Sisters in the Wilderness (11 page)

Catharine's first introduction to the New World was far more pleasant than her sister's. While the
Rowley
was anchored close to the south shore of the St. Lawrence about two hundred miles from Quebec City,
awaiting a pilot, Thomas rowed ashore with the captain onto a little promontory called Pointe au Bic. He returned with an armful of flowers. After five weeks at sea, without a glimpse of anything green and growing, Catharine the amateur botanist was overjoyed. Her eyes filled with tears as she took the bouquet from Thomas and buried her face in it. She identified some of the blossoms, such as the sweet peas and wild roses, but realized with excitement that others were entirely unfamiliar. What was the name of this white orchid? Or these small yellow-andwhite flowers? Were they unique to the New World, and how would she ever be able to learn their names? She carefully carried them off to the cabin and flattened them out between the pages of her Bible to preserve them. To a student of nature, the prospect of finding and identifying new species was thrilling.

When the
Rowley
arrived at Grosse Ile, its passengers were all forbidden to step ashore since none had travelled steerage. Catharine was not plunged into the dirty, hungry, shrieking crowd of new emigrants, as her sister Susanna had been; she did not see them cavorting around on the rocks or doing their stinking wash at the water's edge. Susanna's “perfect paradise” was all Catharine saw—a happy, colourful scene in the distance that reminded her of a fairground, with clothes waving in the wind, women basking in the sunshine and children chasing each other through the water. She didn't believe the customs officer who told her that what she was looking at was really “every variety of disease, vice, poverty, filth and famine.” Similarly, she never went ashore at Quebec City, because of the cholera there. All she could do was marvel at the scenery. With only European experience to go by, she happily assumed that the stands of old trees on the sparsely populated south shore hid “pretty villas and houses.” At the end of the day, the sound of church bells rang across the water through the warm summer air, summoning citizens to evening prayer. As she sat on board the
Rowley,
Catharine could still imagine that Canada was a land of milk and honey—particularly when the captain reappeared from the customs inspection with a basket of ripe apples for her, plus fresh meat, vegetables, bread, butter and milk.

In late August 1832, Thomas and Catharine finally stepped off the
Rowley
and onto Canadian soil in Montreal, then the largest city in British North America. Situated where the Ottawa River flowed into the mighty St. Lawrence, it had been the centre of the fur trade for over a century. It could not compare with the cities that Catharine knew best, London or even Norwich, with their ancient churches and palaces. It didn't have properly paved streets or decent drains, and there were uneasy relations between the English-speakers and French-speakers who made up, in about equal numbers, its population of thirty thousand. However, it could already boast a handsome Catholic cathedral, plus several massive stone colleges, nunneries, barracks and bank buildings. And the Scots merchants who ran all the shipping and trading companies housed themselves in mansions quite grand enough to compete with the merchants of the Old World.

None of this wealth was apparent, though, when the Traills arrived, and the newcomers were not impressed by the city. They found themselves enveloped in the foul smell of open sewers as they walked through narrow, garbage-strewn streets to the Hotel Nelson, on Place Jacques Cartier. The 1832 cholera epidemic had swept through Montreal, wiping out whole families and orphaning infants. Catharine was horrified by the mean houses, the ragged street urchins, the drunken emigrants lurching through the town, the overcrowded boarding houses. She urged Thomas to clear their luggage through customs as quickly as possible, so they could travel on to Upper Canada.

Perhaps the customs officials were too overworked. Perhaps Thomas let himself be elbowed aside by other, pushier colonists. Either way, the Traills' bags were stuck in the customs warehouse. In the sultry heat of late August, Catharine did not have enough energy for sightseeing. She was still not completely recovered from the sickness she had contracted while in Scotland and was apprehensive of further infection. So she remained at the hotel while they waited, and got to know her fellow guests and the hotel staff.

Finally, after two long days, the Traills' bags were released from
customs. But by then, Catharine's fears had been realized: she was feverish, sweating, writhing with stomach cramps and throwing up repeatedly. Cholera had struck.

Thomas had no idea what to do. But Catharine's sweet nature had captivated the hotel staff, who found her a refreshing contrast to the imperious or condescending English women they usually had to serve. The housekeeper and maids appreciated her gentle manners and genuine interest in their families, their backgrounds, and their views on life in Montreal. The landlady's sister, Jane Taylor, came to Catharine's rescue. She despatched Thomas to find a physician and, oblivious to the risks of contagion, settled down to nurse Catharine through the crisis. When the doctor arrived, he quickly applied the finest remedies known to the nineteenth century—bleeding, an emetic and some opium to dull the pain, none of which had any impact on the infection. It was Jane Taylor's round-the-clock nursing and concern that Catharine should never become dehydrated (coupled with Catharine's strong constitution) that probably saved her life. At the same time, Jane soothed Thomas, who was frantic with worry. Almost miraculously, Catharine did begin to recover. Within a week, although she was still frail, she was pronounced well enough to travel on to Upper Canada.

The cholera episode—Catharine's first experience of her new fellow countrymen—confirmed her faith in the essential humanity of all the different people she met. Her sister Susanna felt lost in a country with no established order. Susanna's first impression of Canada was of a frightening chaos, peopled by rude illiterates, amongst whom her exquisite sense of social nuance was useless. Catharine's first impression could not have been more different. She had enjoyed kindness from strangers, and she had survived the cholera because people she barely knew had taken it upon themselves to nurse her. Emigration gave Catharine new friends, new plants and the excitement of a new life.

Chapter 5

Land of Stumps

W
hat did it remind them of ? What was it
like?
It is hard to imagine the feelings of these two women in their first few weeks in North America. They could as well have landed on a new planet as a new continent. They lived in an era of hearsay; they'd had no photographs or travel documentaries to help them visualize the colonies. Their mental images of British North America had been shaped by the huckster promises of William Cattermole and a few romanticized engravings of Quebec City, Niagara Falls and similar sights, which made Canada look like a depopulated Switzerland. Neither woman had any experience of travel; all they knew were the picturesque villages and softly rolling countryside of the south of England. Now, as each couple travelled separately up the St. Lawrence River towards Upper Canada, Susanna and Catharine groped for familiar landmarks or reference points. Was it like Hampshire? Or Kent?

Their husbands were a little more worldly: as Orkneymen, they were blasé about raging waves, bare peaks and dense forest. Thomas Traill had travelled extensively in Europe with his first wife, and John Moodie had spent a decade in South Africa. But even they were unprepared for the scale of Canada—distances so great they took days to cover, rivers as wide as the English Channel, lakes as vast as oceans.

The culture shock was slow to hit them. Montreal and Quebec—the first two cities they had glimpsed—were as crowded, clamorous and cosmopolitan as Leith and Greenock. They had thrived since the early eighteenth century on the fur trade and, more recently, the lumber business. Soldiers, sailors, merchants, money-lenders, colonial officials and domestic servants milled around their cobbled squares. Their wharves were piled high with masts, spars, planks, boards, shingles, clapboards, laths, barrel staves and squared timbers, bound for markets as distant as Britain and the West Indies. For Susanna and Catharine, the only difference between Montreal's docks and their father's old stamping ground at London's Greenland docks was that most of Montreal's dock workers spoke French.

But the newcomers left the prosperous, well-populated cities of Lower Canada behind them as fast as possible. They were bound for Upper Canada, where former officers in the British army, like Thomas Traill and John Moodie, were eligible for free land. They were anxious to reach their destination quickly in order to take up their land grants and get a roof over their heads in the few weeks before the Upper Canadian winter closed in. So from Montreal, each couple spent three days hopscotching between steamboats and stagecoaches, according to the navigability of the St. Lawrence. First they clambered onto a stagecoach to Lachine, to avoid the turbulent water just above Montreal. After a few hours' bumping over rutted roads, they climbed out of the coach and boarded a steamer. They paddled up the river as far as Cornwall, where they disembarked to stay the night. The following morning they got back into a stagecoach and took the road alongside the Long Sault rapids. Once at Prescott, well above the foaming water,
they embarked on another steamer, which toot-tooted its way past Brockville, through the Thousand Islands and (while the passengers slept) into Lake Ontario.

The sisters' rosy expectations of Upper Canadian society were not based exclusively on William Cattermole's promises. They knew that the colony rested firmly on British laws and traditions. British currency circulated through the colony (alongside, for the sake of convenience, American dollars); the lieutenant-governor, who ran the colony, was appointed by the British crown; lawyers trained at British universities ran its legal system; the Anglican Church, usually represented by the forbidding, lace-cuffed figure of Bishop John Strachan, owned vast swaths of land and was enormously important in the colony's affairs. All major decisions were made by the British government in Westminster. By the time the sisters arrived in 1832, the Legislative Assembly was already an arena for fierce debate between the “Family Compact,” a small group of wealthy families who clustered around the King's representatives, and the Reformers, who demanded a larger role for elected representatives in the colony's government. William Lyon Mackenzie, an outspoken member of the Reformers, had made his newspaper,
The Colonial Advocate,
a leading voice of the Reform movement. Nevertheless, in the taverns along the St. Lawrence the sisters saw men raising their tankards to King William
IV
, and on board the lake steamer, they were comforted by the familiar accents of the Old Country.

For all its British laws and traditions, however, Upper Canada still consisted of fewer than a quarter of a million immigrants spread over a vast territory that only its native people really understood. Its immense emptiness was scarcely scratched by the influx of Loyalists and British immigrants. As Susanna and Catharine travelled west from Montreal, they had seen what settlers called “the Front”: the busy little towns that clung to the north shore of the St. Lawrence and consisted, for the most part, of a grist mill, a sawmill, a church, one or two stores and an inn. Only a handful, such as Brockville and Kingston, also boasted a smithy, a newspaper and a couple of lawyers. York, the administrative centre of
Upper Canada that would be renamed Toronto, was still a squalid waterfront settlement of fewer than nine thousand residents—tiny compared to Quebec City and Montreal. To the north of the Front lay the “Back Townships,” the surveyed tracts of impenetrable swamps and forests of pine, oak and maple. Scattered through the thousands of acres of silent forest were bush farms consisting of log huts, barns, laboriously ploughed fields, newly planted orchards and stumps—endless acres of stumps. Once a settler had chopped down the trees on the land he had acquired, he had to wait at least seven years before the huge, ugly stumps were sufficiently rotten to pull out of the earth. Roads connecting these bush farms were either virtually impassable or nonexistent. Even those who acquired their land free had to use their own capital to buy the implements they needed to clear it, and ploughs and hoes were costly. Because labour was in short supply in the under-populated colony, if a gentleman immigrant chose to employ others to prepare his land and plant his crops, he could expect to pay at least twice the wage he would have paid in Britain. Luxury goods were unattainable; only flour, whisky and salt pork were cheap and available. Survival was a back-breaking, soul-destroying struggle.

Before Catharine had even left Montreal, a disappointed settler, on his way back to England, had warned her that most of Mr. Cattermole's promises of an easy life for settlers were utter make-believe. “I found I had been vilely deceived,” the angry Englishman moaned. “Such land, such a country—I would not live in it for all I could see!” It took newcomers, he insisted, at least five years of back-breaking toil to clear their land and build a decent home before they could begin to think of planting flower gardens. But Catharine decided that the young man simply hadn't tried hard enough, and she paid no attention. The next day, as she jolted her way westward in the stagecoach, she was reassured by what she saw. Land along the Front had been farmed for several years, so that attractive white frame houses had replaced log cabins, and well-established orchards were heavy with apples, plums and crab apples. “I am delighted with the neatness, cleanliness and comfort of the cottages
and farms,” she bubbled. She noted with pleasure familiar flowers—goldenrod, and purple-spiked valerian “as plentiful as the bugloss is in our light sandy fields in England.” She talked to the landlady at a tavern about the hanks of home-dyed wool that hung on fences to dry, and the clay ovens that stood close to many dwellings: “At first I could not make out what these funny little round buildings, perched upon four posts, could be; and I took them for bee-hives till I spied a good woman drawing some nice hot loaves out of one.”