Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [63]
Thomas Traill would willingly have sold his farm to the first bidder. Unfortunately, there were no takers. Thomas informed relatives in the Orkneys, in 1836, that “land has been nearly unsaleable for the last two years.” He described his predicament in ghastly detail, adding mournfully that he wished they had emigrated to the West Indies instead of Canada. Then he threw out a pathetic appeal for “anything like a Consulship at some small Foreign Port [where I might live] a life more suitable to my tastes and habits.” The last sentence of his letter is suffused with despair: “But I must live and die, far from many of those that I love most dearly.”
John Dunbar Moodie was in an even worse predicament than his brother-in-law. He had fewer cleared acres and more debts. In yet another of his impetuous business decisions, he had sold his military commission back to his regiment (which would quickly sell it to another bidder), which meant that he no longer had his military half-pay, one hundred pounds a year, to help him scrape by. With the lump sum he had received in return, he’d bought stock in a Cobourg steamboat company. It was soon obvious that the steamboat stock was worthless, but by then John had used it as surety for various loans. John rarely revealed his anxieties; he knew that this would shake Susanna, who depended on his emotional stability. But he too began to explore other options for their future. First, he tried to interest publishers in the idea of a book about emigration to Upper Canada, similar to his recently published Ten Years in South Africa. Next, after seeing an advertisement from the Texas Land Company in the Albion, he considered abandoning Upper Canada and moving to Texas. A few months later, he tried a different tack. He wrote to Sir Francis Bond Head, the newly appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, describing his struggles with “embarrassments and difficulties of no ordinary description” and appealing to him for a government appointment that might shield his family from “distress or ruin.” But nothing came of any of these efforts.
Every few weeks, a letter would arrive for Susanna from Agnes Strickland, in England. Although she often enclosed some entirely inappropriate gift, such as silk stockings (“only worn once at court”), Agnes was acutely aware of her sisters’ deteriorating fortunes and dwindling hopes. She always tried to send her letters with someone travelling to the colony, since the Moodies’ could barely afford to pay for the letters she sent them through the mail. Carefully wrapped in the folded paper (envelopes were still not in use) were two or three silver coins for the children. John and Susanna were too close to starvation to do anything other than spend the precious coins on desperately needed essentials.
Susanna, like Catharine, was a resourceful, practical woman. She was a better cook than her sister, and just as accomplished at preserving cabbage, pickling cucumbers, smoking bacon and plucking wildfowl. When presented with dead squirrels, she could transform them into pies, stews or roasts without a twitch of distaste. When they could no longer afford tea or coffee, she recalled a recipe for dandelion-root coffee in the Albion and promptly went out to dig up some roots. “The coffee proved excellent”; a supply was sent over to the Traills. But things went from bad to worse, and during the bitterly severe winter of 1836, Susanna’s children were weak with hunger. Overcoming her kneejerk English sentimentality about pet animals, Susanna slaughtered her daughter Katie’s pet pig, Spot. She noted with remorse, however, that while her family fell on the pork, their dog Hector, who had been Spot’s boon companion, could not bring himself even to gnaw on one of Spot’s bones.
Susanna and Catharine clung to each other in hardship. When the Traills were afflicted with “the ague,” as settlers always called malaria, Catharine noted that, “but for the prompt assistance of … Susanna, I know not what would have become of us in our