When immigrants arrived they found “woods to be cut down,” hordes of mosquitoes, unfinished roads, “a limited society,” and “cold weather, the ground being covered with snow nearly four months in the year.”9 Scottish Highlanders also reacted badly to their first sight of North America, but they were concerned by the vast forests, coming as they often did from nearly treeless areas. But as former inhabitants of Britain’s poorest region they appeared to have less difficulty in accepting rough-and-ready conditions.
The large group of settlers who came to the Maritimes from the North and East Riding of Yorkshire in the 1770s balked initially at the scale of the task they had taken on, but most remained and became outstanding pioneer farmers.10 MacGregor greatly approved of these “industrious and careful settlers from Yorkshire,” comparing them favourably with settlers from Dumfriesshire and Perthshire in Scotland.11 As they came from thinly populated and fairly remote regions in northern Britain, such people would have been better able than most to cope with the isolation, privations, and drudgery of pioneer life.
However, according to Walter Johnstone, a Presbyterian minister from Dumfriesshire who visited Prince Edward Island in the 1820s, “the English are the most unsuitable of all settlers…. Such of them as bring property with them generally keep up their old mode of living till they are as poor as their neighbours and then they are destitute in the extreme.”12 Perhaps he was a little biased, believing as he did that “no settlers are prized more” than those from Dumfriesshire. In any case, his comments could equally well have applied to Scottish Lowlanders or people from any other part of the British Isles who had unrealistic expectations of pioneer life. Meanwhile, Edward Walsh, who had visited Prince Edward Island in 1803, blamed what he saw as its decline on the Scots:
By far the greater number of farmers on the Island are Scotch Highlanders, ignorant, indolent and selfish in the extreme, who have no idea of agriculture and who are content to clear away some wood in a slovenly manner, in order to breed cattle, from which to breed cattle, from which they derive their sole sustenance. 13
The large number of Yorkshire emigrants who settled in 1774–75 in Nova Scotia and what later became New Brunswick were unusual in having their sea crossings well-documented. Because they left at a time of rising alarm over the large number of British people being lost to North America, details of who they were and why they emigrated were recorded by customs officials. This is one of the rare instances when English emigration has been well-documented. Unlike the Scots, who were associated with infamous clearances, and the Irish, who were associated with great famines, the English slipped away without either, and in most cases virtually unnoticed. Writing in 1806, John Stewart wondered why so much alarm was being expressed over the loss of Scottish Highlanders to Canada while “at the same time not a word is said” of emigration from England, “which is of so much more real consequence.”14 But he was a lone voice.
Settler’s cabin between Halifax and Windsor as seen from a train in June 1867, a watercolour-over-pencil by Juliana Horatia Ewing. She wrote, “They begin by setting fire to the under-wood, which clears the way to the felling of trees. The result is that a cleared place like this is covered with charred stumps of pines and many of the pines lie full length, being I suppose too much burnt to be worth removal.” (Mcdonald, Illustrated News, 34–35.)
When they emigrated, the English left very few newspaper records or personal letters behind. Their exodus also escaped the notice of most contemporary commentators and later English historians. Their departure was treated with less disquiet by people in authority than was the case with the Scots. Nobody seemed to care about the diminution in England’s workforce and armed services. And after they arrived at their chosen destinations, the religious ministers who served them seemed unusually disinterested in their cultural and social needs. Anglican missionaries, appointed by the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, did not see it as their job to offer a cultural lifeline in the way that Roman Catholic priests did for the Irish or Presbyterian missionaries did for the Scots. They rarely mentioned individual English settlements in their twice-yearly reports. Although Methodist missionaries had closer links with ordinary settlers, they hardly ever described their communities, unlike Presbyterian clergymen, who wrote lengthy accounts of Scottish pioneering activities. Thus, the English were overlooked as they left and widely ignored after they arrived.
And yet, by 1865, by which time Canada had acquired well over a million people from Britain, the majority of the immigrants were coming from England.15 However, relatively few of the English actually settled in Atlantic Canada, with most preferring to go to the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, and the Prairies.16
Of great importance to this study is what happened a century earlier, when Atlantic Canada acquired thousands of people with English ancestry from the United States. The driving force behind this influx was Britain’s defence interests. Facing ongoing hostilities with France, Britain was concerned that the French-speaking Acadians living in Nova Scotia might side with France in any future conflicts. It therefore took the unprecedented and brutal step of expelling some thirteen thousand Acadians in two separate deportations carried out in 1755 and 1758.17 And to assist the process of colonization even further, the hunting and fishing territories of the Native peoples were also seized.18
This ethnic cleansing paved the way for the arrival of eight thousand New England Planters,19 all of whom could trace their ancestral roots back to England. Given generous incentives by the British government to relocate to the Maritimes, and being enticed by its good agricultural land, they arrived between 1759 and 1762, primarily from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The second group, consisting of thirtyfive thousand Loyalists, came in 1784–85 from the United States, many originating from New York and New Jersey. Having suffered defeat in the American War of Independence and fearing a further loss of territory to the United States, the British government had financed their removal costs and placed them along both sides of the strategically important Bay of Fundy.20 These Loyalists, many of English descent, swelled the population of the Nova Scotia peninsula and gave the newly created province of New Brunswick an instant population. Planters and Loyalists, together with their descendents, dominated the population of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for many decades, but, with the rapidly growing influx directly from Britain after 1815, the British component of the population eventually became even larger, although the exact numbers are unknown. Eventually two types of English came to be recognized in the region. There were the American-born, having distant English ancestry, and there were those whose ancestors, or they themselves, had emigrated directly from England.
Reading the order of expulsion to the Acadians gathered in the parish church of Grand Pré in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, 1775. Watercolour by C.W. Jefferys (1869–1951).
Planters and Loyalists brought their Yankee ways with them and were, first and foremost, Americans. They were fiercely independently minded, built American-style houses, and favoured the nonconformist religions that were popular in the United States. Their family links were with the United States and not with England. Yet, when asked to state their ethnic origins in 1871, they defined themselves as English, however distant that connection was.21 As a result, some 29 percent of the population in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were categorized as English. The customs and shipping data, although incomplete, reveal that both provinces attracted relatively few English immigrants during the first half of the nineteenth century, with Scottish arrivals being more significant in Nova Scotia and Irish arrivals dominating much of the influx to New Brunswick. Thus, the substantial English presence, revealed by the census, owes more to its eighteenth-century antecedents than to the later arrival of emigrants directly from England.
Meanwhile, Prince Edward Island,
