The Seagoing Adventures of the Fathers of Confederation

Engraving depicting the SS Oceanic, the sister ship to the SS Atlantic. The Atlantic was sailing from Liverpool to New York when it sank off Nova Scotia in April 1874, killing at least 535 passengers and crew. Public Domain

Commentary

“In those days they came usually by boat.” So begins the epic biography of Sir John A. Macdonald by the Toronto historian Donald Creighton.

Whether to start a new life in North America, or to sail to or from England for business or pleasure, generations of our ancestors crossed the ocean by schooner or steamship, perhaps under canvas on some great wooden-hulled full-rigger or aboard one of the great ocean liners, proceeding upriver on bateaux or paddle-wheel steamers.

The only way to cross the Atlantic was by ship and it was dangerous, as hundreds of shipwrecks attest—including at least 350 wrecks in the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” alone, off Sable Island, Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, some of Canada’s founders who were born overseas braved the wind and waves to become North Americans.

Sir John A., born in Glasgow, was only 5 years old when he made his first transoceanic voyage in 1820, with his family, to settle in Upper Canada. At age 27 he made the reverse voyage to England to buy the books he needed to study law. When reports circulated that the brig Caledonia was delayed in returning to Boston, he wrote to assure his mother that, “We were exposed to the same storm that drove her back, but fortunately for us, the wind tho’ blowing a tempest was in our favour.” That was March 1842, but in September the Caledonia was wrecked on the rocks off Sharpnose Point, Cornwall, all hands drowning save one seaman.

The figurehead from the brig Caledonia, which sank off the coast of Cornwall in 1842, on display at the church in Morwenstow, Cornwall. Steve Heap/Shutterstock

In 1844, Macdonald was elected as an assemblyman for the first time, launching a political career that spanned 47 years.

In 1857, as a cabinet minister, Macdonald returned to England to pitch the imperial authorities on backing the Intercolonial Railway from Rivière du Loup to Halifax. It was a “pleasant but uneventful passage” aboard the steamship Anglo-Saxon during which, he wrote, “a couple of icebergs & a few whales being all our wonders,” he suffered little seasickness. In 1863, that ship was wrecked off Cape Race with the loss of 257 lives.

It was later, on his crucial 1866 voyage to England to seal Confederation, that Macdonald was reading newspapers in his room one night, then went to sleep and woke up to find his bed on fire. He put the fire out and went next door and got George Cartier, one of the 16 delegates who travelled to the London Conference, out of bed to help tip “all the water from three adjoining rooms” on the bedding, just to make sure. (But that is a topic for another article.)

One of Macdonald’s political mentors, William Henry Draper, born in London in 1801, “ran away to sea” when he was 15, having “conceived a passion for a seafaring life.” One biographer wrote: “To gratify this passion he is said to have taken French leave, and run away from home” as “an opportunity offered itself of securing a Cadetship on an East Indiaman,” where he stayed till he was 18. (To “take French leave” is English slang for running away without telling anyone, or deserting one’s post.) Draper ended his youthful wanderings when he landed in Upper Canada in 1820, where “Gentle Will” later became a great political figure.

Another pre-Confederation politico, Sir Francis Hincks, was born in Ireland. Rather than follow in his Protestant clergyman father’s footsteps, he joined a shipping firm before starting his own import-export with the West Indies. In 1832, he settled with his new bride in Upper Canada, where he imported and sold sherry, Spanish wine, Holland gin, Irish whiskey, and “dry goods, boots and shoes.” A prominent Reformer before Confederation, Hincks was later named governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands, and advocated adding Caribbean provinces to Canada.

Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt was born in England. According to “The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt” by Oscar Douglas Skelton, when Galt’s father, a Scots novelist, decided to settle in Canada, young Alex and his brothers “talked all day and dreamed all night of bears and Indians and forest trails. The slow journey across the Atlantic, … the journey by steamboat and barge up the Hudson and the Erie Canal to Lockport, were all sources of keen delight to the expectant youngsters.”

Painting of the West Indiaman “Britannia.” West Indiaman was a general name for ships that sailed from the Old World to the West Indies and the east coast of the Americas. Public Domain

The Galts had adventure in the blood as Sir Alex’s grandfather had been a shipmaster, a “strikingly handsome, well-built man, of sailorly directness and kindly humour” and captain of a West Indiaman. Alex’s father, the novelist John Galt, went into business importing British goods to the Turkish-ruled Balkans, which saw spectacles like “a pioneer train of forty-five camels” setting out “from Salonica, laden with two hundred bales of British goods.” These caravans had to brave “Balkan winters, Turkish intrigue, and threatened Russian attack.”

The Galts then decided to try their fortune in Lower Canada. The father became first Commissioner of the Canada Company, and Alex’s brother eventually the registrar of Huron County. Alex got into politics in Sherbrooke and that is how, minus the 45 camels, he ended up as a Father of Confederation from the Eastern Townships, with a knighthood and other honours.

Sir Charles Tupper had a most bracing adventure when crossing the sea in 1841 to attend medical school in Edinburgh. Recounted in his book “Political Reminiscences of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Tupper,” is an incident worthy of a rugged Joseph Conrad tale such as “Lord Jim” or “Typhoon.”

Setting out from Windsor in the brigantine Huntington with a stop at St. John, N.B., he found the crew drunk when he first went aboard. He was one of only two passengers, plus the captain, mate, and three seamen.

For some reason the mate, Mr. Brown, took a strong dislike to Tupper. “Notwithstanding my request,” Tupper recalled, Brown “persisted in smoking in the cabin, and as I was very seasick I spoke to the captain, who told him he must not do so.”

The mate was stubborn, and continued to smoke, sometimes deliberately puffing away upwind from Tupper.

On one occasion, “I was sitting on the planks in this space by the wheel reading the Bible, when the mate sat down to the windward, smoking. I said: ‘Mr. Brown, I expected in the mate of this vessel to find a gentleman, and requested you not to smoke in my face. I tell you now, I will not permit it.’”

The mate, however, “screwed up his nose in contempt, and said: ‘Won’t you?’” Tupper, 20 years old, leaped to his feet. “In an instant I smashed the bowl of his pipe against his jaws into a dozen pieces with a blow of my fist; He sprang on me like a tiger and clinched me.”

It was fortunate for Tupper that he had wrestled a bit at school. The mate “was a much heavier man than I, but I brought into requisition the hip-lock taught me by Pat Hockney at Horton Academy, and brought him down on his head and shoulders under me; but as we were at the edge of the top rail of the deck, and the slightest movement would send us both overboard, I rolled over, which brought Brown on top. With my left arm around his neck, I pinned his face to the deck, and with my right fist paid attention to his ribs.”

Seeing the two brawlers almost go overboard, a crew member named “Anderson, a strong Swede,” grabbed both by the collar and separated them. “The sail filled aback,” Tupper writes, “and the vessel was running backwards when the captain rushed on deck. The mate went to his bunk, which he only left on the third day after. The captain said I had done quite right, and Mr. Brown gave me a wide berth from that time.”

It is tedious to close with a tidy lesson, but fate, fortune, or providence spared men like Macdonald, Galt, and Tupper from the disaster that visited many at sea, and they became Fathers of Confederation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.