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“Saw Mount Surratt [and] Saint Kitts Is.”: Navigation and Notation in an Acadian Merchant Captain’s Voyages from Nova Scotia to the West Indies

Documents authored by eighteenth-century Acadians are rare. The French settlers known as the Acadians had been deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, and Roman Catholic education in the province was soon thereafter reduced to non-existence. The generation of eighteenth-century Acadians born and raised in exile seldom had access to formal education.[1] There were exceptions, however, and some Acadians born in the tumult of the 1750s rose to prominence through lucrat

Colby Gaudet

Aug 13, 202410 min read

Olaudah Equiano's Nova Scotian Interlude, 1758

Olaudah Equiano was an eighteenth-century writer and abolitionist. When he was thirteen and enslaved to a British naval officer, he visited Nova Scotia. He stopped in Halifax and participated in the seige of Louisbourg. In his memoir, he recounted details of those events.

Colby Gaudet

Primary Source: Sarah Bancroft, Antinomian Prophetess of the Annapolis Valley, 1791

In the early 1790s, in the lower Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, there lived a woman known locally as “The Prophetess.” Her name was Sarah Bancroft, and she was an antinomian preacher in the radical New Light tradition of Protestant evangelism. As a prophet, Bancroft preached publicly about the urgency of recognizing and confessing one’s sins in the hopes of experiencing a spiritual conversion (or New Birth) through God’s grace. The New Light message of spiritual rebirth had

Colby Gaudet

Sisters of Charity Burials, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Halifax

In my recent research pursuit of Sister Mary Bernard (1852–1937), who I discussed in my last post, I discovered that she was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery, here in Halifax.

Colby Gaudet

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