Still I must say Ottawa is a splendid place – Below the Town is the Rideaux fall of about 50 feet and 200 in width – and above it in full view of the Town the splendid Chaudière where the river, narrowed from a mile to a few hundred feet, comes violently surging down its ledges and precipitates over this Cliff.
Acland’s Letters: Tenth Letter
Ottawa to Toronto
Map (detail), credit: U of T Press, Radforth, Royal Spectacle, 2012.
Map of the itinerary of the route of H.R.H. The Prince of Wales (detail).
CREDIT: University of Toronto Press.
Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (2012).
Ottawa to Toronto
Sept. 3, 1860
Scene of Ottawa arrival
We left Ottawa on a delightful excursion on Monday Sept. 2 early in the morning. I do not stop to describe scenery because I have many little sketches – rough enough – but sufficient to enable me to explain all to you when, God willing, we meet.
Still I must say Ottawa is a splendid place – Below the Town is the Rideaux fall of about 50 feet and 200 in width – and above it in full view of the Town the splendid Chaudière where the river, narrowed from a mile to a few hundred feet, comes violently surging down its ledges and precipitates over this Cliff.
As we entered on this scene on Friday the moon was rising behind the Rideaux – and we escorted by 180 large canoes manned by 6 or 8 men all clad in red woollen frocks. The sun was setting on them and the fall – and as they paddled & sang their rude songs it produced an effect of a kind I never experienced.
“Rideau Fall, Ottawa.”
Rideau Falls (French: rideau – curtain) cascades as a curtain of water at the confluence of the Rideau with the Ottawa River. To welcome the Prince of Wales, local lumber barons convoked 1,000 lumbermen, assembled 150 large freight canoes, and outfitted paddlers in patriotic colours with white trousers and red shirts faced with blue. The lumbermen paddled out in tight formation to meet the prince and then raced alongside the steamer, keeping time with rhythmic paddle songs as they repeatedly pulled apart and skillfully regrouped.
Contextualized
Excursion up Ottawa River
We quitted more quietly in carriages & drove 9 miles up the River banks past the Rapids – and then embarked for 50 miles in a steamer.11 We reached in about 6 hours the Chats Falls & Portage. The falls are produced by the intrusion of the Laurentine igneous series as a dam across the river bed. Breaking over this dam in many places the upper Lake falls into the lower, constituting the Chats falls, so called because the water comes leaping over like kittens [French: chats – cats] at play. We left our steamer & our 20 Canoes were lifted out, turned over on to men’s shoulders, and in procession preceding, following & mixing with us we cross the portage to the Upper lake: there we embark, pull some miles in a splendid air and sun – reach rapids – another portage – out – walk one to two miles thro’ the woods with our boats – off again & up to Mr. Maclauchlan’s pretty & comfortable settlement. Here at 3 we have a splendid lunch. It cost Maclauchlan £500 to make the necessary preparation for this expedition. 1000 men were collected at Ottawa for the Canoes there, and their dress alone cost £300.
“Two Men Carrying a Canoe, Sept. 3, 1860.”
For sketches like this unfinished picture in pencil and brown ink, Acland often used light gray or blue-gray wove paper. This was sometimes called Varley paper, named after John Varley, the landscape artist who fundamentally influenced Acland’s techniques.
Flat-bottomed side-wheelers, fuelled at wooding-up stations, began operating on the Ottawa River above Chaudière Falls in the 1830s. In 1846, some fifty miles upstream at Chats Falls (submerged by a hydro-electric dam in 1931) a horse-drawn tramway was built through dense woods to carry goods and passengers around the falls before boarding another steamer to continue the journey up the Ottawa. However, Daniel McLachlin, the prosperous lumber baron who sponsored the royal party’s excursion, opted instead to provide canoes that were carried around portages between Chats Falls and Arnprior. There, in 1851 at the mouth of the Madawaska River he had bought some 400 acres, surveyed the land as a town site, and sold lots for nominal sums or simply deeded them to those unable to purchase them. He built a substantial stone residence for his family and restored mills from a failed Scottish settlement established there three decades earlier under the feudal control of the last chieftain of the McNab clan. McLachlin had a paternalistic concern for his settlement, contributed generously to the poor and to churches, and promoted adult education. By 1865, the thriving McLachlin family business employed 800 men and produced 25,000,000 feet of lumber annually worth about $500,000 (approximately $8,000,000 in 2020).
Arnprior to Almonte
We left Maclauchlan with admiration & regret, got into carriages that had come 60 miles for us and drove 20 across a long road through almost unsettled lands22, through land just clearing on the edge of the dense Forest. Grand it was. Old firs – tottering – burnt, half burning – charred – hewn – here & there the original Log hut – here & there the small village. At length at sunset we reach an extreme station, Almont[e]33 – get in our train dirty – dusty – thirsty – snooze – and in 50 miles reach Brockville.
The Prince of Wales’ entourage left Arnprior on one of the colonization roads constructed by the government during the 1850s and 60s to open the central and eastern hinterlands of the province.
Almonte was a temporary northern terminus of the Brockville and Ottawa Railway (B & ORR), completed to Ottawa in 1864, which carried lumber, opened access to markets, and encouraged settlement.
Brockville by night
At Brockville, a moderate country Town, there was a most uproarious demonstration. On the Platform the crowd in all kindness all but crushed us. It was dark – The Prince was got into a carriage – and driven off. The whole town was illuminated. The roofs were covered with people frantically exploding fireworks and we were preceded by some three hundred men in red dresses bearing great torches, and firing Roman candles, and Rockets from their hands.44 And so we reached our Steamer (The Kingston). The next morning as the Prince had not been seen we landed & went round the town – and afterwards steamed off for Kingston, on the edge of lake Ontario. Thence I wrote you a line.
“The loyal & fiery Brockville. Sept 4, 1860.”
Today dubbed the capital of the Thousand Islands, the progress in settlement of this town on the St Lawrence in 1860 is indicated in Acland’s picture in the shadowy outline of stone churches on its heights and the warehouses along its waterfront where lumber was transported by barge across the river to American destinations or floated in great rafts down river to depots at Quebec. As a division point for the Grand Trunk’s Montreal-Toronto route, Brockville had already benefited from jobs generated by the railway with crews changed here and locomotives serviced.
At Brockville and Kingston on the Upper St Lawrence and at towns like Belleville and Cobourg along the north shore of Lake Ontario, early settlers had not arrived directly from Britain but as Loyalist refugees from the United States both during and after the American Revolutionary War.
Orange disturbances
The complications of the Orangemen’s movement has hitherto become more serious. The Duke has acted with decision, and, I believe, rightly. But all the facts are not before me and I can form no positive opinion. The Orangemen in Canada form an important body – and are said by some persons to represent the Protestant interest as against the Romish.55 Lower Canada as you so well know is French & Romish. The whole of our splendid reception was by them. It would appear as though the Upper Canadians have taken umbrage at the way in which the Roman Catholics were received. They could not be otherwise. They were hearty – they were the majority – they were, in fact, the people. We learnt that the Orange party at Kingston had determined to pass through the streets in procession with every Orange emblem and Motto – and to decorate the arches the Prince was to pass under in a similar manner. The Duke and Sir Edmund agreed that this act of tyranny could not be recognized – Orange lodges are not illegal in Canada: but they are in Ireland and if the Prince formally & deliberately recognized them here it was argued it might have inconvenience at home. The lodges & Orangemen deliberated half the night – turned out the leaders who advised moderation – and took possession of the landing places.66 We therefore could not land. Several persons came with addresses on board: but the Mayor & Corporation would not venture – and many members of the Government held aloof.
The Orange Order was founded in 1795 in Ireland as a Protestant fraternity with an intense loyalty to the British Protestant Crown.
As Irish immigrants settled in the upper colony of the Canadas, Loyal Orange Lodges took root in towns and cities along the shore of Lake Ontario and among inland farm communities and villages. Lodges provided fraternity, mutual support, and a political front. By 1840, the original Irish membership expanded to include the broader Protestant community such as the Anglican Mohawks at Deseronto and Scots-born Presbyterians like John A. Macdonald. In 1861, Loyal Orange Lodges in the upper province boasted 100,000 members.
However, the forced union in 1841 with the lower province’s large Roman Catholic, French-speaking populace opened the way for deep sectarian feeling in the Orange Order. In Montreal in 1849, violence erupted during an Orange protest against government compensation for property lost during the 1830s Rebellion in Lower Canada, a rebellion perceived by members of the Order as a disloyalty to the Crown. The parliament building was burned, days of riots ensued, and Lord Elgin was burned in effigy. In 1853, a schism developed in lodges in the eastern part of the upper colony between militant factions and moderate members who, like John A. Macdonald’s conservatives, sought political compromise. At the time of the tour, there were fifty-one secessionist lodges under the leadership of the mayor of Belleville. Anticipating disturbances by militant factions in Kingston, the Duke of Newcastle, who had been Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1846, communicated several times before the royal party’s arrival with town officials to make clear that Orangemen in Kingston were neither to erect arches nor demonstrate in their regalia.
In spite of the Duke’s requests, the militant faction was determined to demonstrate its loyalty to the Crown on its own terms.
In making his controversial decision not to disembark at Kingston and Belleville, the Duke of Newcastle was influenced by his own prior experience in Ireland. He declined conciliatory advice from John A. Macdonald, a Kingstonian and Orangeman, who felt that the imperial minister was meddling in local affairs without an understanding of the essential compromise at the heart of Canadian politics. Acland gave a mock-heroic turn to their experience in a watercolour depicting two boats in close proximity labeled with the caption, “The Orangemen pursue us.” At Cobourg, the “coast was clear” as a train carrying Orangemen from Belleville to Cobourg mysteriously broke down along a desolate stretch of track.
Belleville, Picton, Cobourg
About 2 we set off for Belleville ‘re infecta’ (without accomplishing our purpose) up the bay of Quinté – We received telegrams saying that at Toronto the Orangemen would withdraw – and we were to breakfast on shore & proceed by rail to Cobourg today to attend a ball. But a large body of Orangemen came by a special Train, at 8, just as we were landing, put their emblems on the Arches – and the poor loyal, sober people who wished from their hearts to have us were left.
70 young women had in the night arranged to meet us on horseback & escort us in – and Mr. Murray whose family had been up all night arranging for breakfast were alas ! disappointed. We had nothing to do but up anchor & away. We reached Picton just now still in the Bay of Quinté, but all the population were gone to Kingston or to Belleville and we go on. We shall reach Coburg in Lake Ontario, about dark and if the Orange party have not preceded us by rail we shall land & go to a Ball there is to night.
You will have difficulty in following us: I therefore sketch this.
We go from Kingston up the bay of Quinté which goes 50 miles inland – and though it [Prince Edward County]looks like an island it is connected with the main land beyond Belleville so that we have to go back 40 miles to get out into the lake inside Amherst island.
1000 Islands, geology
The Thousand Islands between Brockville & Kingston are produced, as so much here is, by the intrusion of the Laurentian into the sandstone. Wherever the Laurentian hard rock appears it stands and the softer is removed. The islands vary in size from a few miles in length to a few yards. The water from a few fathoms to 100. By the town of Kingston at the Dockyard creek there are 40 fathoms – Fish abounds in some places … a species, I believe, of Bass. Kingston is well fortified – i.e. by outlying Forts.
“Passing the 1000 Islands.”
The small lighthouse on the left is one of nine built during the 1850s along the intricate channels of the Thousand Islands. Their construction coincided with the advent of river steamers passing through the splendid scenery and navigating by night.
Bay of Quinte scenery
The Thousand Islands between Brockville & Kingston are produced, as so much here is, by the intrusion of the Laurentian into the sandstone. Wherever the Laurentian hard rock appears it stands and the softer is removed. The islands vary in size from a few miles in length to a few yards. The water from a few fathoms to 100. By the town of Kingston at the Dockyard creek there are 40 fathoms – Fish abounds in some places … a species, I believe, of Bass. Kingston is well fortified – i.e. by outlying Forts.
The scenery of these waters is quite indescribable and almost undrawable.77 It has two attributes: greatness of distance, & beautiful though unvaried vegetation. In all these shores there is nothing comparable to Ilfracombe or Linton or Porlock — but we go on & on mile after mile between low wooded slopes.
Here for instance is the view out of the cabin as I write – the Governor General at my elbow playing at Chess with his Secretary – out at the window on the deck the Prime Minister Cartier sitting in the shade talking to Sir Etienne Taché a French Canadian – the great arm of the bay of Quinté as we approach Ontario towards Amherst island. Either shore if you look through a glass a pleasing arrangement of trees, fields, rocks and houses – the shore perhaps 50 to 100 feet high sloping down without cliffs.
These two days rest have been everything to us – and almost every one is well – and I for one in thorough good spirits & enjoying myself on the quiet. I now add the proposed American route.
Sept. 19. Detroit. 20. Chicago. 25. St. Louis. 27. Cincinnati. Oct 3. Washington. 6. Richmond. 8. Baltimore. 9. Philadelphia. 11. New York. 16. Albany. 17. Boston. 20 embark.
Because official receptions at Kingston and Belleville were cancelled, Acland had the leisure to paint a dozen pictures as they travelled from Kingston along the Bay of Quinte.
Domestic chat
I do not at all see that I can with any credit or advantage separate myself from the party, if health is vouchsafed me: and I have now got so much better & heartier that I have no ground for doubting. But I shall be moved by what I hear. Your letters of the 17th & 21st August have reached me to-day: and in celebration I have drawn 2 young Indian boys sitting on the edge of a boat near the Mohawk village this morning. You seem getting on comfortably at Eastbourne and your account of the reading & storm is very pleasant to me. This will be probably finished tonight abruptly at Cobourg: indeed, I learn it must be sealed before we arrive.
By next post you shall have in addition to some little tattle about our journey a more homely letter also. I have not yet written to Dr. Rolleston – indeed my pen has been very idle.88
“Rice Lake Village. Hoja Hakim delt - Style 'After the Chinese'”
During a train excursion from Cobourg to Peterborough, Acland sketched this First Nation Reserve (now called Hiawatha First Nation) established in 1828 on the north shore of Rice Lake. Forty acres of land were cleared between 1829-39 and houses built in direct lines equidistant from each other along the waterfront. Trains crossed the lake to the reserve on a 4.8 kilometer (3 mile) trestle bridge completed in 1854, at the time the second-largest engineering project in North America. Cost-cutting in construction resulted in serious winter ice damage. Although causeway structures were added, in the year following the royal tour the bridge was abandoned after possible sabotage by the rival Port Hope railway. Acland’s designation of his style as “after the Chinese” reflects the re-awakened interest in Chinese art in the 1850’s after Britain’s aggressive expansion of trade into China.
Sarah Acland wrote to her husband from Eastbourne, an elegant sea-side resort extolled for its medicinal benefits and developed by the Duke of Devonshire in 1859.
Contextualized Notes
Flat-bottomed side-wheelers, fuelled at wooding-up stations, began operating on the Ottawa River above Chaudière Falls in the 1830s. In 1846, some fifty miles upstream at Chats Falls (submerged by a hydro-electric dam in 1931) a horse-drawn tramway was built through dense woods to carry goods and passengers around the falls before boarding another steamer to continue the journey up the Ottawa. However, Daniel McLachlin, the prosperous lumber baron who sponsored the royal party’s excursion, opted instead to provide canoes that were carried around portages between Chats Falls and Arnprior. There, in 1851 at the mouth of the Madawaska River he had bought some 400 acres, surveyed the land as a town site, and sold lots for nominal sums or simply deeded them to those unable to purchase them. He built a substantial stone residence for his family and restored mills from a failed Scottish settlement established there three decades earlier under the feudal control of the last chieftain of the McNab clan. McLachlin had a paternalistic concern for his settlement, contributed generously to the poor and to churches, and promoted adult education. By 1865, the thriving McLachlin family business employed 800 men and produced 25,000,000 feet of lumber annually worth about $500,000 (approximately $8,000,000 in 2020).
The Prince of Wales’ entourage left Arnprior on one of the colonization roads constructed by the government during the 1850s and 60s to open the central and eastern hinterlands of the province. According to the provisions of the Public Lands Act of 1853, settlers were granted title to land along these roads if they built a house within a year, cleared at least twelve acres within four years, and resided on the land for at least five. It was hoped that settlers would sell their crops to the lumber shanties, find winter employment in them, and provide the lumber camps with teams of oxen and horses needed for hauling logs. However, the assumption that the vast tracts of pine forest were an indication of rich arable land proved false. The thin soil of the Canadian Shield was infertile, pockets of good land were found only along lakes and river valleys, and by the end of the century sixty percent of the land grants and some of the roads were abandoned.
Almonte was a temporary northern terminus of the Brockville and Ottawa Railway (B & ORR), completed to Ottawa in 1864, which carried lumber, opened access to markets, and encouraged settlement. Almonte was a textile town with flourishing woollen mills that drew on the skills of early Scots settlers: unemployed and impoverished workers from the weaving industries in Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, near Glasgow. These settlers arrived as part of an assisted emigration scheme in 1820 and 1821 after land was purchased in 1819 from the Mississaugas for about £642 in goods and then immediately surveyed for settlement. As well, in 1823 about 560 impoverished Irish immigrants sponsored by the British Government arrived in the Almonte area from County Cork. Like a similar Irish settlement in 1825 near Peterborough, the Colonial Department’s scheme to alleviate poverty in Ireland and populate the colony was inspired by Thomas Malthus’ economic theory of over-population in relation to food supply. In 1855, to avoid confusion with another community, the original settlement was renamed in honour of Juan Almonte, a Mexican officer admired for his resistance to American aggressions in border disputes during the 1830s. In 1860, regular rail travel from Almonte to Brockville, a distance of about 92 kilometers (57 miles), took four hours. At Brockville, passengers could connect with the Grand Trunk line to arrive in Toronto by evening.
At Brockville and Kingston on the Upper St Lawrence and at towns like Belleville and Cobourg along the north shore of Lake Ontario, early settlers had not arrived directly from Britain but as Loyalist refugees from the United States both during and after the American Revolutionary War. Just as the influx of Loyalists in Nova Scotia led to its partitioning to create the separate province of New Brunswick, so, too, in 1791 the western terrain of Quebec was partitioned to create the new colony of Upper Canada. During the 1790s, a second much larger wave of settlers arrived from the United States after the colonial government offered grants of land, like those offered to the original Loyalists, in return for allegiance to the Crown. When places like Brockville (renamed in 1812 for General Isaac Brock, heroic defender of the upper colony) were raided by the United States during its war with Britain in 1812-14, these settlers surprised American expectations by resisting rather than favouring the American cause. In the mass migration that followed the Napoleonic War, subsequent immigrants, particularly those from northern Ireland, referred to these earlier settlers from the United States as Yankees.
The Orange Order was founded in 1795 in Ireland as a Protestant fraternity with an intense loyalty to the British Protestant Crown. It derived its name and its emblematic origins in the definitive defeat in Ireland in 1690 of the deposed Catholic king of Britain, James II, by William, the Protestant prince from the Dutch House of Orange who became king of the British Isles in 1688. Sectarian violence often occurred during the annual Orange parades commemorating the battle that defeated the Catholic king. In these Irish parades, the victorious figure of King Billy (William) rode on a white horse, arches were built across streets, and massed members wearing orange sashes and emblems of the order marched to the sound of fife and drum. Government officials were impotent in deflecting disorder and after a particularly violent clash between Roman Catholics and Protestants during a parade in 1849 the British Parliament passed the Party Processions Act banning all processions in Ireland.
As Irish immigrants settled in the upper colony of the Canadas, Loyal Orange Lodges took root in towns and cities along the shore of Lake Ontario and among inland farm communities and villages. Lodges provided fraternity, mutual support, and a political front. By 1840, the original Irish membership expanded to include the broader Protestant community such as the Anglican Mohawks at Deseronto and Scots-born Presbyterians like John A. Macdonald. In 1861, Loyal Orange Lodges in the upper province boasted 100,000 members.
However, the forced union in 1841 with the lower province’s large Roman Catholic, French-speaking populace opened the way for deep sectarian feeling in the Orange Order. In Montreal in 1849, violence erupted during an Orange protest against government compensation for property lost during the 1830s Rebellion in Lower Canada, a rebellion perceived by members of the Order as a disloyalty to the Crown. The parliament building was burned, days of riots ensued, and Lord Elgin was burned in effigy. In 1853, a schism developed in lodges in the eastern part of the upper colony between militant factions and moderate members who, like John A. Macdonald’s conservatives, sought political compromise. At the time of the tour, there were fifty-one secessionist lodges under the leadership of the mayor of Belleville. Anticipating disturbances by militant factions in Kingston, the Duke of Newcastle, who had been Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1846, communicated several times before the royal party’s arrival with town officials to make clear that Orangemen in Kingston were neither to erect arches nor demonstrate in their regalia.
In spite of the Duke’s requests, the militant faction was determined to demonstrate its loyalty to the Crown on its own terms. As the Prince of Wales’ steamer approached Kingston, thousands of Orangemen were massed in their regalia by the wharf, playing provocative Orange tunes and waving banners defiantly. True to their watchword of “No Surrender,” the militant lodges refused to negotiate any compromise. In sympathy, the mayor, brother of a Grand Master of the Orange Lodge, declined the offer to present an address the following day aboard the Prince of Wales’s steamer. Because of the Orange troubles, in the end the royal entourage left for Belleville without disembarking at Kingston. At Belleville, farmers who had travelled long distances by wagon and residents from surrounding towns were disappointed when defiant Orangemen arriving by train from Kingston again deterred the prince from landing.
In making his controversial decision not to disembark at Kingston and Belleville, the Duke of Newcastle was influenced by his own prior experience in Ireland. He declined conciliatory advice from John A. Macdonald, a Kingstonian and Orangeman, who felt that the imperial minister was meddling in local affairs without an understanding of the essential compromise at the heart of Canadian politics. Acland gave a mock-heroic turn to their experience in a watercolour depicting two boats in close proximity labeled with the caption, “The Orangemen pursue us.” At Cobourg, the “coast was clear” as a train carrying Orangemen from Belleville to Cobourg mysteriously broke down along a desolate stretch of track.
Because official receptions at Kingston and Belleville were cancelled, Acland had the leisure to paint a dozen pictures as they travelled from Kingston along the Bay of Quinte. At Kingston he painted the wood wharf and a Martello Tower erected to protect its naval dockyard in 1846 during tensions between Britain and the United States at the time of the Oregon boundary dispute. Along the Bay of Quinte, he painted two Mohawk boys fishing on the shoreline of Tyendinaga, a reserve granted to Loyalist Mohawk supporters of George III during the American Revolutionary War. He painted the flat shore of Lake Ontario, a contrast to the dramatic headlands familiar to the Aclands in places like Ilfracombe in South West England. As the Kingston steamed between Picton and Amherst Island, he depicted Edmund Head playing chess with Richard Pennefather while on the deck outside George-Etienne Cartier chatted with Etienne Taché, a veteran politician, the first to enter into a coalition with John A. Macdonald, and one of two aides-de-camp appointed for the royal tour of the Canadas. Picton, like Amherst Island and nearby Wolfe Island, was named by John Graves Simcoe, first governor of the upper colony. The names of the two islands commemorate the military commanders at the sieges of Quebec and Louisbourg; Picton was named for Sir Thomas Picton, a British officer killed at the Battle of Waterloo.
Sarah Acland wrote to her husband from Eastbourne, an elegant sea-side resort extolled for its medicinal benefits and developed by the Duke of Devonshire in 1859. Acland also mentions correspondence with George Rolleston who had succeeded him as Lee’s Reader in Anatomy at Christ Church in 1857. In 1860 Rolleston was elected to the newly-founded Linacre Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, a department important to the modernizing of the Faculty of Medicine at Oxford. Like the prominent comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, Rolleston resisted scientific evidence demonstrating the similarity between the human brain and the brain of monkeys. Acland also discussed with Sarah his preference for remaining with the tour although he had the option of returning to England as the Canadian tour concluded.