The notion of the historical 'isolation' of Cape Bretoners is often exaggerated. There was a lot of coming and going all over the world all through the 19th Century. The oceans were the super-highways, and coastal communities tended to have much more direct contact with the major metropolises then than now. One of my own great-grandmothers, born ca 1860, came from a tiny, 'isolated' Gaelic fishing village in Cape Breton: she went to Halifax as a young woman, married an English soldier there, moved with him to England, then to Ireland, then to Scotland, and eventually brought husband and children back to that isolated fishing village. Her daughter-in-law - my grandmother - from a nearby isolated, Gaelic fishing village -
spent many years going back and forth between that village and Boston, making a living .... Etc. Digression over.