7

AS PALE AS ICE
AND AS HARD
AS STONE

MUD ISLAND

About eighty kilometres southwest of Shelburne, you will be certain to notice three ill-formed islands located in the heart of Lobster Bay and called Seal, Mud, and John’s.

Seal is named for the great herd of gray seals that make their home there at certain times of the year. I really don’t know who John was. Perhaps a sailor who drowned close to the island, or an early settler. Perhaps it was once the site of a convenient outdoor privy.

But I can tell you about Mud Island, holder of the murky secret of the cold stone woman.

Back in 1833, the brig Victory set sail for New York City carrying a cargo of Cape Breton granite. The brig was helmed by one George Card of Campobello, New Brunswick and had a crew of seven: five sturdy sailors, a cook, and his assistant, a young red-headed girl named Maggie Flynn.

The weather was calm that day and they’d travelled far and the captain decided to drop anchor in the sheltered lee of Mud Island.

That night, following a long calm, one of the worst nor’easter gales on record slammed into the still waters of Lobster Bay, lashing her full fury on the unwary Victory.

The captain, fearing that the force of the storm would tear the ship from her anchor and turn her, ordered the ship’s cook and young Maggie Flynn into a dory.

Now it might sound like a strange notion, sending a person from a large and sturdy brig to the dubious shelter of a dory in the heart of a gale, but the captain knew what he was doing. A dory was an awfully hard thing to sink. If the weather was bad enough, the sailors would seal the dory up with canvas, and they would ride the storm out, hunkered down in its belly, bobbing along like a cork in the waves.

The waves were rough as young Maggie stepped into the dory. She nearly slipped as her feet caught on a poorly laid rope.

“Sit down!” a sailor called, but the sea was too loud for him to be clearly heard. As Maggie turned toward the sailor, a great wave smashed up against the side of the dory and threw her into the water.

One sailor jumped down into the dory to try and rescue her. He could see her in the water, tossed like a child in a blanket game. “Grab hold!” he shouted, reaching his arm out over the water.

He looked back once, hoping for a little help from the rest of the crew, but the other sailors were far too busy trying to keep the Victory afloat.

“Come on!” he shouted.

Maggie managed to hook one arm up about the bow of the dory. The young sailor worked his way down to her. He could see her face, pale and staring like a death mask, from the heart of the storm-tossed Atlantic and the sight moved him. He worked his way forward and tried to grab on to Maggie’s arm. Another wave rocked the dory, the sailor plunged into the angry waters. Dressed far more heavily than Maggie, he sank like three-day-old biscuit. The dory broke against the ship’s hull and Maggie was lost.

The storm turned the Victory over and stove her in two like a rotted barrel. The captain and the entire crew were lost to the angry waters. After the storm eased up, searchers found the hulk of the ship grounded in the mud flats surrounding Mud Island. The corpses of the five dead sailors, covered in dead eel grass, were strewn around the wreckage of the Victory, like the points on a compass. The captain was still clinging to the wheel, his dead hands frozen hard to the spokes.

They buried the sailors on the shore of Mud Island. The ground was wet and soft for the digging. Shortly after the last grave was dug, a searcher stumbled across the body of poor Maggie Flynn, lying face upward in the shallow water, her arm still hooked about the broken bow stem of the ship’s dory. Her face was as pale as ice, her flesh as hard as stone.

This hardness was far more than simple rigor mortis. Young Maggie was petrified, like a hod of sculpting clay that had hard-ened in the heat of the sun, as if her flesh had turned to granite.

Some said it was something in the water; others claimed it was something in the mud, while still others blamed it on the unseasonable chill of the cold gray Atlantic waters. Whatever the reason, the body of young Maggie Flynn was as cold, hard, and pale as any marble church sculpture.

At first the sailors who had found her were afraid to touch her strangely altered flesh.

“We’ll turn to stone ourselves,” one swore. “Don’t touch her.”

“It’s devil’s work,” another said.

“She is a Maritime woman who has died at sea,” their leader pointed out. “She’ll get a decent Christian burial, even if she was turned to hot burning glass.”

They quickly fell to their work and in a short time had churned the dirt deep enough to lay poor Maggie safely at rest.

They ended the day at a local tavern where ale loosened their tired tongues.

“Digging is thirsty work, and an ale or two will wash the taint of grave dirt from our throats,” said one.

“Aye,” agreed another, “and a tot of rum will wash the taint of ale from our lips.”

It goes without saying that drinking leads to gossip as sure as all rivers lead home to the sea. Soon enough the entire tavern had heard the tale of Mud Island’s petrified woman. Before too long, a boatload of drunken sailors were rowing themselves out to see the petrified remains of poor Maggie Flynn. They dug her up and had their fill of staring, burying her back down in a careless and shallow manner.

Soon word got around to the whole town that a stone woman had been buried in the dirt of Mud Island. Entertainment like that was clearly hard to pass up in nineteenth-century rural Nova Scotia and soon the midnight boat tours and excavations became a regular event. Curiosity seekers from far and wide stole out to take a look at the woman made of stone.

Finally, an old couple who lived on the island took it upon themselves to dig up Maggie Flynn’s grave and rebury her in an undisclosed spot. They said it was the only Christian thing to do, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they had had enough of the nightly rambles of young drunken thrill-seekers.

It has been said by more than a few storytellers that if you pass over a certain part of Mud Island you will feel a chill in your bones, as if you’d climbed into a meat locker. I don’t know about that, but I do believe that somewhere on Mud Island, about fifteen miles from Clarke’s Harbour, the mortal remains of one Maggie Flynn are lying beneath the soft black dirt, as pale as ice and as hard as stone.