A Navigator for the Ages

Captain James Cook has insinuated himself into my consciousness during the past two years. While we wandered in Alaska, his name popped up in Anchorage and the coast south of that city. Cook Inlet, Turnagain Arm, and a dozen other names up in that remote part of the world highlighted the influence of Cook's voyages.

Then, we went to the end of the eastern part of the North American continent and Capt. Cook made his presence felt many times. He mapped the entire coast of Newfoundland and created charts that were so accurate they were used until just recently.

All of this created a hunger in me for more information about Cook. I remember learning about this great navigator back in school. It it was fairly scimpy in details. The easiest way was to visit Amazon.com and search for Cook biographies. There are a handful and I chose one by a rather stuffy Englishman, Richard Hough, who did a pretty thorough job.

Cook was born in Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father came from Scotland but crossed the border when he married. James took up the seafaring life aboard a coal-carrying boat that ranged up and down the east coast of England. He was essentially self-taught and he realized he wanted more than to be a coast wanderer.

Britain ruled the seas back then so he naturally joined the Royal Navy. It didn't take him long to make a mark with the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord ordered his captain to knock off the French in Quebec and Nova Scotia. That's where Cook began to latch on to the idea of charting the coast as well as the St. Laurence River. His charts are spectacularly detailed and accurate.

When he returned home, he took a wife, got her pregnant in time to be ordered off to sea in the HMS Endeavour for a circumnavigation of the world, via Cape Horn, Tahiti, New Zealand. He was ordered to find the southern continent which everyone thought was out there. He failed in finding Antarctica because there was just too much ice for him to push farther south than 70 degrees to find the mysterious land. But he discovered and charted the eastern edge of Australia. This voyage took more than two years and he kept his men free of the dreaded scurvy by requiring them to eat sauerkraut (vitamin C), along with fresh fruit as soon as he touched land like Tahiti or New Zealand.

The natives were a fairly tough bunch, of course, prone to eating their own. But the ladies were able and willing to meet the needs of the seamen when they, far from home, sought the favors of the chicks.
The girls had been infected by earlier French visitors to Tahiti, however, and the boys picked up a fair amount of the STDs of the time. Cook had had the ship's surgeon check all the men before they landed to be sure they would not infect the women. So there is an ironic justice there as the Brits moved in on the locals.

Cook returned home a hero, impregnated his wife again and the Admiralty sent him off on a much larger expedition. This one required that he chart the Pacific coast of North America after pushing as far south in the Pacific in yet another attempt to locate the southern continent. On his way to the land north of California, he happened to discover the Hawaiian Islands. He enjoyed those islands before moving north and east to chart the mainland all the way to the Bering Sea. He had hoped to find a passage that would either allow the ships to sail east across the top of North America, or west across the north of Russia. Can't get here from there, of course. But he surely kept trying.

Aboard the ship on this voyage was William Bligh, who was a master mariner in the sense that he often was used by Cook to locate channels and passages with a small sailboat where his large ship did not dare attempt to enter.

Bligh was a tough case even then and was pretty brutal with his crew – a sign of things to come when he returned years later as captain of the HMS Bounty.

On this third voyage, Cook seems to have gone through a fair large personality change. It is possible the endless thieving on the part of the natives throughout the Pacific ground him down (they were always stealing parts of the ship, hatchets, compasses, clothing. But it seems more likely there was a mental change caused by some vitamin shortage.

His temper flared too often, he turned to flogging which he had steered clear off in his earlier voyages. Anyway, when the Hawaiian natives stole some valuable material from his ship, he ordered them shot and when they swam out of range, he determined to take a party ashore and hold their king hostage.

It all ended badly when some of the Hawaiians (who generally seemed to believe he was the god Orono) decided to attack him. They hacked him to pieces on the rocky beach and then took his various parts and distributed them among the different villages and tribes.

It's a great, great story that does not end happily, obviously. His men negotiated with the king to retrieve as much of Cook as was possible and they gave him a decent burial at sea. Then they sailed their ships back to England – arriving four years after setting out.

Mrs. Cook had produced another kid in the meantime and lived on for more than 40 years.

His impact on cartography as well as discovery is for the ages.

High Drama on the Mountain

Ian: Well, folks, we just survived a bit of drama that I never have experienced before.

Fiona: You're right, bro. We were driving from Virginia to North Carolina, according to the big folks. We were climbing up from the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs down the spine of the mountains.

Ian: And I was sitting on the dash of the motor home, with my feet up on the windshield. I like to drive this way because I get support. Just as we reached 3,000 feet, there was a flashing sign. As you probably know, I can't read. But the parental units began chattering and I could feel the tension in the air.

Fiona: The sign, they said, warned of thick fog for the next 7.5 miles. As we came over the summit, there it was like a huge wet blanket. At first, visibility was about 100 yards ahead. It was downhill all the way now, so Robert geared down. We were traveling at around 55 miles an hour but that was too fast. He braked time after time.

Ian: Now, the visibility was down to 25 yards, maybe less. It didn't worry me because I have complete faith in the parental units to get us to our destination. But I could feel the tension. I might even say it was as thick as the fog. Robert had his lights on, of course, but he was quite whiny about the number of cars in front who had no tail-lights and they would come and go in the thick fog. They would be visible when they applied their brakes. But they would disappear again the moment the driver took his foot off the brake.

Fiona: Scary stuff this. The miles slid by and the fog stayed thick as a woolen blanket. We came down more than six miles and were around 1,300 feet before the blanket began to lift. You could feel the tension lift in our home as things began to clear. When we passed the tiny town of Bottom on Interstate 77 the fog had cleared and all our spirits had returned with the usual comfortable driving.

Ian: We all discussed the drama (well, we just listened) and the consensus was there should have been signs to ask drivers to click on their flashing lights which would have helped cars and the trucks and RVs that followed them down the mountain.

People in Glass Houses....

Kite surfer skids across the water at the end of the day in Linkletter Provincial Park, PEI.

If you are into lists, things like 1,000 places you need to see before you die, The Bottle House in Cape Egmont, PEI, is one of those places. It's called “Les Maisons de Bouteilles” here because we're in the heart of Prince Edward Island's Acadian culture. L'Acadie has a long history of British abuse of the French people when the area was “conquered” and the French were forced off the land, ending up as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana. But now they're back and have rebuilt their history which they wish to share with everyone.

This is not a monumental structure. But it's pretty cool. Edouard Arsenault, a fisherman on this red-sandstone coast, decided in the late 1970s – after he retired- that he'd be the first recycler on the island. He built a six-gabled house by using 12,000 bottles and cement. He had wine bottles, booze bottles of all kinds, pill bottles, jars, all of them with their necks facing inward. The light sparkles through these bottles and visitors seem to like to push pennies and nickels and dimes into the bottles as they walk through the place. Edouard became the last resident keeper of the local lighthouse while he built and built.

After the house, he then built a chapel with approximately 10,000 bottles. Even the pews are built with bottles and wood. There's a beer bottle cross as well as an altar made of liquor bottles! Several couples have been married in this little chapel.

Edouard's sense of humor bubbles up in the tavern he next built. There's a huge central pillar with hundreds of bottles and Edouard held out some unique bottles which he used to display on the bar of this tavern. He collected more than 30,000 bottles for his architectural epic. Strange, strange place.

All of these building began to disintegrate in the 1980s because Edouard did not put down concrete foundations and the ground heaved in each spring thaw. So, after his death, the buildings were dismantled by local craftsmen and rebuilt with proper support systems. They are placed in beautiful flower, herb and vegetable gardens which is maintained immaculately.

We came down the coast to the Linkletter Provincial Park. The Confederation Bridge that links the island to mainland New Brunswick lies on the horizon. This is a spectacular engineering job eight miles long and constructed to resist the floating ice that flows through the Northumberland Straits between the two provinces, we watched a number of kite skid across the waves a lift off and be airborne for a few seconds as the gusts of wind picked them out of the water.

With a blustery breeze blowing across the Northumberland Straits, we watched and photographed a number of

Friday morning, we climbed the ramp onto the bridge. We scooted across and ended in New Brunswick for lunch. Our destination was the Magnetic Hill Winery in Moncton, where we parked for the night. We took the last of our Canadian cash and bought two bottles of wine. Tomorrow, in'sh-allah, we will be back in Maine.

This Canadian journey has been a delight in so many ways. The friendliness of the natives, the beautiful, petite farms, the well-manicured front lawns of the huge majority of homes, the misty bleakness of Newfoundland. We have come to love the character of the people. There is a pleasing openness, a lack of fear. We were here while one of their beloved opposition politicians died of cancer and it was moving to watch the great outpouring of grief and love for this man. We have come to enjoy the political climate in this place. Politics does not seem to be a blood sport up here and I say long may that continue.

We have been frequently stunned by the cost of living here, however. The taxes that are heaped onto EVERY purchase is between 14 and 15 percent. It is worrying that there is a 14 percent tax placed on top of the taxes that the federal government place on all fuel. And we have gotten tired of the endless fees to enter every place we have been. I say that in the full knowledge that any place in Canada seems to be in a better state financially than any place in the U.S. So there is merit to charging fees on everything to keep services solvent. But something in me admires how in Washington, for example, you can enter any museum or art gallery without fees and charges and taxes being levied. That, too, may change for us as we try to right our foundering financial ship.

But, all in all, this two-month voyage to the most easterly point in North America, 'way out into the Atlantic, as well as some of the spectacular sights and sounds of Canada will linger in our hearts forever.

We're glad you were able to accompany us on this journey.

Milk Run

Theresa Hardy cleans the udders of one of her cows before attaching the milk suction system to the udders.

Ivan Hardy loves his cows. He and his wife, Theresa, welcomed us to their farm in Montrose, Prince Edward Island. They grow all manner of veggies and Theresa uses Facebook to alert the locals of her specials. But for Ivan, I sensed, it was all about the cows.

He has Holsteins and Guernseys and a French breed. Each cow has a personality that's much larger than the number that is stapled to their ear. We stood in the cowshed as the light began to fade on Saturday. A Guernsey-Holstein mix with a lovely chocolate-brown coat chewed her cud right beside us while Ivan explained how she reaches down to one of her four stomachs and brings back up some food which she then chews again before swallowing one more time. He held her head and she swallowed again and again. “That's the sign of a contented cow,” Ivan said as she worked happily on her cud.

Theresa had brought 10 of their 48 cows into the milking shed earlier while we spent time out in the field with Ivan and his daughter. They were wrapping the green hay in a tight plastic wrap in a long sausage – I call it a termite. This allows the storage of silage for the cattle without the risk of spontaneous combustion. That occurs when the moist hay is stored in a barn, without eliminating the air from the mix. His daughter recalled pulling hot hay from a barn in the earlier years and, as they hauled it out, the hay burst into flames.

Ivan and Theresa explained how they track the cycle of each of their cows with a huge clock-like device that is on the back wall of the shed. She showed us how No. 89 had been impregnated the day before because her number had come up on the “clock”. They have a man who comes around the farms with his assortment of semen. This allows them to choose the characteristics of the bull and the cow for the best chance of fertility, milk production and quality of milk.

The cows are allowed to go dry for two months before producing a calf. Then the first milk from mom is fed to the calf for four days after birth. This allows the calf to receive the mother's vital colostrum. After these days, Ivan said, it is okay to put the cow back into milk production and the calf can receive colostrum that has been frozen and stored from other cows.

The calves, which were in a different part of the cowshed were in stepping-stone ages. It will be more than a year before they are ready for impregnation which begins the milk production cycle.

Ivan and Theresa feed the animals a rich mix of grains, silage and even dulce, a seaweed collected by horses on the shores of the North Cape of Prince Edward Island. They have just started with the dulce and already are finding the benefits as the cows get minerals in a more digestible form.

After dipping each udder of a cow in an iodine solution, Theresa cleaned off the udders and attached the suction system which immediately begins to pull the milk from the cows. It is pumped into a stainless pipe and fed into a huge steel container where its temperature is brought down from 102 degrees to 50 degrees. A tanker arrives every other day and the milk is tested and analyzed before being trucked off to the south for separation and processing.

Ivan took over the farm from his father. He has doubled the acreage to about 200 acres now. He remembers, when growing up in the 50s, that it was the end of the horse era on the farm. His father bought a 40 horsepower tractor and that mechanization changed everything, he said. I asked if they use their own milk and Ivan said they buy their milk from the store. We laughed as he explained Theresa likes to drink skim milk and it's easier to just buy the milk in a carton.

This was our second farm visit through Harvest Hosts, the new group that makes these visits by RV owners possible. Our respect for the hard, hard work of this family is without bounds. This is a tough way to make a living. It's a 24-7 operation, with no days off. But if you love your cows there are rewards.

Earlier in the day, we had driven to the North Cape, another end of the road, where we stood among some of the largest windmills in the world. These behemoths were rotating steadily in the brisk south wind. There is a low-range but very definite thrumming vibration as these windmill blades whipped around. I'd heard about this noise level but its the first time we've gotten close enough to experience the noise. It would take some getting used to if you had to live with it 24 hours a day.

Tight Little Island

Darkening sky hangs over a Prince Edwards Island farmhouse.

Back on another ferry – this time we crossed over the water to Prince Edward Island – and this time it was actually free! The 75-minute voyage to the island costs nothing. You pay when you leave the province. We came in on the eastern side of the island and drove to a perfect little campground that had a spot for us that perched us on a cliff overlooking Seal Cove. The crash of the waves spooked the cats. But they adjusted. They always do.

Everything about PEI is in miniature. We plot our course on our computer and when we measure the distance to the next stop it turns out to be only 28 miles away.

Tuesday morning broke with fog and rain. We took our time in leaving this lovely spot. And our trip up-island took less than two hours. We came to Red Point Provincial Park, again on the coast. We drove the car, coated in red dirt now, past fields of potatoes, to East Point which is exactly that – the most easterly point of the province. This is a unique place for three different currents converge off the point, the Northumberland Straits, The Atlantic and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The waters off the point were a roiling maelstrom of competing waves tumbling over each other. It looked like a sailor's nightmare.

On our way back to the campground, we stopped at a beach that touted itself as the “singing sands”. No siren song was heard, though. We were told the sands were too wet. When conditions are right, the sands chirp and chatter as you walk along.

East Kings is a bump in the road, so small it doesn't even get mentioned on a large, detailed map of the eastern section of PEI. But we arrived at East Kings' Community Center at 8 p.m. for a ceilidh on Tuesday night. And what a ceilidh it turned out to be. Three hours of music from about eight or nine groups – and tea and biscuits and jam at the intermission. A group from the Catskill Mountains of New York, a guitarist from Ontario, local talented fiddlers, an Irish player of the bodhrain, a fiddler from Brooklyn, NY, a piano player and her guitar-playing husband from West Charlottetown, PEI, two singing ladies called Ding and Dong (they were retired telephone company workers!) and an exceptional local group playing a mandolin, banjo, base fiddle and guitar. Wow. All this for $5! It truly doesn't get better.

We have joined a new group, called Harvest Hosts. This makes farms and vineyards available to us throughout North America. We are invited to park in the farmyard at no charge and, in exchange, we are invited to buy a bottle of wine or maybe a few pounds of potatoes or peas or blueberries.

Our first experience came on Wednesday and Thursday when we visited Shepherd's Farm in PEI. Finding it was the hardest part. I stopped two times along the way, asking directions. But we arrived at the end of a tarred road and drove into the farmyard.

Everyone was away except for Daniel, the 12-year-old son of the house. He showed us where we could park alongside a barn. Water, electricity and a sewer dump were there. He told us his dad was teaching a class in organic farming in Charlottetown and wouldn't be home until late. Then, he said, they were planning on taking off for a fishing trip on a friend's boat.

Jo and I roamed the farm. It has turkeys, chickens, rabbits, pigs, lambs and beef cattle – all of them organically fed. It was very quiet, apart from the bleating of the sheep and lambs and occasional cattle sounds.

On Thursday morning we met with Steven Cousins, the farmer, and his wife Cindy. This is one incredible couple. They have a certified organic farm and he leads the certified farming group in the province. He presented us with the gift of a bag of new PEI potatoes, then took us up to the fields and gave Jo a bunch of garlic, lettuce and a tomato. We then picked our fill of raspberries. Daniel, as well as the other Cousins children, Hannah and Naomi, own parts of the farm and each have responsibilities for their portions. Daniel owns the raspberry patches and sold us two pints. He also owns the pigs, meat chickens and a handful of geese. He won't continue with the geese, he told us, because they are pretty hard to raise.

Daniel has some young workers in the raspberry field, picking away. He pays them from his profits and the raspberries are then sold in town. Steven Cousins has focused on producing foods that can be sold to high-end restaurants. He said they particularly like his small PEI potatoes. But he also sells chocolate mint, orange mint and many vegetables. In addition, he raises sheep and sells the meat to local restaurants.

This introduction to Harvest Hosts program was a winner and we look forward to stopping in at another farm in the northwestern tip of the island in a couple of days.

Whisky Galore!

Glenora Distillery gets its water for the whisky (it's called the 'water of life' in the Gaelic) from this clean-running stream right outside the front door.

There's only one single malt whisky distiller in Canada and we were standing in the still room, sampling the 10-year-old product. It tasted okay, though I'm certainly no aficionado of single malts. My only previous experience was at the home of a Florida couple in Bradenton. Our host, Tom, had found the “perfect” single malt, he said. And he wanted to share it with us. Talk about casting pearls before swine! I tilted the glass back after the proper swirling and sticking my nose into the top to capture the aroma. I remember it being a smooth, well-developed, mature taste.

Glenora's 10-year-old single malt was more astringent, with a bit of a hint of licorice. It also lacked color but that's probably because it was pretty young. They were offering a fill-your-own 750 ml bottle in the gift shop where you could turn a spigot on a whisky barrel on a 20-year-old version. But that would cost $400 for the bottle.

Glenora last year won a 9-year legal battle with the Edinburgh-based Scotch Whisky Association attempting to stop Glenora from using the word “Glen” in its name. The association said that glens are only to be found in Scotland and this inference of Scottish-ness was put on the label to fool people into believing the single malt was Scotch. The distillery had fought this piece of nonsense all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada which dismissed the case without merit and told the Scotch Whisky people they had to pay the costs of the court action which probably made those Scotsmen smart.

Glenora , as a result of the win, brought out a limited edition of their whisky, calling it “Battle of the Glen” which, I thought, was a smart piece of marketing.

Ceilidhs are a dime a dozen on the west coast of Cape Breton... well, not exactly a dime. But they still are a cheap form of entertainment, ranging from $5-8 for tickets. A ceilidh is a get-together for music, usually in a kitchen, a church basement or a local fire hall. We have been taking advantage of the plethora of ceilidhs. There's been one each night within driving distance of our campground in Port Hood.

Tuesdays was in Mabou Village Hall. All the performers were named Beaton, even though they were not closely related. A step-dancer named Beaton showed up from Alberta. The guest fiddler was a young student who had come home to Mabou to visit with his parents. The mom and pop fiddle-piano player, also named Beaton, were the mainstays although the guest fiddler was quite extraordinary. He composed his own tunes, including one to honor his mom and dad who were there celebrating their 31^st wedding anniversary.

Wednesday night we drove south to Judique to the Celtic Music Interpretative Centre. And this took us into a completely different setting. This was much more like an authentic Scottish ceilidh, where the fiddler and the piano player sit and play their jigs and reels and Strathspeys. The audience sat around them as though this all was happening in a kitchen. After a few minutes of music, a group of folks got up and began to dance a reel and the whole affair took on a life of its own. While Shelly Campbell played her fiddle, folks from all over danced with abandon.

Jo and I got into conversation with an old man named Neil from Mississippi. He told us a great story about how he met his Canadian wife when he sailed into Halifax in 1952. They fell in love but then he was posted to Korea and they drifted apart. She ended up meeting and marrying someone else. He ultimately did the same. They each lost their spouses in the later years and she visited some friends from Cape Breton down in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 2000s. They told her about this wonderful man she should meet and she actually called him because she recognized his name.

“She said when she called 'are you the Mr. Neil who sailed into Halifax in 1952?' he told me as the music played in the background. “I told her I was the same person. It was like my ship came in again.”

They met and the old flame was rekindled. They married each other in 2007. The rest is history.

And to wrap up Cape Breton, on Thursday we attended a local ceilidh at the local museum.

There was a moving and beautiful piece of fiddle music played in memory of a dead mentor by one of the musicians that brought tears to the eye. Then a couple of old miners from Port Hood strummed on their guitars while singing about going down the mine shafts no more. The evening was topped off with hot tea and oatcakes.

Failte Oirbh La Mor a' Chlachain

When you're a MacNeil of Barra, they start you young on the music.

Over the hill we came and then across a little cable ferry that could carry just six cars at a time. We passed through villages with their names in the Gaelic, tucked away in the Bras d'Or Lake of Cape Breton. This is Scotland in miniature – and because it it so condensed so is the culture. It's thick with the clans.

We climbed the hill to the 50^th anniversary of Highland Village Days in the village of Iona.

And, oh, what a sight and sound mosaic we found. The Gaelic in the headline of today's blog means “Welcome to Highland Village Days”.

The McLeans were here, as well as the Mackenzies and the MacDonalds, and the Gillises and McLeods of Dunvegan. The MacNeils of Barra, dozens of them, were all there, along with the Campbells and the McKinnons and most of these folks spoke the Gaelic as either a first or second language. An old woman sat beside us on the hill and she only spoke the Gaelic.

We were surrounded, enveloped, in a cocoon of Scottish fiddle music, pipes, piano, supportive guitars as well as Scotland's mouth music, which is known usually as a-capella. What a feast for the ears and for the soul of a Scot. We settled in for four hours of joyous sound and sights.

The presenter of the various groups slid effortlessly between the Gaelic and English as he explained the roots of each group. “Cuirm-chiuil Ghaidhealach bho 1962” which means “a Cape Breton tradition since 1962”. He also had the skills necessary to fill while the sound man re-miked the stage so the different acts could be heard well. The presenter, Joe Murphy was his name, had the skill to launch into Gaelic mouth music – singing in the old language while he maintained repartee between the members of the audience who enjoyed heckling him in the Gaelic.

We watched the MacNeil family – mom and dad and their four daughters – as they sang, fiddled and played the piano. The youngest of the family, perhaps two years old, held a tiny fiddle with her feet and sawed away until she got bored. Then she crawled over to mom on the piano and mom deftly picked her up onto her lap. The kid then placed her hands atop mom's and “played” along with mom to the delight of the crowd.

Iona is the home of a Highland Village re-enactment from the 1840s. It is celebrating 50 years of supporting the culture. Below the Iona Village Center was the Rankin School where children can choose the Gaelic or French as their second language. A group of the kids entertained us with waulking songs in which they imitated the ancestors in sitting around a wooden table, working the wool whiling singing in the old language.

When I watched a Campbell, a MacDonald and a MacNeil take the stage and play together it flashed me back to days in tribal Namibia when I despaired at the tribalism of that country. But I made peace with it in the full knowledge that I had come from just such a tribal society – perhaps we all have - where the clans of Scotland defined lives for hundreds of generations. Back, 320 years ago, the Campbells had betrayed the MacDonald to the English in Glencoe and that resulted in a massacre that still is remembered. But here was a Campbell and a MacDonald playing tunes together. If they can do that, surely the Oshiwambo and the Damara of Namibia can find their way to work together, I thought.

We drove home with the golden sunlight sparkling on the lake. What a day it was.

Now we drive across Cape Breton to the west coast – it's only a short distance – where we will camp on the water's edge and explore more of this rich culture. I feel as though I have come home.