Atlantic surf crashes onto the rocky shore at Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia. Photograph © Paul A. Souders/CORBIS

Canadian Maritimes
By Harry Bruce

"Beyond lay the sea,misty and purple with its haunting, unceasing murmur."—Lucy Maud

With my two granddaughters, I sailed my 22-foot yawl on Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia—one of the three Maritime Provinces. Near the site of a French stronghold that fell to the British 309 years ago, a beluga whale romped along beside us, coming so close the girls patted its amiable head and stroked its spongy gray flanks. "Cool, granddad. It feels like Camembert cheese!" The local museum, not a mile away, boasts cannonballs plucked from the ruins of the French fort. Wildlife and history.... Its defunct cannons pointing at the United States, St. Andrews, New Brunswick (another Maritime Province), wears its pro-British history as proudly as a redcoat saluting the Union Jack. But what have we here, shambling into the heart of this supercivilized town, then crossing the once masted harbor to the little wilderness on Navy Island? A full-grown moose. At least it's not a deer. Deer routinely pillage the vegetable gardens of the handsome colonial houses that bear plaques boasting of the British Loyalists who occupied these same dwellings generations ago. History and wildlife.... When Americans visit the legislative chamber in the New Brunswick capital of Fredericton, a shocker confronts them. Hanging in a conspicuous place of honor is a portrait of a man they know as the devil incarnate, the very symbol of the vile British behavior that caused the American Revolution: King George III. History and surprises....

As the Fredericton-based poet Alden Nowlan once asked, "Where else could you drive past a wild black bear on the way to work and attend a reception for the Dalai Lama that same afternoon? That has actually happened in Fredericton, a city of almost surrealistic surprises."

The Maritime Provinces of Canada form a region of surprise. There is still room for them. Its history is full of French-English warfare, privateers, and shipwrecks, but it has languished economically. The population (still under two million) has therefore never been big enough to obliterate the wilderness or deface the immensely intricate 5,200-mile coastline.

So bald eagles still glide above Fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Once France's "Dunkirk of the North," it is now one of the finest historic reconstructions in North America. And as Atlantic salmon charge up New Brunswick's Miramichi River to spawn exactly where they were born, they still pass Red Bank, a 3,000-year-old settlement of aboriginals, easily the oldest village in the Maritimes. Foxes still prowl the sumptuous dunes on the Prince Edward Island beaches near the 19th-century birthplace of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the beloved novel Anne of Green Gables. White-sided dolphins still cavort in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, founded by the British some 250 years ago. In short, nowhere in North America is there such an extraordinary combination of history, wilderness, and surprise as in these beautiful, out-of-the-mainstream, thinly populated provinces. That's why they're such a fascinating place in which to be alive.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.