Today we went out and about to explore Lunenburg,
Founded in 1753, it was named in honour of the Duke of Braunschweig-Lunenburg
who has become King of England in 1727. It was a British colonial
settlement overseen by the British military. The settlers were
Protestants from Germany, Switzerland and France who had been chosen
for their potential loyalty to the British Crown. They were lured
here by the promise of free land. The town grew and thrived during
the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, being a major
base for fishing.
Big whale jaw bones!
The town centre has been well
preserved and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. A walking tour
takes you around some of the best architecture in the centre. We
passed beautiful old wooden houses all with clapboard exteriors.
Some looked very simple, others were really ornate. The downside was
that you could not get to go inside them to see what they ere like
as they are all still lived in today. All around town little plaques
told you who the houses were built for and in which year.
Like the rest of Nova Scotia
Lunenburg also has its fill of churches with Anglicans, Lutherins
and Presbyterians all in evidence. One of the few buildings we could
go into was St John's Anglican church. Gutted by fire in 2001 it has
only recently been re-opened. They managed to preserve most of the
pews, the altar, two stained glass windows and many memorial plaques
but the rest has had to be rebuilt. To maintain its national
heritage status, the new church us an exact replica of the old. Over
the years the church has been extended and re-modeled and even at
one time moved twenty five feet to enable new sections to be added.
Some of the towns buildings
have interesting stories about them. The best for me was the Rectory
for St John's. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an
English organisation who provided funds for the Anglican church's
operation, decided in 1816 that St John's needed its own rectory.
The congregation did not all agree so instead of providing money to
build the rectory that gave the vicars the carpentry skills they
needed and made them build it themselves.
The town's Fisheries Museum
has exhibits about sailing and how it has changed over the years.
There is a small aquarium with samples of the species they catch
here - lobsters, cod, haddock, Atlantic salmon and crabs. The glass
on the tanks was very think and gave you a drunken feeling if you
got too close up to it. We wondered if it had the same effect on the
fish on the other side.
Move over Picasso!
It was quite an interesting
museum. Stef and I both passed the test at one of the computer
booths on what fish was caught, where and when. We also got to draw
our own fish and have them captured on "film". An elderly man was
whiling away the time at one of his hobbies, building miniature
boats. He is half way through a two foot long model of The Bounty
and has around two more years to go before it will be finished. He
was also part way through a model of a French tall ship, again two
more years to go before it will be finished. His process for
building them in miniature exactly matches the way that the
originals were built and he does not cheat by using glue. It is a
real labour of love which I think needs a lot of patience. His reply
was that if you enjoy doing it you do not need patience, which I
suppose is true.
Outside we had a quick look in
the whale room where they had pieced together lots of good footage
of humpbacks into a continuous loop video. I found it mesmerising.
In the boat shop nothing much was happening and there was no boat
building in action. On the quayside we just made it in time for the
demonstration of how they used to launch a ship. The demonstrator
was a very enthusiastic lady who really brought the demonstration to
life. She explained how planks of wood and wooden blocks were used
to support the boat before it was launched. They had a scale model
for the demonstration and she got people from the audience,
including Stef involved in the process. Once the brakes had been
removed the ship, and the supporting planks of wood, slid gracefully
down into the water. The wood was reused in future launches and the
ship then went on to be fitted out. She also explained that the
number thirteen (or twelve plus one as she would say) was bad luck
and was never mentioned. If a ship's name was thirteen characters
long they would ad in a silent letter to make if fourteen.
We carried on down to the look
at the Theresa E Connor (the "E" is a silent fourteenth letter) an
old fishing schooner with dories stacked up on deck. It was very
clear on deck, nothing to get in the way of the fishermen at work.
Down below in the bow was the galley and living quarters for most of
the crew. Each had their own bunk along the sides of the ship and
there was a central dining table set up and ready for dinner.
Midships was used for storing the fish. They were only stacked up to
three feet high one of top of the other. Any higher and the weight
would crush the fish at the bottom of the stack. Aft were the
quarters of the Captain and the rest of the crew. Still simple
but more luxurious than those in the bow.
Back inside the museum there
was a display charting the changes and improvements in fishing
techniques. In the times of the dory a key change was moving from a
single hook line to trawler lines, each bearing thousands of hooks.
This significantly increased yield until the next advance,
mechanised trawlers.
In the vessel gallery we
joined a talk about the Bluenose, an apparently world famous boat
that neither of us had heard of before. The Nova Scotians have a
friendly rivalry with their counterparts in New England. In 1920, a
local businessman fuelled the competition by putting up four
thousand dollars in prize money and a big silver sup to establish a
racing series known as the International Fisherman's Trophy. To be
eligible to enter, boats had to be working fishing vessels and they
raced over a relatively short course. Elimination races were held in
both the US and Canada with the national finalists them competing
for the Cup.
In the first race the
Canadians were well and truly trounced by the Americans and lost the
prize money and the trophy. Not happy, and not wanting it to happen
again, they rapidly set to work building a new boat. The Captain,
Angus J Walters, oversaw the construction and required changes to be
made, most noticeable raising the bow by eighteen inches. This was
to give the crew more space inside the galley and was thought by the
builders to be a bad move because of the extra wood and therefore
weight that it added. In practice, it helped to keep more water out
of the boat, therefore improving overall efficiency and speed.
The boat was finished in a
matter of months to ensure that it was ready for the next fishing
season. It had to be used for fishing for a least one season to
qualify for the Trophy competition. The name, Bluenose, comes from
the Bluenosers nickname given to the crewmen aboard the schooners
that carried blue skinned potatoes from Nova Scotia to ports in the
US. In her first race in October 1921, Bluenose won the Trophy and
continued to do so each year until 1938 when schooners ceased to be
used for fishing. Local legend has it that Captain Walters was
good at finding tactics to tease out just a little extra speed. One
of them was to get the crew to o their stuff lying on the deck to
reduce the wind resistance of their bodies. In 1942 Bluenose was
sold to the West India Trading company as a cargo ship and in
January 1946 it hit a reef off Haiti and sank. A sad ending for such
a momentous ship.
The top floor of the museum
had exhibits about the illicit rum running trade during the
prohibition era. I had not realised that Canada was also an alcohol
free zone. Some provinces did not relax prohibition until well into
the 1940's. There was also a small cinema here showing a film that
had been taken on board a tall ship that was travelling round Cape
Horn and then up to Chile. Probably shot in the 1920's the crew had
no safety equipment but obviously still had to clamber about and up
the masts in full gale force conditions. Some of them film was shot
from the top of the mast. Seeing the decks totally awash with water,
it was amazing that the ship survived the voyage.
All museumed out we went in
search of the local library to use its Community Access Programme
internet connection. The ladies at the library were very chuffed
that they had a free wireless connection. It was good but I did not
have the heart to tell them it was not a patch on Fredericton where
the whole of the downtown area has free wireless internet access! We
had dinner in town at a place full of Cloggies before working our
way back up the campsite and to bed.
