Tiny Sable Island Canada’s newest national park

Published October 24, 2011 |

Sable Island was once used as a rescue center as the island has seen around 350 shipwrecks off her shores. Sable Island is said to have been first visited by Portuguese explorer Joao Alvares Fagundes in 1520-1521, though there is little evidence to support it. After several failed attempts to colonize the island over the past almost 500 years, there is little more than two lighthouses and about 400 wild horses. Kathryn Blaze Carlson of the National Post reports about the announce to name this tiny island a national park.

It is just a long, slender, green-bean of a thing, but this dune off the cold coast of Nova Scotia is anything but a harmless strip of sand. Its swirling waters are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, for they have swallowed 350 ships since 1583. Its underwater Scotian Shelf hosts 18 shark species who feast on the islandaE�s grey seals.

The island is tall and narrow aE" 40-km in length, and only 1.5-km in width aE" and its body is held together by a skeleton of beach grass that traps the sand granules and the pirate wreckage buried within. Hundreds of untamed horses run wild, their matted manes unruly in the blustering wind where the Labrador current collides with the warm gulf stream and breeds thick fog.

This is Sable Island, a crescent-shaped mass roughly 300 kilometres out to sea. On Monday, Sable Island was formally named a Canadian national park reserve to ensure, the environment minister said in a statement, that the aEoeiconicaE� and aEoefabledaE� island will be protected for all time.

Read the rest of the story at Tiny Sable Island CanadaaE�s newest national park | News | National Post.

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Chris Rivait

Chris loves history and hopes that Yesteeyear becomes a place where everyone can share their history knowledge. Chris owns an Internet Marketing company, Arrivait Marketing. He has a wonderful wife and four great children.