The Pirate Ship

Catherine Jolicoeur: What did they say about it?

Well all they did believe that the ship on fire was a pirate ship.

C.J.: And what had happend to the pirate ship?

God knows! Well the story was that they didn't know anything about it, but they... that it was a pirate ship because at the time of the Spanish, when Spain removed the waves before the British did, they were an awful lot of piracy going on. And the first thing that the Domond did was to blasther off the all those Spanish pirate ships from the United States, Canada and Spain at that time. That's all history we used to read about when we were in school. We used to have Canadian history, British history and what came in ancien history, transaction, old ward between Europe, Unites States and Canada.

C.J.: But did they find a reason why this ship on fire would appear?

That kind of stuff is only imagination, they imagined that those were pirate ships, they used other ships, like hand nobbers today. That was their belief and they used to call it pirates, they were only...

C.J.: Why would the ship appear, was there a reason for that?

I don't know. It was seen back and forth; it hasn't been seen since the second worId war and I haven't heard that anybody has seen it since the 1930's. But I've seen it in bad weather, it looked like a burning ship on fire and it was a sail ship and it was always the same.

C.J.: Did the people say that it was a kind of punishment?

Well, that was what they believed. In those days peoples were very suspicious, I remember when I was young the stories that people told. It was to teach a lesson.

Johnny Laubert (83)
Jacquet River (Restigouche) NB
1978

Université de Moncton, Centre d'études acadiennes, Collections Catherine Jolicoeur