Gilligan, E. 1948. Storm at Sable Island. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. 368 pages.

Extract, page 28: “Sable Island! Between Western Bank and blue Banquereau she lies, in her curving miles of black sand and yellow sand; and the fog and gales pour over her endlessly, even in the heat of short summer, and the plowing gales make her changeful, ever advancing her shoals and bars or drawing them in, so that no man knows from one day to the other the fathoms he will find there to flee away in. A hundred tales are told of cause and effect, of irresistible tides flowing clockwise and counterwise, of seas that come fountaining black and muddy out of the blue and hurl vessels on to the East bar or the West. And others say that beneath the dunes and the marshes of wild hay that bloom in summer there are rifts and quantities of magnetic sands which strike subtly at compass needles and thus lead a vessel to her early and waterless grave. There’s no telling! None. It is a land shunned by all and never visited except by those few Nova Scotians whose business it is to keep the two fair lights burning, and to rescue, if they can, the unfortunates who are driven, season after season, into her fatal clasp. Yet there are many bare miles of her, destitute of food and water, the haunt of nothing but nimble wild horses, where a vessel may come to her final grief and die and vanish in the sucking sands without ever a trace or knowledge of her passing. “Lost on Sable Island” – there’s a legend written many a time, and scores of times, on the ledgers of Gloucester, and carried many a bitter and lonely year in the hearts of women and children.”