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Nova Scotia (Latin for New Scotland; “Alba Nuadh” in Scottish Gaelic, French la Nouvelle-Écosse) is a Canadian province on the North Atlantic coast. Nova Scotia has an area of 55,500 km² and a population of about 940,000 (Nova Scotians). Its capital is Halifax.
Geography
The province's mainland is a peninsula, connected to mainland North America by the Isthmus of Chignecto, and surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, including numerous bays and estuaries. Cape Breton Island, a large island to the northeast of the Nova Scotian mainland, is also part of the province, as is Sable Island, a small island notorious for its shipwrecks, approximately 175 km from the province's southern coast. Nova Scotia is Canada's second smallest province in area (after Prince Edward Island), and no point in Nova Scotia is more than 56 km from the sea.
See below for a map.
History
The native population of the province are collectively known as the Mi'kmaq.
Although first visited by the explorer John Cabot, an Italian sailing for England, in 1497, Nova Scotia was first settled by the Acadian French under Sieur de Monts. They made their first capital, after a failed attempt in 1604 on Île Ste. Croix in present-day New Brunswick, in 1605 at Port Royal, later renamed by the British to Annapolis Royal, which is located at the head of the Annapolis Basin, Nova Scotia.
In 1620, the Plymouth Council for New England, under James I of England/James VI of Scotland designated the whole shorelines of Acadia and the Mid-Atlantic colonies south to the Chesapeake Bay, New England. In the later 1620s, a group of Scots was sent by Charles I of England and Scotland to set up the colony. (The Latin name was so stated in Sir William Alexander's 1621 land grant.) However owing to the signing of a peace treaty with France, the territory was given to the French and the Scots ordered to abandon their mission before their colony was properly established. The French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island was established to guard the sea approaches to Quebec. This fortress was captured by American colonial forces, then returned by the British to France, then ceded again after the French and Indian War.
The British were very concerned about how dominated the colony was by the French-speaking and Catholic Acadians. In 1750 a large number of foreign Protestants, mostly Germans, were imported and settled along the South Shore. The colony was still mostly Acadian, however, and the British decided to forcibly expel the Acadians. This became known as the Great Expulsion.
Scots emigration to Cape Breton Island, in the north of the province, took place in the late 18th and early 19th century. Some Scottish Gaelic is still spoken there, and some Scots is spoken across Nova Scotia.
In 1763 Nova Scotia encompassed almost all of Acadia (except the Magdalen Islands), the present Canadian Maritimes. In 1769 St. John's Island (now Prince Edward Island) was separated. In 1784 the western, mainland portion of the colony was separated and became the province of New Brunswick, and Cape Breton was also a separate province from 1784 to 1820. These changes reflected the grievances of United Empire Loyalists who settled there after being expelled from the USA following the defeat of the British in the American Revolutionary War.
Nova Scotia was the first colony in British North America and in the British Empire to achieve responsible government in January-February 1848 and become self-governing through the efforts of Joseph Howe. Nova Scotia was one of the four original provinces of Confederation, along with New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario.
The Bluenose, which appears on the Canadian ten-cent piece (dime) was built in Lunenburg, a town on the South Shore.
Map
See also
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