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