In 1815 Nova Scotia was overrun by an invasion of rodents!
Dr. George Patterson later interviewed people who lived through what was called Year of the Mice.
The horrors of that year left a mark on those who had experienced it so deep that he found that elderly people that had personally experienced the mouse invasion still used it as a measurement of time. ‘Sixty-two Years After The Mice,’ Dr. Patterson wrote that these had been no ordinary mice:
“They were very destructive and actually fierce. If pursued, when hard pressed, they would stand at bay, rising upon their hind legs, setting their teeth and squealing fiercely. A farmer on whom I could rely told me that having, after planting, spread out some barley to dry in the sun before the door, in a little while he saw it covered with them. He let the cat out among them, but they actually turned upon her and fought her.”
In 1877 Dr. George Patterson wrote his book called The History of Pictou County. No one had ever written a history of the central regions of Nova Scotia before, and he wanted to personally interview the oldest people to hear first hand what life had been like for them.
He wandered the area interviewing its oldest inhabitants to capture their recollections of the region’s history before it was too late.
Dr. Patterson tried to piece together what had caused the Year of The Mice, but he found that the people who had experienced it said that they had seemingly come out of nowhere:
“During the previous season, they did not appear in any unusual numbers. But at the end of Winter, they were so numerous as to trouble the sugar makers by fouling their troughs for gathering sap, and before planting was over, the woods and fields alike swarmed with them. They were of the large species of field mouse, still sometimes seen in the country, but which has never since been very numerous.”
He wrote: “This was a most destructive visitation, from which this portion of the country suffered from these seemingly insignificant animals. The rodent hordes infested Tatamagouche, Pictou, Colchester and Antigonish.”
“These animals swarmed everywhere and consumed everything edible, even the potatoes in the ground. In some houses at West River are still reserved books which the leather on the covers has been gnawed by them.”
It was farmers who were worst affected by the mice. One of those books with the gnawed covers, the minutes of The West River Farming Society, opened with a poem written by an unknown local farmer who apparently also dabbled as a poet:
“Let this be held the farmers’ creed,
For stock seek out the choicest breed,
In peace and plenty let them feed.
Your lands sow with the best of seed,
Let it not for dung and dressing want,
And then provisions won’t be scant.”
However, that year the mice ate all the seeds which had been planted that spring, causing a crop failure. Dr Patterson interviewed one woman who was by then 90 years old, who recalled that she could barely walk because she was so weak from hunger.
While for most of the Maritimes being ravaged by plagues of mice was certainly not common, strangely enough it actually was fairly common across the Northumberland Strait, PEI.
In 1699 a traveller from France named Dièreville visited what was then called Ile St. Jean. He would publish his observations about daily early life when the Maritimes were called Acadia into a book called Relation du voyage du Port Royal de l’Acadie ou de la Nouvelle France.
In it he wrote that every seven years mice (or locusts) ravaged PEI: “The Island of St. John is stated to be visited every seven years by swarms of locusts or field mice, alternately – never together. After they ravage the land, they precipitate themselves into the sea.”
The periodic mice invasions of PEI are a thing of the past today, but at least one notable trace of them survives. The town of Souris in PEI is of course from the French word souris, which means mouse.
Not very much is known about Dièreville as a person – not even his real name. He was a young doctor from France, and had a keen eye for details about everyday life in French Acadia though, the kinds of details most writers of his time did not note. He also had a interesting poetic writing style, even when he is describing a harrowing topic like the plague of mice affecting PEI:
“In April and May, when the warm air loosened the frost, we read that the earth sent forth mice instead of flowers, mice that were large and savage, almost resembling rats, and, some say, white in color. They increased at an alarming rate, until, in August they were as thick as grasshoppers, and destroyed everything eatable that was not carefully protected. Grain, vegetables and shrubs alike disappeared before their ravages, until the fields were as bare as a board."
While it’s unlikely there is ever a good time for a rodent invasion, 1815 was a distinctly bad time. The Maritimes had profited immensely the previous three years as the British and Americans fought the War of 1812.
Ships, forts, and barracks were constructed, the price of farmers’ produce shot up, workers wages rose, and there was a sharp and lucrative jump in prosperity throughout the entire region.
When peace was signed that Spring, it brought with it a deep Maritimes-wide recession. John Young’s Letters of Agricola noted that “peace came and at once dried up all the sources of this artificial prosperity. Real estate [prices] fell almost in an instant, trade declined, land produce was lowered … universal gloom settled over the Province.”
Many decades later, in 1892 the Intercontinental Railway published a little booklet called Forest, Stream and Seashore for tourists visiting the Maritimes. Perhaps startlingly, because tourists are not known for their fondness for mice infestations, their tourist brochure wrote in some detail about what they called the “Anno Marium,” Latin for “Year of the Mice,” comparing it to the plagues in the Bible:
“…An army of mice marched over Colchester, Pictou and Antigonish Counties, eating everything before it as it advanced. It was a veritable plague, as serious for a time as that of the frogs sent upon the land of Egypt, and which has had nothing to compare with it in the provinces in more recent times, with the exception of the invasion of the army worm.”
Dr. Patterson wrote that while the mice had been bad during Spring and Summer it was in Autumn that they truly became a plague: “it was when the grain began to ripen, that their destructiveness became especially manifest. They then attacked it in such numbers … They have been known to cut down an acre in three days, so that whole fields were destroyed in a short time … Over acres and acres, they left not a stalk standing, nor a grain of wheat, to reward the labours of the farmer. They burrowed in the ground and consumed the potatoes. Cats, dogs, and martens gorged themselves to repletion upon them, but with little seeming diminution of their numbers. Trenches were dug and filled with water, but they formed but a slight barrier to their progress.”
In the end the crops failed, and starvation loomed over Central Nova Scotia.
However, it was averted by large and expensive donations by the Governor, Sir John Coape Sherbrooke.
The following year the Governor died, and farmer Nathaniel Symond wrote a letter to the Acadian Reporter newspaper on behalf of the people of Antigonish to express their gratitude. He wrote that before the Governor's donation had arrived “upwards of five hundred souls … had nothing to subsist on but the very scanty allowance of milk their cows afforded them.”
As Autumn began to turn into Winter, Dr. Patterson wrote that the mice: “passed away as rapidly as they came. In the Autumn, as the weather became colder, they became languid, scarcely able to crawl. One could trample them under his feet and finally they died in hundreds, so that they could be gathered in heaps, and their putrefying carcasses might be found in some places in such numbers as to taint the air. “
Just like the French writer Dièreville had written over 200 years earlier, at the end of the season the mice went to the sea to die.
Dr. Patterson wrote: “At Cape George they went to the water, and there died, forming a ridge like seaweed along the edge of the sea, and codfish were caught off the coast with carcasses in their maws.”
While the mice invasion had ended, things would not get any better for a couple years.
In fact things would actually get much worse before they got better.
A massive volcano would erupt in Indonesia, sending an enormous plume of smoke and ash into the sky.
