A maritime historian explores more than a century of adventure and tragedy on the waters off Prince Edward Island, from 1775 to 1899.
Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wooden sailing ship was a vital transportation link along Canada’s Atlantic coast. Self-sacrifice, daring, skill, wreck and rescue are all part of the history of these ships and the heritage of the villages that knew them. With extensive research and vivid prose, local maritime historian Robert C. Parsons documents all of this in Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island.
Prince Edward Island’s legacy of tales from this era of sail is great. There is the wreck of the immigrant-laden Elizabeth at Cascumpec, where the castaways were saved by a Native, and the famous story of PEI’s Jessy thrown onto the shores of deadly St. Paul Island. Then there is the strange tale of Rival caught in the “Yankee Gale” and the SS Quebec’s demise in the death-dealing tides of East Point.
PEI ships were involved in mystery, mayhem and wrecks in practically all parts of the North Atlantic: gripped in the sandbars of Sable Island, plundered on the rugged coasts of Newfoundland, drifting with no crew off Ireland, wrecked on Nova Scotia’s shores, stranded on the Magdalenes, and “Lost with Crew” in the vast Atlantic.
