Island Keepers: Dangerous Islands and Determined Men

Alexander Craig, a journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec, was a professor of
Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.

After homemade strawberry ice cream, on his “list of the ten best
things,” Peter Gzowski (of Morningside fame) lists Sable Island. He
adds, “I was there in the summer of 1986, filming a television program
that was never shown.” We won’t see that tv program, but this
history can give us the flavor of Sable Island, and of the neighboring
Scaterie, with which Sable Island vied for the dubious title
“Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

Mitcham tells the story of two of Cape Breton’s largely unsung
heroes, the brothers James and Philip Dodd. Working from a wide range of
logs, memoirs, reports, correspondence, and other historical data, he
shows how these men, with the support of such influential Nova Scotians
as Joseph Howe and Samuel Cunard, devoted much of their lives to the
difficult business of running the livesaving operations the time and
place so much required.

The book is well supplemented with appendices detailing the history of
the islands, the fisheries disputes, and the many wrecks and the fate of
their survivors.

Islands have a peculiar fascination for the traveller. Lurking beneath
their attraction and isolation lies the savagery of nature, and above
all of the sea. Mitcham shows how two Victorian heroes did their best to
tame the terrors that the ocean let loose on those who worked on it.