his first wife having died in 1856. He was one of the survivors of the mail steamer Fairy Queen, wrecked on October 7, 1853, be- tween Pictou Island and Caribou, with a loss of seven lives.

On May 11, 1860, John C. Sims strongly upheld Richard Pill- man’s application for licence to keep a tavern at New London. At that time there was no inn nearer than Mrs. Barrett’s. No record is available to tell of the fate of the application.

At this period the Age of Sail was nearing its climax. At every turn one meets records of those who went down to the sea in ships and carried on their business in great waters. In March, 1860, a vessel belonging to Mr. McKie, from the Gut of Canso, arrived at New London. In October a Campbell schooner went on shore at Richibucto and four local men were lost. This was un- doubtedly the “passing visitation” referred to earlier by Mr. Meek in his journal. In 1862 Captain McKay of the schooner Gold Hunter, New London, arrived home ignominiously by steamer from Pictou. He had left the fall before, but had to abandon ship in the Atlantic, failing to reach either Bermuda or the American shore. The schooner William Cousins, Bell, master, was burned at Frontera, Tobasco Bar, off the coast of Mexico, but the crew was saved. In the summer of 1866, when 56 vessels totalling 15,000 tons were being built in Prince County alone, the 218 ton brig Ann Bundle was launched at Joseph Morris’s yard, New London. Two years later the brig Garibaldi, 280 tons, was built at the same yard; the brig Baltic slipped down the ways at William Cousin’s yard; D. & G. McKay, New London, launched the 191 ton brigantine, Mary A. McKay.

The handsome schooner Louisa Montgomery, 50—60 tons old measurement, was built on the farm of the Honourable Donald Montgomery by George Mackenzie in 1864, and was drawn to the beach for launching, one half mile, by thirty horses. This schooner bore the name of Senator Montgomery’s Wife Louisa, sister of William Cundall. At George McKay’s yard, Clifton, the brigantine E. L. Lydiard, John McKay, master builder, was launched in 1866. The schooner Great Deceiver, bound from New London to Halifax with a. cargo of oats, was lost with all on board in the spring of 1870. She belonged to Captain John Whitehead, and the cargo was owned by Henry McKie of New London.

The Old Church watched all these sails go in and out the harbour. The harbour itself, by 1857, was supplied with a combined harbour master, ballast master, and collector of light and anchor- age dues. The names of Sims and Anderson occur in this connec- tion. ~William McKay was wharfinger at the same time.

In the 1860’s James Yeo and Son of Port Hill had twenty ships at sea, many of them trading with Appledore in Devon. Island sailors left their bones in many ports as the newspapers grimly record—Constantinople, Bombay, Wellington, Pernambuco.

Death continued to take toll of the old-timers. James Orr of French River died in 1869 at Halifax where he had gone to bring home a vessel of his which had wintered there. William McNeill, born in Charlottetown in 1782, died at Cavendish in 1870. Paul Thompson, 80, a native of Kendal, County Westmoreland, died in

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