Altogether, 655,747 people sailed away from British shores between 1831 and 1841, nearly three times as many as had emigrated during the previous ten years. Creaking timbers, captains bellowing orders, waves slapping against hulls, the whip of rigging in the wind—the docks at Southampton, Woolwich, Liverpool and Glasgow vibrated with the hullabaloo of transporting the huge outflow of people. Steerage passengers outnumbered cabin passengers (usually referred to as “colonists,” to underline the class difference) by about fifty to one. The five colonies in British North America (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), particularly Upper Canada in this period, were the most popular destinations for both rich and poor. Canada-bound emigrants didn’t have to face the dreadful prospect of convict neighbours in Australia, of loneliness in the Cape Colony, of tropical diseases in the Indian subcontinent or the cruel practices of slavery (by now considered utterly unchristian, but not abolished until 1834) in the West Indies. And the voyage to Canada was shorter than the alternatives. In the 1830s, vessels were expected to take an average of six to seven weeks to reach Quebec City from Britain’s west coast ports, compared to twelve to fifteen weeks to reach Australia, and five to six months to reach India. All these sailing times were approximate and varied according the wind and weather.
If Susanna winced at the number of emigrants on her ship, she was even more appalled at the conditions in which they were obliged to travel. Steerage-class passengers had a miserable time. The Anne was a relatively small boat, and its seventy-two cheap-fare passengers were crammed into a space only sixty feet long by ten feet wide and five and a half feet high. On the eastward passage across the Atlantic, timber plugged this space; now, on the westward voyage, it was filled with double rows of berths made of rough planks hastily nailed together. Baggage, utensils and food supplies jammed the aisle, and there was little ventilation. Children played in the fetid darkness; dirty bilge water slopped across the floor; rats swarmed up from the hold. On long, storm-plagued voyages, the smell of unwashed bodies, rotting food and vomit was suffocating. Emigrant ships were supposed to feed all their passengers, but few captains bothered to load sufficient supplies of biscuit, flour, salt pork and fresh water to last the whole voyage. When the daily provisions were distributed, they were almost always too meagre and often spoiled.
The worst of the emigrant ships came from Ireland’s twenty-one ports, carrying the wretched cargo of refugees from famine, fever and the regular failures of the potato crop. By the mid-nineteenth century, the boats had earned the nickname “coffin ships.” But the brigs, brigantines and schooners leaving Scotland’s eighteen ports or England’s thirty-six carried their own burdens of misery. And in the event of a shipwreck, steerage-class passengers usually drowned; lifeboats were provided for cabin-class passengers only. Life in steerage was awful. “Sir, a ship is worse than a jail,” wrote that cynical realist Dr. Samuel Johnson. “There is, in jail, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind: and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger.”
The Anne’s sails were hoist on July 1. A week later she had weathered the storms off Scotland’s eastern coast and was into the Atlantic Ocean. During the first days at sea, Susanna revelled in the lack of demands on her. Within the past four months, she had faced a bewildering series of changes: the birth of her first child, preparing everything she might need for a future in an unknown land, saying farewell to her mother and sisters whom she might never see ever again. Now she could catch her breath. She could finally give little Katie all her attention. She could nurse her in the privacy of the cabin with no interruptions. When the weather was good, she might sit out on the deck and watch the waves. She played with Captain Rodgers’s Scottish terrier, Oscar, who had made eleven transatlantic voyages and whose mate had a litter of three puppies during the voyage: “When my arms were tired with nursing, I had only to lay my baby on my cloak on deck, and tell Oscar to watch her, and the good dog would lie down by her and suffer her to tangle his long curls in her little hands in the most approved baby fashion, without offering the least opposition.”
The Moodies’ maidservant took care of all the laundry, which was done in an iron tub on deck once a week. And cabin passengers ate with the captain, so Susanna didn’t have to conserve or prepare food. Instead, she tucked into meals of hard biscuit, ham, corned beef, fresh eggs, fowl, cabbage and potatoes. Cabin passengers drank ale or porter, rather than the increasingly rank “fresh” water or the stewed black tea that was served to the sailors. Most vessels carried a few hens, kept penned up in the longboat, to provide fresh eggs in the early weeks and fresh chicken as the voyage drew to an end. Some ships even boasted a cow on deck, to provide fresh milk—although the Anne was too small for such a luxury.
It didn’t take long, however, for John Dunbar Moodie to get bored. He was always trying to find something to occupy himself with. Sometimes he trailed a fishing line behind the vessel, hoping to hook a silvery bonito, which might be hauled up onto the deck and eagerly eaten at dinner. Sometimes he amused himself by training his rifle on sea birds that hovered over the ship. He talked to some steerage passengers, swapping war stories with an old Scotch dragoon called Mackenzie. He marvelled at the way the sailors shinnied up and down the rigging. He borrowed the captain’s telescope and spent hours gazing at the horizon, hoping to see land, another vessel, a whale, shark, porpoise or flying fish—anything to break the monotony. On a couple of clear nights, he made Susanna stir from her berth and come and view the brilliant light show in the sky—the Northern Lights, which he hadn’t seen since he’d lived in the Orkneys.
Susanna was amused by her husband’s eager impatience for action, but she secretly rejoiced that there were no other cabin passengers to join John on wild exploits. On the waterfront in Leith, they had heard tales of gentlemen who would take off a in rowboat from the ship in which they were crossing the Atlantic to fish, and were abandoned when the ship’s sails finally caught a wind. Another transatlantic traveller, John Howard, recorded in his diary in 1832 that, when he and some other passengers en route to Quebec on the Emperor Alexander took a little excursion from their vessel in a dinghy, they were “so intent on our sport that we did not observe that a breeze had sprung up.” Howard described how, “looking around for our ship, we found that she had sailed at least five miles from us.…We therefore threw off our coats and [started to row] but all to no purpose as the ship began to disappear from our view.” After the desperate party had nearly given up hope of rescue, and as the rays of the setting sun illuminated the Emperor Alexander’s sails on the distant horizon, the ship finally changed direction and returned to collect them. “The captain was standing on the poop. I took my gun and had a great mind to shoot at him, but at that moment we observed our wives imploring him to take us on board.” If John Dunbar Moodie been a fellow passenger of Howard’s, he would certainly have been amongst those who were nearly lost because they had rowed off to shoot at puffins and other “curious web-footed birds.”
The voyage of the Anne dragged on. The sun rose and set, rose and set, over the empty Atlantic, and progress was agonizingly slow in the baffling winds. After only three weeks, fresh water was rationed. Soon Susanna herself could barely conceal her impatience. She tried to write a story about a woman who emigrated from England to Canada but was unable to finish it. She buried herself in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII. She was forced to wean Katie because of “a severe indisposition,” probably seasickness. The Moodies did not suffer the disasters many transatlantic travellers faced in this period: the Anne did not catch fire, nor was it shipwrecked or driven off course by a raging storm. Susanna did not record any fearful epidemics of measles, typhoid, cholera or fever below decks that might have put little Katie in danger. But she could hardly bear the boredom.
Five weeks into the voyage, the Anne was becalmed on the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland. There she sat, sails flapping empty, for three long weeks. By now, Susanna
was almost screaming with ennui. The Grand Banks fogs were notorious. Another emigrant stuck in a similar fog described how his boat got so lost that he and some crew members jumped into a dinghy to take depth soundings: “During our absence kettles, bells and bugles were kept sounding terrifically on board the good ship, or we should never have found it again, for at twenty yards’ distance we lost sight of her. I shall never forget the vast magnifying effect of the mist on the ship, her spread sails, shrouds and cordage. She loomed into sight an immense white mass, filling half the heavens.”
The journey across the Atlantic Ocean, and up the St. Lawrence River into the heart of British North America, took two months.
Supplies were dwindling on the Anne, but the dense fog meant that passengers and crew could not see any of the Newfoundland fishing boats strung along the Banks. Other transatlantic vessels managed to augment their rations with fish, either caught by their own crew or purchased from fishermen. “Our fishing goes on with great success,” a colonist who also crossed in 1832 noted in her diary. “The Captain has just succeeded in catching an immense cod-fish [weighing] 40 lbs. Amongst the captures of this day is a Hollybut, 70 lbs weight; we are to have it for dinner.” But there were no monster cod or halibut on the Anne, and after close to two months at sea, the steerage passengers were starving and the cabin passengers were down to hard biscuit. Not that Susanna cared; she was wretchedly seasick in the sullen swell. As she clung to the deck rail and stared out into the gloom, she was in limbo, adrift between two worlds, two lives. If only the pebble beaches and crumbling cliffs of the Suffolk seashore would loom out through the fog, rather than icebergs—stark, ghostly and entirely unfamiliar.
In the last week of August, the Anne sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. As the sun climbed in the sky and the morning mist cleared to reveal Lower Canada’s wild, rocky shores, the Moodies’ spirits lifted. Susanna and John stood hand-in-hand at the rail. Susanna was almost overcome by the splendour of the mountains on the north shore—“they loomed out like mighty giants—Titans of the earth, in all their rugged and awful beauty.” She looked up and down the huge waterway: “never had I beheld so many striking objects blended into one mighty whole! Nature had lavished all her noblest features in producing that enchanting scene.” She liked the look of the small whitewashed houses on the shores close to Quebec City, and the neat churches with their silver tin roofs and slender spires against the backcloth of “dense, interminable forest.” Her excitement blossomed on August 30, when the captain finally dropped anchor off Grosse Ile, the quarantine station thirty-three miles below Quebec City. From the deck of the Anne, Susanna watched the bustle of people and boats on the island, heard the sounds of laughter and shouting from the shore and watched the blue smoke from dozens of little cooking fires spiral into the clear sky. After nine weeks of being confined to a ship scarcely more than a hundred feet long, it looked like a “perfect paradise” to her. Visions of fresh bread and butter danced in her head.
This was the first year of operation for the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Before 1832, ships had sailed directly to Quebec City’s docks. A surgeon would then come on board for a cursory check for fever among the passengers that might infect the city’s residents. But by the late 1820s, the Quebec City authorities were exasperated by the incoming tide of destitute paupers who spread epidemics of typhoid, measles or cholera as soon as they stepped ashore. A few months before the Moodies’ arrival, the health authorities of Lower Canada had hastily tacked together some wooden sheds on Grosse Ile and decreed that all vessels must stop there. All steerage passengers were obliged to disembark, to be inspected for disease. Every piece of sheet or blanket that had been used during the crossing had to be taken ashore to be washed; straw bedding was thrown overboard. The sick were herded into the sheds, which looked like animal pens, and held there until they either died or recovered. Within days of its opening, Grosse Ile was known as “the Isle of Death.” Its busiest residents were the coffin-makers.
Susanna Moodie knew nothing of the island’s fearsome reputation as she watched the steerage passengers climb into boats to be rowed over to dry land. The Moodie party did not have to go ashore because, as cabin passengers, they were not considered health risks. Only their bedding had to be sent to Grosse Ile, to be washed by their maidservant. Susanna resented being told to stay on the Anne, particularly when John gleefully joined the disembarkation. She was even more chagrined when the captain and her husband returned and told her that they had been unable to replenish their stores, or buy Susanna the loaf of fresh bread they had promised her, because the provision ship from Quebec City had not yet arrived.
Eventually Susanna did go ashore. And she discovered that the perfect paradise was actually a “revolting scene”—a seething mass of shrieking, dirty, half-naked people. Thousands of emigrants jostled each other at river’s edge as they tried to wash all their bedding and clothes. Women trampled ragged blankets in the dirty water while yelling at their kids. “I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hard-featured, sunburnt harpies, as they elbowed rudely past me.” Even the Scottish labourers who had travelled steerage on the Anne, and been perfectly respectful during the voyage, were “infected with the same spirit of unsubordination and misrule, and were just as insolent and noisy as the rest.” It was a rude shock. Her dismay was intensified as she watched a huge, wild-eyed Irishman, flourishing a shillelagh and wearing only a tattered greatcoat, leap over the rocks shouting, “Whurrah! my boys! Shure we’ll all be jontlemen!”
Relief had surged through the steerage passengers as they stepped on dry land. They were finally released from the noisy, smelly, dirty claustrophobia of the ship’s hold. But Susanna was incapable of empathizing with them. From birth, she had lived in a world of neatly segmented social hierarchies, in which everyone knew the social class they belonged to and regarded other classes almost as separate species. Now, for the first time in her life, there was no invisible membrane between the cabin-passenger gentry and the lower orders. She was looking at a fragmented world of uncertainty. As Susanna struggled to get her bearings in this vision of purgatory, she had her first taste of emigration as exile—exile from the society in which, even though she often felt marginal, she had always known where she belonged. When she tried to express her horror, she sounded impossibly hoity-toity. But it was much more complicated than that: Susanna was trying to protect herself from chaos.
Even in London, Susanna had rarely strayed into the slums of the city’s east end or south bank. She had seen poverty, but the closest she had come to scenes of raw humanity, fighting for survival, was in Mary Prince’s story, or in Hogarth’s series Gin Lane, the richly detailed engravings of mass depravity and mayhem that were exhibited in the windows of London’s print shops. And so, as she looked around her at Grosse Ile, Susanna’s shock was mixed with horrified interest. How could she not recall the description of an uncivilized world she had read in the leather-bound copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan in her father’s library? “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The sight of Hobbes’s words made flesh fascinated Susanna the voyeur. The dark underbelly of the human condition—murder, madness, rage, despair—stimulated her imagination, as it would on many occasions in the future. She left Grosse Ile to return to the Anne only when she heard that there would be a decent meal of bread, butter, beef, onions and potatoes on board.
Two days later, the Anne left the quarantine station behind and sailed towards Quebec City. Safely back on deck, and at a remove from sun-drenched harpies and wild Irishmen, Susanna regained her equilibrium. She relaxed in the sunshine, contemplating spectacular scenery instead of the human terrors of the New World. Only a few months earlier she had gushed for London annuals over imaginary landscapes. Now, stunned by her first sight of the Montmorency Falls and Quebec City perched high on the rocky cliffs, she resorted to the lush vocabulary
of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets for the reality: “Nature has lavished all her grandest elements to form this astonishing panorama. There frowns the cloud-capped mountain, and below, the cataract foams and thunders; wood, and rock, and river combine to lend their aid in making the picture perfect, and worthy of its Divine Originator.” She continued to keep reality at arm’s length when the Anne dropped anchor below the Citadel: she would not step ashore. Ostensibly, this was because cholera raged in the city—although this didn’t prevent John Dunbar Moodie, accompanied by young James Bird, from jumping into a rowboat and disappearing to explore Quebec’s winding streets.
The harbour below Quebec City was jammed with ships, and in the middle of the night, disaster struck. A large three-masted vessel, the Horsley Hill, with three hundred Irish immigrants aboard, collided with the Anne in the dark. There was an ear-splitting crash as the larger vessel’s bowsprit came thundering down on the Anne, threatening to swamp her. Passengers on the threatened ship swarmed onto the deck, screaming with fear, and Captain Rodgers was immediately surrounded by several frantic women clinging to his knees.
Susanna was lying in her cabin when the pandemonium erupted. Grabbing her baby, she hurried out onto the deck to see what had happened and quickly took in the scene: the towering bulk of the Horsley Hill, looming out of the darkness over the Anne; the hysterical women immobilizing the captain. She heard the cracks of splitting timbers, the splash of waves, the confused shouting of sailors. Immediately, she rose to the occasion and ordered the women to follow her below deck. Ignoring the foul smell of unwashed bodies and vomit, she made them sit still and pray quietly. By sheer force of personality, and despite her own alarm, she remained cool and in command. “British sailors never leave women to perish,” she told her companions, with apparently unshakable assurance. Until close to dawn, her authority held. The incident must have reassured Susanna that, even in the New World’s melting pot of peoples, the natural authority of the educated classes held sway and she could make herself heard.
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