Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [30]
The journey across the Atlantic Ocean, and up the St. Lawrence River into the heart of British North America, took two months.
Supplies were dwindling on the Anne, but the dense fog meant that passengers and crew could not see any of the Newfoundland fishing boats strung along the Banks. Other transatlantic vessels managed to augment their rations with fish, either caught by their own crew or purchased from fishermen. “Our fishing goes on with great success,” a colonist who also crossed in 1832 noted in her diary. “The Captain has just succeeded in catching an immense cod-fish [weighing] 40 lbs. Amongst the captures of this day is a Hollybut, 70 lbs weight; we are to have it for dinner.” But there were no monster cod or halibut on the Anne, and after close to two months at sea, the steerage passengers were starving and the cabin passengers were down to hard biscuit. Not that Susanna cared; she was wretchedly seasick in the sullen swell. As she clung to the deck rail and stared out into the gloom, she was in limbo, adrift between two worlds, two lives. If only the pebble beaches and crumbling cliffs of the Suffolk seashore would loom out through the fog, rather than icebergs—stark, ghostly and entirely unfamiliar.
In the last week of August, the Anne sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. As the sun climbed in the sky and the morning mist cleared to reveal Lower Canada’s wild, rocky shores, the Moodies’ spirits lifted. Susanna and John stood hand-in-hand at the rail. Susanna was almost overcome by the splendour of the mountains on the north shore—“they loomed out like mighty giants—Titans of the earth, in all their rugged and awful beauty.” She looked up and down the huge waterway: “never had I beheld so many striking objects blended into one mighty whole! Nature had lavished all her noblest features in producing that enchanting scene.” She liked the look of the small whitewashed houses on the shores close to Quebec City, and the neat churches with their silver tin roofs and slender spires against the backcloth of “dense, interminable forest.” Her excitement blossomed on August 30, when the captain finally dropped anchor off Grosse Ile, the quarantine station thirty-three miles below Quebec City. From the deck of the Anne, Susanna watched the bustle of people and boats on the island, heard the sounds of laughter and shouting from the shore and watched the blue smoke from dozens of little cooking fires spiral into the clear sky. After nine weeks of being confined to a ship scarcely more than a hundred feet long, it looked like a “perfect paradise” to her. Visions of fresh bread and butter danced in her head.
This was the first year of operation for the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Before 1832, ships had sailed directly to Quebec City’s docks. A surgeon would then come on board for a cursory check for fever among the passengers that might infect the city’s residents. But by the late 1820s, the Quebec City authorities were exasperated by the incoming tide of destitute paupers who spread epidemics of typhoid, measles or cholera as soon as they stepped ashore. A few months before the Moodies’ arrival, the health authorities of Lower Canada had hastily tacked together some wooden sheds on Grosse Ile and decreed that all vessels must stop there. All steerage passengers were obliged to disembark, to be inspected for disease. Every piece of sheet or blanket that had been used during the crossing had to be taken