Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  I asked him, as we passed the North West offices in St Gabriel Street, concerning the heraldic emblem above the door, and the picture of the strange canoe at the foot of the shield.

  ‘That?’ said William. ‘You've never heard of the Flying Canoe, laddie? You've all to learn, have you not? There's more to a canoe than meets the eye. The Flying Canoe takes you to more places than you ever knew existed. Oh, ay, lad, you'll come home a changed man if you go by the Flying Canoe.’

  I said nothing; I'd been taught to regard all manner of whimsy as beneath my notice. Moreover, I saw nothing romantic about the far trade. The stench as we approached the warehouses was appalling. I knew the tannery in Keswick – ‘tis where we take our own cattlehide – and I'd passed the tanneries in Penrith, Carlisle and Whitehaven, but never had I encountered anything like the fur depots of the North West Company in Montreal. My gorge rose as we entered, and I was feart for a moment I'd disgrace myself, but as with all things I rapidly became accustomed. There was plenty to distract my mind. Where we came in, the warehouse was piled high with sewn-up canvas bales, unloaded from the oxcarts coming in from Lachine. The road that had taken me less than an hour constituted a day and a half's journey for the lumbering carts with their high-piled loads. Half a dozen fellows were ripping the bales open as they came in, and sorting the furs into piles. This they did with the speed of long practice, while one fellow called out the tally, and the clerk entered the figures in his book. Then a different set of men swept the piles away, to hang them (if damp) and store them ready for tanning. All was done in haste, and it seemed to me that no one fellow saw the same work through to its conclusion, so that I was reminded of nothing so much as ants scurrying about an anthill if one digs it open.

  ‘André! Is that you? Get one of these fellows to bring some pelts over, will you?’

  Presently a bent old man in a voyageur shirt and sash came hobbling over. ‘You wish to see the pelts, m'sieu?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Show my friend here what we've got.’ William swept a pile of notebooks to one end of a battered wooden counter. ‘That's right. Spread them out here!’

  I recognised the smooth whitey-brown badger pelts with their distinctive stripes, and the dappled deerskins. I knew the wet-looking otter pelts, gleaming like polished chestnuts, and the soft reddish fox furs. I'd never seen the animal called skunk or the opossum. I was still examining the latter, trying to imagine what kind of beasts they must be, when William said,

  ‘But these are mere bagatelles. Look at this, now, laddie!’

  It was a round pelt, so dark brown it was nearly black, the fur thick and smooth, but with a sheen to it almost as bright as the otter's. It came from a squat little animal, for the hide was foursquare, like the badger's, about eighteen inches each way. Its legs lay vertical to the body. The most curious thing about it was its tail, for that was as wide as it was long, a six inch square just like the head at the other end. It had that gleam to it that betokens a water animal. ‘Beaver?’ I asked.

  ‘Ay, laddie, beaver. Look at this.’ William picked up the pelt I'd been looking at and stroked it backwards. The far was much darker when rubbed the wrong way. Underneath there was a whitish layer, much like the down on a duck. ‘See that? That's worth more than gold, laddie. There's currency, in that selfsame hair, goes through this warehouse worth more than all the guineas in the Bank of England, and that's the truth. Give me your hat!’

  Surprised, I removed my hat and passed it to him. He rubbed his finger and thumb along the broad brim. ‘Ay, laddie, you Quaker folk are just like the rest. One of these little fellows was snared, way up in the north-west, maybe, or dug out of its lodge in the ten-foot snows of a winter the like of which you've never seen. There it was caught and skinned by an Indian savage two thousand miles west of here, brought by sledge to a North West post – I'm assuming it's not Bay goods I'm handling here – then baled up and carried by canoe across more water than would sink Britannia beneath the waves for ever, then shipped from here to London, where it was sent to the manufactory. And all that to get thee thy plain hat, thou honest Quaker!’

  I was a little shocked by this. I'd thought our hats were manufactured from English wool, and I said to myself that when I got home I would look into the matter. I was still thinking about it while William conducted me round the rest of the North West Factory. More and more I was missing my own people, before whom I might put the concerns, such as this one, that began to press upon me. I resolved that I'd make my way to Yonge Street without more ado.

  I left Lachine two days later, not by canoe, but in one of the river bateaux, which was not near so comfortable as my previous voyage in the Accommodation. For days we beat upriver, tacking to and fro as the river wound, while the wind played tricks on us, changing direction – or we did – a dozen times in every hour. I felt sick. I was relieved – but in this I was alone – each time we came to a great rapid, for then the boatmen had to pole the boat through the rapids, with a great clanking of iron poles against the rocks, while the passengers walked along rough trails from which we returned bemired to the thighs, but in my case much refreshed. There were five great rapids on the St Lawrence River; our progress was pretty slow until we got to Prescott. There I was briskly shifted, like so much luggage – and indeed the mails and sundry other bales were flung aboard after me – to a Durham boat, which brought me without further obstacle as far as Kingston. The morning mists chilled my bones and set my nose a-running. We passed islands and rivers, dimly visible in daggy mist; I couldn't have cared less. I never even went ashore at Kingston: there was a big schooner, the Lord Nelson, about to sail for York, and I scrambled aboard with the postbags, and we were away within the hour.

  We were well into the open lake when the fog lifted at last. A fresh wind rose, a little patch of blue appeared ahead, and within an hour the sky was swept clear and clean. The choppy waves sparkled in the sun, and, chilled and queasy as I was, I couldn't restrain a gasp of delight. This was the sea, though there was no salt in it. There was no horizon, only a distant band of brightness where sky and water met; only far to our right there lay a thin line of land. I had thought to find a continent, and here instead was an ocean. I bethought me of the map in Thomas Wilkinson's study, and remembered the outline of five great lakes, but never could I, brought up within sight of Derwentwater, have conceived of any lake so vast as this. Gulls cried in our wake as they do when they follow the plough in spring, but there was no land to till here, on this fresh ocean at the very edge of the world. I hated the Atlantic, but this inland sea spoke to me of clean water and new possibilities; it seemed untouched as if the hand of the Lord had but this day finished it, and I was filled with new hope.

  I only realised when I reached York that the Monthly Meeting named Yonge Street is upwards of twenty-five miles from York itself. I walked the half mile from the fort into the town itself, and inquired for a place to stay the night. I was directed first to Jordan's York Hotel. It looked to be a pleasant house, only there seemed to be some kind of fashionable rout going on, for the place was thronged with carriages fall of ladies and gentlemen in evening dress. Several officers of the military were lounging at the door. I withdrew hastily, and asked a passer-by if there were any hostelry nearby that might be a little quieter? He gave me a quick appraising glance. ‘You're a Quaker? You'd probably be more comfortable at the Toronto Coffee House.’ He took me by the arm and pointed – ‘up that way.’

  The indifferent words cheered me more than I can describe. For the first time Friends were near. The Toronto Coffee House was in the next street. It seemed full enough to me, but the crowd was less fashionable, and the little slip of a room they gave me at the back of the house was clean and plain, though I was oft awoken in the night by the noise from the Coffee Room below, and the comings and goings from the yard below my window.

  I was up betimes next morning, and striding along Yonge Street with my knapsack on my back. Mr Cooper at the Coffee House said I had a day's walk befor
e me, but I couldn't miss the way. He was right; the track had been well cleared through the forest, but underfoot it was not so much a road as a morass, going straight as a die with no regard for the frequent swamps in its way. Sometimes the stretches of black mud are traversed by a path of logs laid side to side, which in Upper Canada they call corduroy, but as often as not the logs were rotted, or floating free, and more treacherous than simple bog. Apparently the old Indian path to the west takes a drier route, keeping to such heights as there are. I was told there would be hills, but I found none, only a long rolling countryside and a dead straight track, so that from the top of each rise one could see the cleared ribbon of track far ahead on to the next rise. William told me that York is distinguished as a capital by its extraordinary distance from anywhere else.

  On the road north, however, I met farmers, journeymen and carriers, and twice a straggling band of militia bound for York. Every man going south would stop to ask me, had I news from York? It was the same as in the Coffee House, and in the schooner: the talk was all of war, and rumours of war. Once I was called a bloody turncoat Quaker, and had mud flung at me, and another time a wild-looking fellow held the point of a bayonet at my throat, and ordered me to swear I was a Loyalist. I told him I was an Englishman, and that I would not swear aught for any man. He said he'd supposed me to be a damn Yankee Quaker, and if I was an Englishman he was willing to shake my hand. I shook hands with him, but thought it honest to make clear to him that though I was not a Yankee I was most certainly a Quaker, and that neither force nor the threat of force would move me: I would not take up arms for any cause, nor do hurt to any man.

  No one else molested me. It began to grow dusk. I felt small and exposed on the open road. I'm used to a country where I can see out. The forest of Upper Canada is not like an English wood, with its paths and clearings and villages; it's a dense unbroken wilderness, whose compass is beyond measure, and whose depths are unfathomable. As the dark thickened, the trees became a wall of whispering shadows. Night creatures flickered to and fro just beyond the edges of my vision. The going was getting so slow I found myself like to be benighted, but I pressed on through the failing light until I reached the summit at Oak Ridges. Here the forest began to fall away at last, and soon the first farmstead appeared. The clearing was so recently hacked out of the wilderness that the fields were still pocked with stumps. I came to a log cabin built close to the road. A light twinkled at the window; from indoors the fields must already seem to be dark.

  I passed more clearings and more cabins, and then I came to a place where the fields were not surrounded by dense forest, but separated from their neighbours by rough-hewn log fences. The harvest was in; the stubble fields looked smooth as a spread blanket. I came to a copse of trees, and just beyond it a house whose windows were filled with lamplight, set back a little from the road. It was so surprising that I stepped up very quietly and looked in the window, standing within the little warm circle of light, feeling the chill of the dark against my back, breathing in the unfamiliar smells of the forest night.

  A dozen Friends were gathered on the first three rows of benches. For a moment the Meeting House seemed filled with a heavenly radiance, a Meeting for Worship in the manifest Light of God's presence, but I banished such a flight of fancy still unfledged. In Mosedale we're thrifty folk, and we don't use four great lanterns to light one small Meeting. Our Meeting House is old and damp, built of Lakeland stone, with little windows and oak benches darkened by the years. Here the wood was pale and new, the roof high, and the space below airy and light. There were no dark shadows or unlit corners, no damp streaks on the walls or mouldy patches. Never before, in fact, had I seen so modern and commodious a Meeting House. The floor was of wooden boards, which must be an unconscionable comfort to the feet on winter mornings. The empty benches around the little gathered Meeting could have accommodated upwards of fifty, and that, I realised shortly, was only in the men's Meeting, for, when I peered in the next lit window, I saw I was at the other side of a wooden partition that divided the Meeting House in two, and on this side there were perhaps twenty women in caps and grey cloaks, also gathered in the silence.

  I found the door to the Men's Meeting, opened it quietly, and crept to a bench at the back, where I took my place in the gathered Meeting.

  At last there was a stirring in the silence. The Clerk set up his desk, and opened the book of minutes. I had no notion why there should be a Meeting for Worship for Business at twilight on Fifth Day, but this was a strange country and perhaps Friends had developed strange practices.

  Naturally the Friends were surprised to have a stranger so suddenly appear among them. I explained who I was and handed my Minute from Caldbeck Monthly Meeting to the Clerk, who introduced himself to me as Joseph Doan. He shook my hand and gave me a good welcome. I also shook hands with one David Willson and one Amos Armitage, but it seemed to me that there were other Friends who hung back a little. But Joseph Doan said straight out, ‘We pray for thy poor sister. I fear she is lost to thee, but we cannot but love the spirit of compassion which brings thee here. Thee's welcome to our Meeting.’ Amos said, ‘If we have no means to forward thy concern, at least we can offer thee shelter. Thee can share the comfort of our worship so long as thee desires.’

  I thanked them for that, and told him I sought first of all my aunt Judith Scott. David Willson shook his head. ‘Our Friend Judith left us almost a year ago. When the letter came telling us that thy sister was lost, Judith fell into a slough of great sorrow, and could in no way feel the hand of the Lord in it. But then the Lord Jesus Christ planted the seed in her heart that she should leave us again, and return to minister among our Friends in Pennsylvania, and from there whithersoever the Lord might send her. She was comforted, and went forth from Yonge Street in Twelfth Month last year. Thomas Armitage took her by sled to York as soon as the road was frozen hard enough.’

  That was a blow. I'd counted on speaking to Judith, but to try to follow her into a strange and hostile country would indeed be a wild goose chase. I listened to the Friends in a kind of daze, but presently Amos Armitage said that they were here for a Preparative Meeting (for so they call their Particular Meetings) for Business. He said I might sit quietly among them if I pleased, and when the Meeting was done he would see to my lodging.

  I unlaced my gaiters, took off my clarty boots and left them at the door, and returned to my corner, where the little draughts crept around me and pierced my sodden breeks and stockings. I did my best to ignore the grumbling in my belly – for I had eaten naught but cheese and clapbread since I left York – but closed my eyes, and gave sincere thanks to God for bringing me safe through the wilderness this day, unto this remote haven of my own people.

  Presently I began to take note of the Meeting. Many Friends felt moved to speak, and that vehemently. If Joseph Priestman had been Clerk, he would have asked Friends to make room between their words for the silence through which the will of God might be revealed. It seemed to me this meeting was sometimes swayed by the opinions of men, and those often contrary, rather than by the leadings of the Spirit which is beyond all human debate or controversy. This can happen anywhere when men are upset by a very pressing concern, but in those days I made less allowance for it.

  Joseph Doan was a quiet-spoken grave man, whose words seemed the more precious because they were but few. He stood aside from the Clerk's bench to speak his concern: ‘When John Graves Simcoe invited Quakers to settle in Upper Canada, he gave his word that we could live according to our religious principles, including our ancient testimony for peace. He wanted men like us on the frontier, because he knew we could make the wilderness into good farmland, and that we'd live in peace with our Indian neighbours. Those were the terms on which we crossed the border into Upper Canada and settled here. No man has the right to molest us, or to confiscate our goods, or imprison us. It was made clear from the beginning of the settlement that we were not to be subject to war tax or military service. We were led to
this place by the Lord God to create our own peace on earth within the wilderness, and we have every right, by civil law as well as by divine guidance, to stand by the principles of our Religious Society.’

  A burly Friend with fists like great hams ministered next: ‘Ay, Friend, but is thee going to tell Isaac Brock that? I doubt he'll heed thee; he'll be more mindful of the American army across the lake than a promise made when Yonge Street was a farmer's track.’

  A short silence ensued, while Friends sat with bowed heads. I shifted so I was sitting crosslegged on my bench, and could rub my numb feet through my wet stockings. The bench creaked – I'm no lightweight – and I sat very still.

  ‘Friend Joseph is right.’ I could not see the face of the Friend who spoke. ‘When we were given our contract there wasn't a war in the offing. Just in the last year we've paid nearly three hundred pounds in fines because we won't join the militia. Our farms are small; we can't pay that kind of money. We've already seen eight Friends in prison for not paying. Isaac Brock our new governor is a soldier, and Yonge Street's a military road, like it or not. It wasn't built for settlers; it was built by the government to make a safe route from York to Lake Huron, away from the border. Those of us who live close to the Road barely go a day now without being harassed by militia, or just by fellows going down to York to see what's doing. The soldiers take what they please, and if they don't go their length now, mark my words, they will, if Government condones their ravages upon us. And those who live out of sight of the Road, their time will also come. I know not why the Lord should have sent this trial upon us, just when our fields are cleared of stumps, and our harvests are lasting us right through to next year's growth. I can't believe it's God's will that we should go back to the United States, and have all to carve out of the wilderness again. Some of us grow older, and could not do the work.’