Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [26]
From Leith, the Traills travelled on to Thomas’s birthplace in the Orkneys, so that Thomas could introduce his new wife to his family and at the same time inform them of his plans to emigrate. One of his cousins told Thomas that Catharine was “a lovely, bright, sunny thing to take out to the untracked wilds of a new country.” But the hard-headed islanders knew that the Thomas Traills had little alternative. Within a few weeks, Thomas and Catharine were in the port of Greenock, outside Glasgow on Scotland’s west coast, looking for a ship to take them across the Atlantic.
Days after the Traills left, it was the Moodies’ turn. Susanna stood on the coastal steamer’s deck and listened for the last time to the bells of St. Edmund’s, summoning parishioners in the little village of Southwold to morning service. Slipping out of sight were the windmills and church towers of her childhood, and the bright green fields filled with spring wheat. “To leave England at all was dreadful,” she would write later. “To leave her at such a season was doubly so.” The Moodies, with their tenweek-old baby, intended to sail directly to North America.
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