Digby Neck is a long, thin finger of rock between the Bay of Fundy and St. Mary’s Bay in western Nova Scotia, and Sandy Cove is a fishing village about halfway along it. In September 1863 a stranger appeared on its Fundy beach who had no legs below the knees, no papers and, as far as anyone could tell, no language his rescuers shared. He lived another forty-eight years on the shores of St. Mary’s Bay and became one of the best-known unsolved stories in the Maritimes.
What happened
The overseers of the poor for Digby Neck later gave the date as September 8, 1863. According to a letter George Armstrong of Bridgetown wrote to the Halifax Baptist paper the Christian Messenger after visiting the man that month, George Albright’s children found him first. Their father did not believe them until his elderly mother walked down to the shore and confirmed it. The man had been left with a few scraps of bread and a small bundle of clothes, he had lain out in the rain, and he seemed dazed by cold, fear or drugs. Albright said two fore-and-aft schooners had anchored in the cove about ten days before Armstrong’s visit and were gone by morning, without anyone from either vessel speaking to the villagers.
Armstrong found the stumps fully healed and judged the amputations the work of a competent surgeon. The man seemed to give his name as Matteo and appeared to answer yes to Spain and no to Italy, though everyone around him assumed he was Italian. The Digby Neck overseers boarded and clothed him at two dollars a week, and on February 3, 1864 they carried him across the bay to Meteghan, more than fifty miles away, to Jean Nicolas, a Corsican settled among the French-speaking Acadians who was thought to speak Italian. It was there that the stranger acquired the name Jerome, from a sound he made when asked who he was. When Nicolas left the district in 1870, Jerome moved to the household of Dedier and Elisabeth Comeau at what is now St. Alphonse, where he spent the rest of his life.
The legend grows
He almost never spoke. Visitors reported a word that sounded like Colombo, perhaps a ship or a place, and later the word Trieste; he was said to growl at people he disliked, to fly into rages, to love children and music, and to spend his days on the floor beside the kitchen stove. The province paid the Comeaus a small allowance for his keep, and on Sundays after Mass people paid a few cents to look at him. Newspapers as far away as Boston printed versions in which he wore a stripped naval uniform, had the soft hands of a gentleman, or was a nobleman mutilated to keep him from an inheritance or an officer punished for mutiny. Sandy Cove’s own legend puts him on a rock now called Jerome’s Rock.
The explanation
The prosaic answer was in print within weeks. On September 15, 1863 the Morning Freeman of Saint John, New Brunswick, denounced the parish of Chipman in Queens County for ridding itself of a disabled Italian laborer whose legs had been amputated after severe frostbite. Ratepayers tired of supporting him had paid a man to take him to Saint John, supposedly for passage to the Italian consul in Liverpool; instead he had been put aboard a coasting vessel and dumped on a remote shore, first reported as Maine. By October the Freeman had read Armstrong’s letter and concluded that the Sandy Cove castaway was the same man. Parish records gathered by the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project show that lumbermen had found a half-frozen stranger in the woods near Chipman in December 1859, that the surgeon Henry Peters amputated his legs at Gagetown in 1861, and that the parish knew him as Gamby. In 1905 a Chipman senator told the St. John Daily Sun the same story, and Judge A. W. Savary of Annapolis Royal spent years collecting letters that pointed the same way.
Where it stands
The Chipman connection explains the legs, the timing and the abandonment, and it is the account most writers since Savary have accepted, though no document names the schooner or proves beyond doubt that Gamby and Jerome were one man. It does not explain who he was before the winter of 1859, why he would or could not talk, or where he was born. His death was registered at Meteghan on April 15, 1912; the clerk guessed his age at about eighty-five and recorded that he had never spoken a word. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Meteghan, where a stone now marks the grave, and a film and songs have kept the story alive in Clare. His death drew little notice in a week dominated by the Titanic, and the Daily Echo’s obituary already placed his landing in 1854.