Travel Blogging XVII

Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada: This town owes some of its serious beginnings to the American Revolution. More than 10,000 Tories or “loyalists,” Americans who maintained allegiance to Britain, migrated here after the revolution to escape persecution.

Probably the thing for which St. John is best known is it’s location on the Bay of Fundy which has some of the highest tides on the planet. We’ve been tied up alongside here for roughly five hours during which the tide has risen about eight feet. I know this because my cabin window was a couple of feet below dock level when we arrived and is now about 6 feet above dock level.

I generally understand tides as being related to the pull of the moon on the oceans, I don’t understand why they’re so dramatic here on the Bay of Fundy and almost imperceptible in the Baltic Sea. Explanations for these differences exist, I don’t remember them.

New Brunswick is the Canadian province with the second highest prevalence of French speakers, after Quebec where they are an overwhelming majority. Francophones are not a majority in New Brunswick but a large enough minority to have political clout.

If you’re wondering why there are all these Francophones in Canada, it is because they were here first, before the English, though of course not before the "first peoples" as the Canadians call the Indians and Eskimos . Later they were defeated by the English, turning this region into a British colony from which it evolved into the bilingual nation of Canada.

There are still political stirrings in Quebec to move toward independence from English-speaking Canada. Will it happen? Maybe someday, not anytime soon. The complications of such a separation would be immense.