50 "TRANSACTlONg. 1897-S. 



tinguished philanthropist whose life-long devotion to the 

 cause of the slave in the colonies of Great Britain resulted in 

 the Imperial Statute of 1833, by which the last vestige of 

 slavery was removed from Canadian soil. The village of 

 " Buxton " memorizes to this day, and let us hope for all time, 

 the great event of the legal abolition of slavery in the British 

 Colonies, and the gratitude of the fugitive slaves who found 

 an asylum in free Canada from the wrongs and sorrows of the 

 land of their birth. 



On the 27th May, 1753, there sailed out of Halifax Har- 

 bour a fleet of fourteen transports carrying 1,453 persons, 

 mostly Germans, with a few French-speaking Protestants 

 from Switzerland and France, under charge of 92 regular 

 troops and 66 rangers. Their destination was Merleguesh. 

 Landing safely they began to build a town which they pro- 

 tected, on the land side from Indians, by palisades and block- 

 houses, and on the water side from pirates, by a battery called 

 Fort Bowscawen. With true German promptitude they began 

 at once to obey the primal command " increase and multiply " 

 for Jane Margaret Bailey gave birth to a child on the first 

 night after the landing. From this band has largely sprung 

 the 37,000 souls ascertained by the Census of 1891 to be the 

 population of the fine County of Lunenburg — as the town and 

 county were christened for the first settlers a fortnight before 

 they left Halifax, in memory of Liineburg, in Hanover, 

 Prussia. One of their first acts after landing was to call the 

 stream on the banks of which they stepped from the boats, 

 Rouses Brook in honor of Capt. Rous under whose safe con- 

 duct they had come to their future home. Thus Capt. Rous 

 is remembered in our place-names, and that his memory is 

 worthy of perpetuation is plain from the fact that he was in 

 command of the Sutherland^ 50 guns, when Wolfe was before 

 Quebec, and that it was from the deck of this ship that Wolfe 

 issued his last orders before he climbed the steep slope leading 

 to the Plains of Abraham and to fame. 



In the year 1783 the British legion which had served 

 with distinguished reputation in the war between Great Brit- 

 ain and some of her American Colonies under Col. Tarleton 

 came to Nova Scotia and began a settlement at Port Mouton, 

 and laid out the boundaries of a town to which they gave the 

 name Guysboro. They soon found that the soil was stony 



