| Armdale Yacht Club | |
| Abbreviation: | AYC |
| Formation: | 1937 |
| Location: | 75 Burgee Run, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Status: | active |
| Purpose: | advocate and public voice, educator and network for recreational and competitive sailors, coaches, volunteers and events |
| Affiliations: | Britannia Yacht Club |
| Website: | armdaleyachtclub.ns.ca |
The Armdale Yacht Club is a yacht club located on Melville Island, at the head of Halifax Harbour's Northwest Arm in Nova Scotia, Canada. The Club was founded in 1937 and was established at its current location in 1947. The Club is known for founding the Bluenose fleet.[1]
The land was officially named Melville Island in late 1804 or early 1805 in honour of prominent abolitionist Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (who at the time had just been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty).[2]
Sir Admiral John Borlase Warren and Captain John MacKellar erected the officers’ quarters, the current Club House, in 1808 when he was commander-in-chief on the North American Station from 1807 to 1810.[3] [4]
Beginning in 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars prisoners were kept on site. The War of 1812 brought an influx of American prisoners to Melville Island; up to 1800 at a time were housed in its barracks or on a nearby 350-person prison ship Magnet. Most of the French prisoners were released or paroled to make room for the Americans, who were seen as more of a risk. The most famous prisoners were the 320 American survivors of the capture of USS Chesapeake in 1813 who were interned on Melville Island.[5]
After the decommissioning of the military prison, Melville Island was used as a receiving depot for 727 of the black refugees, the estimated 1600–2000 escaped slaves who arrived in Halifax between 1815 and 1818.[6]
The Irish Famine led 1,200 Irish to flee to Halifax from May to October 1847. They quarantined at Melville Island, where 203 Irish patients were admitted to hospital and 30 died.[7]
In 1855, Nova Scotia politician Joseph Howe developed a plan to use Melville Island as a recruitment and training centre for American soldiers to fight for the British Foreign Legion in the Crimean War. Written when he was age 17, Howe's first poem was entitled Melville Island (1821).[8] [9]
Author of the Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper, briefly used Melville Island as the setting for his book Ned Myers: Life Before the Mast (1843).[10]
In the 1940s, William James Roué produced a design, at the request of a group from the Armdale Yacht Club, for a small one-design sloop that would be both fast and elegant and could be sailed easily by two or three people. The schooner Bluenose was still afloat, but had been sold to the West Indian Trading Company for use as a freighter. The new class was given the name Bluenose to help perpetuate the memory of the great champion. Months after Bluenose was lost on a Haitian reef, the first Bluenose class sloops were launched in the spring of 1946.[11] The first twelve bluenose sloops were constructed at the same time together by their first owners under the direction of master boatbuilder John H. Barkhouse, of Barkhouse Boatyard in Chester, Nova Scotia. Many of these original twelve boats are still actively sailed or even raced. B1 was allowed to fall into a state of disrepair, but has since been restored and is on display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.[12]
These first boats were carvel-built of pine planking on oak frames. Production was brisk in the early years, with as many as fifty boats built by 1949.[13] Other local builders in Nova Scotia also built the design, with 77 wooden versions eventually completed.[14]
The AYC has reciprocal agreements with other yacht clubs, e.g. Britannia Yacht Club