In my post about Halifax’s first hanging, I suggested that Halifax life in its earliest years must have been terribly isolated. Not exactly a dramatic assertion. It was so small, and surrounded by thick pine woods, beyond which lay a long and difficult journey to any other settlement. Pictured in the header is one of the blockhouses which encircled Halifax in its earliest days — you can see all the newly-felled trees which were cut down both to build it and make room for it.
These defence buildings were scarcely more than outposts, and were the only defence the first Haligonians had. There were vastly more Acadians and Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia than there were Englishmen in Halifax, and no one was exactly chuffed with the creation of this new British town. Cornwallis had little interest in making peace.
“… [T]he town of Halifax in 1750 is just one year old. Bearing little resemblance to the modern city, it is a muddy, hand-hewn place, pitched camp-like between Citadel Hill and the harbour, and smelling of equal parts open sewer and wood smoke. Street performers, cafes, and baskets of French fries are nowhere to be seen on the waterfront. Instead, dock workers and sailors work like animals within sight of a stocks and gallows. The great star-shaped stone fort commanding Citadel Hill today would not be built for another century, and the town’s two thousand or so inhabitants seek protection behind a wooden perimeter wall. The Royal Navy guards the saltwater approach, but beyond the town’s pickets a dense forest covers much of the province.
“Even seventy years later Joseph Howe would remark that ‘to plunge ten yards into the forest would as effectually shut us out from the world as if there was not one cultivated acre on this side of the Atlantic.'”
The pioneer experience of isolation, expanse and wilderness interests me insofar as it makes me curious about a person’s mental health. What can that kind of isolation and instability lead us to do?