The Hector: Nova Scotia Poem by Sheena Blackhall

In seventeen seventy three by Western Ross
The Hector dropped its anchor off the land
Where crofter-fishermen lived at a loss
Two men professed their fate to understand
Pagan and Witherspoon offered a berth
Free passage to the far Canadian strand
A farm, a year's provisions, fertile earth
All this they promised to the Ross-shire men
At last…a country that rewarded worth
And so they came, from shieling and from glen
Bringing their families to the waiting boat
MacKays and Frasers from each cloudy Ben
Grants, Chisholms, clad in torn plaid and coat
McKenzies, Camerons and Pattersons
McLeods, McLennans, owning scarce a groat
Douglases, Murrays, Munroes Mathiesones
And one lone piper playing a lament
To kittle up the blood in Highland bones
The old Dutch ship was leaky, creaky, spent
And in this ailing tub they took to sea
Enduring storms that cracked its masts and rent
The straining sails. After this purgat'ry
The children, Finlay, Angus, Janet, Kate
Succumbed to smallpox, hunger, dysentery
Folk lived by eating worms, mouldy oatcake
Come into Nova Scotia at Pictou
With eighteen dead. The Hector, two weeks late
No cleared land waiting. Disillusion grew
The forests, tall and frosty, winter near
And no provisions, plans and hopes askew
But they endured. Made of the past, a bier
Put down new roots, these seeds of Highland sprays
From this small offshoot, thousands flourish here
In Nova Scotia's mighty, wooded ways
Whose mist enfolds the ghosts of Gaelic lays