Читать книгу Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers - Lucille H. Campey - Страница 12

CHAPTER 1

Leaving England

In the English farmer will be observed the dialect of his country, the honest John Bull bluntness of his style and the other characteristics that mark his character. His house or cottage is distinguished by cleanliness and neatness, his agricultural implements and utensils are always in order and where an English farmer is industrious and persevering he is sure to do well. 1

THIS RESTRAINED COMPLIMENT from John MacGregor was rare praise indeed, since few early observers of people and places in the Maritimes took much notice of English settlers. Adding the barbed comment that the Englishman “does not reconcile himself as well as Scottish settlers to the privations and extreme difficulties of pioneer life,” ² he hardly gave them a ringing endorsement! But at least he mentioned an English farmer. Studies of immigration to Canada (initially British North America) have neglected the English.³ The popular perception is that Canada was settled mainly by the Scots and Irish, when in fact the opposite is true. Although they formed only around a quarter of the total British influx to Canada before Confederation,⁴ the English actually dominated the much larger emigrant stream that arrived from Britain between 1867 and 1915. The Scots came in the largest numbers initially, with the Irish quickly overtaking them, but the English were actually the dominant ones overall.⁵ And yet, while copious emigration studies have been undertaken on the Scots and Irish, very little has been written about the English.

Part of the reason for this neglect is the invisibility of the English when they reached Canada. They were defined, together with the French, as forming one of its two “founding peoples.” Thus the English were not regarded as an ethnic group, and if any categorization did register, it was their association with Canada’s elite, since the English were extremely well-represented in business and in the upper echelons of government. A further complication is that they themselves drew little distinction between being English and being British. The English regarded the Union Jack, the monarchy, and parliamentary institutions as symbols of their English identity. In this confusion it becomes difficult to define Englishness, but, nevertheless, it can be stated with total certainty that the English were and remain a distinctive ethnic group. It is perverse in the extreme that the largest country in the British Isles, which contributed the most people to the emigrant stream from Britain to Canada, should have been so completely ignored.⁶ This study, the first of three to be carried out on English emigration to Canada, assesses their colonizing endeavours and impact in the Atlantic region during the period from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century.

The English influx to Atlantic Canada grew appreciably in scale from the late eighteenth century. England was by then the wealthiest and most industrialized country on Earth, having long-established cities, towns, and villages, most of the land having been cleared long before the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Underpinning them was a highly developed society and economy that offered the most advanced way of life on the planet. Understandably, many early arrivals were shocked by their first glimpse of the crudely built log houses and vast wildernesses of the Maritimes. In 1775, as his ship approached Malpeque Bay, on the Island of St. John (later Prince Edward Island), Thomas Curtis, a south of England labourer, thought he had seen “a cow house, or a place for cattle.” Later on, he was informed “that it was a dwelling house and, when on shore, I found none much better.”⁷ After learning that local people generally survived the winter on salt fish and potatoes, his heart sank. An anonymous English observer echoed Curtis’s view in 1808 when he stated that Charlottetown had fewer than 150 houses, which were “small and wretchedly built,” although “some of the streets were well laid out.”⁸

A view of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, painted in 1843 by Fanny Bayfield. Despite the handful of large and prestigious buildings that can be seen, Charlottetown remained principally a wooden town with very wide streets, designed to offset the spread of fires.

Of course, the English were not alone in forming negative first impressions. An immigrant guide of 1808, extolling the advantages of Prince Edward Island, warned British people not to be deceived by overly optimistic reports. When immigrants arrived they found “woods to be cut down,” hordes of mosquitoes, unfinished roads, “a limited society,” and “cold weather, the ground being covered with snow nearly four months in the year.”⁹ Scottish Highlanders also reacted badly to their first sight of North America, but they were concerned by the vast forests, coming as they often did from nearly treeless areas. But as former inhabitants of Britain’s poorest region they appeared to have less difficulty in accepting rough-and-ready conditions.

The large group of settlers who came to the Maritimes from the North and East Riding of Yorkshire in the 1770s balked initially at the scale of the task they had taken on, but most remained and became outstanding pioneer farmers.¹⁰ MacGregor greatly approved of these “industrious and careful settlers from Yorkshire,” comparing them favourably with settlers from Dumfriesshire and Perthshire in Scotland.¹¹ As they came from thinly populated and fairly remote regions in northern Britain, such people would have been better able than most to cope with the isolation, privations, and drudgery of pioneer life.

However, according to Walter Johnstone, a Presbyterian minister from Dumfriesshire who visited Prince Edward Island in the 1820s, “the English are the most unsuitable of all settlers…. Such of them as bring property with them generally keep up their old mode of living till they are as poor as their neighbours and then they are destitute in the extreme.”¹² Perhaps he was a little biased, believing as he did that “no settlers are prized more” than those from Dumfriesshire. In any case, his comments could equally well have applied to Scottish Lowlanders or people from any other part of the British Isles who had unrealistic expectations of pioneer life. Meanwhile, Edward Walsh, who had visited Prince Edward Island in 1803, blamed what he saw as its decline on the Scots:

By far the greater number of farmers on the Island are Scotch Highlanders, ignorant, indolent and selfish in the extreme, who have no idea of agriculture and who are content to clear away some wood in a slovenly manner, in order to breed cattle, from which to breed cattle, from which they derive their sole sustenance. ¹³

The large number of Yorkshire emigrants who settled in 1774–75 in Nova Scotia and what later became New Brunswick were unusual in having their sea crossings well-documented. Because they left at a time of rising alarm over the large number of British people being lost to North America, details of who they were and why they emigrated were recorded by customs officials. This is one of the rare instances when English emigration has been well-documented. Unlike the Scots, who were associated with infamous clearances, and the Irish, who were associated with great famines, the English slipped away without either, and in most cases virtually unnoticed. Writing in 1806, John Stewart wondered why so much alarm was being expressed over the loss of Scottish Highlanders to Canada while “at the same time not a word is said” of emigration from England, “which is of so much more real consequence.”¹⁴ But he was a lone voice.

Settler’s cabin between Halifax and Windsor as seen from a train in June 1867, a watercolour-over-pencil by Juliana Horatia Ewing. She wrote, “They begin by setting fire to the under-wood, which clears the way to the felling of trees. The result is that a cleared place like this is covered with charred stumps of pines and many of the pines lie full length, being I suppose too much burnt to be worth removal.” (Mcdonald, Illustrated News, 34–35.)

When they emigrated, the English left very few newspaper records or personal letters behind. Their exodus also escaped the notice of most contemporary commentators and later English historians. Their departure was treated with less disquiet by people in authority than was the case with the Scots. Nobody seemed to care about the diminution in England’s workforce and armed services. And after they arrived at their chosen destinations, the religious ministers who served them seemed unusually disinterested in their cultural and social needs. Anglican missionaries, appointed by the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, did not see it as their job to offer a cultural lifeline in the way that Roman Catholic priests did for the Irish or Presbyterian missionaries did for the Scots. They rarely mentioned individual English settlements in their twice-yearly reports. Although Methodist missionaries had closer links with ordinary settlers, they hardly ever described their communities, unlike Presbyterian clergymen, who wrote lengthy accounts of Scottish pioneering activities. Thus, the English were overlooked as they left and widely ignored after they arrived.

And yet, by 1865, by which time Canada had acquired well over a million people from Britain, the majority of the immigrants were coming from England.¹⁵ However, relatively few of the English actually settled in Atlantic Canada, with most preferring to go to the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, and the Prairies.¹⁶

Of great importance to this study is what happened a century earlier, when Atlantic Canada acquired thousands of people with English ancestry from the United States. The driving force behind this influx was Britain’s defence interests. Facing ongoing hostilities with France, Britain was concerned that the French-speaking Acadians living in Nova Scotia might side with France in any future conflicts. It therefore took the unprecedented and brutal step of expelling some thirteen thousand Acadians in two separate deportations carried out in 1755 and 1758.¹⁷ And to assist the process of colonization even further, the hunting and fishing territories of the Native peoples were also seized.¹⁸

This ethnic cleansing paved the way for the arrival of eight thousand New England Planters,¹⁹ all of whom could trace their ancestral roots back to England. Given generous incentives by the British government to relocate to the Maritimes, and being enticed by its good agricultural land, they arrived between 1759 and 1762, primarily from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The second group, consisting of thirtyfive thousand Loyalists, came in 1784–85 from the United States, many originating from New York and New Jersey. Having suffered defeat in the American War of Independence and fearing a further loss of territory to the United States, the British government had financed their removal costs and placed them along both sides of the strategically important Bay of Fundy.²⁰ These Loyalists, many of English descent, swelled the population of the Nova Scotia peninsula and gave the newly created province of New Brunswick an instant population. Planters and Loyalists, together with their descendents, dominated the population of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for many decades, but, with the rapidly growing influx directly from Britain after 1815, the British component of the population eventually became even larger, although the exact numbers are unknown. Eventually two types of English came to be recognized in the region. There were the American-born, having distant English ancestry, and there were those whose ancestors, or they themselves, had emigrated directly from England.

Reading the order of expulsion to the Acadians gathered in the parish church of Grand Pré in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, 1775. Watercolour by C.W. Jefferys (1869–1951).

Planters and Loyalists brought their Yankee ways with them and were, first and foremost, Americans. They were fiercely independently minded, built American-style houses, and favoured the nonconformist religions that were popular in the United States. Their family links were with the United States and not with England. Yet, when asked to state their ethnic origins in 1871, they defined themselves as English, however distant that connection was.²¹ As a result, some 29 percent of the population in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were categorized as English. The customs and shipping data, although incomplete, reveal that both provinces attracted relatively few English immigrants during the first half of the nineteenth century, with Scottish arrivals being more significant in Nova Scotia and Irish arrivals dominating much of the influx to New Brunswick. Thus, the substantial English presence, revealed by the census, owes more to its eighteenth-century antecedents than to the later arrival of emigrants directly from England.

Meanwhile, Prince Edward Island, which had no Planters and very few Loyalists, had to acquire its English directly from England, giving its population a relatively low English component of only 20 percent by 1881. On the other hand, Newfoundland, which relied almost entirely on West Country fishermen to bolster its early immigrant population, ended up as Canada’s most English province. The 1991 census records that a staggering 82 percent of the population claimed to have some English ancestry, although most of the influx occurred long before Newfoundland had officially recorded immigration statistics.²²

The emigrants who came from England to settle in Atlantic Canada were driven primarily by a desire for economic self-betterment. Some were fleeing dreadful poverty, but most had positive motives for leaving, with many seeking the ultimate prize of owning land and the independence that went with it. Paradoxically, emigration increased with the rapid rise in England’s industrial output. Because machines increasingly replaced people, thousands of agricultural labourers working on the land and tradesmen in traditional jobs like handloom weaving had been displaced from their jobs. An oversupply of labour led to pitiful wage rates and chronic unemployment levels. The upheaval caused by the introduction of large commercial farms on Yorkshire estates during the eighteenth century fuelled the exodus from this one region. Rather than endure higher rents and an uncertain future, the Yorkshire tenantry immigrated to Nova Scotia. They were the largest single group to leave, but, generally-speaking, most settlers came as families, usually in small numbers, and were drawn from many parts of England and from every social class. Most could afford to emigrate unaided, and they considered the opportunities available in various destinations very critically before deciding where they would finally settle.

Map 1. Reference Map of England.

Although each of the four Atlantic provinces has its own individual story, their emigration sagas have some common threads. In each case a significant component of the English influx had been driven by longestablished trade links with the southwest of England. This one region supplied each of them with more immigrants than any other part of England and it did so over the longest period. The timber trade propelled the stream of emigrants from the West Country to Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, while the fishing trade did the same for Newfoundland. People from Devon and Cornwall hopped on the ships that were regularly crossing the Atlantic to collect their timber cargoes, while fishermen, drawn mainly from Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, and Somerset, who had been brought to Newfoundland on short-term contracts, occasionally opted to become permanent settlers. People leaving from Devon and Cornwall tended to be agricultural labourers, farmers, and tradesmen, mostly of modest means, although in some cases they included well-off farmers, but the English males recruited to work in the Newfoundland cod fishery were universally poor. Those who took temporary employment in Newfoundland during the summer often had to rely on poor relief paid by their parishes to see them through their winters in England.

Without Atlantic Canada’s timber trade with England, the influx of English settlers could not have happened. The doubling of the already high duties on Baltic timber in 1811 had the effect of pricing it out of the market and making North American timber the cheaper alternative. As the trade soared, regular and affordable sea crossings came within the reach of the average emigrant as ships set sail from the major English ports to collect their cargoes. Although the industry was regularly plunged into boom and bust, according to fluctuations of business cycles in Britain, it offered diverse employment opportunities and was a vital component of a settler’s livelihood. And while a substantial part of the influx came from the West Country it was not the sole supplier of emigrants by any means. The ports of Liverpool, London, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Newcastle, Whitehaven, Workington, and Maryport also had their emigrant departures, normally linked with collections of timber from the Maritimes (see Map 1). John Kerr, a Northumberland immigrant who settled in 1843 on land he obtained from the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company in Stanley (York County), was probably fairly typical. He informed his parents that “the land is good and free from stone; it will grow any kind of grain once the plough [is] in it” but that “the trees is [sic] standing as thick as they can grow and you can’t see far before you.”²³ The forests were said to be so dense that even before beginning the task of chopping down trees to create farms, settlers had first to “cut their way in.”²⁴

Another common factor in all four Atlantic provinces was the importance placed by English settlers on their religion. In his 1832 emigration pamphlet, the land agent John Lewellin advised people to seek others who shared their “feelings, manners, usages and sentiments, morals and religion.” Doing so, he claimed, would “stifle many a sigh in present difficulties and hush many a regret.”²⁵

Timber booms on the Saint John River, New Brunswick. Woodcut printed in The Illustrated London News, April 7, 1866, 232.

Religion was an important support mechanism for immigrants struggling to cope with a new and challenging environment. The Methodist and Baptist preachers, who trudged huge distances speaking of God’s love and salvation, had the greatest appeal. The Baptist preacher Henry Alline worked among the New England Planters in Nova Scotia; the Yorkshire-born William Black brought his brand of Methodism to the entire region; while Laurence Coughlan, an Anglican minister who converted to Methodism, attracted an enthusiastic following in the Conception Bay area of Newfoundland.

Despite being the official religion, the Church of England attracted relatively few followers. Anglican clergymen were remote figures who adhered to rigid hierarchical structures and seemed not to appreciate the hunger among their congregations for uplifting messages and a kindly smile. As J.F.W. Johnston observed in his travels through the Maritimes, “The Church of England has less hold on the people than either Presbyterians, Baptists or Roman Catholics.” He blamed this on the fact that, while other religions had to raise most of their funds from their congregations, Anglican missionaries could rely on funds supplied from Britain by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. This made them “independent of the people on pecuniary matters and they have not cultivated them as other sects have.”²⁶

The bitter winters were another common feature. The Methodist minister Joshua Marsden wrote, in 1816:

[T]hose who are accustomed only to the cold of England cannot conceive the intense severity of winters in Nova Scotia: the snow is often from four to six feet deep; the ice upon the rivers is two feet thick; the cold penetrates the warmest rooms, the warmest clothes, and will render torpid the warmest constitutions; it often freezes to death those who lose their way in the woods, or get bewildered in the thick and blinding fury of a snow drift.²⁷

The Right Reverend John Inglis, the third Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia and son of Charles Inglis, the first bishop. Lithograph by William Charles Ross, engraved by M. Gauci. Bishop John worked hard to extend the influence of the Church of England, but his hostile and high-handed approach toward other Protestant religions made him out of step with his time.

And New Brunswick was even colder in his opinion. Newspaper reports in Newfoundland speak of similar conditions. It was an insurmountable deterrent for some. Having emigrated to Prince Edward Island from Barnstaple in 1832, William Holmes and his wife, Betsy Richards, decided very soon after arriving that they “did not like the climate and moved on to Boston.”²⁸

A striking theme in this study is the relatively large number of English immigrants who came from extremely poor backgrounds. In addition to the desperately poor fishermen who went to live in Newfoundland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were the many hundreds of destitute children, from English cities like Liverpool and Birmingham, who were sent to the Maritimes a century later. They were the so-called “home children,” whose relocation had been arranged by an assortment of English do-gooders who believed that such children needed to be saved from the corrupting influences of their families and guardians and given a fresh start in life. In addition, there were those people who were assisted to immigrate to Atlantic Canada by their parishes.²⁹ Assistance was justified on the grounds that it offered them an escape from their poverty and it reduced the burden on the ratepayers who were having to contribute to their maintenance. However, only a minority ever received financial help, and those who did originated mainly from East Anglia, this being one of the regions that experienced disturbances during the Swing riots of 1830–31.³⁰ Impoverished labourers agitating for better wages and the removal of the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods failed to win these changes and were dealt with severely. Just after these disturbances a large group from Suffolk immigrated to Prince Edward Island, although shortly thereafter people from this county switched their allegiance to Upper Canada.

After the 1830s, when Upper Canada acquired its internal routes and became more accessible, it became the prime destination of most British immigrants. The Maritime provinces could not match its better land and job prospects and each lost their already-established settlers to it. People bypassed Nova Scotia, since most of its good land had already been snapped up by Planters, early Yorkshire settlers, and Loyalists, and they were deterred by Prince Edward Island’s semi-feudal land system, since it denied them the freeholds they sought.

This was the stark reality that the Colonial Office sought to address in 1832 when it advised that “Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton … do not contain the means either of affording employment at wages to a considerable number of emigrants or of settling them upon land.”³¹ New Brunswick’s better land opportunities, especially those being marketed at the time by the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company, made it still a viable destination, but, because of the loss of most of the province’s customs data, the number of immigrant arrivals will never be known with any accuracy. Meanwhile, this preference for Upper Canada suited the British government. English Protestants streaming into Upper Canada offered a welcome counterbalance to the very large French-speaking, Roman Catholic population in Lower Canada. Preserving its hold on British America always remained a top priority.

William Cobbett, the radical journalist and champion of the English agricultural labourer, had strong views on emigration.³² He was opposed to it. To him, Prince Edward Island was “a rascally heap of sand, rock and swamp … in the horrible Gulf of St. Lawrence … a lump of worthlessness … [that] bears nothing but potatoes,” and he was equally scathing about the other provinces.³³ Having served as a soldier in the British Army in New Brunswick for a few years, he had first-hand knowledge of the region, but being a fiery opponent of emigration, his purple prose must be taken with a pinch of salt. However, his words probably reflect the received wisdom of the day. Vessels lined up almost daily at large ports like London and Liverpool to take people to Quebec, but few were heading for Maritime ports.³⁴

Nevertheless, as is so often the case, most ordinary people made up their own minds. Many English, particularly those living in the West Country, streamed into Prince Edward Island during the 1830s and 1840s, hoping to benefit from its burgeoning shipbuilding industry.³⁵ Meanwhile, Nova Scotia’s mining industry attracted a growing number of English coal miners during the second half of the nineteenth century and still more arrived later with the province’s growing industrialization.³⁶ The views of people already settled carried far more weight than official advice or outspoken commentators, and this, more than anything, drove the later influx to the Maritimes.

The British government’s land policies, such as they were, promoted everything under the sun except effective colonization. Land speculators were thriving, but ordinary colonists found it extremely difficult to cope with the many obstacles that were placed in their way. They had low priority. Since the late eighteenth century the government had been granting huge quantities of wilderness land as rewards to favoured individuals. Most recipients sold their land on to speculators, who amassed huge holdings but did nothing to further colonization. Settlers had the residue, which was often inferior, and what holdings they could obtain were relatively small and scattered over huge distances. It was a bureaucratic muddle that favoured the rich and privileged while hindering the growth of compact settlements. Conditions were especially bad in Prince Edward Island, where settlers were actually prevented from purchasing land. The land on the island had been divided and sold off by lottery in 1767 to various claimants, irrespective of their willingness to promote settlements.³⁷ They simply waited for their land to increase in value, and, in the meantime, sought people willing to take up leaseholds.

Late eighteenth-century portrait of Walter Patterson, who became Prince Edward Island’s first governor in 1769. His corrupt and incompetent handling of land transactions following the 1767 lottery made him a controversial figure, and, after seventeen years as governor, he was forced to leave office. In 1798, Patterson died in poverty at his lodgings in London.

When Lord Seymour of Ragley took possession of Lot 13 in Prince Edward Island, Charles Morris, the surveyor, selected “1,000 acres of the best land” for him and allocated the remainder to his future tenants. This was all going to be very beneficial to his lordship, since the rents collected from tenants would more than pay for the quit rents — land fees that were payable to the Crown.³⁸ Lord Seymour grabbed most of the economic benefit for himself, denying his settlers the prospect of owning land. This aspect of Old World thinking caused considerable resentment in Prince Edward Island, and many settlers left the province.

The situation in Newfoundland had been even worse. There the West Country merchants had an iron grip on the island’s economy and did what they could to stop colonizers, fearing that they would interfere with the smooth functioning of the fishery. They wanted Newfoundland to be a British off-shore fishery with no other function than to make them wealthy and benefit the West Country economy. However, the young lads and men who took up temporary employment in the fishery had other ideas. Once they appreciated the province’s benefits, some voted with their feet, thus setting in train a small but regular supply of immigrants who contributed greatly to its development.

The city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1892, lithograph by an unknown artist. The cityscape reveals a metropolis focused around a busy harbour. Water Street and the Military Road, running parallel to the waterfront, were the earliest streets; they once linked two forts.

A recurring theme in emigrant letters and official reports is the sheer hard work involved in becoming a pioneer farmer. An advertisement in the Berwick Advertiser in 1843, aimed at “persons desirous of obtaining cleared or uncleared farms” in Prince Edward Island, stated that no one need apply who could not “command £100 upwards to commence cultivations.”³⁹ Settlers with capital could buy already-established farms in settled areas, but they were a fortunate few. Most people were like William Grieve, a shepherd from Whittingham in Northumberland, who planned his transformation to pioneer farming in the Harvey settlement in New Brunswick very carefully. The writer J.F.W. Johnston was clearly awestruck by the man’s resilience and staying power:

He landed at Fredericton in 1837 with a family of ten and only 7 [shillings] and 6 [pence] in his pocket. He did not come out to Harvey along with the other settlers but, having received his grant of land, he hired himself as a farm-servant to Colonel Shore at Fredericton at £30 a year; and such of his children as could do anything he hired out also. Supporting the rest of his family out of his earnings, he saved what he could and whenever he had a pound or two to spare he got an acre or two of his land cleared. In this way, he did good to the other settlers, by bringing some money among them and giving a little employment. At last, four years ago — that was after seven years’ service — he came out and settled on his land himself, building a good house for his family right away — that is without the previous erection of a log house, as is usually the case, and a very good house he appeared to have. He now owns seven hundred acres of land in different lots and had clearings of twenty acres on each of three or four of these farm lots intended for his several sons, who appear to be as industrious as himself.⁴⁰

There were many William Grieves in this emigration saga. Agricultural workers, farmers, tradesmen, craftsmen, miners, and fishermen came with little spare money, but they had an overwhelming desire to succeed. To do so they had to show enormous courage and resilience. They built their communities on the west side of Nova Scotia, on the east side of Newfoundland, and in many parts of southern New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The first large group came from Yorkshire, and following them were people who left from across the length and breadth of England. This is their story.