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;