On May 4, 1783, my ancestor William Fraser landed in Shelburne after a nine-day sail from New York City, part of a fleet of thirty ships carrying about 3,000 desperate Loyalists to Nova Scotia.

Fraser, born in Scotland, worked in the engineering department in New York, but he, his four brothers, and their families had to flee revolutionary mobs that were confiscating property and tarring and feathering the war’s losers.

Shelburne was overcrowded with the displaced—both Black and white—living on rations from the Crown while they urgently cut down trees to build houses for themselves in their new home.

Fraser died soon after he arrived in Shelburne, leaving a son, John. The boy was only three when his mother also passed away. Though he had four uncles in town, life must have been hard for him because when he was twelve or thirteen, he stowed away on a fisherman’s sailboat bound for St. Margarets Bay, up the coast toward Halifax.

That fisherman, James Boutillier, took the boy in. The Boutilliers, French Protestants, had come to Lunenburg in 1750 to escape the threat of persecution by Catholics. John became part of the family, and he married Boutillier’s daughter, Susanna, in 1809. When their daughter, Sarah, was nineteen, she married Thomas Maher, a twenty-year-old Irish cobbler recently arrived from County Kilkenny, where Catholics were living under British oppression.

He was my five-times-great-grandfather, and today, I catch mackerel and sail in the same waters where he and the Boutilliers caught mackerel and sailed their boats.

These people were all refugees—not much different, in a way, from the Ukrainians and Syrians who have come here. They all found prosperity in Nova Scotia: peace, order, the chance to make lives without much sectarian or political violence and to fish whenever they felt moved to do so.

It seems noteworthy to me that a Catholic who fled Protestant domination would marry the daughter of Protestants who had fled Catholic domination. They were sensibly turning their backs on the hatreds of the old world.

I have been thinking about their lives more often since United States president Donald Trump started calling former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “governor” and threatening to make Canada the fifty-first state. The prospect of living under the Stars and........

© The Walrus