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By Root 1138 0

with the voyage. Despite his bookish interests, he had not furnished himself with a library to last six weeks. He had none of John Moodie’s interest in catching fish, shooting birds or chatting up the crew and passengers. Instead, he moped. Catharine tried to convince herself that Thomas’s low spirits were a typically male response to cramped quarters: “Where a man is confined to a small space, such as the deck and the cabin of a trading vessel, with nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to do, and nothing to read, he is really a very pitiable creature.” She resorted to playing the role she had so often played within the Strickland family: the resilient optimist, who raised everybody’s spirits. When a long-faced Thomas started pacing the deck, she rose from the bench where she was sitting and sewing and walked alongside him, her arm linked through his. She enthused about all their plans for the future and the excitements that awaited them in Upper Canada. But there was a hard-headed realist underneath the Pollyanna cheerfulness. She realized that this was an inauspicious start to their marriage and emigration. She confided to her mother that the plans she had described with such gusto “in all probability will never be realised.”

Catharine’s first introduction to the New World was far more pleasant than her sister’s. While the Rowley was anchored close to the south shore of the St. Lawrence about two hundred miles from Quebec City, awaiting a pilot, Thomas rowed ashore with the captain onto a little promontory called Pointe au Bic. He returned with an armful of flowers. After five weeks at sea, without a glimpse of anything green and growing, Catharine the amateur botanist was overjoyed. Her eyes filled with tears as she took the bouquet from Thomas and buried her face in it. She identified some of the blossoms, such as the sweet peas and wild roses, but realized with excitement that others were entirely unfamiliar. What was the name of this white orchid? Or these small yellow-andwhite flowers? Were they unique to the New World, and how would she ever be able to learn their names? She carefully carried them off to the cabin and flattened them out between the pages of her Bible to preserve them. To a student of nature, the prospect of finding and identifying new species was thrilling.

When the Rowley arrived at Grosse Ile, its passengers were all forbidden to step ashore since none had travelled steerage. Catharine was not plunged into the dirty, hungry, shrieking crowd of new emigrants, as her sister Susanna had been; she did not see them cavorting around on the rocks or doing their stinking wash at the water’s edge. Susanna’s “perfect paradise” was all Catharine saw—a happy, colourful scene in the distance that reminded her of a fairground, with clothes waving in the wind, women basking in the sunshine and children chasing each other through the water. She didn’t believe the customs officer who told her that what she was looking at was really “every variety of disease, vice, poverty, filth and famine.” Similarly, she never went ashore at Quebec City, because of the cholera there. All she could do was marvel at the scenery. With only European experience to go by, she happily assumed that the stands of old trees on the sparsely populated south shore hid “pretty villas and houses.” At the end of the day, the sound of church bells rang across the water through the warm summer air, summoning citizens to evening prayer. As she sat on board the Rowley, Catharine could still imagine that Canada was a land of milk and honey—particularly when the captain reappeared from the customs inspection with a basket of ripe apples for her, plus fresh meat, vegetables, bread, butter and milk.

In late August 1832, Thomas and Catharine finally stepped off the Rowley and onto Canadian soil in Montreal, then the largest city in British North America. Situated where the Ottawa River flowed into the mighty St. Lawrence, it had been the centre of the fur trade for over a century. It could not compare with the cities that Catharine knew best,