“Here to stay” A visit to Nova Scotia’s forgotten French Shore STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DARCY RHYNO
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his is Parc de nos Ancêtres (Ancestors’ Park) in Larry’s River. “We’re trying to marry our geography with our history,” Jude Avery says of the site design. Avery is a passionate local historian and retired teacher who chronicles the history of French settlers to Tor Bay in his book The Forgotten Acadians. An interpretive panel stands beside each boulder. The first reads, “This development is a direct result of a cultural awakening.” Avery tells me the seeds of Parc de nos Ancêtres were planted in 2004 when the World Congress of Acadians came to this region for the first time. The Congress is an occasional, massive event that encourages
descendents of Acadians—exiled from the Maritimes by British forces during the Great Expulsion of 1755-63—to rediscover their roots. The 2004 Congress inspired Avery and other community leaders to celebrate what they came to call the forgotten French shore. They did so through three initiatives: the Savalette Festival, Place Savalette and Parc de nos Ancêtres. “It’s a marine cul de sac,” Avery says of Tor Bay, adding that its most prominent feature is the rockiness of the landscape. These boulders in the shape of an anchor tie that landscape to a creation story for the local Acadian population. As Avery tells it, Bishop Plessis of Quebec, who visited Tor Bay in 1815, was shocked by the desperate lives of his parishioners. He pleaded with them to move to another, more prosperous French community on Cape Breton Island. “He said, ‘You’re going to die here. You’ll starve to death.’ One elder answered by saying, ‘We have thrown our anchor. We are here to stay.’”
Ancestor’s Park, Larry’s River; View of Berry Head Lighthouse on the lobster boat tour.
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A scene painted on one of the boulders depicts two men shaking hands. One is Captain Savalette, a fisherman from the Basque region of southern France who summered on the Sugar Islands in the bay. “Captain Savalette made 42 voyages here between 1565 and 1607,” Avery says. “In 1607, right here on this shore, he met what we could refer to as the Canadian founder, Samuel de Champlain.” That was just two years after Champlain built a small, wooden fort at Port Royal, NS and a year before he founded Quebec City, two of the first European settlements in what is now Canada. If Champlain expected to find the shores of Tor Bay and the Sugar Islands empty, he must have been surprised. The Mi’kmaq people were here for untold thousands of years, hunting and gathering each summer. They befriended and traded with Savalette for nearly half a century before Champlain arrived to discover Savalette’s 80-ton galleon at anchor, surrounded by chalupas. These were small sailboats converted from their
