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the attitude of the Loyalist innkeeper in Cornwall: “Our host seemed perfectly indifferent as to the comfort of his guests, leaving them to wait on themselves or go without what they wanted.” She admitted that she had been warned about the “odious manner ascribed, though doubtless too generally, to the American.” She was equally upset when a large, rude man jammed himself into the stagecoach on the Cornwall to Prescott leg of the journey, squashing up the other nine passengers so uncomfortably that she herself was “literally bruised black and blue.” The Loyalists, who made up the majority of residents of the Front in the early 1830s, were full-fledged North Americans: they had been on the continent for several generations, members of a society that valued achievement over education or wealth. They had no time for genteel immigrants who assumed that a British colony would respect the British class system. Their pioneer individualism jarred on class-conscious English nerves. But Catharine made the best of these circumstances, and praised the tavern-keepers at the Prescott inn to the skies: “the female servants were all English, and seemed to vie with each other in attention to us.”

Susanna didn’t have Catharine’s ability to overlook the disturbing evidence that Upper Canada was not a northern Eden. Although never as sensitive to landscape as her sister, she shared Catharine’s pleasure in the scenery on the journey west (anything was better than the “watery waste” of the long sea voyage she had endured). But Susanna’s primary focus was always people, and she was appalled by many of her fellow passengers on the steamer, especially the Irish drunk who lay outside the ladies’ cabin all night, singing and ranting about “the political state of the Emerald Isle.” She was unnerved by the way that servants sat at table with their employers, and common labourers took pleasure in lippy talk with the gentry to whom, in England, they would have tugged their forelocks. And she was horrified when she and John met Tom Wales, the Suffolk friend with whom John had gone to hear Cattermole’s lectures, who had arrived in the colony two months earlier. Like many of the new European arrivals, Wales was shivering with “the ague”—a malarial fever spread by mosquitoes which left its victims feverish and weak. Like the disappointed Englishman whom Catharine had met in Montreal, Tom Wales was hellbent on getting back to England as fast as he could. He gave Susanna an earful about the bush—hideous roads, swarms of black-flies, swamp fever, thieving land agents and a disgusting diet of potatoes and pork fat.

Cobourg in 1838: this sketch, completed by the artist William Bartlett six years after the sisters passed through the little town, includes the newly-opened Victoria College (centre).

As the Traills had arrived in Lower Canada two weeks before the Moodies, the two families travelled separately up the St. Lawrence River. Thomas and Catharine arrived in Cobourg—their jumping-off point for the backwoods—a week before John and Susanna.

The couples had agreed that they would eventually rendezvous at Sam Strickland’s home in the township of Douro, two days’ journey north of Cobourg. Communications were so bad in the colony that not only was there no way that each couple could track the other’s moves, but Sam Strickland didn’t even know his two sisters were about to arrive on his doorstep.

Cobourg gave Catharine and Susanna their first real taste of Upper Canada. During his East Anglian lecture tour, Cattermole had described the town as a “handsome and thriving place [with] stores in abundance… hatters, shoemakers, and every other convenience which a wealthy, grain-purchasing, money-making generation could desire.” And it certainly had pretensions. It had shrugged off its early nickname, “Hardscrabble,” and with flag-waving pride renamed itself Cobourg, in a misspelled tribute to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had married Princess Charlotte, only child of the future King George IV, in 1816. Princess Charlotte was heir to the British throne;