Written in the Ruins by Chiasson Paul;

Author:Chiasson, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

10

History Takes a Turn

While researching China’s early maritime adventures, I read through various articles on early Chinese military technology. Some showed images of small Chinese walled structures called fortified manors.[1] These fortified manors were simple, perfectly square enclosures that could protect a few small buildings built within their walls. Each had two entrances on opposite sides of a central open space. These square Chinese fortified manors appeared to be very similar to the eighteenth-century French surveyors’ written description of the small ruins on the shore at Saint Peters, the walled enclosure that Nicolas Denys used for his storehouse and offices. It made me think that when Denys first arrived in the region he may have looked for locations for his fishing and trading business that already had walled and fortified structures in place, buildings that could have been used as secure storage areas. As a businessman, such pre-existing structures would have saved him time and money. I began to search for other places Denys had settled in the region, so I could compare those ruins with what I had found in Saint Peters.

Denys’s nearest settlement to Saint Peters had been built just across the Strait of Canso, the narrow expanse of water that separates Cape Breton from the mainland, on a bay called Chedabucto Bay, at a place now called Guysborough. Even before a fire destroyed much of Saint Peters in 1669, Denys had moved his primary settlement to Guysborough, and because it had become a significant settlement for Denys, I suspected there would still be ruins to see. I planned a visit to Guysborough to see if the ruins Denys had left behind there were anything like the ruins of Saint Peters.

I thought that perhaps Guysborough could give me some insight into what I was seeing on the shore of Saint Peters Bay. The visit was to be a casual couple of days tacked on to a trip to Cape Breton. However, what I was to find would shock me. A radical new gloss on the region’s history has developed there that would send my research on an unsettling voyage into stories of a sixteenth-century Italian family’s lost letters, strange legends of the Knights Templar, holy bloodlines, and a mysterious new image — a flag — that to some now appears to be representing the early history of the region.

It was the summer of 2010, and my fascination with the ancient ruins that might be left in Guysborough had been simmering for months. My research had begun to reveal that the region had a rich history. To the Mi’kmaq, Guysborough was known as Sedabooktook, meaning “running far back.” The Mi’kmaq name describes its position at the far west of the long, thin Chedabucto Bay. The head of the bay is also the mouth of an important river that gives easy access to an inland water system joining together the central heartland of the province. Given its connection to both the coast and the region’s interior, as well as it

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