had to acquire its English directly from England, giving its population a relatively low English component of only 20 percent by 1881. On the other hand, Newfoundland, which relied almost entirely on West Country fishermen to bolster its early immigrant population, ended up as Canada’s most English province. The 1991 census records that a staggering 82 percent of the population claimed to have some English ancestry, although most of the influx occurred long before Newfoundland had officially recorded immigration statistics.22
The emigrants who came from England to settle in Atlantic Canada were driven primarily by a desire for economic self-betterment. Some were fleeing dreadful poverty, but most had positive motives for leaving, with many seeking the ultimate prize of owning land and the independence that went with it. Paradoxically, emigration increased with the rapid rise in England’s industrial output. Because machines increasingly replaced people, thousands of agricultural labourers working on the land and tradesmen in traditional jobs like handloom weaving had been displaced from their jobs. An oversupply of labour led to pitiful wage rates and chronic unemployment levels. The upheaval caused by the introduction of large commercial farms on Yorkshire estates during the eighteenth century fuelled the exodus from this one region. Rather than endure higher rents and an uncertain future, the Yorkshire tenantry immigrated to Nova Scotia. They were the largest single group to leave, but, generally-speaking, most settlers came as families, usually in small numbers, and were drawn from many parts of England and from every social class. Most could afford to emigrate unaided, and they considered the opportunities available in various destinations very critically before deciding where they would finally settle.
Map 1. Reference Map of England.
Although each of the four Atlantic provinces has its own individual story, their emigration sagas have some common threads. In each case a significant component of the English influx had been driven by longestablished trade links with the southwest of England. This one region supplied each of them with more immigrants than any other part of England and it did so over the longest period. The timber trade propelled the stream of emigrants from the West Country to Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, while the fishing trade did the same for Newfoundland. People from Devon and Cornwall hopped on the ships that were regularly crossing the Atlantic to collect their timber cargoes, while fishermen, drawn mainly from Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, and Somerset, who had been brought to Newfoundland on short-term contracts, occasionally opted to become permanent settlers. People leaving from Devon and Cornwall tended to be agricultural labourers, farmers, and tradesmen, mostly of modest means, although in some cases they included well-off farmers, but the English males recruited to work in the Newfoundland cod fishery were universally poor. Those who took temporary employment in Newfoundland during the summer often had to rely on poor relief paid by their parishes to see them through their winters in England.
Without Atlantic Canada’s timber trade with England, the influx of English settlers could not have happened. The doubling of the already high duties on Baltic timber in 1811 had the effect of pricing it out of the market and making North American timber the cheaper alternative. As the trade soared, regular and affordable sea crossings came within the reach of the average emigrant as ships set sail from the major English ports to collect their cargoes. Although the industry was regularly plunged into boom and bust, according to fluctuations of business cycles in Britain, it offered diverse employment opportunities and was a vital component of a settler’s livelihood. And while a substantial part of the influx came from the West Country it was not the sole supplier of emigrants by any means. The ports of Liverpool, London, Hull, Great Yarmouth, Newcastle, Whitehaven, Workington, and Maryport also had their emigrant departures, normally linked with collections of timber from the Maritimes (see Map 1). John Kerr, a Northumberland immigrant who settled in 1843 on land he obtained from the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company in Stanley (York County), was probably fairly typical. He informed his parents that “the land is good and free from stone; it will grow any kind of grain once the plough [is] in it” but that “the trees is [sic] standing as thick as they can grow and you can’t see far before you.”23 The forests were said to be so dense that even before beginning the task of chopping down trees to create farms, settlers had first to “cut their way in.”24
Another common factor in all four Atlantic provinces was the importance placed by English settlers on their religion. In his 1832 emigration pamphlet, the land agent John Lewellin advised people to seek others who shared their “feelings, manners, usages and sentiments, morals and religion.” Doing so, he claimed, would “stifle many a sigh in present difficulties and hush many a regret.”25
Timber booms on the Saint John River, New Brunswick. Woodcut printed in The Illustrated London News, April 7, 1866, 232.
Religion was an important support mechanism for immigrants struggling to cope with a new and challenging environment. The Methodist and Baptist preachers, who trudged huge distances speaking of God’s love and salvation, had the greatest appeal. The Baptist preacher Henry Alline worked among the New England Planters in Nova Scotia; the Yorkshire-born William Black brought his brand of Methodism to the entire region; while Laurence Coughlan, an Anglican minister who converted to Methodism, attracted an enthusiastic following in the Conception Bay area of Newfoundland.
Despite being the official religion, the Church of England attracted relatively few followers. Anglican clergymen were remote figures who adhered to rigid hierarchical structures and seemed not to appreciate the hunger among their congregations for uplifting messages and a kindly smile. As J.F.W. Johnston observed in his travels through the Maritimes, “The Church of England has less hold on the people than either Presbyterians, Baptists or Roman Catholics.” He blamed this on the fact that, while other religions had to raise most of their funds from their congregations, Anglican missionaries could rely on funds supplied from Britain by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. This made them “independent of the people on pecuniary matters and they have not cultivated them as other sects have.”26
The bitter winters were another common feature. The Methodist minister Joshua Marsden wrote, in 1816:
[T]hose who are accustomed only to the cold of England cannot conceive the intense severity of winters in Nova Scotia: the snow is often from four to six feet deep; the ice upon the rivers is two feet thick; the cold penetrates the warmest rooms, the warmest clothes, and will render torpid the warmest constitutions; it often freezes to death those who lose their way in the woods, or get bewildered in the thick and blinding fury of a snow drift.27
The Right Reverend John Inglis, the third Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia and son of Charles Inglis, the first bishop. Lithograph by William Charles Ross, engraved by M. Gauci. Bishop John worked hard to extend the influence of the Church of England, but his hostile and high-handed approach toward other Protestant religions made him out of step with his time.
And New Brunswick was even colder in his opinion. Newspaper reports in Newfoundland speak of similar conditions. It was an insurmountable deterrent for some. Having emigrated to Prince Edward Island from Barnstaple in 1832, William Holmes and his wife, Betsy Richards, decided very soon after arriving that they “did not like the climate and moved on to Boston.”28
A striking theme in this study is the relatively large number of English immigrants who came from extremely poor backgrounds. In addition to the desperately poor fishermen who went to live in Newfoundland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
