Sable Island: TheStrange Origins and Curious History of A Dune Adrift in the Atlantic

Rating:
Summary: Excellent human and natural history of a fascinating island
Review: Authors Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle have produced an interesting book on the history of the Canadian island known as Sable Island. One could be forgiven I believe for thinking the place uninteresting and unworthy of a nearly 250 page book, the island described by some as a "desolate and barren and storm-swept sandbank in the North Atlantic." A crescent shaped island, with arms at east and west reaching to the north, the center bulging towards the south, it is the last lonely outpost of land between Canada and Europe (or Bermuda). Located a hundred miles south of Nova Scotia, it is a mere thirty miles long and at its widest less than a mile wide. A treeless place, it is an island of dunes - some bald, most covered in vegetation - and small ponds. Not a particularly high island, on the north beach dunes reach 85 feet in height, but on the south beach they are rarely more than 8 feet high, considerably shorter than some of the waves that occur during the many gales and storms of the region (though waves that rarely reach the island directly - at least at that height - owing to numerous sand bars miles out to sea around the island). What fame the island has is generally not from it scenery; located on major shipping lands, in an area that is frequently prone to storms and fog, and often not very visible far out to sea, the island has been described as the deadliest piece of real estate in Canada, with hundreds of wrecks having taking place in its waters, fully ten wrecks for every mile of coastline. An additional dangerous feature of the island are its spits located out to the east and west (washed over too often for much in the way of vegetation) which extend between four and nine miles out, as well as the submerged east and west bars, which extend out to eighteen miles - though a massive storm can radically change the size of the spits and bars overnight.

The authors spent a great deal of time discussing the geology of the island, introducing many concepts of that science. Sable Island is an island of sand - not rocks, shale, slate, boulders, or really much in the way of soil - as indeed the name Sable is the French word for sand. Geologists have pegged the island's age at around 15,000 years and they believe the island represents a by-product of the glaciers that once covered Canada, that originally Sable Island was the terminal moraine of a glacier's advance (though much of that original sand has since been moved by wind and wave). The island has not been a static one, changing in size and shape numerous times over human history. Many believe that the island will eventually vanish, its sand vanishing into the depths of the Gully, a huge canyon cut in the continental shelf that almost touches the tip of the island's eastern bar, massive in size (largest submarine canyon in the western North Atlantic at 25 miles long, 10 miles wide, and 8,000 feet deep). There is a great deal of debate over whether the island is moving east, moving west, growing, or shrinking, a subject covered a length.

Meteorology and oceanography around the island are very well covered, with much discussion of global currents and wind systems. The island is very windy, with average winds at 16 miles an hour, gales of up 85 miles an hour routine, and winds of over 120 mph recorded during hurricane-strength storms. It is also wet - annual precipitation is 55 inches, mostly rain, monthly averaging between 3.6 and 5.7 inches - and foggy (July routinely boasts upwards of 20 foggy days and one June had 126 straight hours of fog).

Numerous animals call the island home. For decades the island was known for cattle that had been let loose on the island, though they were all harvested by the 1630s. More famous -and still present - are the ponies of Sable, owing their existence to the politics of the Expulsion (or in French the Grand Derangement or Great Upheaval) of the Acadians in the 1750s. The authors go into a great deal of detail on horse genealogy, firmly showing that the horses bear genetic (and historical) relationships to horses from Acadia. At various times rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, and foxes plagued the island though all have since been removed. Native animals include many species of insects (including three endemic moths and a beetle), a unique nematode, an endemic freshwater sponge which lives in the island's numerous ponds, the Ipswich Sparrow (a subspecies of the Savannah sparrow, breeds only on Sable), numerous nesting seabirds (mostly gulls, terns, and sandpipers), and seals (mostly gray and harbor). The walrus once occurred on the island but has been extinct since the mid 17th century though for many decades afterward their tusks were collected from the shifting sands.

Much of the book (I would say over half) dealt with the human history of the island. It was comprehensive, going all the way back to debates over whom first saw and may have landed on the island, whether they were Viking, Basque, or Portuguese. There was much confusion in early maps over where the island was, its exact shape and size, and indeed who owned it. At various times the island was called Fagunda Island, Santa Cruz, and Isola della Rena (rena being Italian for sand) before the name became Sable Island (or Isle de Sable) in 1601. Unfortunately, most of the human history of the island is associated with the numerous shipwrecks, many of them with few if any survivors and at times hundreds of lives were lost, leading eventually to life saving services and lighthouses being set up on the island. Much of this made for exciting reading, with many first person accounts quoted of shipwrecked sailors and those involved in life saving.

An interesting book, I would have liked some pictures though.