Prefaceby Thomas H. RaddallI met Wallace MacAskill (at left with wife Elda) for the first time in 1951, although I had admired his work since 1937, when he published a collection of his marine photographs under the title Out of Halifax. A limited edition, it was quickly snapped up, but I managed to obtain a copy. In the spring of 1951 he gathered a second collection and asked me to write the picture captions and a foreword. I called at his little shop on Barrington Street in Halifax and noted in my diary: "He is a short stocky Cape Bretoner, speaks in a mild voice with a faintly Gaelic intonation, has a pale face, blue eyes, white hair, a jutting nose. Simple and Rleasant in his ways and speech, a poet with the camera, fascinated all his life with the sea." The book was published that autumn under the title Lure of the Sea, again in a limited edition which sold quickly in Canada and the United States. Most of the copies had ordinary case-bound covers but a few presentation copies were bound in sail cloth, and he inscribed one to me. He was planning a third collection when he died in 1956. MacAskill was born in Cape Breton in 1893, with a cherished Highland ancestry. An early interest in the camera took him to New York, where he studied portrait photography, and then came home to open a small studio in Sydney, N.S. But already his mind was drawn to ships and the sea. Shortly before World War I he moved to Halifax, where he could observe every kind of ship, large or small, sailor steam, and from there he ranged along the coast to visit the fishing people. Eventually he built his cottage "Brigadoon" on the edge of the high crag where York Redoubt, the most powerful of the Halifax forts, guarded the harbour entrance. From the curved window casements of "Brigadoon" one looked across the channel to the stony spit on McNab's Island called Hangman's Beach, where long ago the Royal Navy used to dangle the bodies of deserters and mutineers as a warning to every Jack Tar passing by. "Brigadoon" also looked seaward and in the other direction it had good views of the harbour and the port in general. During World War II the channel was barred by anti-submarine booms and nets except where the gate vessels, one green, one red, gave admittance to the harbour, and so "Brigadoon" had an eagle's aerie view of all the war traffic, in and out. As a bustling naval base and assembly port for trans-Atlantic convoys Halifax became literally the crossroads of the world, especially in those dark days when Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone against Hitler's might. From the site of "Brigadoon" the MacAskills could watch the passage of all types of ships from the huge "Queens," Mary and Elizabeth, each carrying 15,000 troops, down to queer tall-funnelled spar-decked craft drawn hither from Oriental coasts and rivers. Here passed famous British battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and armed merchant liners, as well as Canada's fast growing anti-submarine fleet of destroyers, frigates and corvettes.
In 1943 a German submarine laid mines of a new, intricate and highly dangerous type across the harbour entrance, and "Brigadoon" had a clear view of naval men carefully drawing one of them ashore on Hangman's Beach and with cool courage taking it apart piece by piece. The Germans never mined the Halifax Aside from its seaward views the interior of "Brigadoon " was fascinating in itself, its walls hung with interesting nautical bricabrac and photographs. Here Wallace and his wife Elda entertained their guests in the warm Cape Breton style. Yet MacAskill was no mere observer of the sea. In various craft but notably in his yacht Highlander he sailed on it, usually with a bagpiper in his crew to provide fair winds of the musical kind. He sailed very well, too. During his active life he won just about every racing trophy of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron. Meanwhile his nautical pictures were circulating about the world. In a single year they were shown in 27 countries, mostly in leading newspapers and magazines. Three years before his death the Photographic Association of America made 50 slides of his work, together with tapes telling exactly how the pictures were taken and with what. These too were studied around the world. Wallace and Elda were born in a time when the wooden windjammer was sinking fast under the onslaught of iron and steam. Sail had a brief renaissance during the First World War, when losses by submarine warfare gave a sudden importance to anything that could float and carry a cargo. But it was a swansong. The last Nova Scotian to carry square sail, a barkentine built at Meteghan during the war, perished in a storm off Bermuda in 1924. Fore-and-aft sail hung on for a few years in the bank fishing fleet and in stately tern schooners plying the fish and lumber trade with the West Indies, but after 1930 most of these were disrobed by the diesel engine. Joseph Conrad once remarked, "The special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird." That was Wallace MacAskill's sentiment as well. In recent times a few captious souls have pooh-poohed the sentiment, saying that he merely "romanticized" the dying age of sail. The truth is that in his time, and just in time, he managed to catch various aspects of what has been called "the most beautiful thing ever made by man for a purpose of utility" and in doing so preserved them for posterity. Posterity is all the richer for it.
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entrance again (they had much more urgent use for their mines in Europe) but their submarines prowled outside until the war's end. On Christmas Eve 1944 the minesweeper Clayoquof was torpedoed and sunk within gunshot of York Redoubt, and in April 1945 so was the minesweeper Esquimalt.Home Page | Angus | History | Links | Tartans | Message Forum