“The Prospect of this Country is very Sterile”

Capt.-Lt. Archibald Robertson, British military engineer, sailed out of Boston harbor on 25 Mar 1776.

Robertson’s ship was an army transport called the Thames. It was in the first contingent of vessels heading for Halifax—forty-nine in all, per his count.

Three days later, Robertson recorded in his diary, the Thames crew spotted Cape Sable, the island at the southernmost corner of Nova Scotia. The next day, the ship “made the light house west of the harbour of Halifax and came to an Anchor about 2 o’clock off Chebucto point in the harbour.”

On 30 March, 250 years ago today, Robertson’s ship moored alongside a wharf, and Loyalist refugees presumably started to disembark at their new home.

The young officer examined his new base with an eye for its defenses. He wrote:

The Prospect of this Country is very Sterile and unimprovable, The Bay very good and extensive and if the Ground was Cultivated or Capable of being so would be very beautifull.

The Town which is long and Stragling built of wood on the side of a hill, and the Dock Yard, are so Commanded by Different heights that it appears to me to be impossible to fortify them without a Multiplicity of Works and more troops than could possibly be spared.

The Ships in the Harbour opposite the Dock Yard could Easily be drove away from either side and the Dock Yard destroy’d from the East side which is not above 1400 Yards across.

Adm. Molyneux Shuldam, Gen. William Howe, and most of the rest of the evacuation fleet arrived from Boston on 2 April.

The picture above is Robertson’s “Sketch of the Harbour & Town of Halifax with our fleet turning up,” now in the collections of the New York Public Library.