Capturing a country through sport: Off the beaten track
To celebrate our country’s birthday, the Star is showcasing 150 of the quintessential Canadian sporting characters and moments of the last 150 years. In the eighth of a 10-part series, we highlight the non-mainstream sports.
The hopes of the Maritime region rode on the sturdy shell of the Bluenose, which became a symbol of Canadian pride. (Toronto Star file photo)
To celebrate our country’s birthday, the Star is showcasing 150 of the quintessential Canadian sporting characters and moments of the last 150 years. In the eighth of a 10-part series, we highlight the non-mainstream sports.
Bluenose
After international yachtsmen called off America’s Cup races in 1920 every time the wind picked up, the Halifax Herald raged about the need for “a real race — not a ladylike saunter of fair weather freaks.”
From that colourful sentiment, the great Bluenose was born.
She was built to carry the winning hopes of a Maritime region — and win she did for her entire racing career — and became an enduring symbol of national pride.
But the Bluenose was also a real fishing vessel — so real, that her name, as the story goes, came from the blue dye left behind when the Nova Scotia fisherman wiped their noses with their homemade blue-dyed mittens.
William Roue, a young marine architect, designed the magnificent Bluenose to fish for cod on the Grand Banks and race on the open ocean — and she was so far ahead of her time that she was long called the last truly great sailing ship ever built.
And she was as Canadian as could be: built at the Smith & Rhuland Shipyards in Lunenburg, made almost entirely from the forests of Nova Scotia and skippered by local Angus Walters.
He sailed Bluenose to victory to capture the International Fishermen’s Trophy in 1921 and, try as many did in the coming years to build a schooner that could beat her, Walters kept sailing her to victory until her last race in 1938.
He even kept things fair — when a competitor lost a sail, he doused his, knowing Canada’s great schooner would still win the day.
“The wood ain’t growin’ yet that’ll beat Bluenose,” he loved to say.
He was right and Bluenose, beautiful as she was fast, graced Canadian stamps and the dime long after she’d met her sad end on a reef off Haiti in 1946.