Post by Joe on Feb 21, 2007 0:12:37 GMT -5
Sable Island
© Paul Illsley
© Paul Illsley
Located 300 km east-southeast of Halifax are the crescent-shaped, shifting sand dunes of Sable Island.
It is here that the Labrador current meets the warm gulf stream creating the fogs that give all sailors nightmares. Although the island is charted on most maps it is not clearly defined because it is elusive and constantly shifting, it has been called the world's fastest moving island. The island is 20 miles long; one mile wide; and in some places 85 feet high.
As early as the 1500s, there were numerous attempts to settle Sable Island. None proved successful, due to the harsh conditions of the environment and the difficulty of travel to and from.
The history of the island and its mostly short-lived settlements indicates that while Sable was sometimes a destination in and of itself, more often it was at best an inconvenient physical impediment between points A and B, or at worst a fatal end to a ship’s voyage. The island is famous as a site of more shipwrecks than landings.
In the late 1700s, rumours of plunderers who preyed on wrecks prompted the Nova Scotia legislature–with the necessary endorsement of England (the island was British under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, until Confederation)–to establish in 1801 the first permanent station for the purpose of providing a lifesaving “Humane Establishment” on the island. The prime mover behind this impetus was Sir John Wentworth, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. The island’s first superintendent was James Morris, who landed in October 1801 with his wife, children, and a handful of male staff. Warning flagstaffs were erected, and beach patrols implemented. Light stations were eventually put up in the late 1800s, although they had to be moved as the sands underneath them shifted away.
By the mid 18th century, livestock herds had been introduced by settlers to the island (later to perish or be consumed) for about 200 years. The island’s famous ponies are likely descended from animals that were part of livestock including horses, cows, sheep, goats and hogs landed on the island by Thomas Hancock of Boston in the late 1750s. The animals may have been confiscated by the British from Acadians during their expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in the mid 18th century.
Sable Island commissioners continued to be appointed until 1960, when the "Establishment" was shut down. Since that time, residents have remained on the island, but in other capacities such as staffing the Sable Station. The last shipwreck on the island occurred in 1947 and improvements in navigation technology rendered the need for a lifesaving station on the island obsolete.
The plight of the Sable ponies also seized the public imagination when the Canadian government proposed to sell them in 1960. The horses gained protected status in 1961 by an amendment to the Canada Shipping Act.
In 1999 the Sable Island Preservation Trust was formed. Environment Canada maintains a station on Sable, and the island is now a site where the human presence is monitored and limited to environmental and natural history research aimed at preserving the island’s ecosystem and the sea, air and land life that rely on it.
