Sydney, Nova Scotia

The harbour of Sydney is known from 1597 when Captain Leigh, master of the Hopewell of Bristol, which landed here and carried out some exploration of the island. The town of Sydney itself was founded in 1785 by Colonel Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres (an English soldier whose family had fled there from France) who had been made governor of Cape Breton the year before. There were a few hundred Scots among the first settlers there, a couple of thousand loyalists from New York State.

The first major seaborne emigration from the Highlands began at the start of the nineteenth century with around 35,000 Scots arriving between 1802 and 1850. Figures are hard to come by as many masters in the timber trade, seeking to avoid the bureaucracy of emigration, landed their human cargoes in the coves and inlets of western Cape Breton away from any customs officials. Life was not necessarily easier for those arriving at Sydney. As in most early Scottish emigration, early passengers were relatively wealthy but, by the 1820s, Cape Breton was the shortest, and consequently cheapest, transatlantic journey making it attractive to the poorest emigrants.

Thomas Crawley, a colonial official in Sydney reported the arrival of the Stephen Wright from Tobermory with ‘another load of poor emigrants’ in 1827,

‘We know little of them yet except that they brought with them some bad cases of malignant smallpox. Four are dead. Three more, I understand, are dying, and happy shall we be of the contagion does not spread over the city.’

‘The master of the vessel who is an obstinate brutish fellow, declares he will do nothing towards the relief or recovery of his unhappy living cargo and, in pursuance of that determination, perversely refuses to let air into the hold of the vessel where it must necessarily be pestilential.’

Even at the end of the nineteenth century, Sydney was a sleepy little town and, although there had been mining around Sydney for several centuries, it had never between particularly important. The French had exploited fish and coal in the area to some degree but, when the island was returned to Britain, it had these commodities in abundance. Small mining towns opened up in mid-cebtury but it was not until the 1890s, with the influx of American capital and the amalgamation of various mining companies into the Dominion Coal Company that industrialisation really took off. Between 1890 and the start of the First World War, Sydney's population grew rapidly by immigration and, with the large supply of coal, a steel plant was opened in the town. This obviously contributed to the growth of the harbour which also had military significance being the starting point for many transatlantic convoys in both world wars.

Voyages