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.