Brier Island: Land's End in the Bay of Fundy

Richard Wilbur is Supervisor of the Legislative Research Service at the
New Brunswick Legislature and author of The Rise of French New
Brunswick.

If you’ve never heard of Brier Island, this account not only will
inform, it will place it on your itinerary as a “must see.” Every
potential tourist site should be blessed with so gifted and informed a
publicist as Phil Shea. A descendant of the island’s first settler,
Shea was raised on Brier Island and later became a widely travelled
journalist and travel writer who obviously has kept close ties with his
rocky homeland, which juts out from the Bay of Fundy into the Gulf of
Maine.

Besides the author’s own narrative skills and love of his subject,
the account owes much to the information Shea gathered from the local
“yarn-spinners”—the fiddlers, fishermen, and others to whom he has
dedicated this handsome little volume. Another bonus is proof of
Shea’s photographic skills: photos “by the author” are
interspersed with others gleaned from local archives and the files of
the thriving Brier Island Ocean Study, organized in 1884 to gather
information on several endangered species of whales that frequent the
area.

The 13 chapters in this 120-page volume, arranged more or less
chronologically, are uneven in both length and content. Probably because
of the current interest, “Whales and Other Visitors” is the longest
and best illustrated. It is all the more appreciated after the reader is
introduced to the island’s violent nautical history—which is filled
with wrecks and wreckers, rumrunners, and many other colorful citizens.
Shea includes a chapter on its most famous sailor, Captain Joshua
Slocum, the first person to sail alone around the world.

Besides whale-watchers, Brier Island has long attracted birders, and in
1988 two conservation groups, one in the United States and the other in
Canada, pooled their resources to buy some 1200 acres on the back of the
island as a permanently protected area bordered by six miles of ocean.
Such a facility is one inducement to the thousands of visitors who find
their way to this remote island each year. Along with their nature
guidebooks, they would be well advised to take along this great little
volume.