Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [27]
The Moodies were the first to leave Britain. The coastal steamer from London deposited them at Leith, the little harbour close to Edinburgh, and John conceived the bright idea of starting their transatlantic voyage from there. Though Glasgow was the usual departure point for North America, if they sailed out of Leith instead, they could simply pay a porter to carry all their worldly goods from the steamship’s hold to that of a sailing ship on a neighbouring wharf, rather than packing everything onto a public coach to then bump and rattle over forty miles of dusty, potholed highway to Glasgow. The departure from Leith might even allow John, as they rounded Duncansby Head in the far north, a last glimpse of the Old Man of Hoy—the unclimbable red sandstone mountain, encircled by screeching seabirds, that had dominated his boyhood in the Orkneys. And so their minds were made up.
John was never a man to weigh his options wisely, and this decision was not a wise one. It meant that the Moodies would have to sail round the northern tip of Scotland, guaranteeing them a slower, stormier passage. It also meant that they didn’t have many vessels to choose from.
John Moodie marched up and down the harbour, chatting to any nautical types who were hanging around the wharves or drinking in the quayside taverns below Leith’s Martello tower. Leith was both a flourishing fishing port and a centre of trade with other seafaring European nations, including the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Holland, France, Spain and Portugal. The names of its crooked, cobbled streets—Elbe, Baltic, Cadiz and Madeira—reflected its cosmopolitan links. Its tall stone warehouses bulged with Danish barley, Norwegian timber, Russian tallow and flax, Dutch clocks, European wines and North American rice, rum and animal pelts.
Several dozen smacks, brigs and schooners were tied up at the stone quays. John soon discovered the handful of wooden sailing ships bound for Quebec City. He talked to their captains, all of whom were hungry for genteel passengers who would pay full rates to fill cabins. At Susanna’s urging, he booked his small family onto a ninety-two-ton, one-masted brig, the Anne, which had a monosyllabic and dour Scottish captain called Rodgers and a crew of seven. Seventy-two passengers were contracted to travel in steerage. The Moodie party consisted of Susanna, John, three-month-old Katie and Hannah, a nursemaid Mrs. Strickland insisted they take with them, as well as James Bird, the eleven-year-old son of their Suffolk friends, who was being sent to acquire pioneer skills in the New World. They were the only cabin passengers.
Susanna was assailed by misgivings as she surveyed those who would be travelling below decks. There were so many people in steerage, and they were so poor. She, her sister and their husbands were crossing the Atlantic in a year when the flood tide of emigrants to Canada was at its peak. Some 52,000 would be landed in Quebec City in 1832, during a shipping season that lasted only two months. In addition to choosing the worst route, the Moodies had also chosen the worst year to travel.
Altogether, 655,747 people sailed away from British shores between 1831 and 1841, nearly three times as many as had emigrated during the previous ten years. Creaking timbers, captains bellowing orders, waves slapping against hulls, the whip of rigging in the wind—the docks at Southampton, Woolwich, Liverpool and Glasgow vibrated with the hullabaloo of transporting the huge outflow of people. Steerage passengers outnumbered cabin passengers (usually referred to as “colonists,” to underline the class difference) by about