And people like Ralph Stibbins, a forty-year-old merchant with three children, and Robert Wilson, a forty-nine-year-old farmer with a wife and seven children, who sailed in the same ship as the Harrisons, were probably also men of substance. John Robinson, a farmer from Bewholm in Holderness who had sailed in the Prince George, said that if he found Nova Scotia to be “as favourable as represented” he would “make a purchase there and return to take his family over.”52 He and his friend, Thomas Rispin from Fangfoss, had the time and resources to explore the entire Francklin Manor and write a detailed account of their findings for the benefit of people back in Yorkshire.
As the zeal to emigrate spread north, the Providence set sail for Halifax in April 1774 from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the Mary did the same from Stockton-on-Tees. While the thirty-four people who sailed in the Mary were all from County Durham,53 some of the seventy-three people in the Providence,54 like John and Mary Richardson, George and Margaret Foster, Mary, George, and John Oxley, and Christopher Flintoff, certainly came from Yorkshire.55 Most of the Mary’s passengers sought “better employment,” but Thomas Lancaster, a linen-draper’s apprentice, had come “to dispose of goods” and presumably return, while the shopkeeper Thomas Miller stated that he had “goods to sell and [would] return.”56 Strangely, the Providence’s crossing was not recorded in the British customs register but her passengers were included in a list sent by Governor Legge to Lord Dartmouth.57
Rising alarm in Britain over the loss of so many people energized anti-emigration campaigners, who used negative feedback from Nova Scotia, whether accurate or not, to discourage even more people from leaving. This account printed in the York Chronicle by an anonymous “North American correspondent” was fairly typical:
Tombstone of George Oxley, passenger on the Providence, at the United Church cemetery, River Philip, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. His death in 1790 was the first to be recorded in River Philip.
I am sorry to hear … that a great many farmers are quitting the northern parts of Yorkshire for America; I fear that most of them will change for the worse. They little know what they must suffer from change of soil and climate, and the toil they must endure before they can make bread to eat; and if, by their industry, they at the last attain to live free from want, they must never expect to grow rich, for they must settle so far inland, that the produce of their land will bear a very low price, and in all the back settlements cash is very little known among them…. Those who are gone to Nova Scotia will have five or six months winter.58
Politically, emigration was bad news in Britain. Lord Dartmouth described it as “an evil” that needed to be stopped and Governor Legge, appreciating its negative undertones, gave a very cautious report of immigrant arrivals: “Those that are able are purchasing lands of the former settlers, others [are] hiring themselves out to service, and others, wishing themselves at home again, will soon quit the Province.”59 In a later report in 1774, Legge doubted that any more Yorkshire people would come to Nova Scotia “as they seem not to be well pleased with the country, the best lands are already granted, the rest being wilderness land; those people have returned home who were dissatisfied or were not able to purchase of the former inhabitants.”60 But Legge was wrong. More people emigrated in 1775.
The last ship to leave was the Jenny, which sailed from Hull in April 1775 with eighty Yorkshire passengers. They included households that came with their servants, such as the families of William Black, a linen draper, and William Johnson and William Robinson, both farmers. Christopher Harper, from Barthorpe-Bottoms near Malton, who came with his wife and seven children, had travelled alone the previous year in the Two Friends to visit Fort Cumberland, where he purchased a 143acre farm “with a good house upon it, elegantly furnished with barns and other conveniences besides woodland at a distance and 20 cows with other cattle etc. for which we were told he gave £550.”61
The shipping agents for the Jenny crossing included the same Christopher Harper and John Robinson, another affluent farmer, who, from his extensive travelling, could describe the region’s excellent agricultural potential.62 The Jenny was a superior vessel, being classed as “A1,” and unlike the others was almost new. She was reported to be “a remarkably fine and lofty ship,” suggesting that the steerage space was more spacious than normal.63 Quite clearly, the more affluent folk deliberated longest and were the last to leave, doing so just before the outbreak of the American Revolution brought a halt to emigration.
Most new arrivals were shocked by the scale of the wilderness that greeted them. As their ship neared Halifax Harbour, John Robertson and Thomas Rispin thought the coastline “appeared very discouraging and disagreeable — nothing but barren rocks and hills presented themselves…. This unfavourable appearance greatly dampened the spirits of most of the passengers and several of them began to wish themselves in Old England before they had set foot in Nova Scotia.” And, on the way from Halifax to Sackville they “passed through nothing but dreary wastes or forests of rocks and wood.”64 Robertson and Rispin blamed this “unfavourable appearance” on the place being “populated so thinly” and the failure of its New Englander settlers to adopt good farming practices.
However, the immense potential of the land soon became apparent, and the two men concluded that their economic future and that of the others lay in improving it. It was theirs for the taking: “A man may have as much land as he pleases; the first year he pays nothing; for the next 5 years a penny an acre; the next 5 years 3 [pence]; for 5 years after that 6 [pence]; and then 1 shilling an acre forever to him and his heirs.”65
Charles Dixon had recognized the importance of land drainage and, when he arrived in 1772, set to work almost immediately, building dykes and reclaiming more of the salt marshes at his farm in Sackville. By 1787 he had built dykes around 104 acres of his own marshland in Sackville, while Thomas Bowser had done the same for his forty acres. However, some settlers went through a longer and more traumatic period of adjustment.66
The Harrisons, from Rillington in the East Riding, had stocked their large farm with cattle and seemed to be doing well, but they hated their place along the River Hébert. John’s eldest son, Luke, wrote home to his cousin, complaining bitterly about the mosquitoes and climate:
We have all gotten safe to Nova Scotia but do not like it all and a great many besides us, and [we] are coming back to England, all that can get back. We do not like the country nor never shall. The mosquitoes are a terrible plague…. You may think that mosquitoes cannot hurt a deal, but if you do you are mistaken, for they will swell one[’s] legs and hands [so] that some is blind and lame for some days…. One is tormented all the summer by mosquitoes and almost freeze to death in the winter.67
However, the Harrisons did not leave, and twenty-nine years later Luke was extolling the merits of Nova Scotia to the same cousin back in Yorkshire:
I cannot help but praise up Nova Scotia for growing the greatest crops of potatoes and the best, which answer well to eat with the fish, as we have plenty…. Dear cousin you gave me an invitation of coming to purchase a place in my native country but I had rather ten to one to stay where I am…. People that come from England like the country very well and those that are advanced in years live to a great age.68
At first the Trueman family, from Bilsdale in the North Riding, disliked their place at Pointe de Bute, but after finding their bearings they flourished, and at least five successive generations of Truemans would live there.69
The memorial stone
