A remote, rocky island in the Bay of Fundy remains the only piece of land still in dispute between Canada and the United States, neither of which are in the mood to give it up.
Long before the arrival of European settlers, the island was used by Peskotomuhkati as a summer hunting site. The Peskotomuhkati named it Mesancook, which means bare place.
It is not a big island, and is almost completely desolate. It is significant today because the country that owns it controls the lucrative fishing rights around it.
The little island was subjected to thick fogs that could roll in and last for several days straight at a time. This, along with the lack of protection from the elements that their name for it implies, is why the Peskotomuhkati never settled the island.
That is also why, after Europeans began arriving in North America, they paid very little attention to the isolated island.
Even when wars raged between Canada and the United States, first during the American Revolution, and later in the War of 1812, the island was ignored or forgotten, despite its strategic location.
The island was so completely forgotten by both countries during both wars that it did not appear at all in the peace treaties which ended those wars.
Yet even as the ink was still drying on the paper of the peace treaty which ended the War of 1812, New Brunswick had designs on the island.
This was before Canada existed, and the then independent colony of New Brunswick could at times be surprisingly willing to risk border disputes with the United States.
Only five months after the war ended, already a detailed survey map of Machias Seal Island –with a marked location for a lighthouse– had been presented to the province’s Executive Council.
The Executive Council ultimately passed on that 1815 proposal to build the lighthouse. However, 17 years later, the government was convinced to build the lighthouse by Saint John merchants who were losing a remarkable number of ships on the dangerous rocky areas surrounding the island.
The first of what would eventually be three successive lighthouses on that small rocky outcrop was built in 1832.
In 1876, historian J. G. Lormier wrote in his book ‘History of Islands & Islets of the Bay of Fundy’ that Machias Seal Island was the “most desolate abode in the Bay of Fundy.”
Lormier described the island’s lighthousekeepers at that time, John Connolly and his sons. They had spent 37 years alone on the island, and he wrote that “the experience of this Connolly family of the fogs and the storms and the isolation of living on a lone, desolate rock, amid the fury of the elements, for 37 years, must have been bitter indeed.”
Living and working in a lighthouse wasn’t an easy life.
On January 9th, 1869, John Connolly and his brother Obadiah watched as a ship from Sackville, New Brunswick, laden with lumber and hay, bound for Barbados, struck a low rising islet some distance off of the coast of the island.
Risking their lives, the brothers started out at once in a small rowboat in heavy winds and icy winter seas for the stricken vessel. The two men rescued all nine of the ship's crew and brought them back to the lighthouse. There they fed and warmed up the the sickly and freezing and freezing crew, all of whom were from either New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.
In his book, Lormier called on the then only nine year old government of the brand new country called Canada to treat lighthousekeepers like the Connolly brothers better, writing: “surely the Marine Department of Canada would be not only justified but duty bound, in consideration of such a life-long exile from all human society, save their own, to grant them a suitable salary during the remainder of their hitherto wasted years. ”
The Connolly brothers’ years on the island weren’t wasted for sailors though – during their 37 years as keepers of the light, they rescued seven other crews of vessels which had crashed onto the rocks surrounding that desolate island. “And that of itself is sufficient to entitle them to the consideration of the new Government,” Lormier sniffed.
The American military in effect occupied Machias Seal Island in 1918. Throughout the First World War, German U-Boats had regularly prowled the Bay of Fundy hunting Canadian ships. However, after the Americans finally joined the war, those German submarines launched a brazen attack on U.S. soil, shelling Cape Cod.
In response U.S. Marines occupied Machias Seal Island. They did so to protect its lighthouse, and to use the island as a base to defend the wider region from the German submarine attacks.
The comparatively minor issues of the island’s unresolved sovereignty had been set aside in the face of the U-Boat menage, and the Americans had indeed sought and received the blessing of the Canadian government before they set foot on the island. After the war’s end the Marines duly departed Machias Seal Island, and that seems to be the last time there was an American military presence on the island.
Today the Canadian Coast Guard fly in two Guards on helicopters for rotating four week long shifts to ensure the island is constantly manned by Canadian officials, to assert its sovereignty over the island. Now every single lighthouse remaining on the East Coast is automated – except for Machias Seal Island.
The desolate little rock in the middle of nowhere is significant to the two countries because the country that owns it controls the lucrative fishing rights around it.
Unfortunately, since both countries claim the island, and neither recognizes the others’ claims to the island, both nations continue to allow their respective fishing fleets to fish around it. As a result, it’s become something of an ecological nightmare as a result, with fish stocks becoming depleted from overfishing.
