The flight from Montreal had been short and pleasant. Through the aircraft’s small window, the pastoral landscape of Prince Edward Island (PEI) was expanding into detailed view as our plane from Montreal jostled with the final air currents and descended to land at Charlottetown, the island’s capital.

Below us stretched the gentle hills and estuaries of PEI, many of which we would encounter, albeit by short outings from the capital, in the few days that followed on this, the last part of our Canadian trip.

Four days later, we felt we had at least sampled life here and enjoyed it very much. Charlottetown, the island’s capital and our base, offered a lovely quayside walk into it’s historic town centre, a stroll taken in search of dinner each evening when we returned to our guest house a little weary from so much driving and exploring.

We were saving the final day for something special. The penultimate one saw us explore some of the bays and beaches on the north of PEI, and we closed off the day by spending a few hours exploring Bernie’s long-awaited Green Gables Heritage museum.

For now, (above) here’s a montage of some of the interesting panels of both author and characters…

Bernie remembers loving these books as a child. She hadn’t expected to visit the place of their origin, here on Prince Edward Island. For her, this visit, alone was worth the trip.

Back to the conclusion of the main story…

Russ and Paul’s ancestor, William Brent, had taken his final voyage aboard a boat built for them somewhere on Prince Edward Island. They were to use it for the final part of their emigration from Cornwall to New Zealand – a considerable undertaking … and one filled with risk!

The end of our trip was fast approaching. We had set aside the final full day to travel to St Mary’s Bay – a huge estuary from some point in which Russ’s ancestors had departed for their new life aboard the Lady Grey, a schooner built for them on PEI for the purpose – presumably with their life savings.

At that time, PEI was a renowned centre of timber production and boat building. But there were no surviving records as to where the schooner had been constructed – beyond that it had been somewhere in St Mary’s Bay – a large area!

There were many small docks in St Mary’s Bay and we had no chance of searching them all. Also, we had been warned that many of them were recent and unlikely to have been connected with the building of ‘our boat’.

Our last day was to be spent in the hopeful fulfilment of our promise to Russ – the direct descendant of William Brent (see previous posts).

He had asked no more than we take a few photos of PEI, to add to his family records back in New Zealand. But we felt we could do more, as long as the ‘fates’ were on our side… In reality, we had almost no chance of finding the location, so long after the event.

Taking general photographs of PEI was simple but we thought that we could do better than just take snaps of the general scenery. We both felt this, strongly, but had no idea why we felt that confidence.

I confess to having a general strategy on such occasions; if there’s a lighthouse, I head for it… Apart from a love of photographing lighthouses, other good things occasionally happen…and there’s a hopefulness about lighthouses!

Local maps revealed that the western edge of St Mary’s Bay was bounded by a long causeway at the end of which was a larger piece of land named Panmure Island (see map below).

The lighthouse (as photo earlier) was located here, facing the ocean, literally the last piece of land the Lady Grey would have passed on her way out into the open sea. Surely this would be a more meaningful photo-set for Russ and Paul?

The journey took us an hour from our guest-house in Charlottetown. Once there, we spent a cold twenty minutes exploring the small headland before gratefully getting back into the car and retreating down the causeway … where we remembered seeing a cafe!

It had been a while since breakfast. We were glad to make the stop and relieved to find that though the cafe was closed, there was a ‘take-away’ hatch in the wall!

There was a tall observation platform. I climbed up to take some shots of the beach and ocean. Here was a perfect balance of estuary on one side and the open Atlantic on the other; both visible from the viewing deck.

I began to get that ‘gently buzzing head’ feeling that tells you something extraordinary is about to happen.

I looked down from the viewing deck to see Bernie talking to two young people in blue polo shirts. It turned out they were the local Park Rangers and were keen to help us, being fascinated by Bernie’s retelling of the story of The Lady Grey. We explained our thinking that we had probably got as close as we could to the distant past of William Brent and his family.

They were both interested in The Lady Grey and asked us to tell them more about its origination, here.

They knew the history of Panmure Island and explained that there were only two boatbuilders here in the 1820’s and both of them operated from the old quays. They pointed us back the way we had come – along the causeway, again – and beyond the turning for the lighthouse – which we had taken for a forest track leading nowhere. They assured us that the track widened and would take us onto the Panmure Island coast and there we would see the remains of the boatbuilder’s quayside.

They were certain that the Lady Grey would have been constructed there, as the ship-building operation had been substantial – and it gave direct access to the deep tidal flows necessary to launch such a ship into the estuary for final fitting before its maiden voyage out into the nearby Atlantic Ocean.

We drove in silent excitement back across the causeway…

Approaching the lighthouse, again, we could see the small track we had missed. We took it and, soon, another landscape of red sand and forest opened up before us.

Less than 100 metres in, we came across the sea-washed remains of the old quays, long abandoned…

So, now Russ and Paul have their photo souvenirs and – via the Rangers – accurate and verified contact with the past.

And we feel pleased that we were able to provide more details of the the missing piece of Russ and Paul’s family story – Prince Edward Island.

©️Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2025.