ISBN: 9780217341356 / 0217341357 A History of the County of Pictou, Nova Scotia by: George Patterson

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: shape of the harbour, and could it be shown to be in accordance with the Micmac language, we would deem it preferable to the others. But when such difference of opinion... Show More

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: shape of the harbour, and could it be shown to be in accordance with the Micmac language, we would deem it preferable to the others. But when such difference of opinion exists among the learned, we are obliged to leave the matter unsettled. CHAPTER II. PICTOU IN THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD. It is now known that these coasts were visited by the Breton and Basque fishermen during the sixteenth century, and that they traded with the aborigines, supplying- them with various implements in exchange for their furs- It is probable that Pictou harbour was then well known to these hardy mariners. The only fact, however, known to us which seem to afford evidence of their presence, was the discovery by Henry Poole, Esq., on the 17th March,. 1860, of a piece of wood three and a half feet below the surface of the ground, while the men were engaged in cutting a drain, on what is now the Acadia Company's area at the Albion Mines. This piece of wood, three feet long, showed marks of having been cut by an axe, while- the trees growing above the spot were two feet in diameter, and he counted 230 rings of annual growth in the hemlock tree cut down just over it. The first recorded notices of Pictou, however, are to be found in the voyages of the early French visitors, in the early part of the 17th century. We may here give a description of its shores from an account published in the year 1672, by Monsieur Denys, appointed Governor of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the year 1654. " Starting from Cape St. Louis (now Cape George), tenleagues thence we come to a small river, whose entrance has a bar, which sometimes closes it, when the weather is stormy and the sea piles up the sand at its mouth, but when the river swells it passes over and makes an opening. Only small sloops can enter this river, ... Show Less