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LITTLE LORRAINE CEMETERY ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF THE IRISH IMMIGRANTS WHO LOST THEIR LIVES WHEN THE SHIP ASTERISK WITH 500 SOULS ON BOARD BOUND FROM LIMERICK TO QUEBEC WERE WRECKED ON LORRAINE HEAD APRIL 22, 1816 ONLY TWO SURVIVING MAY THEY REST IN PEACE ERECTED BY THE A.O.H. IN UNITED STATES AND CANADA O'CONNELL'S DAY AUGUST 6, 1949 |
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| Lorraine Head lays within the Fortess of Louisbourg National Historic Site. You can view a photographic panorama of the coastline from Lorraine Head to East Lorraine Head in the Dream City exhibit. The snapshot above, of the Asterisk Memorial at the Little Lorraine Cemetery several kilometres away from the park, is not part of the exhibit, but illustrates for my purposes -- that being Contact 2008 's thematic focus Between Memory & History -- the particular problem of skepticism one encounters when digging into any reading of history. Can the story be believed? The memories are real, but did the data and events stored in those memories mutate? What's the truth? The tragedy described by the monument pictured above has been repeated in several books about Nova Scotian shipwreck disasters and is name-checked in a display at a private marine museum in "New Town" Louisbourg. I have tried to find more information about this fateful event, but have been stumped and now believe the tale of the Asterisk deserves an asterisk (*) because it is a tale that has been badly mangled in the re-telling. Here's why: On April 15, 1834, four emigrant ships departed Limerick in Ireland and set sail across the Atlantic for Quebec. On the early morning of May 8th, 1834, one of those ships, the Astrea, with 251 persons aboard, struck rocks at the head of Little Lorraine -- about five kilometres northeast of Lorraine Head -- and quickly disintegrated. 248 aboard perished. Three men survived. Familiar threads from the tales of both tragedies say fifteen inhabitants of Little Lorraine worked feverishly for days collecting the bodies, most of the deceased naked or in nightgowns, and interring them. The women pulled together whatever clothes they had to dress the dead for respectful burial, and the men used pick-axes to dig shallow graves. There were no coffins. There was no time for building coffins. The inhabitants superstitiously believed that if the dead were not properly attired and buried before sundown, their spirits would haunt Little Lorraine. Reading these parallel stories, one is struck by the similarity and coincidence. The names of the ships; the places of departure and destination; the proximity of the wrecks; the low number of survivors; the eyebrow-raising ballpark figure of exactly 500 crew and passengers on board. And according to Cape Breton's Magazine No. 11, coins from the wreck were discovered as having been struck with the date 1826 on them -- a decade after the supposed Asterisk tragedy. I suppose it's possible, but . . . Are the Asterisk and the Astrea one-and-the-same? I think it more than likely they are. If that is the case, then what we have seen memorialized and retold in books is a tale that has: - the wrong name of the ship; - the wrong month, wrong day, wrong year; - the wrong number of fatalities; - the wrong number of survivors; and - the wrong wreck location; -- all of that engraved in stone. Between memory and history; or is that, between history and memory? |
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