Here’s a question for a hot Summer day: Did early Maritimers go to the beach like we do now?
The answer has evolved over the years, and you may be surprised at how Maritimers from centuries ago would view beaches and swimming in particular.
First, it’s pretty easy for us to answer the question of whether Maritimers would have gone to our beautiful ocean-side beaches on a hot Summer day: no. Absolutely not.
Surprisingly consistently throughout the entirety of human history, across different cultures around the world, very few people would have ever chosen to voluntarily gone swimming in the ocean until the past century.
After all, oceans are dark, foreboding, and dangerous. People died in oceans. Monstrous creatures washed up from them.
It would not be that much of an exaggeration to describe the way Europeans thought of the ocean as “apocalyptic.”
We can see this reflected in literature, from the world being drowned in the Bible to the beach of tears and the sea of monsters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, through Dante’s third circle of hell being lined with sand: classic literature is consistent that ocean beaches are malevolent places.
Language is telling: before the mid-1800s “on the beach” was an expression meaning being desperately poor.
To answer the question, New Brunswickers before the mid-to-late 1800s would find scenes of packed beaches, such as Kouchibouguac and New River Beach, utterly incomprehensible.
Swimming in a lake was an altogether different thing, however.
While it is often frustratingly difficult to find sources on what average people did for fun in times gone by, we do know that before Europeans arrived, Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy peoples had a robust bathing culture. They diligently kept themselves clean by bathing frequently in lakes and rivers. It’s not a stretch to assume that they also swam for fun on hot days since they were already used to lakes and rivers.
Europeans, by contrast, were distinctly more averse to going in the water at all, either to swim or certainly to bathe.
The Europeans began to arrive in large numbers in the Maritimes with Samuel de
Champlain’s French explorers in May of 1604.
The Mi’kmaq weren’t surprised by their arrival. There had been a legend that blue-eyed people from faraway lands to the east would arrive and disrupt their way of life.
If their arrival didn’t surprise the Mi’kmaq, the Europeans’ personal hygiene standards did.
The Europeans didn’t care for their teeth at all, while the Mi’kmaq chewed wood to clean their teeth, chewed mint for fresh breath, and whitened their teeth with charcoal. It was shocking to them that Europeans carried their mucus around with them in used handkerchiefs.
And the worst was that the Europeans didn’t bathe. Ever.
Uniformly across the continent, Europeans were against submerging themselves in water at all, considering it unhealthy and also immodest.
The Europeans, rich or poor, thought underwear kept them clean. As long as they wore clean underwear, the thinking went, they were clean people. French King Louis XIV was said to have taken only three baths in his entire life.
So the settlers were not going swimming, not in 1604, and not for the next two and a half centuries.
Ideas of the beach, swimming, and the ocean began to change with industrialization.
This change — which was a complete shift from the entirety of human history that came before — began abruptly in the early 1800s in Britain and quickly spread across the world, including to the Maritimes.
In the mid-1800s, life was much more secure and prosperous in New Brunswick than ever before. Cities were growing, food was secure, there was industrial growth, there was a massive and lucrative shipbuilding sector, and there was stability and security. Travel (in summer, on rivers) was faster than ever, and relatively financially accessible even for lower-income people.
Nature, for the first time, was beginning to be seen by settlers as something not actively trying to kill them.
Rather, nature and the ocean began to be seen as something purifying and good for the soul, unlike the filthy city.
In New Brunswick, the new attitude was perhaps best exemplified by Fredericton photographer George Thomas Taylor. He, along with his Indigenous guides from St. Mary’s and Tobique, travelled all over untouched New Brunswick, taking photographs with his homemade camera of its natural beauty and its people. Prints of his photographs were very popular and sold well.
Once again, foreigners appeared on The Maritimes’ shores, this time coming from the South: wealthy American tourists. They came from places like Boston and New York City to escape the dirt and smog, arriving in places like St. Andrew’s.
They wanted to spend time on the beach, and they wanted to eat lobster — two things New Brunswickers firmly associated with poverty. Just as the Europeans’ customs were bewildering to the Mi’kmaq, the Americans' tastes and desires were mystifying to Maritimers — no self-respecting white New Brunswicker would eat lobster if they could afford not to. However, the locals were more than willing to accept the Americans’ money.
Soon, wealthier New Brunswickers began following the American tourists' lead and also
began going to the beach for fun.
Between the 1890s to the beginning of the First World War, wealthier people from Fredericton and Saint John might make the difficult expedition to places like St. Martins simply to enjoy the beach.
They would dress up in fine clothes — men in suits and women in full dresses — and they’d have picnics, walk around, perhaps fly a kite. They sometimes even would eat a hated lobster, baking them on hot rocks covered in seaweed right on the beach, a technique learned from Indigenous people. However, they were still suspicious of swimming.
The rich people became so enamoured with the beach life that they built railways to places like St. Andrews and built luxury resorts like the famous Algonquin, completed in 1889.
The railways meant it became possible for middle-income Maritimers to go on trips to beaches, too. The average Maritimer likely couldn’t afford the luxurious Algonquin, but there were more affordable resorts in St. Andrew’s or on inland lakes like Lake Utopia.
Even so, we still have to jump years into the future to find the average New Brunswicker enjoying the beach on a hot summer’s day.
The First World War shattered that old world of wealthy aristocrats in suits and dresses flying kites on the beach. Fashions, tastes, and attitudes changed quickly in the 1920s.
In that decade, New Brunswick became something of a hotspot of North American tourism. It attracted big sports and silent film actors who came to go fishing and hunting.
This was almost entirely due to one man named Doug Black, an excellent tourism promoter from Fredericton who first promoted New Brunswick as a passion project, and later was made the first ever head of the brand new tourism department.
Doug Black also promoted New Brunswick’s natural wonders, including its beaches to the owners of the new innovation that was suddenly attainable to the average person; the automobile.
Only about one century ago marked the first time the average New Brunswicker had the security, the spare money, and the free time to enjoy going to a beach on a hot summer’s day.
For the first time in the late 1920s and early 1930s, you could drive your car to the same ocean-side beaches in New Brunswick that we go to today. There you would find familiar parking lots filled with cars, and get out to see the beaches filled with people in bathing suits, hanging out on the beach and playing in the water on hot summer days.
While back then the roads were considerably worse, the cars were very different, and the swimsuits were less revealing (though you might be surprised at just how revealing they were in the wild 1920s), you would finally recognize the culture of going to the beach as essentially exactly the same as today.
Photos of that era look remarkably modern: hordes of young people in scantily clad bathing suits clamoured to the beaches in Summer. Our beach culture has remained largely unchanged in the past century.
Today, we largely do the same thing our grandparents or great-grandparents did on hot summer days.
