[15] During its four-year existence, the left-leaning, monthly magazine published a wide variety of articles and editorials on issues in Canada's Maritime Provinces, including everything from pollution, housing and censorship to birth control, drugs and the problems of native peoples.
[16] In 1971, Cameron took a leave of absence from UNB and moved to D'Escousse, a village on Isle Madame, a small island off the southeastern coast of Cape Breton.
)[19] Cameron settled in D'Escousse after buying a house he describes as "composed of two tiny ancient buildings pushed together to make one comfortable home."
"[20] Cameron had already published magazine articles and a literary book, Faces of Leacock, a 1967 study of the great Canadian humorist, but now he was finally free to begin his apprenticeship as a full-time writer.
"My friends in D'Escousse include welders, fishermen, millwrights and mothers on welfare as well as teachers, potters, priests and businessmen."
In the book Wind, Whales and Whisky, he writes about spending the summer completing it by adding masts, toilets, compasses and handrails before sailing the 33-foot schooner back to D'Escousse.
[22] Everett Richardson was one of 235 trawlermen from the tiny ports of Canso, Mulgrave and Petit de Grat who fought for better pay, safer working conditions, job security and most of all, for the right to belong to the union they had chosen, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union led by Homer Stevens, a member of the Communist Party of Canada.
It is a story about privilege and poverty and injustice in this country, and about the social and political arrangements which cheat and oppress most Canadians, which stunt our humanity and distort our environment.
However, Cameron points out that they did win collective bargaining rights for fishermen in Nova Scotia breaking centuries-old rules that prohibited them from joining unions.
Critic Patrick O'Flaherty complained that the book contributed to a Canadian literary atmosphere that "continues to stink of parlor radical sanctimoniousness.
"[23] Two years later, critic Michael Greenstein praised the book for its even-handedness, but suggested Cameron got too bogged down in the official account of the strike and could have used more lively anecdotes to entertain his readers.
"[25] Cameron introduces his readers to a wide variety of characters that he meets during his voyage including moonshine makers, malt-whisky distillers, musicians, poets, American Buddhists, fishermen and coal miners.
[20] Cameron also describes how businessman John Risley discovered that lobsters "essentially go dormant in icy water" enabling his company to store them for up to a year by putting them into individual plastic trays stacked in "huge racks which reach clear to the ceilings of the cavernous holding rooms" and pumping 24,000 gallons of chilled sea-water per hour through the trays.
"At that temperature", Cameron notes, "lobsters do not eat, grow or moult, but they retain their weight, their texture and their taste, drawing only on the nutrients in their blood."
"The rocks have a tortured appearance", Cameron writes, "abrupt, sharp shapes, angled striations, rapid shifts of colour from pink to white, rust, green, grey, black.
The geology looks like frozen violence: layers of rock bent, twisted, broken, folded, thrust upward, knocked sideways, pressed downward.
After describing "the most unbelievably wonderful meal of the voyage"—lobster and grey sole baked in the oven with tinned mushroom soup accompanied by scalloped potatoes and broccoli, Cameron writes: "I love living in a depressed region, I thought.
"[20] In a chapter entitled, "Good People in Bad Times", Cameron outlines the troubles of industrial Cape Breton including the long decline of two of its economic mainstays, coal mining and steel making.
One, who grew up on Cape Breton Island, wrote that the book brought back many memories: "I could smell the salt and feel the warmth of those country kitchens and hear the intoxicating song of the fiddle ...
When her marriage ended, she moved back to D'Escousse with her son and, "nervous as a schoolboy," Cameron asked her to help him sail his schooner to Louisbourg, Cape Breton in 1979.
"We had 16 years of blissful happiness", Cameron told a journalist adding "it was the kind of marriage that every day I felt myself filled with wonder that I had such a person to share my life with.
In her 2014 book of essays, Coastal Lives, Simmins describes their lengthy courtship and their life together in Nova Scotia after a determined Cameron finally persuaded her to leave the "extravagantly green and lush" Pacific coast rainforest she loved for the often, wild and stormy weather of Atlantic Canada.
His death came just a few weeks before his latest non-fiction book Blood in the Water: A True Story of Revenge in the Maritimes was due to be released.