Sisters in the Wilderness (9 page)

Both couples were bound for the mouth of the St. Lawrence River—that vast waterway described by every travel writer of the time as “mightier than an ocean.” The lands and towns ahead of them were little more than a catalogue of unfamiliar names: Newfoundland, Grosse Ile, Quebec, Montreal, Cobourg, York. Neither Susanna Moodie nor Catharine Parr Traill would ever again see her homeland, or her mother and sisters. Left to herself, Susanna would have regarded emigration as a one-way trip over the edge of the world. But Catharine had none of Susanna's dread of the unknown: she rather liked the idea of starting out afresh. In 1826, she had even published a little children's adventure story, entitled “The Young Emigrants,” based upon letters from some family friends who had settled in Upper Canada. Catharine's enthusiasm diluted Susanna's fears. The prospect of emigration was not nearly so intimidating if it was a family affair. Susanna and Catharine could dream of taking their places within the landed gentry of Upper Canada, where their own children would be assured of a future.

Chapter 4

Flapping Sails

F
or most of the thousands of people who left the British Isles during the early nineteenth century, emigration meant the chance of a new and better life. They were escaping grinding hardship in their native land; they were fleeing the disease, starvation and hopelessness that engulfed Britain's labouring classes at the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Anything
was better than what they were leaving behind, and William Cattermole's descriptions of the New World made emigration even more attractive.

But in any century, even the most optimistic emigrant is also entering exile—from her history, her roots, her place within her community. And the two young Strickland women were not fleeing starvation; they were both leaving comfortable, if threadbare, lives and promising literary careers. They were emigrating to better their families' prospects, but
plenty of young ladies like themselves remained in England, scraping by on slender means.

Catharine, and to a lesser extent Susanna, convinced herself that emigration was the start of an adventure. In fact, what choice did either have, when their husbands insisted that emigration was the only option? In departing England, though, both women lost their social and psychological moorings and were cast adrift. Both continued to call England “home” in the years to come, and they yearned for the country from which genteel poverty had exiled them. “Home! the word had ceased to belong to my
present—
it was doomed to live for ever in the
past,
” Susanna wrote. “For what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home? The heart acknowledges no other home than the land of its birth.” Powerful waves of nostalgia for a vanished world would regularly overwhelm them. Reydon Hall—its kitchen, library, lawns, sycamore tree; the surrounding fields and the pale Suffolk sky—remained locked in their memories, preserved for ever in the amber of loss. Half a century later, they would still catch glimpses of childhood bedrooms in their dreams, or vividly recall autumn bonfires in the kitchen garden if they smelled wood smoke. Being wrenched from one's homeland leaves deep scars in the psyche of every emigrant in any era: Susanna and Catharine bore these scars for the rest of their long lives.

The Moodies were the first to leave Britain. The coastal steamer from London deposited them at Leith, the little harbour close to Edinburgh, and John conceived the bright idea of starting their transatlantic voyage from there. Though Glasgow was the usual departure point for North America, if they sailed out of Leith instead, they could simply pay a porter to carry all their worldly goods from the steamship's hold to that of a sailing ship on a neighbouring wharf, rather than packing everything onto a public coach to then bump and rattle over forty miles of dusty, potholed highway to Glasgow. The departure from Leith might even allow John, as they rounded Duncansby Head in the far north, a last glimpse of the Old Man of Hoy—the unclimbable red sandstone
mountain, encircled by screeching seabirds, that had dominated his boyhood in the Orkneys. And so their minds were made up.

John was never a man to weigh his options wisely, and this decision was not a wise one. It meant that the Moodies would have to sail round the northern tip of Scotland, guaranteeing them a slower, stormier passage. It also meant that they didn't have many vessels to choose from.

John Moodie marched up and down the harbour, chatting to any nautical types who were hanging around the wharves or drinking in the quayside taverns below Leith's Martello tower. Leith was both a flourishing fishing port and a centre of trade with other seafaring European nations, including the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Holland, France, Spain and Portugal. The names of its crooked, cobbled streets—Elbe, Baltic, Cadiz and Madeira—reflected its cosmopolitan links. Its tall stone warehouses bulged with Danish barley, Norwegian timber, Russian tallow and flax, Dutch clocks, European wines and North American rice, rum and animal pelts.

Several dozen smacks, brigs and schooners were tied up at the stone quays. John soon discovered the handful of wooden sailing ships bound for Quebec City. He talked to their captains, all of whom were hungry for genteel passengers who would pay full rates to fill cabins. At Susanna's urging, he booked his small family onto a ninety-two-ton, one-masted brig, the
Anne,
which had a monosyllabic and dour Scottish captain called Rodgers and a crew of seven. Seventy-two passengers were contracted to travel in steerage. The Moodie party consisted of Susanna, John, three-month-old Katie and Hannah, a nursemaid Mrs. Strickland insisted they take with them, as well as James Bird, the eleven-year-old son of their Suffolk friends, who was being sent to acquire pioneer skills in the New World. They were the only cabin passengers.

Susanna was assailed by misgivings as she surveyed those who would be travelling below decks. There were so many people in steerage, and they were so poor. She, her sister and their husbands were crossing the Atlantic in a year when the flood tide of emigrants to Canada was at its
peak. Some 52,000 would be landed in Quebec City in 1832, during a shipping season that lasted only two months. In addition to choosing the worst route, the Moodies had also chosen the worst year to travel.

Altogether, 655,747 people sailed away from British shores between 1831 and 1841, nearly three times as many as had emigrated during the previous ten years. Creaking timbers, captains bellowing orders, waves slapping against hulls, the whip of rigging in the wind—the docks at Southampton, Woolwich, Liverpool and Glasgow vibrated with the hullabaloo of transporting the huge outflow of people. Steerage passengers outnumbered cabin passengers (usually referred to as “colonists,” to underline the class difference) by about fifty to one. The five colonies in British North America (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), particularly Upper Canada in this period, were the most popular destinations for both rich and poor. Canada-bound emigrants didn't have to face the dreadful prospect of convict neighbours in Australia, of loneliness in the Cape Colony, of tropical diseases in the Indian subcontinent or the cruel practices of slavery (by now considered utterly unchristian, but not abolished until 1834) in the West Indies. And the voyage to Canada was shorter than the alternatives. In the 1830s, vessels were expected to take an average of six to seven weeks to reach Quebec City from Britain's west coast ports, compared to twelve to fifteen weeks to reach Australia, and five to six months to reach India. All these sailing times were approximate and varied according the wind and weather.

If Susanna winced at the number of emigrants on her ship, she was even more appalled at the conditions in which they were obliged to travel. Steerage-class passengers had a miserable time. The
Anne
was a relatively small boat, and its seventy-two cheap-fare passengers were crammed into a space only sixty feet long by ten feet wide and five and a half feet high. On the eastward passage across the Atlantic, timber plugged this space; now, on the westward voyage, it was filled with double rows of berths made of rough planks hastily nailed together. Baggage, utensils and food supplies jammed the aisle, and there was little
ventilation. Children played in the fetid darkness; dirty bilge water slopped across the floor; rats swarmed up from the hold. On long, storm-plagued voyages, the smell of unwashed bodies, rotting food and vomit was suffocating. Emigrant ships were supposed to feed all their passengers, but few captains bothered to load sufficient supplies of biscuit, flour, salt pork and fresh water to last the whole voyage. When the daily provisions were distributed, they were almost always too meagre and often spoiled.

The worst of the emigrant ships came from Ireland's twenty-one ports, carrying the wretched cargo of refugees from famine, fever and the regular failures of the potato crop. By the mid-nineteenth century, the boats had earned the nickname “coffin ships.” But the brigs, brigantines and schooners leaving Scotland's eighteen ports or England's thirty-six carried their own burdens of misery. And in the event of a shipwreck, steerage-class passengers usually drowned; lifeboats were provided for cabin-class passengers only. Life in steerage was awful. “Sir, a ship is worse than a jail,” wrote that cynical realist Dr. Samuel Johnson. “There is, in jail, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind: and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger.”

The
Anne
's sails were hoist on July 1. A week later she had weathered the storms off Scotland's eastern coast and was into the Atlantic Ocean. During the first days at sea, Susanna revelled in the lack of demands on her. Within the past four months, she had faced a bewildering series of changes: the birth of her first child, preparing everything she might need for a future in an unknown land, saying farewell to her mother and sisters whom she might never see ever again. Now she could catch her breath. She could finally give little Katie all her attention. She could nurse her in the privacy of the cabin with no interruptions. When the weather was good, she might sit out on the deck and watch the waves. She played with Captain Rodgers's Scottish terrier, Oscar, who had made eleven transatlantic voyages and whose mate had a litter of three puppies during the voyage: “When my arms were tired with nursing, I had only to lay my baby on my cloak on deck, and tell Oscar to watch her, and the
good dog would lie down by her and suffer her to tangle his long curls in her little hands in the most approved baby fashion, without offering the least opposition.”

The Moodies' maidservant took care of all the laundry, which was done in an iron tub on deck once a week. And cabin passengers ate with the captain, so Susanna didn't have to conserve or prepare food. Instead, she tucked into meals of hard biscuit, ham, corned beef, fresh eggs, fowl, cabbage and potatoes. Cabin passengers drank ale or porter, rather than the increasingly rank “fresh” water or the stewed black tea that was served to the sailors. Most vessels carried a few hens, kept penned up in the longboat, to provide fresh eggs in the early weeks and fresh chicken as the voyage drew to an end. Some ships even boasted a cow on deck, to provide fresh milk—although the
Anne
was too small for such a luxury.

It didn't take long, however, for John Dunbar Moodie to get bored. He was always trying to find something to occupy himself with. Sometimes he trailed a fishing line behind the vessel, hoping to hook a silvery bonito, which might be hauled up onto the deck and eagerly eaten at dinner. Sometimes he amused himself by training his rifle on sea birds that hovered over the ship. He talked to some steerage passengers, swapping war stories with an old Scotch dragoon called Mackenzie. He marvelled at the way the sailors shinnied up and down the rigging. He borrowed the captain's telescope and spent hours gazing at the horizon, hoping to see land, another vessel, a whale, shark, porpoise or flying fish—
anything
to break the monotony. On a couple of clear nights, he made Susanna stir from her berth and come and view the brilliant light show in the sky—the Northern Lights, which he hadn't seen since he'd lived in the Orkneys.

Susanna was amused by her husband's eager impatience for action, but she secretly rejoiced that there were no other cabin passengers to join John on wild exploits. On the waterfront in Leith, they had heard tales of gentlemen who would take off a in rowboat from the ship in which they were crossing the Atlantic to fish, and were abandoned when the ship's sails finally caught a wind. Another transatlantic traveller, John Howard,
recorded in his diary in 1832 that, when he and some other passengers en route to Quebec on the
Emperor Alexander
took a little excursion from their vessel in a dinghy, they were “so intent on our sport that we did not observe that a breeze had sprung up.” Howard described how, “looking around for our ship, we found that she had sailed at least five miles from us.…We therefore threw off our coats and [started to row] but all to no purpose as the ship began to disappear from our view.” After the desperate party had nearly given up hope of rescue, and as the rays of the setting sun illuminated the
Emperor Alexander's
sails on the distant horizon, the ship finally changed direction and returned to collect them. “The captain was standing on the poop. I took my gun and had a great mind to shoot at him, but at that moment we observed our wives imploring him to take us on board.” If John Dunbar Moodie been a fellow passenger of Howard's, he would certainly have been amongst those who were nearly lost because they had rowed off to shoot at puffins and other “curious web-footed birds.”

The voyage of the
Anne
dragged on. The sun rose and set, rose and set, over the empty Atlantic, and progress was agonizingly slow in the baffling winds. After only three weeks, fresh water was rationed. Soon Susanna herself could barely conceal her impatience. She tried to write a story about a woman who emigrated from England to Canada but was unable to finish it. She buried herself in Voltaire's
History of Charles XII.
She was forced to wean Katie because of “a severe indisposition,” probably seasickness. The Moodies did not suffer the disasters many transatlantic travellers faced in this period: the
Anne
did not catch fire, nor was it shipwrecked or driven off course by a raging storm. Susanna did not record any fearful epidemics of measles, typhoid, cholera or fever below decks that might have put little Katie in danger. But she could hardly bear the boredom.