Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [32]
Two days later, the Anne left the quarantine station behind and sailed towards Quebec City. Safely back on deck, and at a remove from sun-drenched harpies and wild Irishmen, Susanna regained her equilibrium. She relaxed in the sunshine, contemplating spectacular scenery instead of the human terrors of the New World. Only a few months earlier she had gushed for London annuals over imaginary landscapes. Now, stunned by her first sight of the Montmorency Falls and Quebec City perched high on the rocky cliffs, she resorted to the lush vocabulary of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets for the reality: “Nature has lavished all her grandest elements to form this astonishing panorama. There frowns the cloud-capped mountain, and below, the cataract foams and thunders; wood, and rock, and river combine to lend their aid in making the picture perfect, and worthy of its Divine Originator.” She continued to keep reality at arm’s length when the Anne dropped anchor below the Citadel: she would not step ashore. Ostensibly, this was because cholera raged in the city—although this didn’t prevent John Dunbar Moodie, accompanied by young James Bird, from jumping into a rowboat and disappearing to explore Quebec’s winding streets.
The harbour below Quebec City was jammed with ships, and in the middle of the night, disaster struck. A large three-masted vessel, the Horsley Hill, with three hundred Irish immigrants aboard, collided with the Anne in the dark. There was an ear-splitting crash as the larger vessel’s bowsprit came thundering down on the Anne, threatening to swamp her. Passengers on the threatened ship swarmed onto the deck, screaming with fear, and Captain Rodgers was immediately surrounded by several frantic women clinging to his knees.
Susanna was lying in her cabin when the pandemonium erupted. Grabbing her baby, she hurried out onto the deck to see what had happened and quickly took in the scene: the towering bulk of the Horsley Hill, looming out of the darkness over the Anne; the hysterical women immobilizing the captain. She heard the cracks of splitting timbers, the splash of waves, the confused shouting of sailors. Immediately, she rose to the occasion and ordered the women to follow her below deck. Ignoring the foul smell of unwashed bodies and vomit, she made them sit still and pray quietly. By sheer force of personality, and despite her own alarm, she remained cool and in command. “British sailors never leave women to perish,” she told her companions, with apparently unshakable assurance. Until close to dawn, her authority held. The incident must have reassured Susanna that, even in the New World’s melting pot of peoples, the natural authority of the educated classes held sway and she could make herself heard.
Although the Traills began their Atlantic crossing a week after the Moodies, they made far better time. After leaving Thomas’s relatives in the Orkneys, they went directly to the port of Greenock, outside Glasgow. There Thomas paid fifteen pounds each for his and Catharine’s cabin passage to Montreal in a fast-sailing brig, the Rowley. The Rowley was not a regular passenger ship: its hold was filled with a cargo of rum, brandy and sugar. The Traills’ only companions were two young men and the captain’s goldfinch.
Catharine had fallen very sick just before embarkation and was unwell for much of the voyage. At one point both the captain and the steward feared that she would die before landfall. But she gradually recovered, and in letters home describing the crossing, her chief complaint about the voyage was boredom. “I can only compare the monotony of it to being weather-bound in some country inn,” she wrote to her mother. She didn’t even have Voltaire to fall back on, as Susanna had, let alone a newborn baby. “I have already made myself acquainted with all the books worth reading in the ship’s library: unfortunately, it is chiefly made up with old novels and musty romances.”
The most unnerving fact for Catharine was the way Thomas sank into gloom. Thomas was singularly ill-equipped to deal