Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [35]
Their husbands were a little more worldly: as Orkneymen, they were blasé about raging waves, bare peaks and dense forest. Thomas Traill had travelled extensively in Europe with his first wife, and John Moodie had spent a decade in South Africa. But even they were unprepared for the scale of Canada—distances so great they took days to cover, rivers as wide as the English Channel, lakes as vast as oceans.
The culture shock was slow to hit them. Montreal and Quebec—the first two cities they had glimpsed—were as crowded, clamorous and cosmopolitan as Leith and Greenock. They had thrived since the early eighteenth century on the fur trade and, more recently, the lumber business. Soldiers, sailors, merchants, money-lenders, colonial officials and domestic servants milled around their cobbled squares. Their wharves were piled high with masts, spars, planks, boards, shingles, clapboards, laths, barrel staves and squared timbers, bound for markets as distant as Britain and the West Indies. For Susanna and Catharine, the only difference between Montreal’s docks and their father’s old stamping ground at London’s Greenland docks was that most of Montreal’s dock workers spoke French.
But the newcomers left the prosperous, well-populated cities of Lower Canada behind them as fast as possible. They were bound for Upper Canada, where former officers in the British army, like Thomas Traill and John Moodie, were eligible for free land. They were anxious to reach their destination quickly in order to take up their land grants and get a roof over their heads in the few weeks before the Upper Canadian winter closed in. So from Montreal, each couple spent three days hopscotching between steamboats and stagecoaches, according to the navigability of the St. Lawrence. First they clambered onto a stagecoach to Lachine, to avoid the turbulent water just above Montreal. After a few hours’ bumping over rutted roads, they climbed out of the coach and boarded a steamer. They paddled up the river as far as Cornwall, where they disembarked to stay the night. The following morning they got back into a stagecoach and took the road alongside the Long Sault rapids. Once at Prescott, well above the foaming water, they embarked on another steamer, which toot-tooted its way past Brockville, through the Thousand Islands and (while the passengers slept) into Lake Ontario.
The sisters’ rosy expectations of Upper Canadian society were not based exclusively on William Cattermole’s promises. They knew that the colony rested firmly on British laws and traditions. British currency circulated through the colony (alongside, for the sake of convenience, American dollars); the lieutenant-governor, who ran the colony, was appointed by the British crown; lawyers trained at British universities ran its legal system; the Anglican Church, usually represented by the forbidding, lace-cuffed figure of Bishop John Strachan, owned vast swaths of land and was enormously important in the colony’s affairs. All major decisions were made by the British government in Westminster. By the time the sisters arrived in 1832, the Legislative Assembly was already an arena for fierce debate between the “Family Compact,” a small group of wealthy families who clustered around the King’s representatives, and the Reformers, who demanded a larger role for elected representatives in the colony’s government. William