Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [23]
Cattermole was not the only huckster selling rainbows. A volume entitled The Emigrant’s Guide to Upper Canada by a Captain Charles Stuart should have been renamed The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Celestial Regions, according to another settler, E.A.Talbot. Salesmen like Cattermole and Stuart presented the gloomy acres that were available in the most attractive language, and soon John was musing about the possibility of an “estate” in the New World, as if he were talking about a grouse moor in Scotland. Neither Cattermole nor Stuart mentioned the monumentally hard work required to clear the land of dense forest growth, the total absence of everything most English people considered essential to their comfort, or the loneliness and poverty that settlers faced in the early years.
The combination of Reid’s anecdotes and Cattermole’s gush, plus the cheerful letters that arrived at Reydon Hall from Sam Strickland, captivated John Moodie. He decided that, if he couldn’t return to South Africa, Canada was an acceptable alternative. Retired and half-pay officers were eligible for free grants of several hundred acres of land there, in the hopes that, in the event of invasion from the south, they would form the core of an instant defence force. It was only twenty years since the Americans had mounted an invasion of Upper Canada, and relations between the United States and Britain remained uneasy. John, being the type who was convinced he could make a go of any adventure, began to muse on the excitements of life as a landowner in Upper Canada. He grumbled about their cramped life in Southwold and complained to his sister-in-law Agnes that he was “Suffolkating.” Agnes couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live in a colony where there were no theatres, libraries or stately homes. But she always had a soft spot for “brother Moodie,” so she didn’t try to discourage him.
London cartoonists warned gullible emigrants that the promises of hucksters like William Cattermole were worthless.
The prospect of emigration appalled Susanna. She did not want to leave England. She shared many of Agnes’s reservations about a land with no history, no literature and no cultural life. But she had to admit that she and John were going nowhere in England, and there would be little they could promise their children for the future. And she knew that she would meet her brother in Canada, instead of South Africa’s lions, elephants and snakes. “You must not be surprised at our flight in the spring,” she confided to her friends the Birds. John set about getting letters of recommendations to various Upper Canadian nabobs in order to smooth his path through the colony. Letters of introduction, establishing the holder’s social standing, were crucial door-openers for gentlemen emigrants to a society where jobs were allocated by patronage. With a letter from the right patron, a half-pay officer could get his name on the list of candidates for such desirable appointments as customs officer, postmaster or sheriff. John started to play the patronage game even before he crossed the Atlantic.
News that the Moodies were planning to emigrate shook Susanna’s sister Catharine to the core. Throughout the stormy progress of the Moodie romance, Catharine had been quietly nursing a broken heart. For more than a year, she had been in love with Francis Harral, son of the editor of La Belle Assemblée. When the romance went off the rails, Catharine sank into a depression and was barely able to write. At the Moodies’ wedding, Susanna noticed that “my dear Katy [looked] butsoso.”
Realizing