Bluenose Ghosts by Helen Creighton

spilled comes from Ship Harbour. “There’s a flat rock between Musquodoboit Harbour and Jeddore. A sailor with a bundle in a handkerchief tied to a stick carried over his shoulder used to be met there. If he liked you, he’d tell you how to get the treasure, but if he didn’t like you he’d disappear. He said you had to kill a baby and let the blood spill on the rock to get the treasure, but people thought it didn’t need to be a human baby.”
    It was fortunate that I had a good background of these stories before I met Mr. Isaac Doyle and his family at West Jeddore. I might explain here that all along our southern coast there are points of land jutting out into the sea and that these form separate bays and harbours. You get place names like East Jeddore on the eastern side of the harbour, West Jeddore, and Head Jeddore, the head being at the land-locked end of the waterway. Mr. Doyle is an elderly fisherman and, like many of his craft, he has a gentle, kindly manner and a quiet sense of humour. He also knows all the customs and beliefs so far related in this chapter except that of ploughing with a rooster and harrowing with a hen, and he is also a singer of folk songs. When our talk turned to the supernatural he told me so many stories about a place called Goose Island that I felt I ought to see it for myself. Consequently an expedition was planned with Mr. Doyle as guide and his son Arthur and grandson Sheldon as boatmen. There were eleven of us in all, seven of them children.
    Goose Island is not more than 200 yards long and 100 wide, and it is six miles out in the Atlantic from our starting-place at West Jeddore. As we approached it from the distances of Egg Island and Duck Island it looked completely unapproachable. At the eastern end however an opening appeared in the rocky shore. It was large enough to take a small boat, but not the large fishing craft we were in. That meant that we must go ashore in relays, rowed in the small boat we had towed behind us for this purpose.
    Before the use of engines made it so much easier and safer to move about on the sea, men used to go out to Goose Island for a whole summer, leaving it only to go home on Saturday night. There would be as many as eight or ten of them and they lived in wooden camps. The island is almost flat and it is covered with a low scrub of weeds and grass, and it is protected all around by a rocky cliff.
    Strange things have happened on this island. For instance different men have heard a boat rowing but, upon investigation, there was no boat there.
    â€œMy father walked all around the island, looking for the boat,” said Mr. Doyle, “and suddenly his cap was taken off his head and clapped back with the weight of lead. When he got back to camp he heard a noise like fifty wine bottles being broken against the clift on the western end of the island. He thought afterwards that he might be hearing the sound repeated of a boat burying silver in that hole, as it might have done in pirate days.
    â€œAnother time some of the men went out there and they had a boat with a capstan for hauling the smaller boats in. There were three little trees on the western end of the island at that time and on that day three birds came and perched on the only three spruce trees on the island. They were unknown birds. No one had ever seen their like before. One was blood red, one jet black, and the other snow white. From the trees they flew to the capstan but, when the men tried to catch them, they flew to Black Point and were never seen again. The men all saw them and talked about them a lot. They decided they were three pirates, and that they were trying to show where treasure was buried. There are initials carved on the clift on the eastern end of the island and all kinds of plans, and we’ve always supposed they were French. They are all over the clift.”
    We were all over it too, up and down, scrambling from one craggy rock to another,