Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography

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

Not to be read at one sitting, this work must be digested and savored
over time. Its impressive scholarship (the endnotes cover 38 pages)
should ensure the book’s status as the definitive study on this
subject for years to come.

The author first places Cape Breton’s white settlers in their
European context, showing how the island’s cod fishery was dominated
by Channel Island merchants, who also had a stranglehold on this
industry throughout the Atlantic region—a hold they would maintain
throughout most of the century. The first of several excellent maps in
the book detail, in this first chapter, the distribution of agricultural
land and the layout of the capital, Sydney.

This is not a pleasant story, depicting as it does the plight of
Scottish crofters forced from their homeland by the enclosure movement,
and later the desperate conditions of Irish peasants during and after
the potato famine. The potato blight followed them to Cape Breton, and
rather than just mention this situation, Hornsby explains what this
blight actually was.

We also learn fascinating details of how the advent of canning
transformed the lobster fishery, and how the coal industry came to the
island, along with gross human exploitation and despair. We are not
introduced to many personalities, perhaps because a geographer
concentrates more on macro-events like settlement and migration
patterns. But a few miniature portraits maintain the human
element—like the tale of John Finlay-son, who emigrated to Cape Breton
“in early life” and later left with his family to resettle first in
Australia and, finally, New Zealand. As Hornsby neatly puts it,
“Finlayson’s life encapsulated the complete cycle from western
Scotland, settlement and population growth in Cape Breton, followed by
renewed emigration”; it gives another and earlier version of “going
down the road.”

This work is aimed at the academic world, where it should become a
basic primer for students of Cape Breton’s story. It deserves a
broader audience and undoubtedly will find one.