and eastern arms, each no more than a small boy's stone's throw across. If there is sunshine when you fly in, the island can look oddly tropical, a delicate sliver of solidity, a brilliant white beach in a glittering emerald sea, topped with dunes and greenery and dotted with ponds. Some of the dunes are bald, but most are covered in vegetation. If you didn't know the frigid temperatures of the water or the island s latitude, you could image that the greenery was palm trees or mangrove thickets and the air on the beaches was bikini-balmy. But, of course, there is not a tree on the island, or any growth more than a few feet high, and what you might take at first as sunbathers on the beach are really gray seals, resting after a meal of halibut or pollock in a place safe from sharks.