Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [31]
Susanna Moodie knew nothing of the island’s fearsome reputation as she watched the steerage passengers climb into boats to be rowed over to dry land. The Moodie party did not have to go ashore because, as cabin passengers, they were not considered health risks. Only their bedding had to be sent to Grosse Ile, to be washed by their maidservant. Susanna resented being told to stay on the Anne, particularly when John gleefully joined the disembarkation. She was even more chagrined when the captain and her husband returned and told her that they had been unable to replenish their stores, or buy Susanna the loaf of fresh bread they had promised her, because the provision ship from Quebec City had not yet arrived.
Eventually Susanna did go ashore. And she discovered that the perfect paradise was actually a “revolting scene”—a seething mass of shrieking, dirty, half-naked people. Thousands of emigrants jostled each other at river’s edge as they tried to wash all their bedding and clothes. Women trampled ragged blankets in the dirty water while yelling at their kids. “I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hard-featured, sunburnt harpies, as they elbowed rudely past me.” Even the Scottish labourers who had travelled steerage on the Anne, and been perfectly respectful during the voyage, were “infected with the same spirit of unsubordination and misrule, and were just as insolent and noisy as the rest.” It was a rude shock. Her dismay was intensified as she watched a huge, wild-eyed Irishman, flourishing a shillelagh and wearing only a tattered greatcoat, leap over the rocks shouting, “Whurrah! my boys! Shure we’ll all be jontlemen!”
Relief had surged through the steerage passengers as they stepped on dry land. They were finally released from the noisy, smelly, dirty claustrophobia of the ship’s hold. But Susanna was incapable of empathizing with them. From birth, she had lived in a world of neatly segmented social hierarchies, in which everyone knew the social class they belonged to and regarded other classes almost as separate species. Now, for the first time in her life, there was no invisible membrane between the cabin-passenger gentry and the lower orders. She was looking at a fragmented world of uncertainty. As Susanna struggled to get her bearings in this vision of purgatory, she had her first taste of emigration as exile—exile from the society in which, even though she often felt marginal, she had always known where she belonged. When she tried to express her horror, she sounded impossibly hoity-toity. But it was much more complicated than that: Susanna was trying to protect herself from chaos.
Even in London, Susanna had rarely strayed into the slums of the city’s east end or south bank. She had seen poverty, but the closest she had come to scenes of raw humanity, fighting for survival, was in Mary Prince’s story, or in Hogarth’s series Gin Lane, the richly detailed engravings of mass depravity and mayhem that were exhibited in the windows of London’s print shops. And so, as she looked around her at Grosse Ile, Susanna’s shock was mixed with horrified interest. How could she not recall the description of an uncivilized world she had read in the leather-bound copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan in her father’s library? “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The sight of Hobbes’s words made flesh fascinated Susanna the voyeur. The dark underbelly of the human condition—murder, madness, rage, despair—stimulated her imagination, as it would on many occasions in the future. She left Grosse Ile to return to the Anne only when she heard that there would be a decent meal of bread, butter, beef, onions