Sunday, November 14, 1999 Back The Halifax Herald Limited

Humble spud spawned world-famous nickname

By Leslie Smith Dow

Blueˇnose (blü'nohz') n. Informal.

1 a Nova Scotian; less often, a New Brunswicker.

2 (adj.) of or associated with Nova Scotia.

3 a ship built in Nova Scotia and manned by Nova Scotians.

4 bluenose, a prudish or puritanical person.

- from Gage Canadian Dictionary.

Ottawa - Most Nova Scotians are proud to be called Bluenoses, identifying, no doubt, with the unbeatable, graceful racing schooner of the same name and revelling in the link to a glorious maritime past. But, that, it seems, is not the origin of the word.

The shocking truth is that the nickname comes from a lowly potato, and has nothing whatever to do with the sea - or the province of Nova Scotia.

According to oral histories, it all started in 1817, when Nova Scotian immigrants brought some unusual potatoes with them to the Ottawa Valley and elsewhere in Ontario; these people were likely the original Bluenoses.

The Nova Scotians arrived a year after the so-called "summer of horror" - also known as "the summerless year" because snow fell in all 12 months - bringing with them ample supplies of a peculiar potato with a blue nub or "nose" to use for seed, and to eat while they waited for the new crop to be ready. The potato grew well in Nova Scotia, and still does today, although its varietal name is White Albert. There is a Blue Albert variety, but this, strangely, is not the one to which the bluenose nickname applies, says Franz Klingender, curator of the Agriculture Museum at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm.

The Nova Scotians shared their potatoes with the starving settlers - whose family names are commemorated in shopping malls, businesses, bridges and other sites throughout this area - and were rewarded by having the name of the potato transferred to themselves.

The term Bluenoses, often considered disparaging because anybody who ate quantities of potatoes must be poor, was applied honourably to the immigrants from "down East." It may have been the first time the name was used to describe Nova Scotians.

Canadian history professor Cameron Bickerton of Ottawa's Carleton University has studied the origins of the moniker and thinks the Bluenose name could well have been bestowed by Upper Canadians on their Maritime saviours.

Mr. Bickerton, who searched diligently for early references to the term, found nothing at all pertaining to the sea. "Bluenose could so easily be thought to be something of the sea and something of fishermen."

The nickname, he said, has very likely been twisted by tourist promoters, in the same way that Peggys Cove is now portrayed as a quaint Nova Scotia fishing village, leading "to misappropriation of tradition." Mr. Bickerton is confident that there is a "consistent evidentiary base" for the term Bluenose or Bluenoser to have come from Upper Canada.

Dr. Helen Creighton's two books on Nova Scotia folk traditions and songs make no mention of Bluenose, says Prof. Bickerton. "If it were really a genuine product of folk culture . . . you'd find it there." He did find an early reference to Bluenose in A. W. H. Eaton's History of Kings Co., Nova Scotia, indicating the peculiar blue potato was introduced to Kings County around 1820, where there was an agricultural revolution going on. Various new crops were being tried, among them the blue potato, which the emigrants likely brought to Upper Canada.

The Nova Scotians may have emigrated after experiencing their own "summerless year," says Mr. Bickerton, and because of a desire for more land.

"It was very common practice for migrants to carry seed potatoes with them for crops and to eat on the road."

But even that theory could be refuted. In May of 1897, a small item also appeared in a York (Toronto) gazetteer advertising "Blue Nose Potatoes, To be sold at Mr. Russell's farm near York," according to the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. That leads Mr. Klingender to believe the potatoes may have originally come from the United States, and been imported simultaneously to Nova Scotia and Upper Canada. "Trade here was more north-south than east-west," he says. "The idea that people were introduced to the bluenose potato in this area (Ottawa) in 1817 without knowing it was available elsewhere in Upper Canada is possible," concedes Mr. Bickerton.

The legend of the bluenose potatoes has been passed down through the generations. An elderly Ontario man, Benjamin Waldbrook, told the story to historian W. L. Smith. Mr. Waldbrook had heard the story from his father, and Mr. Smith wrote it down in his 1923 book, Pioneers of Old Ontario. The story was retold by Harry and Olive Walker in their 1968 book, Carleton Saga.

The many twists and turns of the origin of the word are further complicated by numerous entries in dictionaries of slang and euphemisms that point to the word as having a New England origin. That misconception, says Mr. Bickerton, can be blamed on Sam Slick, the popular Yankee peddler created by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. "Everyone was reading Thomas Chandler Haliburton in New England, and he popularized the use of the word bluenose. He was really writing about American mannerisms and American culture" and the lexicographers, most of them British, missed the parody.

Mr. Bickerton says he doubts the word originally applied to pre-Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, to their habit of drinking too much rum, or to the effects of the cold sea air on the extremities. "They were just too poor (to drink)," he notes.

Mr. Bickerton has a copy of Noah Webster's original 1847 dictionary, a huge, 1,500-entry work in several volumes, which contains no reference at all to the word bluenose. This, says Mr. Bickerton, is "very odd," and is an indication that the word was not popularly used before this in Nova Scotia or New England.

During the "summerless year" of 1816, wheat and other crops died unharvested in the fields in parts of Ontario and Quebec, buried under snow. When the weather finally relented a little, some meagre harvests were reaped by men wearing heavy overcoats. Ira Honeywell, whose original settlement covered a large part of present-day Ottawa, trekked the 70-plus kilometres to the military settlement of Prescott for barrels of flour, which he reluctantly - and for a price - shared with his only neighbours, the Dows and the Billings.

"Snow commenced falling in June, and the whole country was continuously covered by a wintry blanket. Practically nothing was gathered in the way of a crop. Everything rotted in the ground. There was no flour, there were no vegetables; people lived for twelve months on fish and meat - venison, porcupine, and ground-hog being varied with the thin meat of cattle, slaughtered because there was no vegetation to sustain them," according to Mr. Waldbrook's word-of-mouth narrative.

"I am told that the people of Nova Scotia do not like the title," recalled Mr. Waldbrook. "They should be proud of it. The name recalls the time when help from that province by the sea proved the salvation of sorely stricken Ontario."

"Flour," wrote historian Smith, "was seventy dollars per barrel at Quebec, potatoes were a penny a pound, and the country was full of stories of the horrors endured during the winter of a years duration." Hay was even sent from Ireland to Quebec, where the cold weather was also felt. Fortunately, the next year's harvest, aided by the largesse of the Nova Scotians, was bountiful.

The first literary reference to a Bluenose was likely by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in the introduction to his 1849 masterpiece, The Old Judge: "Such is the gentleman known throughout America as Mr. Blue Nose, a sobriquet acquired from a superior potato of that name, of the good qualities of which he is never tired of talking, being anxious, like most men of small property, to exhibit to the best advantage the little he has."

According to the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principals, Nova Scotians have been Bluenoses since 1785, when the then-derogatory term was applied to them by the newly arrived Loyalists from the United States. The dictionary notes Nova Scotians were often called Bluenoses because of the effect of the cold Atlantic winds on fishermen's snouts, or from drinking too much 100-proof Caribbean rum. Yet another bluenose was the bright blue cannon in the bow of a Nova Scotia privateer during the War of 1812, which allegedly sent many a Yankee ship scurrying for cover.

The name was immortalized in 1921 with the launch of Canada's most famous sailing ship, the 39-metre (130-foot) fishing schooner Bluenose at Lunenburg. She was lost on a reef off Haiti in 1946, but in 1963, Olands Brewery built a replica, the Bluenose II, which was donated to the province of Nova Scotia.

Another reference to the term as meaning "puritanical," or "stuck-up," likely came from a reference to Queen Victoria's "blue-nosed" or "blue-blooded" tastes, says Mr. Bickerton.