A number of settlers arrived in the Nancy in September 1750. a Lieutenant John Young had originally been placed in charge of them. It was normal practice at the time that whenever one of the passengers on board an emigrant ship had "superior social status", that person was given a sort of unofficial overseer role by the Lords of Trade. But though he left England with them in the Nancy, he did not arrive in Halifax on the Nancy with them - he arrived after them under separate sail.

Many of the original 1749 settlers sent with Cornwallis had proved disappointing - they were either former military or naval people who had no skills to offer the new settlement, or had skills which were more appropriate for fully developed urban civilisations, such as those found in New England, to which Bates argues a good 1100 of them in fact scampered off to in short order.

The Lords of Trade commissioned John Dick in Rotterdam to round up "foreign protestants" - Germans, Swiss, Dutch, etc, who they figured would be of sturdier stock. John Dick's shipments of these began in earnest in 1752. In the interval, however, the Lords wanted to send more people over. In 1750, they sent over approximately five hundred people in the Alderney and the Nancy. The Alderney was the larger of the two. About 100 of these were Swiss or other protestants, who had come to England in the hopes in fact of being accepted for Nova Scotia, and the rest were English, presumably English that the Lords had determined were "sturdier". The Swiss and others it is presumed were mostly on the Alderney. Bell presumes that the Nancy carried mostly English passengers; he further presumes that the Nancy had about 143 passengers on it. He notes that the Board of Trade Journal records that the Nancy embarked 143 on 26 June 1750.

Lieutenant Young travelled on board the Nancy. The Nancy seems to have gone somewhat off of what a direct course to Nova Scotia would have been, because by the 15 August 1750 it had reached the Azores Islands. Lieutenant Young and another passenger, the Marquis de Conte, went ashore to get some fresh water and other replenishments for the ships stock. The weather was a bit rough making the tooing and fro-ing in their small shore boat difficult. The master of the Nancy, George Stone, refused to come into harbour, even though the British Consul there and other ship captains said that it could have been effected quite easily, as the Nancy was not a large ship. Instead, after three days, Stone simply turned his vessel around and headed for Nova Scotia, leaving John Young, Marquis de Conte, the mate Isaac King, and 4 others on the islands.

Lieutenant Young thereupon commissioned Job Bradford to take the stranded party to Halifax. Bradford was the master of the ship Charming Molly out of Boston, and happened to be in the Azores with his ship - and available - at the time. They left from Tercera in the Azores on 30 August 1750. When they arrived in Halifax, the port officer at the time recorded the cargo of the Charming Molly as "3 pipes of Wine and 7 Passengers", so Young did not add any to his party while in the Azores.


"....The Charming Molly (1750) entries state that the passengers left London on the Nancy in July, 1750 and were stranded at Tercera, Azores. They travelled to Halifax on the Charming Molly, Sept., 1750. The source of the entry is given as "The Settlers from the Azores" by Winthrop Bell, Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, 31(1957):19-37."

Joan Settle to Randal Oulton 27 Jan 1998.

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