Snapshot: 7 October 2026, version 2026-10-07.v1. Nothing on the page is deployed from a database; every figure sits in a small data file beside it, with its source.
The sail plan
The schooner is not traced from a photograph or a plan. It is computed from a table of her dimensions in feet (src/schooner.js, SPEC), so a corrected number moves the whole drawing. The registered figures come from the Nova Scotia Archives' transcription of her March 1921 registration, and agree with Wikipedia's metric infobox (which cites E. F. Robinson, The Saga of the Bluenose):
| Length overall (hull) | 143 ft (43.6 m) |
|---|---|
| Waterline | 112 ft (34.1 m) |
| Beam | 27 ft (8.2 m) |
| Draught | 15 ft 10 in (4.8 m) |
| Mainmast, with topmast, above deck | 125 ft 10 in (38.4 m) |
| Foremast, with topmast, above deck (registry) | 102 ft 6 in (31.2 m): see below |
| Main boom | 81 ft (24.7 m) |
| Fore boom | 32 ft 6 in (9.9 m) |
| Sail area | 10,000 sq ft (930 m²) |
| Dories | 8, two men each (Wikipedia, citing Robinson) |
Measured from photographs, not from a document: the gaff lengths (51 ft main, 32 ft fore; 15.5 m and 9.8 m) and their angle (40° above the horizontal), the topmast lengths and doublings, the bowsprit (17 ft 6 in, 5.3 m, outboard, steeved 9°), the mast rake (2.2° aft), the sheer and freeboards, the hull's underwater profile, the placement of the deck furniture, and the three headsails (jumbo on its club, jib, jib topsail) with the fisherman staysail between the masts. The reference photographs are W. R. MacAskill's of October 1921 (section 7). No public-domain copy of W. J. Roué's plans exists online; the books that reproduce them are in copyright.
The foremast. The registry gives 102 ft 6 in above deck. In every 1921 photograph the fore truck stands only a little below the main truck, about 94 per cent of its height, and Bluenose II, built to the same plans, is signed as 36 m to the main's 38 m. The drawing follows the photographs (118 ft 6 in, 36.1 m) and notes the registry figure here rather than drawing something no photograph shows. If a reader knows how the registry measured, the number is one line to change.
Colours (the painted version used in the cards) follow the surviving photographs and two museum-grade models: black topsides, a light stripe at the covering board, red bottom with a light boot-top, buff masts with white mastheads, black booms and gaffs, grey dories. No written source for the original stripe colour was found; some accounts say gold. The racing number ("2" in October 1921, "8" in another photograph) was carried only for a race and is not drawn. The pennants at both trucks follow the photographs; their colours are not recorded.
The 1921 race
The race on the map is the first International Fishermen's Trophy series the Bluenose sailed, 22 and 24 October 1921, off Halifax, against the Gloucester schooner Elsie (Captain Marty Welsh). The source is the Canadian Press, reporting from the committee steamer Tyrian, as printed in the Victoria Daily Times of 22 and 24 October 1921 and digitised by the University of Victoria on the Internet Archive. The newspaper is out of copyright; the facts (marks, distances, times) are quoted as printed, OCR errors and all, in the research notes.
Race one, Saturday 22 October, course Number 3, as the paper gives it: a reach of six miles to the inner automatic buoy off Chebucto Head; a run down the wind of six miles to the southeast automatic buoy; a reach of nine miles to Shut-in Island Bell; a dead beat of twelve miles back to the inner automatic buoy; six miles of windward work to the finish. Five legs, 39 miles, called "forty" (about 72 km if nautical miles, 63 km if statute). Wind north-west, 25 knots at the start, 27 reported (46 to 50 km/h). Official times: start Elsie 9.00.10, Bluenose 9.00.49; first mark Bluenose 9.32.30, Elsie 9.33.25; finish Bluenose 1.33.05, Elsie 1.45.35. Elapsed, worked out here: Bluenose 4 h 32 m 16 s, Elsie 4 h 45 m 25 s. Elsie lost her foretopmast.
Race two, Monday 24 October. No course number or leg lengths were printed; the marks in order were the inner automatic buoy, the Sambro Lightship buoy and the southeast automatic buoy. Times: start Elsie 9.00.32, Bluenose 9.01.52; inner buoy Bluenose 9.46.00, Elsie 9.46.20; Sambro Lightship buoy Elsie 10.46.49, Bluenose 10.47.16; southeast buoy Elsie 11.49.28, Bluenose 11.49.45; finish Bluenose 2.21.41, Elsie 2.31.12. Wind 12 to 17 knots (22 to 31 km/h), moderate sea; its direction was not printed and is drawn as north-west. Bluenose won the series two races to none.
The paper does not name the time zone, and it does not say whether its miles are nautical or statute; the page converts race miles as nautical miles (1.852 km) because the course was sailed and drawn at sea, and says "about". The clock on the page shows the times as printed.
Where the marks were placed
None of the four buoys has a recorded position in anything gathered: automatic buoys and lightships of 1921 are not modern features, and no chart or Notice to Mariners of the period was found online. Each mark is therefore placed, and drawn with a dashed halo, by these rules (tools/course-1921.mjs):
- Inner automatic buoy: one nautical mile seaward (bearing 125°) of Chebucto Head, whose position is Wikipedia's.
- Shut-in Island Bell: 0.9 nm south of Shut-in Island. There are two Shut-in Islands in Halifax County; the eastern one (Geographical Names Board of Canada, CBIRK) lies 12.6 nm from Chebucto Head on 055°, which matches the printed twelve-mile leg. The western one, 18.9 nm away, does not.
- Southeast automatic buoy: the one point exactly 6 nm from the inner buoy and 9 nm from the bell on the seaward side, from "a run down the wind of six miles" and "a reach of nine miles".
- Start and finish line: 6 nm from the inner buoy toward the harbour mouth (bearing 040°), from "a reach of six miles to the inner automatic buoy"; the paper names only "the breakwater".
- Sambro Lightship buoy (race two only): 2 nm seaward of Sambro Island Light; the lightship's mooring is not in any source gathered.
As drawn, the five legs of race one measure 6.0, 6.0, 9.05, 11.84 and 6.0 nautical miles (11.1, 11.1, 16.8, 21.9 and 11.1 km), 38.9 in all (72 km), against the printed 6, 6, 9, 12 and 6. The course is a faithful reconstruction of the printed description, and not a chart. A Canadian Hydrographic Service chart of 1921 or the race committee's own papers would settle the buoys; corrections are welcome.
How the schooners move
Each schooner has the timed points the committee boat printed: start, some marks, finish. Between two timed points she moves at an even pace along the drawn course. In race one that is one estimate for Bluenose between 9.32.30 at the first mark and 1.33.05 at the finish (33 miles in four hours), and the same for Elsie. In race two every mark was timed, so the estimate is within each leg only. The race log marks timed moments with a solid dot and even-paced roundings with a hollow one, labelled. Tacking on the windward legs is not drawn, because no source describes it; the dashed course line is the leg as printed. Before her start a schooner is drawn just behind the line; after her finish she holds at it.
The lead shown under the clock is the difference in distance sailed along the course, in nautical miles, under that pace model. At the finish the printed margin on elapsed time is shown instead.
The shoreline and the map
The shore is Statistics Canada's 2021 Cartographic Boundary File for Nova Scotia (Open Government Licence – Canada), the same source as the Shipwrecks atlas, requested from the service for this frame alone with a quantization tolerance of 0.0001° (about 10 m) and then simplified to 0.0003° (about 30 m) for the page (tools/try-statcan-fine.mjs, tools/dequantize-statcan.mjs). It is a modern shore for screen use: a generalized cartographic boundary, not a chart, and not the shore of 1921. Islets under about 30 m are gone.
The projection is the atlas's spherical Lambert conformal conic (standard parallels 44° and 46° N, central meridian 63° W), fitted to the frame 63.72° W to 63.18° W, 44.36° N to 44.72° N. Place names are set by hand at the positions Wikipedia gives for Chebucto Head, Devils Island and Sambro Island Light, and the Geographical Names Board gives for Shut-in Island.
The life clock
The 27 dated moments from 1920 to 2026 are in data/timeline.v1.json, each with the ids of its sources in data/sources.v1.json. Where a source gives only a month or a year, the moment sits at the first of that month or year and says so. Where sources disagree the note says which gives what (section 10). The year counter runs 1920 to 2026 in thirty seconds.
Photographs
All five photographs are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under licences that allow it, with each file's licence record kept beside it in photos/:
- W. R. MacAskill (1890–1956), Bluenose, 1921, hand-coloured by Elva MacAskill; Nova Scotia Archives, Wallace MacAskill Collection, ref. 20040026. Public domain in Canada (the photographer died before 1972) and in the United States (published before 1929).
- W. R. MacAskill, Bluenose sails away, 1921; Nova Scotia Archives, ref. 20040025. Public domain, as above. Nothing in the frame confirms the identification; the archive caption is the evidence.
- W. R. MacAskill, Captain Angus Walters with the International Fishermen's Trophy, 1921; Nova Scotia Archives. Public domain.
- W. R. MacAskill, Bluenose and Henry Ford, 1922; Nova Scotia Archives. Public domain.
- Gordon Leggett, Bluenose II off Blue Rocks, 4 August 2022. CC BY 4.0.
The Nova Scotia Archives' own online copies are not reproduced: the Archives asks for a written request and credit for any publication. Its exhibit Bluenose: A Canadian Icon (over 350 items) is the richest single source on her and is cited for facts throughout.
The dime
The ten-cent coin's schooner was first struck in 1937, designed by Emanuel Hahn (1881–1957). The Royal Canadian Mint's circulation-coin page says he developed the design from photographs of the Bluenose. On 15 March 2002 the Mint announced, after a review of the 1937 artwork, a 1931 photograph and a letter of Lester Pearson's, and after a campaign led by Senator Wilfred Moore, that the schooner is the Bluenose (Canadian Press, in The Globe and Mail, 16 March 2002). Wikipedia's line that the design is a composite of three schooners cites that same article, which says the opposite, and is not used.
Section 06 shows the Royal Canadian Mint's photograph of the 2026 ten-cent reverse, supplied by Joel (photos/dime-mint-2026.webp). The Mint's intellectual-property policy treats coin images as its property whatever the age of the design, and its terms of use reserve the photographs on its site; reuse is Joel's to settle with the Mint before publishing. Two vector versions were also made and kept: the coin's raised relief traced from a high-contrast rendering (tools/trace-dime.py) and a second pass that took CANADA and the year from the Mint photograph and set 10 CENTS from Jost Light outlines (tools/trace-dime-letters.py, saved as assets/dime-reverse.svg). Joel judged the traces not good enough beside the photograph, so the photograph is what the page shows.
Bluenose II
Bluenose II's figures are Wikipedia's (which cites the United States Coast Guard's vessel record), in metric because that is how the record gives them, with feet in brackets: 46 m overall, 34 m waterline, 8 m beam, 5 m draught, 1,036 m² of sail, masts of 38 m and 36 m, two 250 hp diesels, a crew of five officers, a cook and twelve deckhands. Her interpretive sign in Lunenburg gives 49 m overall, which includes the bowsprit, and the same mast heights. One source for most of it; the Province's own site has no specifications page.
The rebuild ledger is from the Province's figures as reported by CBC News on 24 July 2017 (final cost $24,289,855, of which capital $21,151,565, a legal settlement with the Lunenburg Shipbuilding Alliance $2,030,000, hydraulic steering $592,425 and a wooden rudder $515,865), with the 2009 budget ($14.4 million) and the 2010 contract ($12.5 million) from Wikipedia, and the Premier's "boondoggle" from the same CBC report. The hull dates (relaunched 29 September 2012, back in the water 6 September 2013, full service 2015) are Wikipedia's; the Canadian Encyclopedia gives a spring 2015 relaunch instead (section 10).
The ports map draws the 2026 schedule as published on bluenose.novascotia.ca on 7 October 2026. Each light is the town's Wikipedia coordinate, not a berth. Boston is beyond the frame and gets an arrow from the home port, the way the Shipwrecks atlas points to the Titanic. The outline is the atlas's Statistics Canada coastline simplified to 0.004° with islands under about 8 km² dropped: an outline for a small map, not a chart.
The Heritage Minute and 1938
Historica Canada's Heritage Minute Bluenose (1995) is embedded with YouTube's privacy-enhanced player and loads only when pressed; the film is Historica Canada's copyright and nothing from it is stored here. Historica's description places it in 1938, "the last and most dramatic sailing race of her career", against "an American ship": the only American challenger that year was Gertrude L. Thebaud, and the series was sailed off Boston and Gloucester from 9 to 26 October 1938, Bluenose winning three races to two. Its closing claim of seventeen years unbeaten is true of the International Fishermen's Trophy, which no challenger ever took from her; she lost the 1930 Lipton Cup series to Thebaud, lost single races in 1938, and in 1923 was awarded the loss of the second race against Columbia.
Why 1938 is not on the map. The 1938 wire reports (Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Victoria Daily Times, on the Internet Archive) give course lengths and leg counts for most races and a full clock for the second: on 13 October off Gloucester, Bluenose rounded the first mark at 2.08 p.m. to Thebaud's 2.20.23, the second at 2.56.08 to 3.09.09, and finished at 4.29.10 to 4.41.08, EST. But no report names a buoy, a start line or a bearing; the only place names are Nahant and Gloucester. Three different course shapes were used. Without a mark there is nothing to place, so the 1938 series is given as a table and the 1921 race, whose marks are named, is the one animated. The Cape Ann Museum's Ben Pine papers hold the 1938 race pamphlet with a course diagram; only its finding aid is online.
| Date | Where | Course | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun 9 Oct | off Nahant (Boston) | 36 miles (67 km), twice round an 18-mile (33 km) triangle, six legs | Thebaud by 3 min 4 s |
| Tue 11 Oct | off Gloucester | 36 miles | No race: called off at the six-hour limit, Bluenose about a mile ahead |
| Thu 13 Oct | off Gloucester | 36 miles (67 km) in three legs of 15, 10 and 11 (28, 19 and 20 km) | Bluenose by 11 min 58 s |
| Thu 20 Oct | off Gloucester | 36 miles | No race: called off for lack of wind, Thebaud ahead |
| Sun 23 Oct | off Gloucester | 36 miles, twice round the triangle | Bluenose by 6 min 39 s, elapsed 4 h 42 m 57 s |
| Mon 24 Oct | off Nahant (Boston) | 35½ miles (66 km), irregular triangle: about 9, 12 and 14 (17, 22 and 26 km) | Thebaud by about 5 min |
| Wed 26 Oct | off Boston (the papers); off Gloucester (Wikipedia) | 35½ miles (66 km) | Bluenose 4.04.10, Thebaud 4.07: 2 min 50 s. The trophy stays |
In the deciding race Thebaud was skippered by Cecil Moulton, not Ben Pine. The Nova Scotia Archives puts Bluenose's lost foretopmast in the first race; Wikipedia in the fourth.
Where the record disagrees
- Displacement: 285 tons (Archives, from the registration) or 258 (Wikipedia). Not printed on the page.
- Foremast height: 102 ft 6 in (registry) against the photographs and Bluenose II (section 1).
- 1923: the Archives say the trophy stayed with Bluenose by default and the prize money was split; Wikipedia says a tie was declared and the title shared; the Canadian Encyclopedia lists 1923 as a win, "disputed". The page says first home twice, second race awarded to Columbia, no third race.
- 1930 Lipton Cup score: Thebaud 2–0 with a race called off (Wikipedia, citing the New York Times) or lost, won, lost (Archives). The page gives the result only.
- 1938 details: the topmast lost in race one (Archives) or race four (Wikipedia); the deciding race off Boston (1938 reports) or Gloucester (Wikipedia).
- Angus Walters' birth: 9 June 1881 (Wikipedia, Parks Canada) or 1882 (Canadian Encyclopedia). Death 11 August 1968, agreed.
- Bluenose II launch day: 24 July 1963 in the Archives' text and Wikipedia; two Archives captions say 23 July.
- Bluenose II rebuild: hull relaunched 29 September 2012, back in the water 6 September 2013, in service 2015 (Wikipedia, CBC); the Canadian Encyclopedia says relaunched in spring 2015.
- Stamp day: 6 or 8 January 1929.
- Sale, 1942: "West Indies" or "West Indian" Trading Company; two of three sources say West Indies.
- Esperanto's loss: 30 May 1921 (Wikipedia) or June 1921 (Archives).
Primary sources
- Nova Scotia Archives, Bluenose: A Canadian Icon, with the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic: archives.novascotia.ca/bluenose. Facts only; reproduction of its images needs the Archives' permission.
- Province of Nova Scotia, Bluenose II: history, mission, schedule.
- Victoria Daily Times, 22 and 24 October 1921 (Canadian Press), Internet Archive, University of Victoria: 22 October, 24 October.
- Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Victoria Daily Times, Appleton Post-Crescent, 9 to 27 October 1938, Internet Archive. Facts only.
- The Canadian Encyclopedia: Bluenose, Angus Walters, Lunenburg.
- Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; facts and the citations behind them): Bluenose, Bluenose II, Angus Walters, Gertrude L. Thebaud, Columbia (schooner), Esperanto (schooner), Delawana, Smith and Rhuland, William James Roué, Dime (Canadian coin), Emanuel Hahn, Wallace R. MacAskill, Heritage Minutes.
- Royal Canadian Mint, 10 cents and intellectual property policy; Canadian Press in The Globe and Mail, "Boat on dime is Bluenose", 16 March 2002.
- CBC News, final cost of the Bluenose II rebuild, 24 July 2017.
- Historica Canada, Heritage Minute: Bluenose.
- Statistics Canada, 2021 Cartographic Boundary Files, Open Government Licence – Canada. Geographical Names Board of Canada, Shut-in Island.
- Wikimedia Commons, Category: Bluenose (ship, 1921), for the photographs and their licence records.
Research notes with every request, licence wording and OCR phrase are kept with the project and are not published. Built by Joel Hirtle, October 2026, in the shape of the Shipwrecks of Nova Scotia atlas.