In the Geological Journal in 1829, a report by Richard Brown, Sydney’s mine agent, on fossilized upright trees in sea cliffs on the Bay of Fundy contributed to intense geological interest in this rich carboniferous site.

Its strata of successive subtropical forests, now recognized to date from 310,000,000 years ago, provided empirical evidence in support of the vigorously contested theory that, rather than drifting into place through the action of water, coal was formed on location, or in situ, over almost inconceivably long periods of time from forests submerged under marine water and covered with sediment. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Bay of Fundy site was twice visited by Charles Lyell, the eminent British geologist who established the principles that made geology into a science. Charles Darwin also mentions the Bay of Fundy site in the Origin of Species in response to criticism of the gaps in his empirical evidence for the theory of evolution. The Bay of Fundy provided an instance of the unevenness of the fossil record due to circumstances like the large span of time between occurrences of fossilization. In his own comments on geology, Acland reflects the mid-nineteenth-century consensus that over millions of years the Earth’s solid crust had formed above the molten masses at its centre and that its stratigraphic rock indicates the sequences in this formation.

At the end of the last Ice Age that covered most of Eastern North America some 10,000 years ago, the Mi’kmaq followed the caribou to the Maritime districts. When Europeans arrived, the Mi’kmaq were organized into a confederacy divided into seven districts. The chiefs of each district were members of the Mi’kmaq Grand Council which ruled by consensus over the entire territory. With European settlement, traditional sources of food were increasingly jeopardized. In 1841 Chief Paussamigh Pemmeenauweet (Paul Louis-Benjamin Peminuit) represented the severe deprivations of the Mi’kmaq in a letter to Queen Victoria. By the time of the royal visit, the Mi’kmaq were further marginalized and invaded even on their own reserves by white squatters.

Direct petitions to the Queen were based on the personal, fiduciary relation between Indigenous peoples and the Crown established at the end of the Seven Years’ War by George III in his Royal Proclamation. To encourage First Nations people who had fought on the side of the French to accept British rule and to deal with the expansionist westward ambitions by the American Atlantic colonies, the Royal Proclamation established principles to be maintained in perpetuity for the disposition of land through treaties which were understood both as legal contracts and as a direct personal relation with the Crown affirmed in Britain’s solemn pledge to recognize and protect Aboriginal rights. This element of personal connection between First Nations and the Monarchy later was described in terms of kinship evident in the Mi’kmaq salute to the son of the Mother Queen in Halifax.

In Britain, the Volunteer Movement had received an impetus from the real possibility of war with France. Britain risked engagement after France and Austria went to war in 1859 and tensions also arose from an attempt in the previous year on Napoleon III’s life which involved a bomb made in Birmingham. In Oxford, Acland had been one of the first members of the Oxford University Volunteer Corps and his oldest brother, Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, had raised five Volunteer Corps of mounted rifles in Devon. Under threat of war with France, the rich coal deposits at Sydney were of strategic importance to fuel steam power for the Royal Navy. At Sydney, two Volunteer units had been organized in July 1859 to defend the town and its coal operations, taking the place of the British garrison removed during the Crimean War. Because the royal visit was unscheduled and entirely unexpected, under the command of Richard Brown the miner-Volunteers who were working under ground had scrambled to dress and equip themselves to form a guard of honour for inspection by the Prince. Their uniforms, which included wide-awakes, or broad-brimmed hats, were supplied by the mining company; their guns by the imperial government. Because of the proximity of the French colonies of St Pierre and Miquelon, just 191 miles (308 kilometers) from the coal mines of Sydney, Major Christopher Teesdale, the Crimean War hero, advised the Volunteer Corps on its defenses. The mines at Sydney and Pictou were also an important source of coal for supplying the huge demands of British industry and trade. An article on the coal-fields of Great Britain written in 1861 reported that coal powered 5,200 locomotives, 607 iron furnaces, 3,000 factories, and 2,500 steam vessels. The same article speculated on how long coal reserves would last, remarked on the increased depths of mines, and mentions the Duke of Newcastle as the owner of one of England’s deepest coal mines.

Maritime safety began to improve with the development of a lighthouse system in the Atlantic colonies. Lighthouses were established on Flint Island in 1856 and on Scatarie Island in 1839 where 283 lives were lost in a single shipwreck in 1834. Prior to the siege of Louisbourg, the British ran a naval blockade off the coast of Scatarie, capturing one French warship dramatically after a long chase and five-hour gun battle. Since the departure of the last of its fishing community in the 1950s, Scatarie Island has become an Island Wilderness Area remarkable for its rare or unusual flora.

To augment the Christ Church collection, Acland had dredged for marine fauna, then a relatively new endeavour, near Orkney and the Shetland Islands after his appointment in 1845 as Lee Reader of Anatomy. Fourteen large cases of specimens pickled in whiskey sent by sea to London were taken into custody at the London docks with the sender under suspicion of smuggling whiskey. On the deck of the Hero, his informal lecture on some polypes attached to sea-weed delivered to a small, eclectic assembly demonstrates how a system of classifications makes a science of the natural world and illustrates its inter-connectedness as articulated in Humboldt’s idea of the cosmos. The polypes attached to the leathery fronds of kelp or laminaria were a stage in the life-cycle of the medusae, the floating jellyfish with tentacles like the snakes on the head of the Medusae in Greek mythology. Jellyfish, armed with stinging cells to prey on very small, sometimes microscopic zooplankton, are related to sea anemones and to coral. The formation of coral reefs was of intense interest before Darwin’s voyage and was the subject of his first monograph in 1842.

The British military base at Halifax was the staging point for the siege of Louisbourg in 1758, for attacks on rebel-controlled areas in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolutionary War, and for the forces that attacked Washington and burned the Capitol and White House during the War of 1812. After 1818, the British Royal Navy’s North American Station used Halifax as the summer base for its squadron and the Royal Navy Dockyards in Bermuda for the remainder of the year.

In 1860 at this important base Admiral Sir Alexander Milne greeted the members of the royal suite aboard his flagship before they proceeded along a route transformed for the occasion, as elsewhere along the tour, by lavish decorations of spruce and fir boughs, by banners bearing mottos like “Rule Britannia” and “Welcome Prince,” by flags, bunting, and festive, temporary arches. The townspeople in the rapturous crowd that lined the route included the Irish who had swelled the populace since the 1820s, providing labour and skilled tradesmen to rebuild waterfront wharves and warehouses. In 1860 they constituted more than fifty percent of the city’s population. The rest of Nova Scotia’s populace was mostly a mixture of descendents from the 2,500 original colonists who arrived with Colonel Edward Cornwallis to establish Halifax in 1749; the shiploads of German “foreign Protestants” who had settled at Lunenberg a few years later; the 8,000 settlers from New England who had occupied farms of expelled Acadians; and tens of thousands of refugees from the American War of Independence, including Black Loyalists, who arrived after 1783.

Acland met Joseph Howe, a central figure in Nova Scotia’s early history. In the 1830s, as a colourful, influential newspaperman Howe’s denunciations of the self-interest of the appointed Executive Council and his arguments for the inclusion in the Executive Council of members of the elected Assembly paved the way for the granting of Responsible Government in 1848, making Nova Scotia the first colony in the British North American colonies to be granted this constitutional amendment.

In the company of Dr Almon, Acland visited the cramped and poorly ventilated Poorhouse where patients in medical wards were attended by elderly female inmates. His impressions of the Lunatic Asylum across the harbour in Dartmouth under the direction of Dr James DeWolf are reported in detail at the end of the tour in the Appendix, “Notes on Medical Arrangements of the Four outer Colonies of North America.”

Acland’s dinner conversation with Philip Cataret Hill, the cultured future premier of Nova Scotia, was on the subject of a pre-eminent scientist’s opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Louis Agassiz, whom Acland met in Boston during the American segment of the tour, was a Harvard professor of geology and zoology, a distinguished researcher in fossil fish who gave a great impetus to the study of extinct life, and a powerful proponent of the theory that a great Ice Age once gripped the Earth. However, throughout his life Agassiz rejected Darwin’s theory of the transmutation of species through natural selection. His stance was based on an interpretation of creation in Genesis, the first of the Mosaic Books, as a separate creation by God of every kind or species. Like others who embraced the school of Natural Theology, Agassiz found confirmation for his rejection of the transmutation of species and an affirmation of the separate divine creation of each species in the perfection of each species in itself, such as the jaw of a fish perfectly designed for its watery life.