Echoes of Stornoway

Two centuries ago, my great-great grandfather, Donald ‘The Scholar’ Campbell, was one of the pioneer Scots immigrants who settled on the opposite shore of the Great Bras d’Or in a place that came to be known as New Harris. In a 1830 letter to his brother-in-law at Stornoway on the Hebridean island of Lewis, he rhapsodized about all the rewards of life in his new homeland and urged his wife’s brother to join him in New Scotland, and make sure to bring fishing nets while he was at it.

Boularderie Island today is populated by uncounted descendants of Donald Campbell. I am just one of Donald’s numerous great-great-grandsons. Two among the raft I know and care about are Jack Campbell and David MacDonald, two who had never been introduced to one another. I decided it would be a good idea to organize a pilgrimage by three great-great grandsons to the place where our ancestor built a home for his young family in the 1820s. And so it came to pass on a suitably sunny September Sunday. 

Jack had previously led me to the site of Donald Campbell’s homestead. The intervening years have left the site even more choked with windfall and dense undergrowth than it was before. Jack and David are even older than I am, both of them octogenarians. The going got rough; I began to wonder whether this might have been a very bad idea instead of a good one. I imagined having to call Diane or Sheila to report news both bad and good: the bad news is that your spouse is gone; the good news is that his final words were that he loved you more than ever. But we managed to make our way to the old foundation stones, contemplated the life Donald and his children might have lived at New Harris and emerged from the slog in the woods intact. I felt sweet relief; the phone call I rehearsed would not be needed. 

Jack and David found plenty to talk about. I was happy to be a third wheel as they reminisced about people long gone that I never knew. We agreed to extend the historical tour. We carried on from New Harris to New Campbellton, a community of consequence in the boyhood years of both men. Heeding Jack’s instructions, I turned the truck into a laneway, climbed a hill to an old house at the end of it. This is the house where I was born in 1937, Jack said. On the veranda sat a lady in a rocking chair reading a book. I got out of the truck to introduce myself. At the sight of someone as big and ugly as me, she might have reached for a shotgun and invited me to bugger off. But no, this is Cape Breton; once introductions were made she insisted we all come in for tea, cookies and conversation. It was impossible not to be smitten by our hostess. She spoke in a  lovely lilt and told me that she had acquired it at the very place Donald Campbell had directed his letter in 1830: Stornoway on the island of Lewis. You imagine. The ensuing conversation was lively, wide-ranging and very entertaining.

Jack was pleased to learn about the history of the old house. David, a novelist and short-story writer, described his early experience of the house and explained that one of his stories was inspired in part by this very house. Our new friend had us write our names in a notebook. I promised to let her know by email about David’s books and my own. We departed the old place feeling well rewarded for having taken the turn on the laneway to Jack’s birthplace.

That was not the end of the adventure. We carried on to the lovely hilltop cemetery at the end of another New Campbellton laneway, inspected the grave markers of people we once knew and some we never did, including one bearing the name of a young man who went off to war in 1915 and never returned to his New Campbellton family.

All three of Donald’s descendants awarded high marks to our day at New Harris and New Campbellton. When it came time to part, my cousins expressed eagerness about renewing acquaintance in the summer of 2022. I like to think it will come to pass.