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CHAPTER 2

Laying the Foundations: Yorkshire Emigration

Remember the rock from whence ye was hewn. 1

CHARLES DIXON RECORDED his pioneering experiences for the benefit of his children. “It was for your sakes we crossed the ocean so that you would out-strip us in purity of heart and holiness of life.” ² This was seemingly an unconventional motive for emigrating, but Dixon was a devout Methodist who wished to escape the social injustice and “troubles … befalling my native country.” A bricklayer’s son from Kirk Leavington in the North Riding of Yorkshire, he was a man of strong convictions and a natural leader. He rose to become one of Nova Scotia’s leading figures, and, following the separation of New Brunswick from Nova Scotia in 1784, served in New Brunswick’s first House of Assembly. Yet he could never have imagined this outcome when he first learned about the advantages of the New World.

Dixon had established a profitable paper factory for himself at Hutton Rudby, and his relocation to Nova Scotia seems unexpected. However, he was dissatisfied and restless and, learning about the favourable accounts of Nova Scotia being circulated by agents of Lieutenant Governor Michael Francklin, he considered emigrating. But, lacking sufficient funds, he remained where he was. When “a gentleman” called to see him out of the blue and offered “to pay [his] stock and interest in Hutton Mills,” he immediately persuaded his wife and family to move with him to Nova Scotia. They were among the group of sixty-two emigrants (seventeen families) from the North Riding who set sail from Liverpool in the Duke of York in 1772:³

We had a rough passage, none of us having been to sea before, much seasickness prevailed. After six weeks and four days we arrived at Halifax … and were received with much joy by the gentlemen in general, but were much discouraged by others, and the account given us of Cumberland⁴ was enough to make the stoutest heart give way.⁵

Fort Cumberland, near Sackville (later New Brunswick), was their destination, but upon their arrival in Halifax, Dixon and the others “heard all kinds of negative reports” about it — “enough to sway many peoples’ opinions.” When he actually reached Fort Cumberland, Dixon realized that the discontent felt by the local New Englanders “was mainly due to indolence and lack of knowledge.” The enormous potential of the land was immediately obvious to the Yorkshire group, and those with sufficient funds acquired land and livestock and some even helped friends and relatives to do the same. Fourteen Yorkshire settlers acquired over eight thousand acres in the Sackville area alone.⁶ Dixon set an example by purchasing a 2,500-acre farm from Daniel Hawkins for £260. Thomas Bowser, from Acklam near Birdsall,⁷ leased a 750-acre farm in the same area for four pounds, ten shillings per annum,⁸ while the thirteen-yearold George Bulmer, an apprentice mason, eventually purchased one thousand acres and obtained a grant for a further three hundred.⁹

Meanwhile, James Metcalf from Hawnby in the North Riding, who had also sailed in the Duke of York, bought 207 acres along the Maccan River farther to the south and shared with two others in the purchase of an additional forty-five acres. Writing to his fiancée, Ann Gill, in Huby, to the south of Easingwold, he described “a little fly called a mosquito that is troublesome in summertime and bites like a midge,” but added that was “the only thing I wish to say against the country.”¹⁰ He hoped that she would come immediately and advised her not to be fearful of the ocean crossing and not to listen to adverse comments about Nova Scotia:

If you come be not discouraged by anything in the country for it is good; if you come you will sail up to Fort Cumberland and when you are there write … to me at Maccan River … and I will come for you…. I will be as good as my word … the passage is paid at Liverpool before you go on board but, if you should not be able to pay, make friends to some that come and I will pay … may ye Lord bless you and conduct you safely hither.¹¹

James’s letter took two years to reach her, but when it did, Ann reacted immediately. She left for Nova Scotia, and upon her arrival in Fort Cumberland (now known by its original name of Fort Beauséjour) dispatched a message to James, who rushed to meet her. They were married the following day in the stockade of Fort Cumberland, and, after producing a large family, both lie buried on the banks of the Maccan River.¹²

The Yorkshire influx to Nova Scotia had been encouraged and directed by no less a dignitary than the lieutenant governor. The Pooleborn Michael Francklin became one of Halifax’s leading merchants after amassing a fortune during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) by supplying troops to the British and privateering. He was the ultimate wheelerdealer who exploited his political office to the full, but his enormous appetite for land speculation was his ruination, since it left him heavily in debt. Having acquired thousands of acres in Nova Scotia, he failed to attract New England settlers as he had hoped, thus leaving himself with no revenue and a sizable bill in quit rents to pay to the Crown.¹³ His solution was to seek settlers from overseas, concentrating his efforts in the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, where he knew there was considerable discontent over enclosures and rent rises.

Map 2. Yorkshire Settler Locations in the Chignecto Isthmus, 1772–75.

Francklin offered one-hundred-acre lots at “Francklin Manor” — a choice tract in the Chignecto Isthmus that offered prime sites along the rivers that empty into the Cumberland Basin, especially the Hébert, Maccan, and Nappan (see Map 2). “None but Protestants will be admitted … and none need apply but husbandmen or artificers, and such as are possessed of at least £50 in money, that they may be able to carry on their improvements.”¹⁴ Each family that could satisfy these criteria was to receive “at least ten acres of cleared land for the immediate culture of grain, or providing winter fodder for not less than 20 head of horned cattle,” and for this the settler would pay “a yearly quit rent of one penny per acre for the first five years, sixpence per acre for the next five years and, after that period, one shilling per acre for ever…. The climate is healthy and temperate, and the lands are surrounded by settlements already made; the rivers abound with fish, the woods with game, and good timber fit for building.”¹⁵ And there was icing on this cake: “There are no game-laws, taxes on lands, or tithes in this province.” Francklin knew that emigration offered a welcome release from the feudal constraints and payments of the Old World.

Michael Francklin, lieutenant governor and sometime temporary governor of Nova Scotia between 1766 and1776, oil portrait by J.S. Copley, circa 1762.

Seeking settlers for the land he had previously hoped to populate with New Englanders, Francklin left for England in 1769 to personally direct a recruitment campaign in Yorkshire. He concentrated his efforts in the farming areas of the North and East Ridings, where the great upheaval being experienced by the creation of large consolidated holdings from former scattered strips in the common fields made farmers and agricultural workers particularly receptive to his offer. Through his family and business contacts he had inside knowledge of tenant grievances on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Here, it was simply a matter of directing resentful tenants toward Nova Scotia. Francklin placed his agents in Rillington, Skelton, Thirsk, Hovingham, Sowerby, Whitby, and Burniston — all towns in the North and East Riding of Yorkshire. The agents located potential settlers and arranged for their sea crossings from the nearby ports of Hull, Scarborough, Stockton-on-Tees (Durham), and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (see Map 3).¹⁶ By 1775, when the American Revolution halted the exodus, eight vessels had carried around nine hundred emigrants from the north of England to Nova Scotia.¹⁷

Map 3. Yorkshire: The Main Region of Emigration, 1772–75.

Francklin’s campaigning efforts attracted “a fine quality of substantial, knowledgeable men to whom the land was remarkable for not needing manure and the terms unbelievably tempting.”¹⁸ The Reverend John Eagleson, an Anglican missionary sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in London, observed in 1773 how “the country is fast settling, many English farmers annually coming over and settling among us; whose favourable accounts of the country to their friends seem to induce still more to emigrate hither.” His hope that “in a short time, this district will be settled with a sober, industrious and religious set of people”¹⁹ was borne out, although not without controversy and setbacks, and few would support his religion.

As the exodus grew, emigrants had to withstand criticism from Britain’s ruling classes, who feared that emigration would seriously deplete the country’s workforce and armed services. A correspondent writing in the York Chronicle in 1773 thought “it a matter of astonishment to every rational being in this Island, that the Government should permit such numerous emigration from the mother country.”²⁰ And in his view, Michael Francklin’s involvement made a bad situation even worse:

It may be said that Government has just granted a large portion of land, in a neighbouring forest, for the purpose of population and agriculture. But how have they granted it? Not in the judicious manner in which settlers receive it in the American provinces…. The very land should have been parcelled out in small lots. Instead of this, one great man has the whole, and he naturally will make the most of it.²¹

The government’s anti-emigration stance required it to lament the loss of people, and yet it needed loyal British emigrants for its North American colonies. It would have to face up to this quandary eventually, but in 1773 the government’s principal aim was to contain the exodus that appeared to be spiralling out of control. Although parliamentary action to curb emigration was resisted, the government instructed customs officials at every port to record the numbers emigrating, thus providing passenger lists for the period from 1773 to 1775, showing who left on each ship and their reasons for leaving.²² Overall, the results reveal that farmers and craftsmen and tradesmen were particularly wellrepresented among the Yorkshire emigrants, while there were relatively few labourers and unskilled workers.

The disruption and higher rents caused by the creation of enclosed farms in Yorkshire was given as the principal motive for emigrating. As Mathew Walker, who sailed from Scarborough in 1774, explained, “all the small farms [had been] taken into large ones in his parish” and he “could not get bread.”²³ Michael Pinkney, who travelled at the same time, said that he had been “turned off his farm, it being taken into a larger one.”²⁴ In fact, Yorkshire had the largest acreage enclosed of any county in England, most of which took place from the late 1760s to the 1770s in the North and East Ridings. Men like Walker and Pinkney were in the front line. They faced higher rents, and eviction if they could not afford to pay them.

Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the American colonies and owner of estates in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had first-hand knowledge of enclosures. The distress being caused by rent rises on his estates was made very clear to him by William Lister, one of his tenants: If his Lordship “could see the tears running from his eyes I’m sure it would melt your heart.” ²⁵ Claiming that Edward Elmsall, Lord Dartmouth’s farm manager, was singling out tenants whom he disliked to raise their rents and evict them if they could not pay, he thought the situation to be very unjust and that his Lordship should know that his neighbour Robert Dixon had “now gone to America.” But Lister knew his place: “Nay my dear, dear Landlord … I had rather go to my bare and bended knees [than cause any provocation].”²⁶

However, contrary to William Lister’s account, Elmsall was well aware of the discontent on Lord Dartmouth’s estate and advised against further rent rises and brutal evictions. He deplored the extent to which “old tenants” were being removed by Thomas Gasgoine’s agent in Shropshire, stating that “the tenants have made much noise in this country,” and conveying his hope that similar action in West Yorkshire would “be disagreeable to your Lordship.”²⁷ But although the pain was as great, few people emigrated from the West Riding since, in this more industrialized region, people had more employment alternatives and wages were generally regarded as good.²⁸ Around the time that Lord Dartmouth was raising rents on his Yorkshire estates, he was also speculating on land in Nova Scotia and east Florida. Conveniently, his cousin Francis Legge happened to be governor of Nova Scotia and could offer sound advice:

Many of the nobility are soliciting for grants of land within this province [Nova Scotia] … and considering your numerous family, it may be of some advantage hereafter to some of your younger sons if they could obtain grants … if your Lordship could procure for four or five of your sons twenty thousand acres each, I shall take care to have them located in such places as they must of course in time become valuable, in the doing of which I shall be assisted by the Surveyor General.²⁹

William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801). Portrait by Pompeo Batoni, circa 1753–56.

Courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Purchased through gifts from Jane and W. David Dance, Class of 1940; Jonathan Cohen, Class of 1960, Tuck 1961; Frederick B. Whittemore, Class of 1953, Tuck 1954; Barbara Dau Southwell, Class of 1978; and David Southwell, Tuck 1988; Parnassus Foundation/Jane and Raphael Bernstein; and an anonymous donor.

Benefiting financially from one’s political position carried little or no stigma at the time. People in high office, with large ambitions, felt they were entitled to grab the choicest land and did so. And yet, seemingly unmindful that colonizers would have to be found for his and his sons’ newly acquired lands, Lord Dartmouth railed against the rising level of emigration from Yorkshire:

The increase of the inhabitants in the province of Nova Scotia by emigration from this Kingdom may be of local advantage to this colony but is a circumstance of very alarming consequence and consideration in respect to the interests and security of Great Britain … it is an evil that must soon require some remedy.³⁰

Nevertheless, despite the government-inspired pressure on people not to emigrate, the exodus from Yorkshire continued. The numbers peaked during the three-month period from March to May 1774 when the ships Two Friends, Albion, Thomas and William, Prince George, Mary, and Providence carried around seven hundred Yorkshire emigrants to Nova Scotia. John Bulmer, who sailed with his wife and family in the Two Friends, said that he had left “on account of their rents being raised” by Beilby Thompson, MP; Christopher Harper from Rillington, who sailed in the same ship, made the same complaint about his landlord, William Weddell, MP.³¹ Both landlords contributed unwittingly to the peopling of Nova Scotia, with substantial numbers leaving from Thompson’s estate just south of York and Weddell’s estate near Ripon (see Map 3). Both groups were among the 103 passengers who sailed in the Two Friends from Hull. It had clearly been a very difficult crossing. An unnamed young woman said it gave her “great pleasure to see land after being nine weeks at sea, and the ill-treatment that we met with. I assure you that our usage was as bad as though we had been transports, not being permitted to go on deck when the weather permitted, but as the captain pleased.”³²

Those who sailed in the Albion included the former tenants of the Duke of Rutland, Lord Cavendish and Thomas Duncombe, and they, too, complained of increased rents. In fact, “rents being raised” was the repeated refrain of people who were asked why they were leaving England. Some men, like Thomas Lumley from Rillington and William Chapman from Hawnby, both farmers, and William Trueman, a miller from Bilsdale (near Thirsk), were probably sufficiently affluent to have afforded higher rents, but preferred emigration to lowered living standards. Nathaniel Smith, a farmer from Appleton-by-Wisk who came with his entire household, including servants, certainly had considerable means. Complaining that “Hull and York have lightened our purses,” he had to finance lodgings for his large contingent at the exorbitant rate of a guinea a day while awaiting the Albion’s departure from Hull. Captain James Watt added to their woes when he said “to our comfort, if I may use the expression, he shall think himself well off if one third of us survive our journey.”³³ Enduring seasickness, an outbreak of smallpox, and dreadful storms, the ship’s 188 passengers finally reached Halifax: “When we came nigh the shores we thought it prudent to take a pilot up the Bay as our captain was altogether a stranger to the place.” They anchored two miles from shore, with the governor’s schooner blocking “our people from landing” for fear of spreading the infection.³⁴

In the same month that the Albion had sailed, the York Chronicle claimed that three ships carrying emigrants from Sutherland in Scotland to North America had suffered serious fatalities: “One was wrecked on Shetland, and most of the people perished; another is thought to be totally lost, no account being received of her arrival; and the third arrived after a dismal passage of three months with the loss of 70 people.”³⁵ However, anti-emigration campaigners sometimes resorted to rumours and scare stories, and the reporting of such faraway incidents in a Yorkshire newspaper, whether true or not, was clearly intended to focus attention on the perils of an ocean crossing. But Yorkshire people were impervious to such tactics.

Agents working for Michael Francklin in the East Riding had clearly been deluged with requests for places on ships.³⁶ Samuel Pattindon, captain of the Thomas and William, reported that the ship would be leaving late in order to give people time to raise the necessary funds, but the delay gave scaremongers the time they needed to sow doubt and confusion:

[A]s persons who … intend to remove their habitations to this land of liberty, not being judges of a proper ship to accommodate them for such a passage, have been intimidated by threatening advertisements, and in doubt how to proceed — The owner of the abovenamed ship [Thomas and William] begs of such persons as intend to take their passage to Nova Scotia this season, that they will make inquiry at Scarborough of any interested persons, who are conversant in maritime affairs, and hopes they will go on board of such ship, as they shall be advised is properly fitted, and sufficient for the performance of the voyage.³⁷

The Prince George,³⁸ which was also due to sail from Scarborough at this same time, suffered equally bad press:

Some evil-disposed person or persons have maliciously reported that the ship, Prince George, advertised for taking passengers from Scarborough to Nova Scotia, is totally unfit to perform the voyage, and that therefore the persons going therein must do so at the hazard of their lives and fortunes. The owner of the said ship takes this method of informing the public in general, and particularly all such persons who have engaged to go in his said vessel, that the said report is without the least foundation, and merely intended to draw all such passengers from him, for the emolument of some other owner, the above-named ship being in not only good condition, but as well calculated for the above purpose as any other vessel advertised for such voyage.³⁹

The Thomas and William and Prince George were hardly the best of ships, both being rated by Lloyd’s of London as “E1” (seaworthy but only second class). The real issue though was not the quality of the ships but the extent of overcrowding. As a correspondent to the York Chronicle noted, “few of them had considered the consequences attending so large a number of people being, for at least two months, crowded together four in a bed and the beds one upon another three deep with not so much room between each to admit even the smallest person to sit up on end.”⁴⁰ Many people had wanted to leave from Scarborough and shipowners had met the demand. They offered affordable fares, but to maximize profits they had packed passengers like sardines into the holds of their ships.

The actual number of passengers carried in the Thomas and William and Prince George is difficult to assess. The confusion may have been deliberate, since the suffering endured in overcrowded ships often generated adverse publicity for shipowners. A list of 193 people who had sailed from Scarborough in April 1774 was provided to British customs officials, but the ship carrying them was not recorded.⁴¹ Presumably this was done on purpose to conceal the fact that 193 people had actually sailed in the three-hundred-ton Thomas and William,⁴² when the captain claimed the smaller total of 105 passengers on reaching Halifax.⁴³ Meanwhile, the crossing of the 150-ton Prince George was mysteriously left out altogether from the British customs register. On arrival in Halifax, the captain claimed that she had carried 143 people, but according to John Robinson, one of the passengers who kept a meticulous account of his journey to Nova Scotia, there were 170 people onboard.⁴⁴ Robinson’s figure is probably the more reliable. If that number did sail, the overcrowding must have been unbearable. Apart from slave-trade regulations, there were no enforceable legal limits at the time restricting passenger numbers in ships. Later, with the passing of the Passenger Act of 1803, a formula was introduced allowing only one person for every two tons burthen.⁴⁵ Applying this ruling to the Prince George, she should have had a maximum of seventyfive passengers, when in fact she carried 170.⁴⁶

The Thomas and William’s passengers were reported to be “all well” on arrival after a five-week crossing, with their number increasing by two — “two women being safely delivered in the passage.”⁴⁷ But a more negative spin was given to the Prince George’s arrival. Yorkshire people were told that all of her passengers had returned to England “and many more would have gladly returned, but could not pay for their freight, the country not being in any respect equal to the favourable idea they had formed of it.”⁴⁸ This was utter nonsense, but it did illustrate the serious concerns being felt over the growing loss of people, some of whom were surprisingly affluent. One large family, probably the Harrisons from Rillington, were reported to have taken £2,200 with them.⁴⁹ Fares alone in the Thomas and William for two adults and nine children would have cost between twenty-five and thirty-three pounds, and the Harrison family probably spent far more besides on lodging costs.⁵⁰ Having come laden with many household possessions, they were almost certainly among the forty men, women, and children who stayed at an inn in York en route to Scarborough to board ship.⁵¹ And people like Ralph Stibbins, a forty-year-old merchant with three children, and Robert Wilson, a forty-nine-year-old farmer with a wife and seven children, who sailed in the same ship as the Harrisons, were probably also men of substance. John Robinson, a farmer from Bewholm in Holderness who had sailed in the Prince George, said that if he found Nova Scotia to be “as favourable as represented” he would “make a purchase there and return to take his family over.”⁵² He and his friend, Thomas Rispin from Fangfoss, had the time and resources to explore the entire Francklin Manor and write a detailed account of their findings for the benefit of people back in Yorkshire.

As the zeal to emigrate spread north, the Providence set sail for Halifax in April 1774 from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the Mary did the same from Stockton-on-Tees. While the thirty-four people who sailed in the Mary were all from County Durham,⁵³ some of the seventy-three people in the Providence,⁵⁴ like John and Mary Richardson, George and Margaret Foster, Mary, George, and John Oxley, and Christopher Flintoff, certainly came from Yorkshire.⁵⁵ Most of the Mary’s passengers sought “better employment,” but Thomas Lancaster, a linen-draper’s apprentice, had come “to dispose of goods” and presumably return, while the shopkeeper Thomas Miller stated that he had “goods to sell and [would] return.”⁵⁶ Strangely, the Providence’s crossing was not recorded in the British customs register but her passengers were included in a list sent by Governor Legge to Lord Dartmouth.⁵⁷

Rising alarm in Britain over the loss of so many people energized anti-emigration campaigners, who used negative feedback from Nova Scotia, whether accurate or not, to discourage even more people from leaving. This account printed in the York Chronicle by an anonymous “North American correspondent” was fairly typical:

Tombstone of George Oxley, passenger on the Providence, at the United Church cemetery, River Philip, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. His death in 1790 was the first to be recorded in River Philip.

I am sorry to hear … that a great many farmers are quitting the northern parts of Yorkshire for America; I fear that most of them will change for the worse. They little know what they must suffer from change of soil and climate, and the toil they must endure before they can make bread to eat; and if, by their industry, they at the last attain to live free from want, they must never expect to grow rich, for they must settle so far inland, that the produce of their land will bear a very low price, and in all the back settlements cash is very little known among them…. Those who are gone to Nova Scotia will have five or six months winter.⁵⁸

Politically, emigration was bad news in Britain. Lord Dartmouth described it as “an evil” that needed to be stopped and Governor Legge, appreciating its negative undertones, gave a very cautious report of immigrant arrivals: “Those that are able are purchasing lands of the former settlers, others [are] hiring themselves out to service, and others, wishing themselves at home again, will soon quit the Province.”⁵⁹ In a later report in 1774, Legge doubted that any more Yorkshire people would come to Nova Scotia “as they seem not to be well pleased with the country, the best lands are already granted, the rest being wilderness land; those people have returned home who were dissatisfied or were not able to purchase of the former inhabitants.”⁶⁰ But Legge was wrong. More people emigrated in 1775.

The last ship to leave was the Jenny, which sailed from Hull in April 1775 with eighty Yorkshire passengers. They included households that came with their servants, such as the families of William Black, a linen draper, and William Johnson and William Robinson, both farmers. Christopher Harper, from Barthorpe-Bottoms near Malton, who came with his wife and seven children, had travelled alone the previous year in the Two Friends to visit Fort Cumberland, where he purchased a 143acre farm “with a good house upon it, elegantly furnished with barns and other conveniences besides woodland at a distance and 20 cows with other cattle etc. for which we were told he gave £550.”⁶¹

The shipping agents for the Jenny crossing included the same Christopher Harper and John Robinson, another affluent farmer, who, from his extensive travelling, could describe the region’s excellent agricultural potential.⁶² The Jenny was a superior vessel, being classed as “A1,” and unlike the others was almost new. She was reported to be “a remarkably fine and lofty ship,” suggesting that the steerage space was more spacious than normal.⁶³ Quite clearly, the more affluent folk deliberated longest and were the last to leave, doing so just before the outbreak of the American Revolution brought a halt to emigration.

Most new arrivals were shocked by the scale of the wilderness that greeted them. As their ship neared Halifax Harbour, John Robertson and Thomas Rispin thought the coastline “appeared very discouraging and disagreeable — nothing but barren rocks and hills presented themselves…. This unfavourable appearance greatly dampened the spirits of most of the passengers and several of them began to wish themselves in Old England before they had set foot in Nova Scotia.” And, on the way from Halifax to Sackville they “passed through nothing but dreary wastes or forests of rocks and wood.”⁶⁴ Robertson and Rispin blamed this “unfavourable appearance” on the place being “populated so thinly” and the failure of its New Englander settlers to adopt good farming practices.

However, the immense potential of the land soon became apparent, and the two men concluded that their economic future and that of the others lay in improving it. It was theirs for the taking: “A man may have as much land as he pleases; the first year he pays nothing; for the next 5 years a penny an acre; the next 5 years 3 [pence]; for 5 years after that 6 [pence]; and then 1 shilling an acre forever to him and his heirs.”⁶⁵

Charles Dixon had recognized the importance of land drainage and, when he arrived in 1772, set to work almost immediately, building dykes and reclaiming more of the salt marshes at his farm in Sackville. By 1787 he had built dykes around 104 acres of his own marshland in Sackville, while Thomas Bowser had done the same for his forty acres. However, some settlers went through a longer and more traumatic period of adjustment.⁶⁶

The Harrisons, from Rillington in the East Riding, had stocked their large farm with cattle and seemed to be doing well, but they hated their place along the River Hébert. John’s eldest son, Luke, wrote home to his cousin, complaining bitterly about the mosquitoes and climate:

We have all gotten safe to Nova Scotia but do not like it all and a great many besides us, and [we] are coming back to England, all that can get back. We do not like the country nor never shall. The mosquitoes are a terrible plague…. You may think that mosquitoes cannot hurt a deal, but if you do you are mistaken, for they will swell one[’s] legs and hands [so] that some is blind and lame for some days…. One is tormented all the summer by mosquitoes and almost freeze to death in the winter.⁶⁷

However, the Harrisons did not leave, and twenty-nine years later Luke was extolling the merits of Nova Scotia to the same cousin back in Yorkshire:

I cannot help but praise up Nova Scotia for growing the greatest crops of potatoes and the best, which answer well to eat with the fish, as we have plenty…. Dear cousin you gave me an invitation of coming to purchase a place in my native country but I had rather ten to one to stay where I am…. People that come from England like the country very well and those that are advanced in years live to a great age.⁶⁸

At first the Trueman family, from Bilsdale in the North Riding, disliked their place at Pointe de Bute, but after finding their bearings they flourished, and at least five successive generations of Truemans would live there.⁶⁹

The memorial stone archway at Pointe de Bute Cemetery, New Brunswick, dedicated to the early Yorkshire settlers. A bronze tablet commemorates the building in 1788 of the province’s first Methodist church.

Nathaniel Smith, the prosperous farmer from Appelton-by-Wisk, enjoyed a smooth transition to his new life in Fort Cumberland, but he knew some discontented people who felt they had been misled by Charles Dixon’s overly optimistic accounts of the region. He thought that a few of them might return to Yorkshire, but that if they did, they would not “bring a bad report” of the land: “One gallon of cream will yield as much butter as two in Old England upon the best of lands [that] I was ever concerned with.”⁷⁰ Although the land was good, he wrote, “let none come here and expect to sit down at ease free from troubles, trials and disappointments … but according to human reason most of the English settled in Fort Lawrence⁷¹ and Cumberland have a hopeful prospect.” Nathaniel certainly expected to prosper quickly: “Any industrious man capable of purchasing two cows may do well … but the man of money is the man for Nova Scotia. Some have already made purchases of excellent houses and fine lands … and in a little time will be as compact and elegant as the most gentlemanly house in England.”⁷²

Nathaniel might have been referring to John Weldon, from the North Riding village of Crathorne near Kirk Leavington. One of Michael Francklin’s 1772 recruits, he had wasted no time in equipping himself with cattle for his farm along the Petitcodiac River off Shepody Bay, to the west of where the main group had settled (see Map 2). In three years’ time he had twenty-two oxen, twenty-six cows, six horses, thirty-two sheep, and eighteen swine, and had acquired sufficient capital to change his status from tenant to landowner. Joshua Gildart, from nearby Carlton in Coverdale, who brought three servants with him, also prospered. He, too, rented 150 acres from Francklin on the Petitcodiac and within a year of his arrival had acquired even more livestock than Weldon. He later purchased five hundred acres farther up the Petitcodiac at Moncton, and spent three hundred pounds in improving his various landholdings.⁷³ Obtaining a further 753 acres along the Petitcodiac, near its juncture with a river he called the Coverdale to commemorate his native origins (it was also known as Little River), Gildart demonstrated the Yorkshire flair for rapidly acquiring real estate.

At the other end of the social spectrum were farm workers like Jonathan Barlow, who struggled just to survive:

Tombstones of the early Yorkshire settlers at Five Points Baptist Cemetery, Coverdale, near Salisbury, New Brunswick.

I found everything very dear in Cumberland, and was glad to lay among the hay. So I fell to work for eighteen pence per day and victuals found some days. On June 3rd I hired to Samuel Rogers of Westcock [near Sackville] for £1, 15 s. per month; stayed with him most of the summer. I found the mosquitoes very troublesome, but the land was very good. Therefore I bought 150 acres of land, but having no house or habitation.⁷⁴

And servants also faced difficult times:

I went to a place of service for three weeks, and had I been a poor beggar I could not have been worse used; and indeed the inhabitants in general seem to be poor miserable beings, which was very mortifying to me, who had been used to good living at home. It is a desolate, depressed, and almost uninhabited country, their food is chiefly fish, which is not very delicate, but cheap. If anyone should inquire about my situation here, pray describe the country as I have done, every word that I have wrote being truth. I am going to leave this place soon, and when I am settled shall let you hear further from me.⁷⁵

Nathaniel Smith thought that “many of the poorer sort seem very discontented … as none is able to employ them,” partly because the wealthier farmers generally brought their own servants and farm labourers with them. “Some I believe will return … others would return but have not therewith to pay their passage; those I greatly pity.”⁷⁶

According to Major General Eyre Massey, the commanding general in Halifax, some did return in 1776, and were helped to do so with government funds. They “seemed heartily sick of their jaunt,” having received “no encouragement in America.” Giving “some their passage to England,” he hoped that they would serve as a lesson to deter “the Old Country from losing so many of her subjects,”⁷⁷ although the many hundreds who remained would prove him wrong.

The Yorkshire settlers scattered far and wide, choosing their locations according to land and job availability.⁷⁸ In this respect they were very different from the Scottish Highlanders who came to the region at this time and relocated themselves as entire communities on land granted by the government. Highlanders sought to preserve their culture and traditions and so progressed in groups rather than singly. However, as Governor Legge explained to Lord Dartmouth, the Yorkshire immigrants “do not come with the expectation of lands [being] granted to them.” They did not wish to settle as one community, but as individuals. “Some come to purchase [land], others perhaps to become tenants and some to labour.”⁷⁹ Having rented substantial farms in Yorkshire that had been handed down from father to son, they were accustomed to renting, and took their time before making the transition from renter to owner. And when they bought farms from their New England predecessors they became widely dispersed in the Chignecto Isthmus, including the area to the west, along the Petitcodiac and Memramcook rivers, off the Shepody Bay, and the region to the south along the River Philip. Several families went even farther afield, settling in Annapolis and nearby townships in the southwest of the province.⁸⁰

Yorkshire settlers had to cope with the privations, drudgery, and isolation of pioneer life, and endured testing conditions that seem almost incomprehensible today. Yorkshire men had to turn wildernesses into cleared farms, while the women would have had to become completely self-sufficient in meeting the domestic needs of their families. To do so they would have had to remember old skills and learn new ones. They clearly rose to the challenge. As John Robertson and Thomas Rispin observed:

[T]he women are very industrious house-wives and spin the flax, the growth of their own farms, and weave both their linen and woollen cloth; they also bleach their linen and dye the yarn themselves. Though they will not descend to work out of doors, either in time of hay or harvest yet, they are exceedingly diligent in every domestic employment. The candles … soap and starch which are used in their families are of their own manufacturing.⁸¹

Methodism played its part in helping settlers like Charles Dixon find a moral dimension to their new life. They had wanted to escape from what they saw as England’s corruption and over-worldliness, and sought a refuge for themselves and their families in a British-held wilderness. Their Methodist religion provided a vital support mechanism by drawing people together regularly for worship, and it was also an important link with their English past. Methodist fervour was sustained by a great many of the immigrants, but by far the most outstanding example was William Black, who arrived in the Jenny in 1775 as a boy of fourteen with the rest of his family. Thirteen years later he had become the spiritual leader of the entire Nova Scotia Methodist community and thereafter became one of the most important Methodist leaders in North America.⁸²

Having completed his tour, John Robinson concluded that he would have a far better life in Nova Scotia than in England, and so returned to Yorkshire to bring back his family: “A large sum of money would not induce me to stay any longer[in England].”⁸³ A new world with no masters and servants had opened up, and soon the paucity of a population, which had held back the province’s development, would find a solution. Oddly enough, the outcome of the American War of Independence, which began in 1775 and ended in 1783, worked to its advantage. Having lost the war, the British government relocated large numbers of Loyalists, many of whom were English or of English descent, from the United States to Nova Scotia, thus beginning a new chapter in the province’s development.

Plaques at Pointe de Bute Cemetery, New Brunswick, commemorating the Reverend William Black, pioneer Methodist preacher, and the introduction by him of Methodism in Canada.