Bartholomew R. Haines, Merchant, Westport, Nova Scotia

A printed wrapper headed “Prices Current only,” postmarked BARBADOES DE 11 1861, carried a commercial circular from Barbados across the Atlantic and up the whole length of Nova Scotia to “B. R. Haines Esq., West Port, Nova Scotia,” routed, per the endorsement at lower left, “Mail, via Halifax, N.S.” A small manuscript “1” beside the address marks the piece for the privileged reduced rate carried by printed commercial circulars of this kind, well below the cost of an ordinary sealed letter — this was market intelligence, not correspondence, and paid accordingly. The reverse carries two backstamps tracing the whole route: Halifax, N.S., JA 8 1862, and a second, harder to read but legible as Westport, Brier Island's, JA 11 1862 — nearly a month in transit from Bridgetown to the Bay of Fundy, and a further three days from Halifax out to the Digby Neck itself. A later hand has added a few cataloguing notes in pencil — “wrapper w/ enclosure,” a stock or lot number, and a query about whether a second adhesive had once been present and was later removed — the ordinary residue of a philatelic collection rather than anything from the letter's own working life.

S. P. Musson, Son, and Co.

The enclosure has survived along with the wrapper, and it is exactly what the wrapper's own printed heading promises: “S. P. Musson, Son, and Co.'s Circular for the B. N. A. Provinces,” dated in print at the foot of its second leaf, “Barbados, December 10, 1861.” Musson was a genuine and, as it turns out, remarkably durable Bridgetown commission house — the firm had already been trading in the Caribbean since 1820 by the time this circular went out, making it a well-established concern of some four decades' standing rather than a fly-by-night operation chasing Nova Scotian lumber money. It went on to considerably more than that: S. P. Musson, Son and Company was later one of six original firms that combined to

form Barbados Shipping and Trading Limited, and its Jamaican arm was spun off in its own right in 1963, when Desmond Blades led a management buyout that established Musson (Jamaica) Limited. That firm's modern successor, Musson (Jamaica) Limited, has since grown by organic expansion and acquisition into one of the largest privately held companies in the Caribbean, with subsidiaries and affiliates today employing more than five thousand people across upward of twenty-five countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond — a very long institutional life indeed for a firm whose 1861 business is preserved here in nothing more than a two-page price list and a shipping log. Circulars of this kind were how a West Indies commission merchant did the unglamorous, essential work of the trade: canvassing a standing list of correspondents up and down British North America with a running account of prices, arrivals, and market conditions, so that a shipper in Yarmouth or a store keeper on Digby Neck would know, before committing a cargo, roughly what it might fetch. That B. R. Haines was on this particular mailing list is itself a small piece of evidence about the shape of his business, independent of anything a census taker ever wrote down about him.

The circular's contents are a compact snapshot of the Nova Scotia–West Indies carrying trade at the close of 1861. It works methodically through lumber (“W. P.” — white pine — quoted by the thousand feet, with sales noted from Yarmouth, Liverpool, and Port Medway, and prices given as far afield as Tobago, Guadeloupe, and Trinidad), red oak staves, shingles, and fish — cod, mackerel, and herring, the herring specifically called “abundant and selling.” A short paragraph on “Produce” notes that “sugar making has commenced on some few Estates,” with prices not yet settled; a section on “Exchange” gives the going rates for Colonial Bank drafts on London at ninety, sixty, and thirty days, alongside the premium charged for American gold. The circular's second leaf, headed “Arrivals of Lumber and Fish,” is a running log of vessels that had come into Barbados in the weeks just before it was printed — schooners, brigs, and a brigantine, arriving from Yarmouth, Liverpool, and Port Medway in Nova Scotia and from Newfoundland, their cargoes of lumber, cod-fish, mackerel, potatoes, staves, and shingles sold off or forwarded on to Tobago, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts, Antigua, Demerara, and Carriacou. This was the reciprocal engine of the old West India trade in miniature: Nova Scotia's lumber, fish, and provisions going south, West Indian sugar, molasses, and rum coming back, with a Bridgetown commission house like Musson's sitting in the middle of the traffic, keeping its Nova Scotian correspondents current on where the market stood.

Digby Neck and the Islands

Westport sits about as far from Halifax as it is possible to get while still standing on Nova Scotia soil — the last inhabited point at the end of a chain of land and water running some fifty kilometres southwest from Digby, out along a peninsula so narrow it is rarely more than a mile or two wide, and then on across two more islands strung off its tip like beads on a string. The whole formation is one continuous ridge of basalt, laid down some 201 million years ago as a sequence of Triassic lava flows during the same rifting that opened the Atlantic Ocean — part of a vast igneous province that also underlies stretches of what are now Morocco, Brazil, and the eastern United States. That hard volcanic rock is the reason the land holds the shape it does: too tough for the glaciers of the last ice age to grind down the way they levelled the softer country to either side, it survives as a long, resistant spine, the same ridge that forms North Mountain along the Annapolis Valley to the east, breached only at Digby Gut, where the tide pours through into the Annapolis Basin.

Digby Neck proper runs southwest from Digby through a string of small communities — Rossway, Gullivers Cove, Centreville, Sandy Cove, Mink Cove, Little River — to East Ferry, where the peninsula gives out into the Petit Passage, a tidal race a little over half a kilometre wide. Across it lies Long Island: Tiverton at the near end, Freeport fifteen kilometres on at the far one, the whole island rarely more than five kilometres across, its southern shore a line of steep cliffs facing St. Mary's Bay and its northern shore a gentler run of small cliffs and rocky beach facing the open Fundy. From Freeport a second, even narrower channel, the Grand Passage, separates Long Island from Brier Island and its single village of Westport — the destination, finally, of a letter posted in Bridgetown. Samuel de Champlain is credited with charting this coast as early as 1604, but permanent settlement waited a hundred and eighty years, until the land grants that followed the American Revolution brought Loyalist families like the Haineses north to take up lots the Crown was only too glad to see occupied. St. Mary's Bay, on the landward side of the whole chain, offered comparatively sheltered water; the Bay of Fundy, on the seaward side, offered the highest tides on earth, rising and falling by tens of feet twice a day and scouring the passages between the islands into some of the fastest tidal currents on the Atlantic coast — water that could make a young fisherman's living and drown him with very little warning either way. It was, and largely still is, a fishing economy first and everything else after: cod, herring, mackerel, and lobster inshore, small craft built and owned by the same men who sailed them, and, in Bartholomew Haines's own working lifetime, at least one further export trade in lumber, fish, and staves running south to the West Indies and back. Brier Island's other claim to fame belongs to a slightly younger generation: Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, grew up in Westport in the very years Bartholomew Haines was building schooners and keeping a store there — two lives on the same short, wind-scoured street, one bound eventually for the whole globe, the other for Barbados and back, by way of a Halifax mailbag.

A Loyalist Family on Long Island

The addressee's own family had been on this coast for the better part of eighty years by the time this circular reached him. His grandfather and namesake, Bartholomew Haines, was born September 16, 1750, at Rye, in Westchester County, New York, and married Gloranah Kniffen there in February 1776. Four children were born to the couple in New York before the family left the newly independent United States altogether: departing New York on November 28, 1783, in the great Loyalist evacuation that followed the British withdrawal that same autumn, landing at Digby on December 9, and reaching Freeport, on Long Island in the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, by May 20, 1784. A muster roll taken the following summer at nearby Clements, in Annapolis County, suggests he may have come north as part of a disbanded Loyalist provincial corps, which was how a great many Digby-area land grants were made in this period. Six more children were born at Freeport, and Bartholomew himself became one of the founding proprietors of Long Island, recorded on an 1787 division of the island's lots as one of the inspectors chosen to oversee the allotment among the settlers — a man who had crossed an ocean and a revolution and ended up, within a few years, helping to parcel out the ground he and his neighbours would build their lives on.

His son Nicholas Haines, born at Rye in 1780 and brought across as a small child, married Mary Hicks in 1798 and had nine children of his own at Freeport before dying young, at thirty-six, on September 16, 1816. His sixth child and third son, born December 1806, was named Bartholomew after his grandfather — the addressee of this circular, then not yet ten years old when his father died, growing up in a household his grandfather had helped to found and his father would not live to see him inherit.

Fisherman, Shipbuilder, Merchant

Bartholomew Robert Haines's working life, traced across half a century of censuses, directories, and ship registries, moves steadily from the water toward the shore. As early as 1840 he owned, and by his own account had built, the schooner Bee, registered at Yarmouth, sixty-four shares — the whole vessel — held in his name alone, his residence given as Westport and his occupation as mariner: already, in his early thirties, a man managing his own small coasting craft rather than simply crewing someone else's. The 1861 Nova Scotia census, taken within days of this very circular's transit up the coast, finds him at Long Island with a household of eight and an occupation recorded plainly as fisherman — the two facts sit together comfortably enough; owning a coasting schooner and working the fishery were not separate lives for a man in Bartholomew's position; they were the same livelihood, worked from both ends. By 1866 he had gone further still, recorded as a shipbuilder at Long Island and majority owner — forty-eight of sixty-four shares — of the brigantine Emma Hains, a proper ocean-going, square-rigged vessel of exactly the class that carried the West India trade this circular describes, and named, in the affectionate custom of the period, after his own youngest daughter, Emma Jane, born in 1852.

The “merchant” designation itself turns up earlier than either the 1869 marriage record or the 1870–71 directory, and in a form that matches the circular's own addressee more closely than any other source found so far. Hutchinson's Nova Scotia directory for 1864–65 lists, under Long Island, “Hains B. R., merchant” — the bare initials, not the spelled-out Bartholomew, and the same “Hains” spelling used on his schooner and brigantine registrations rather than the fuller “Haines.” It is about as close a match to “B. R. Haines, Esq.” as a nineteenth-century directory is ever likely to produce, and it places him in trade within three years of the Barbados circular reaching him. The same page lists a second Long Island merchant, “Hains Robert” — almost certainly his eldest son, Robert, born 1834 and by his mid-thirties evidently already in business himself, alongside a roster of the island's other tradesmen: shipwrights, master mariners, joiners, a blacksmith, a dry-goods dealer.

The shore side of the business caught up with the water side over the following decade. The 1871 census records him, now 63 and back at Long Island, as a store keeper, with three grown sons still at home — Charles, a seaman; Milton, a tradesman; and Edwin — and McAlpine's Maritime Province Directory for 1870–71 lists him plainly, under Freeport, Long Island, as “Haines Bartholomew R., merchant” — the exact name and profession a Barbados commission house would have drawn on to keep him on its own circulation list. By 1881 the occupation is rendered simply as trader, and by the 1891 census, at 84, he has stepped back into farming, while two of his sons, Milton and Edwin, are each by then keeping stores of their own at Freeport — the family business handed on, in duplicate, to the next generation. It is a working life that runs, in order, from mariner to fisherman to shipbuilder to store keeper to merchant to farmer, each stage overlapping the last rather than replacing it outright, and it explains without much difficulty why a Bridgetown commission house would have thought it worth the postage to keep him informed of the Barbados lumber and fish market at the end of 1861.

Two Marriages, and a Long Life at Freeport

Bartholomew married twice. His first wife, Edith Ann Magray, whom he married at Westport on Brier Island sometime before 1850, bore him ten children over two decades — Robert, William Wellington, Harriet Sophia, Wealthy Ann, Caroline, Charles Wesley, Freeman, Milton, Edwin, and Emma Jane, the daughter for whom the brigantine was later named — before dying in 1867. Two years later, in June 1869 at Digby, he married again, to a woman recorded in the Nova Scotia marriage register as Sarah Lent — the same surname carried, a generation on, by a fourteen-year-old lodger named Shippey Lent found boarding in Bartholomew's household in the 1891 census, very plausibly a young relative of his second wife's own family. The 1869 registration itself (Digby County, Book 1812, page 31, number 93) is a useful independent check on everything gathered from census and directory alike: it gives the groom's age as 63, matching his December 1806 birth exactly, names his father as Nicholas Haines — confirmed here for the first time from a vital record rather than a compiled family tree — and gives his occupation plainly as Merchant, a full two years before McAlpine's directory recorded the same designation and just short of a decade after the Barbados circular had already been addressed to him as “Esq.” One of the sons from the first marriage, William Wellington Haines, was lost at sea on October 25, 1871, only months after that year's census had recorded him alive and well.

Bartholomew Robert Haines died at Freeport on May 27, 1893. A death notice in The Messenger and Visitor, the Saint John Baptist weekly — matching the family's own consistently recorded Baptist faith across every census that asked the question — recorded it plainly: “Died at Freeport on May 27th Bartholomew R. Haines, 87, leaving a widow, who was his second wife.” It is the same bare name and initial, printed in the ordinary commercial and denominational press of his own lifetime, that a Barbados merchant house had already been using to address him more than thirty years before, on a wrapper of market prices that took the better part of two months to find its way from Bridgetown to a fisherman's door on Digby Neck. He was buried at Hilltop Cemetery, Freeport, on the same small island his grandfather had helped divide up among its first proprietors, a hundred and ten years after that grandfather had first stepped ashore at Digby, a Loyalist refugee with a young family and nothing else settled about his future at all.