Sable Island People

Lyall Campbell – Sable Island’s Historian

(March 2006)

In the foreword to Bruce Armstrong’s book Sable Island (1981), Thomas H. Raddall wrote,

“In the course of time and human whimsy a lot of legend has crept into the history. Even so solemn a scribe as the Reverend George Patterson could not resist mingling a bit of fancy with his facts here and there. Nor could Judge Haliburton, or for that matter nearly everyone else who has talked or written about Sable in time past.”

Indeed many popular (past and contemporary) versions of the Sable Island ‘story’ introduce fanciful characters and events and are threaded with exaggeration and speculation. The real story of Sable Island needs no such embellishment: the island’s history is fascinating and dramatic – and relevant. Considering the present-day questions about both the value of a human presence on the island, and the long-term future for the Sable Island Station, Sable’s history is most instructive.

Historian and author Lyall Campbell is one of the few authorities on the history of Sable Island - he is probably the world’s expert on Sable Island of the 16th through 19th centuries.

Lyall was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He attended Bloomfield and Chebucto schools in Halifax, and then Queen Elizabeth High School. After completing high school, Lyall was not ready to attend university – he wanted to travel across Canada. So after working for a year at Simpsons-Sears, Lyall hitchhiked to Toronto where he worked in a warehouse for two months. Then he hitched a ride to Edmonton and took a job with Alberta Government Telephones. In April he moved on to British Columbia where he worked in the Forest Service. On turning twenty-one, Lyall decided to go to university. He hitched back to Halifax to begin a general BA at Dalhousie University. He had no specific goal in mind, but he wanted to learn. He majored in English, philosophy and history – the last choice was partly pragmatic, as backup for a role as teacher. During his three years of study, Lyall worked in the Dalhousie Library. Upon graduating, he earned funds for a trip to Europe by working on a survey crew in Newfoundland. In February 1959, he travelled by freighter to England. Lyall spent two months hitching through France, Italy, England, and Scotland, and toured art galleries, museums, historic sites, and cathedrals. In May he returned to Halifax and married. Then he and his wife Sheila moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, to take summer courses in education. In the autumn, both accepted teaching positions in the town of Dalhousie, New Brunswick. There they saved enough money to return to Halifax to resume studies at Dalhousie University. Lyall began a masters degree in history. His thesis had to be based on original documents, which meant using the provincial archives then housed on the Dalhousie campus. So it was necessary to find a topic in Nova Scotia’s history.

Lyall was not particularly interested in Nova Scotian history. At that time, it seemed to be merely a lesser version of Canadian history, concerned chiefly with politics and economics, punctuated with wars and battles, all of which had little to do with real people. (The situation today is quite different.) Also, Lyall had a strong interest in European history, a result of both his travels in Europe, and his exposure to the subject as taught by George Wilson, “a professor with a romantic turn of mind,” who provided rich and lengthy reading lists for his students. Such background material was not available for Canadian history. Also, because of his experience in Europe, Lyall tended to view history with a bias toward “culture.”

In 1961, in search of a thesis topic, Lyall approached Bruce Fergusson (Charles Bruce Fergusson, Archivist of Nova Scotia 1956-1977) for suggestions. Fergusson proposed several topics, including the Canso Causeway, and the Post Office in Nova Scotia. Lyall rejected them all until Sable Island came up, and he decided to focus on Sable’s history. (Fergusson was later to write The Status of Sable Island, a review of boundaries and jurisdiction and their significance in discussions of offshore mineral rights). Lyall spent much time at the archives avoiding Fergusson, who was “a little crusty,” but eventually Lyall embraced the subject, and got down to work. In 1962 he completed a 250 page thesis titled History of Sable Island Before Confederation.

With the MA completed, Lyall was ready to leave Nova Scotia again. He and Sheila moved to Charlottetown, to teach at Prince of Wales College. Sheila taught English; Lyall history. There he had a conflict with the administration about his marking – his standards were considered too high. Lyall loved teaching but disliked the system, so he decided to become a librarian and went to the University of Toronto for a degree in library science. He was eager to be a reference librarian because he felt it would provide opportunities to teach young people.

Lyall ‘revisited’ Sable Island while working as a reference librarian in the Sigmund Samuel Library at the University of Toronto. There he used the Island as a subject to learn and practise methods in library science. He found so much interesting information that he began researching the subject for himself whenever he had the opportunity. He gathered plenty of material, and began to make the history of Sable Island a lifelong study.

Lyall quit the University of Toronto, and he and Sheila moved to England. There he worked for a year as a librarian in charge of the reading room and reference services in the University of London Institute of Education Library. When health problems began to trouble his wife, they returned to Canada. Lyall found a job as History Librarian in the London Public Library in Ontario. While he was there, the Audubon Society sponsored a slide show on the birds of Sable Island. The speaker was D. R. Gunn, Superintendent of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. Although he did not cover the Island’s history, Gunn later sent Lyall photocopies of published material he had collected. During this time Lyall also met Dr. W.W. Judd who visited the Island in 1945. Judd gave Lyall details of the wreck of a Liberator bomber on Sable that year. From London, Lyall made a visit to Boston to do research at the State Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Part of Lyall’s job at the library was to review books for purchase. Although his area of expertise was history, he had access to all reviews and came to appreciate “popular” materials.

While at the LPL, Lyall applied for a Canada Council grant. He was awarded the grant in 1969, and, after having worked in the library for two and a half years, he left to start on his first book about Sable Island. Sheila wanted to live in Montreal, so they moved. During the next few years, Lyall researched his subject at McGill University, using old newspapers, journals, and “rare” books, and also travelled to Ottawa to do a week’s research at the National Archives. During this time Lyall held several jobs, including Librarian in Charge of Public Services at the McGill Law Library. In 1974, his first book, Sable Island, Fatal and Fertile Crescent, was published.

This book begins with the loss of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ship Delight in 1583, and concludes with the end of the shipwreck era, marked by the wreck of the Manhasset in 1947. During the late 1960s, exploration for offshore oil had made Sable Island newsworthy. Lyall’s father kept him informed with clippings from the Halifax papers. Also, increasing interest in the rare Ipswich Sparrow generated various magazine articles. Lyall was not concerned with the high-profile conflicts between the federal and provincial governments at the time, but he saw that Sable Island had become relevant in the media, and that many reports distorted Sable history. He wanted to reveal the truth about the Island’s past, to show how much effect this obscure location had had on the wider world.

Although he envisaged a public library audience for his book, Lyall was told by a history professor friend that his writing “fell between two stools” - not scholarly enough for academics, but too high-toned for the general public. Publishers in Toronto seemed to agree. After more than a year of rejections, Lyall contacted Lancelot Press in Hantsport, Nova Scotia. He did this on the advice of Phyllis Blakeley, described by Lyall as “the most helpful person I ever knew at the archives.” She said the publisher would keep the book in print. However, the editor insisted that Lyall reduce the book to half its length and remove the footnotes. In six weeks Lyall prepared a new version in as popular a style as he could manage. The book is a slim version of his original manuscript, and Lyall feels that the process resulted in a few errors. One of these – regarding the absence of schools on Sable Island – he learned of from Barbara Christie. At the time, Lyall had little awareness of the realities of the publishing world.  As a writer, he centered his world view entirely on Sable Island.

In 1977, Lyall and Sheila moved to Vancouver. Sheila again had health problems, and Lyall began looking for employment. He was limited in the library work he could find because he had not upgraded his “professional qualifications.” But he managed to find a position as a writer and editor with a small publisher. The company had a large grant from the Province of British Columbia for an educational project on Captain Cook and the Nootka. Lyall was put in charge of the project, and his team completed the work before the deadline. Lyall was promoted to senior editor, however, within a year the company was bankrupt.

Lyall then found a job with the Open Learning Institute in Richmond, BC. It was a new distance education facility (which preceded Alberta’s Athabaska University). Lyall was hired as a copy editor and wrote a style guide for all courses produced at OLI. In his first year, became a course designer. The basic duty of this role was to take a course from manuscript through printing. His OLI work began his research into preferred forms of writing in the English language. At the time there was no standard Canadian authority. He became sensitive to such matters as the difference between formal, informal, and colloquial language; how idiom differed from cliché; and use of the serial comma. Since that time he has studied every new stylebook that has appeared in the local library. These studies have affected his own writing. He sees the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as a “godsend” and uses it as his basic authority for language.

In the summer of 1984, after about five years at OLI, Lyall quit and moved to Halifax. There he focused on Sable Island. To organize his collected material, and to practice the discipline of writing, Lyall wrote a number of manuscripts. These drafts, which were not intended for publication, included “Coastguard work at Sable Island 1801-1830,” “The loss and gain of the Hannah and Eliza,” “Sable Island as a penal colony,” “The Sable Island Establishment and the loss of the Martha,” “Economics of the Sable Establishment,” “American Shipwrecks at Sable Island,” and “Fishermen at Sable.” Some of this material was later used in his second book. Searching for “human interest” stories, Lyall also prepared a thorough analysis of James Morris’s journals and letters.

Although Lyall received a Canada Council grant to write his first book, he never got one to support his research. So his life became a pattern of working in libraries and publishing companies, and then leaving the jobs when he had saved up enough to quit and return to his Sable Island studies. The number of boxes of documents to be packed and unpacked grew with every move. Eventually, looking for a city where low living expenses would allow him to devote his time to research and writing, Lyall settled in Edmonton, Alberta.

Lyall has spent 15 years working as an editor, and many years studying the use of language. His life is writing, and even though his work has not been supported by the usual funding agencies, he has always had a sense of himself as a researcher and writer. Indeed, that Lyall is a researcher and writer is demonstrated by his persistence and his dedication to the studies even in the absence of support from the agencies that usually fund such work. Lyall’s life is writing, and his life’s subject is Sable Island. But his Sable Island is not the Island as it is today.

Lyall Campbell’s Sable Island – the place in his mind’s eye and imagination - is the Sable Island of the 16th to 19th centuries. His Island is a landscape where walrus herds haul out on the beaches, feral cattle and horses wander in valleys between high hills, remnants of wrecked vessels are scattered along the shoreline, and occasional outposts shelter hardy men there to harvest furs and hides. And it is a landscape where a life-saving station is established and stands to provide rescue and shelter to victims of shipwreck. The people of his Island include the squatters who exploit the wildlife and shipwrecks, and the multi-skilled men who live and work at the station. Some of these men have their families with them, and at times there are as many children as adults on Sable Island. Lyall’s Island is one where cranberries are harvested, and horses rounded up, for sale on the mainland, and where residents fish for flatfish and eels in a Wallace Lake so large that it can be sailed for more than half the length of the Island.

Lyall writes for students and the general reader (see Bibliography, below). Articles written in 1975 and 1976 were expanded versions of subjects covered in the 1974 book (which, alas, is no longer in print). In 1994 his second book, Sable Island Shipwrecks - Disaster and Survival at the North Atlantic Graveyard, was published. As indicated by its title, the 1994 book focused on shipwrecks, and it included ten pages of notes. His 1962 thesis, a copy of which is held at the Nova Scotia Archives, has been used by many others writing about the Island, all too often without crediting Lyall’s thesis as their source.

Lyall has been working on a manuscript about Joseph Darby (Sable Superintendent 1830-1848) but he doubts that it will have a wide enough appeal for publishers. He is presently completing a manuscript having a working title of  “The Dawning of Sable Island, 1500 to 1800”. Here “dawning” refers to the beginning of human experience on Sable Island.

Although he has no strong desire to visit present-day Sable Island, Lyall’s interest and concern about the future of the Island persist. He first voiced these concerns in the last two chapters of his 1974 book. In those chapters he reviews both the politics of ownership and jurisdiction, and the increasing activity of the oil industry on and around Sable Island in the 1960s and early 1970s. He also discusses the arguments for special status.

“A joint brief of two organizations, the Nova Scotia Resources Council and the National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada, was sent to the federal government in May 1971. It urged that Sable be given formal status as a park or reserve so as to protect it and even restore it as a unique Canadian heritage. The sponsors thought that any well-worded federal law declaring such status would be sufficient to protect the island and its wildlife” (Campbell 1974, page 93).

Now, thirty years after Lyall presented these issues in his book, this subject is still relevant. The Government of Canada, having suspended plans to close the Sable Station in early 2005, is reviewing the Island’s status and considering various means to ensure long-term protection and conservation for Sable Island. In 1974, Lyall wrote,

“It could be that the politicians have a more intimate knowledge of Canadian public opinion, that they know how few Canadians really care about Sable Island. Perhaps they realize that so long as nobody tries anything as grossly unpopular as slaughtering the animal life outright or shipping off all the horses, there is nothing to worry about. The odd little fuss will blow over as it has always done” (Campbell 1974, page 95).

Although questions about the future of Sable Island continue today, Canadians are now far better informed, and many consider the Island to be a unique and greatly cherished part of Canada’s cultural and biological heritage. This increased awareness, appreciation, and sense of responsibility, owes much to the research and writings of Lyall Campbell.

Lyall Campbell has written for this website an account of Sable Island's First People and Livestock.

Click on thumbnails for more information

Shomette, D.G. 1994. The American Neptune 55(4): 370-372. (A review of Lyall’s 1994 book.)

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