Paging Through the Nova-Scotia Chronicle

The Nova Scotia Archives has digitized several newspapers from various periods in the province’s history, with the results open for anyone to look at.

This digital archive doesn’t include the region’s first newspaper—the Halifax Gazette launched by John Bushell, fresh from Boston, on 23 Mar 1752. But the Nova Scotia Archives does own the one surviving copy of Bushell’s first issue; it acquired that precious sheet from the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2002.

The earliest newspaper available in the digital database is the Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser, published by Anthony Henry in Halifax from 1769 to 1770.

Henry had taken over the Halifax Gazette when Bushell died in 1761. But then he lost his position as the local government’s preferred printer by opposing the Stamp Act of 1765. (Isaiah Thomas, who worked for Henry after skipping out on his apprenticeship in Boston, claimed he pushed his employer into political action. Thomas also sniffed that Henry printed “in a very indifferent manner.”)

For a few years Robert Fletcher enjoyed the government’s favor for his new Nova-Scotia Gazette. Copies of that paper can be read through the University of Toronto.

Anthony Henry’s Nova-Scotia Chronicle was thus the province’s first newspaper published without being sponsored by the province itself. When he started, Henry had only eighty subscribers.

In 1770, after Fletcher returned to Britain, Henry renamed his newspaper Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, regaining semi-official status by default. He even became the King’s Printer in 1788. After Henry died in 1800, another Boston-trained printer, the Loyalist John Howe, took over. A version of that paper appears today as an official organ of the provincial government: Nova Scotia’s Royal Gazette.

Like other North American newspapers, the Nova-Scotia Chronicle was a weekly. Its pages were half the size of most other papers, but a typical issue contained eight pages instead of four. Without much local news that his readers hadn’t already heard, Henry printed lots of excerpts from British newspapers, as well as articles from the other North American ports.

Folks using the digital archive to track particular citations should bear in mind that Henry dated each issue by the full week it covered: “From TUESDAY September 26, to TUESDAY October 3, 1769,” for instance. Each paper was actually printed on the last date in that range, and the database dates each paper accordingly. However, sometimes authors have cited issues by the first date.

I digitally flipped through these pages hoping to find interesting coverage of the Boston Massacre, but Henry appears to have reprinted articles from the Boston newspapers without commentary. But then I stumbled across an interesting page I’d never read anywhere before.

TOMORROW: Character studies.