BLUENOSE’S MAIDEN FISHING TRIP nearly ended before it began. It was nighttime in the spring of 1921, and the ship’s crew had just finished their first-day catching cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. At around 2 a.m., to the horror of Captain Angus J. Walters, the watch shouted an alarm: a huge wooden schooner was careening out of the blowing, inky darkness toward their smaller ship. The “free-cussing” Walters ordered the crew overboard in small fishing dories while the watch frantically blew the foghorn. At the very last moment, the oncoming vessel sheared away. “What actually put her clear of us, that she did not cut us in two, is more than I can say,” Walters later said. “That full-rigged ship just cleared us by inches.”
It was a close call — the first of many — in a legacy that, for many Canadians, is gilt with triumph. But like most symbols fated for coins, Heritage Minutes and licence plates, the true story of Bluenose is more complicated. In its lifetime, the ship was a sure-shot, a shipwreck, a phoenix rising from the ashes. Yet even now, in today’s perilous historical moment, Bluenose contains another tale, one with eerie echoes from the past and hopeful, cautionary lessons for the future.
The era in which Bluenose was built was “a time fraught with distressing things,” says HeatherAnne Getson, former historian at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, in Lunenburg, N.S., and author of the book Bluenose: The Ocean Knows Her Name. Communities around the world had been devastated by the human and economic losses of the First World War, which, in a cruel twist, had been followed by the illness and death of millions in the Spanish flu pandemic.
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