pressures we find today. When one is very young, life is always beautiful and interesting — and it was never more so for me than on the day in the long ago when I left for my future home with my husband, sitting proudly and happily behind a span of pure white horses! No automobile could ever take their place! The bridegroom of that November day is now in his 9lst year, and life has been good to both of us.

(This essay was read at the Women’s Institute Convention in 1964, by Mrs. MacKay, and was awarded second prize in the Provincial Competition.)

Courtesy of her son, Elmore MacKay.

6le Etgtuhew of the matte 39010

The following narrative has been extracted from a taped interview of Tommy Gallant by the Stanley Bridge Historical Society.

“It would be the year 1959 that I found the Marco Polo and salvaged the anchors.”

The Marco Polo was a three masted barque built in a Saint John NB. shipyard by James Smith in 1851, named for the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, and destined to find greatness as a result of the speed with which she could circumnavigate the globe, faster than any other ship of her day. Irrespective of her greatness, her fate was to suffer an ignominious end as a deal carrier, when she foundered in the shallow waters off the north shore of Prince Edward Island on July 25, 1883, near the famous beaches of Cavendish which were so revered by Lucy Maud Montgomery and the fictional characters she created. There the Marco Polo gained respite from her many battles with angry seas, winds, tides, currents, and age in the relentless pursuit, by her masters, to retain her dominance over her peers. Here she could rest at last in the welcome soli— tude of these sun drenched shoals. The remarkable speed of this ship, relative to her, is alleged to be attributable to her launching and Tommy relates this happening as follows: “Once she was built on the slip and completed they knocked the wedges out and she takes off into the water.

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