HISTORY O F EDUCATION I N NEW BRUNSWICK
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CHAPTER 3
THE NOVA SC O T IAN BACKGROUND Nearly two hundred years a fter De Monts and Champlain caught their initial glimpse of the splendid harbour at the mouth of the Saint John river. firs t comers among the Loyalists , scanning the same shores with interes t and anxiety. beheld a scene a lmost as wild and uncult ivated as that wh ich had greet ed the eyes of Champlai n . B ushes and cedar trees still covered the rocks and s w a m ps w h ich surrounded the harbour o f the Saint Joh n . 1 and 'the river valley. for which many of the L oyal ists were bound. " seemed one dense and unending m ass of green" . 2 A recent writer. describing the area which is now New B runs wick as it was in 1 7 6 0 . has called it " a tangled . uninhabited forest massif" . 3 So it had been for centuries. and so closely indeed did it still approximate that d escription at the time of the arrival of the Loyalists that one of the exiles in the van of the migration could say tha t nothing but wilderness met the eye. 4 S trictly speaking. one can appl y the word " uninhabited" to the New Brunsw ick of 1 7 8 3 only in a figurative sense. for besides Acadians and Indians there were several settlements of Engl ish speaking people. Official and complete statistics for these pre-Loyal ist settl ements are not available for a later date than 1 7 6 7 . 5 which may be evidence of the scant attention paid to the area by the government at Halifax. Estima tes of the number of Acadians and Engl ish speaking settlers in New Brunswick in 1 7 8 3 can be found in various studies on Acadian h istory but from our standpoint there is little gain in attempting to track down the n umber of pre-L oyalist settlers to the last man. The significant thing is that in an area of nearly 2 8 . 000 square miles there were no mor'c than 5 .000 inhabitants excl usive of the natives. Thus the Loyalists. being more than double the old inhabitants in number. might well feel possessive about Nova Scotia-north - of - the-bay. and when i t became a separate province in 1 7 8 4 might think of i t . with reaso n . a s "par excellence the p rovince o f the L oyal ists. " 6 O n l y five thousand people ! Yet New Brunswick. to use the present name. had been d iscovered nearly as early as any part of America. nor did it lack fish and furs. both great a ttractions in the early years of North American his tory. Geographicall y. too. i t was nearer to Europe than Quebec or any of the thirteen colonies. Moreover . being separa ted from the St. Lawrence by the Appal achian H ighland . as was New England. it formed an extension of the latter area and invited New England en terprise. But the energies of both French
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Hannay ( 1 ) , V o l . I , p . 134. Creighton . p . 1 71 . Brebner ( I ) , p. 9. Brown, p. 137. Hannay ( I ) , Vol . p . 77. Gilroy. p . of Introduction.
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