Dear God, how many times must we start over?" muttered Matthew Westerby, Loyalist, waiting on the wharf in Port Mouton, the smouldering remains of Guysborough behind him. He and his fellow Loyalists, both Black and White, freed Blacks and household slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas had sought refuge in 1781 in St. Augustine in the still-British Floridas. Within two years, Britain returned Florida to Spain and they were again exiles. The British Navy transported decommissioned regiments and any civilians who wished, to lands in Nova Scotia just in time for winter. Their stay in the new settlement lasted barely six months before fire swept through it, destroying everything. Now they waited for ships to take them to a new settlement on Canso Strait, taking with them only the few possessions snatched from the flames and the name of Guysborough. In Scotland, lairds found it more profitable to run cattle and sheep on their lands than to lease them out, and the exodus leading to the departure of thousands in the 1790s began. Iain Bruce buried his wife and still-born son, took his two remaining children by the hand and walked to Loch Broom looking for transportation to Nova Scotia. They arrived at Pictou and made their way east, looking for unoccupied lands. Along the St. Mary's River Valley, toward Glenelg and Lochaber they trudged, arriving finally at the new settlement of Guysborough. In the 1990s, I built a cottage in Guysborough County, never expecting to find traces of old settlements. The shock came when a skeleton emerged as we dug for the septic tank. Forensics later revealed it to be that of a young man who had been savagely beaten. Who was he? How did he come to have, on a leather thong around his neck, a copper British ha'penny minted in Virginia in 1773 but never issued? And why was he wearing an expensive linen shirt, but no shoes?