Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers. Lucille H. Campey

and it did so over the longest period. The timber trade propelled the stream of emigrants from the West Country to Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, while the fishing trade did the same for Newfoundland. People from Devon and Cornwall hopped on the ships that were regularly crossing the Atlantic to collect their timber cargoes, while fishermen, drawn mainly from Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, and Somerset, who had been brought to Newfoundland on short-term contracts, occasionally opted to become permanent settlers. People leaving from Devon and Cornwall tended to be agricultural labourers, farmers, and tradesmen, mostly of modest means, although in some cases they included well-off farmers, but the English males recruited to work in the Newfoundland cod fishery were universally poor. Those who took temporary employment in Newfoundland during the summer often had to rely on poor relief paid by their parishes to see them through their winters in England.

      Without Atlantic Canada’s timber trade with England, the influx of English settlers could not have happened. The doubling of the already high duties on Baltic timber in 1811 had the effect of pricing it out of the market and making North American timber the cheaper alternative. As the trade soared, regular and affordable sea crossings came within the reach of the average emigrant as ships set sail from the major English ports to collect their cargoes. Although the industry was regularly plunged into boom and bust, according to fluctuations of business cycles in Britain, it offered diverse employment opportunities and was a vital component of a settler’s livelihood. And while a substantial part of the influx came from the West Country it was not the sole supplier of emigrants by any means. The ports of Liverpool, London, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Newcastle, Whitehaven, Workington, and Maryport also had their emigrant departures, normally linked with collections of timber from the Maritimes (see Map 1). John Kerr, a Northumberland immigrant who settled in 1843 on land he obtained from the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company in Stanley (York County), was probably fairly typical. He informed his parents that “the land is good and free from stone; it will grow any kind of grain once the plough [is] in it” but that “the trees is [sic] standing as thick as they can grow and you can’t see far before you.”²³ The forests were said to be so dense that even before beginning the task of chopping down trees to create farms, settlers had first to “cut their way in.”²⁴

      Another common factor in all four Atlantic provinces was the importance placed by English settlers on their religion. In his 1832 emigration pamphlet, the land agent John Lewellin advised people to seek others who shared their “feelings, manners, usages and sentiments, morals and religion.” Doing so, he claimed, would “stifle many a sigh in present difficulties and hush many a regret.”²⁵

      Timber booms on the Saint John River, New Brunswick. Woodcut printed in The Illustrated London News, April 7, 1866, 232.

      Religion was an important support mechanism for immigrants struggling to cope with a new and challenging environment. The Methodist and Baptist preachers, who trudged huge distances speaking of God’s love and salvation, had the greatest appeal. The Baptist preacher Henry Alline worked among the New England Planters in Nova Scotia; the Yorkshire-born William Black brought his brand of Methodism to the entire region; while Laurence Coughlan, an Anglican minister who converted to Methodism, attracted an enthusiastic following in the Conception Bay area of Newfoundland.

      Despite being the official religion, the Church of England attracted relatively few followers. Anglican clergymen were remote figures who adhered to rigid hierarchical structures and seemed not to appreciate the hunger among their congregations for uplifting messages and a kindly smile. As J.F.W. Johnston observed in his travels through the Maritimes, “The Church of England has less hold on the people than either Presbyterians, Baptists or Roman Catholics.” He blamed this on the fact that, while other religions had to raise most of their funds from their congregations, Anglican missionaries could rely on funds supplied from Britain by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. This made them “independent of the people on pecuniary matters and they have not cultivated them as other sects have.”²⁶

      The bitter winters were another common feature. The Methodist minister Joshua Marsden wrote, in 1816:

      [T]hose who are accustomed only to the cold of England cannot conceive the intense severity of winters in Nova Scotia: the snow is often from four to six feet deep; the ice upon the rivers is two feet thick; the cold penetrates the warmest rooms, the warmest clothes, and will render torpid the warmest constitutions; it often freezes to death those who lose their way in the woods, or get bewildered in the thick and blinding fury of a snow drift.²⁷

      The Right Reverend John Inglis, the third Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia and son of Charles Inglis, the first bishop. Lithograph by William Charles Ross, engraved by M. Gauci. Bishop John worked hard to extend the influence of the Church of England, but his hostile and high-handed approach toward other Protestant religions made him out of step with his time.

      And New Brunswick was even colder in his opinion. Newspaper reports in Newfoundland speak of similar conditions. It was an insurmountable deterrent for some. Having emigrated to Prince Edward Island from Barnstaple in 1832, William Holmes and his wife, Betsy Richards, decided very soon after arriving that they “did not like the climate and moved on to Boston.”²⁸

      A striking theme in this study is the relatively large number of English immigrants who came from extremely poor backgrounds. In addition to the desperately poor fishermen who went to live in Newfoundland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were the many hundreds of destitute children, from English cities like Liverpool and Birmingham, who were sent to the Maritimes a century later. They were the so-called “home children,” whose relocation had been arranged by an assortment of English do-gooders who believed that such children needed to be saved from the corrupting influences of their families and guardians and given a fresh start in life. In addition, there were those people who were assisted to immigrate to Atlantic Canada by their parishes.²⁹ Assistance was justified on the grounds that it offered them an escape from their poverty and it reduced the burden on the ratepayers who were having to contribute to their maintenance. However, only a minority ever received financial help, and those who did originated mainly from East Anglia, this being one of the regions that experienced disturbances during the Swing riots of 1830–31.³⁰ Impoverished labourers agitating for better wages and the removal of the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods failed to win these changes and were dealt with severely. Just after these disturbances a large group from Suffolk immigrated to Prince Edward Island, although shortly thereafter people from this county switched their allegiance to Upper Canada.

      After the 1830s, when Upper Canada acquired its internal routes and became more accessible, it became the prime destination of most British immigrants. The Maritime provinces could not match its better land and job prospects and each lost their already-established settlers to it. People bypassed Nova Scotia, since most of its good land had already been snapped up by Planters, early Yorkshire settlers, and Loyalists, and they were deterred by Prince Edward Island’s semi-feudal land system, since it denied them the freeholds they sought.

      This was the stark reality that the Colonial Office sought to address in 1832 when it advised that “Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton … do not contain the means either of affording employment at wages to a considerable number of emigrants or of settling them upon land.”³¹ New Brunswick’s better land opportunities, especially those being marketed at the time by the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company, made it still a viable destination, but, because of the loss of most of the province’s customs data, the number of immigrant arrivals will never be known with any accuracy. Meanwhile, this preference for Upper Canada suited the British government. English Protestants streaming into Upper Canada offered a welcome counterbalance to the very large French-speaking, Roman Catholic population in Lower Canada. Preserving its hold on British America always remained a top priority.

      William