THE IPSWICH SPARROW. 



7 



fifty known wrecks hud occurred, and by January i, 1895, eighteen more 

 had been added, two of them occurring during the summer of 1894, after 

 my departure. A ' wreck-chart' of the island was prepared by Mr. S. D. 

 Macdonald of Halifax in 1882, and published by the Department of Marine 

 of the Dominion Government.' It has been revised up to 1890, but there 

 are supposed to have been other unknown wrecks far out on the bars, of 

 which there is no evidence save perhaps broken spars or a dead body flung 

 by the breakers high on the sandy beach. Richly does Sable Island 

 deserve the title ' An Ocean Graveyard,' and well has it been said, "No 

 other island on this globe can show so appalling a record of shipwreck and 

 disaster ! " 



One of the most fascinating pages in the history of the island, and one 

 that certainly bears most directl}^ upon the history of our Sparrow, is that 

 which records its gradual demolition by storms and ocean currents. It is 

 now apparently a question of years, not centuries, before the island becomes 

 a submerged bar like those with which it is surrounded or those which extend 

 out for miles from either end. There have been periods when it has 

 melted away with startling rapidity, and then again others during which 

 little or no change has taken place. The western extremity has suffered 

 most, while the eastern has been little affected save perhaps by the fury 

 of the gale that, drifting the sand before it, builds up or pulls down the 

 miniature mountains with surprising rapidity. It has been thought that 

 the whole island has been moving eastward grain by grain, but such a 

 statement has not been fully substantiated. It is the western end and 

 southern shore that have been steadily' washing away, and the process goes 

 on more rapidly, the smaller the island becomes, while there is little or no 

 compensatory building up of the eastern end. 



Its size prior to 1775 must remain a matter of conjecture. In that year, 

 however, charts compiled from French sources show it to have been no less 

 than forty miles in length and two and one quarter in breadth. In 1799 an 

 Admiralty survey, carefully made, gave the island a length of thirty-one 

 miles and a breadth of two. In 1808 a special survey of tlie island made 

 it thirty miles in length and two in breadth, with hills from one hundred 

 and fifty to two hundred feet in height, reaching their maximum elevation 

 near the eastern end. In 1815 another chart shows the length to be only 

 twenty-nine miles, and yet we learn that within the four years prior to 1814 

 no less than four miles of the western end had crumbled into the sea, as 

 proved by the situation of the main station erected in 1801. It was then 



'A facsimile of this map, together with an account of the island, may be found: J. M. Oxiey, 'An 

 Ocean Graveyard,' Scribner's Magazine, I, May, 18S7, PP- 603-610. 



