Acland’s Letters: Fourth Letter
New Brunswick
Thursday, August 2, 1860
Halifax to Saint John, N.B.
Up at 5. Breakfast at Lord Mulgrave’s 6 – write to Sarah – 7 by train to Windsor – Granite Region – Cross over to Sandstone – Burnt Forests – Windsor – Bay of Fundy at Hansport [Hantsport] – Denudation of Sandstone & covering by Basalt at Blomidon – Cape Split – All lie down in “Styx” (Captain Vesey). Doctor Richardson – Reach St John’s [Saint John] at 10 – Governor on board (Manners Sutton)11 – off at 12 – Bed till 7 – Swim in harbour with Teesdale & Grey. Salutes from 100 guns (5 forts) – Land – processions – Levee – Firemen – Men of Washington – Dr Bayard – Lunatic Asylum – Double faced Fall. Parafine Works. Albertite, Albertine22 – dine – bed at Walker’s – Apothecaries – conversation with Grey on Bible & religious subjects – Tilley, prime minister.33
For nearly three miles we wound a way between living walls – decked by fir trees planted by the way side for ornament the whole way, where they were not by nature.
Saint John to Fredericton
August 4. Called at 6 to Duke. Vomiting and Diarrhea – off at 9 by Rail to River Kennebasis – General – Col. Fordyce – Governor – Volunteers – River – Fredericton44 – Rafts of Timber (lumber) – Sawmills – Sawdust 1,200 bushels per 10 hours – Furnaces. Splendid Landing. Beauty of Scene – Splendour of Militia horses – grey – some black – Very fine band – No dinner – Another band – View from Government House – Fine house – Third band appears. Torch light procession as a jewelled serpent winds among the trees. Home sweet home – English contrasted – God aid and teach us – and unite us with them for mutual aid.
The royal entourage began its journey from Saint John to Fredericton by travelling along the scenic Kennebecasis River on a short completed section of the financially-troubled European and North American rail line, a line that was intended to facilitate trade with Europe from the ice-free ports of Halifax and Portland, Maine.
On Sunday morning, Acland attended both an early communion service and the main service, sustaining what was deepest in him.
On Sunday afternoon, Acland swam from a timber raft, wrote to his daughter, Sarah, and read from Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851) by Thomas Chandler Haliburton.
Acland notes a conversation with the Duke of Newcastle on the religious views of Queen Victoria, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and on three prominent converts to Roman Catholicism.
The park across from Government House opened by the Prince of Wales was an early instance of the public park movement which began in the 1830s and gathered momentum in the 1880s.
Return trip to Saint John
August 7. To start for Bay of Fundy, Pictou and Prince Edward Island at 6 – post letters on the way at Windsor.
On winding up this letter I am really at a loss what topics of so many to commit to paper at greater length. But I will endeavour to prepare one or two and add them.
August 7 – We went to bed at 2:30 – Off this morning at 6 by steamer for St John’s New Brunswick. We slept or were still the whole way 8 hours – & having seen the river before did not much regret the closing eyelids. We reached St. John’s which we had left on Saturday as you know – We had to return to embark in our “Styx” – and it requires some explanation to say how we embarked. St John’s is a great mercantile port. It occupies chiefly the North side of the harbour. Here all the good houses and ships are. On the opposite side of the harbour are two large suburbs with saw-mills of various works inhabited mostly by the work people. We disembarked from the Steamer at 2, in one of these suburbs, Indianopolis – were received by two or more companies of volunteers who lined the streets – For nearly three miles we wound a way between living walls – decked by fir trees planted by the way side for ornament the whole way,99 where they were not by nature. I became at last quite overpowered – We passed through an Arch 50 feet high made of boughs of fir trees most beautiful to behold, surmounted by trees 12 feet high. We ended on a pier. By its side were saw-mills – thither we entered – in about four minutes two huge pine trees were sawn into planks, and trimmed on their edges by vertical saws which ascended and descended in the fourth of a second – and circular saws which ripped in 30 seconds a three inch plank 30 feet long. Thence through boats loaded with Lumberers cheering in the most enthusiastic manner we embarked. Is England separated from her Colonies?
The throngs that joyously greeted the Prince of Wales in a working-class area by the harbour were part of the massive migration that began at the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815, gained momentum in the 1830s, continued through the next two decades, and was augmented by the Irish exodus during the famine in the 1840s.
Contextualized notes provided by Jane Rupert
Contextualized Notes
On their arrival at Saint John at 10 pm, the royal party was greeted aboard the Styx by J.H.T. Manners-Sutton, New Brunswick’s lieutenant governor, the eighth since the colony’s founding in 1784 at the request of 14,000 Loyalist refugees who had supported the Crown during the American Revolutionary War. After Acland’s early morning swim in the harbour with the prince’s two young equerries, Major Christopher Teesdale and Captain Charles Grey, the formalities of the day began with salutes from guns at five forts that reflect Saint John’s military history. The first, Fort Howe, had been built shortly after an American siege in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War. Another fortification was erected after the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, a conflict that resulted from incendiary incidents related to British restrictions on trans-Atlantic vessels as part of the British blockade of trade with Napoleonic France. In Saint John, marchers in the procession along a route lined with firemen included lumberers, representing Saint John’s largest trade, and proud shipbuilders like those who in 1851 had built the fastest clipper ship of the day, the Marco Polo.
The process for distilling kerosene oil (coal-oil or paraffin) from albertite, a bituminous rock named for its source in nearby Albert county, had been discovered around 1846 by Abraham Gesner. A native Maritimer and pioneer in the petroleum refining industry, Gesner coined the word “kerosene” from Greek root words for “wax” and “oil.” In an age of lamp light, his discovery replaced whale oil, providing a fuel that was cheaper and burned more brightly with a less smoky smell. In the 1850s, thousands of tons of this rock were shipped from New Brunswick to both New York City and Boston to produce kerosene for street lamps. Gesner, a serious amateur geologist who had trained as a physician in London, had become part of the international conversation on geology even before his appointment in 1838 by New Brunswick to make a survey of the colony’s natural resources. His business difficulties, typical in the world of mining claims and the promotion of minerals, included contested mineral rights in New Brunswick, apathy for his proposed development of a local kerosene industry even after a dramatic illumination by night of the parliament building in Halifax, and loss to a British competitor of the American patent rights for the kerosene distillation process just a few years after finding financial backing for a kerosene refinery on Long Island, the first of its kind in North America.
Tilley was a Saint John apothecary, ardent supporter of the moral arm of the temperance movement that had rapidly spread in the 1840s, booster of railways, and an early advocate of a federal union of the British North American Colonies. He had been appointed to the key office of provincial secretary for a second time in 1857 and was made premier in 1861. When the confederation of the colonies took place in 1867, its designation as a dominion and its motto, ad marem usque ad marem (from sea to sea), were inspired from Tilley’s daily Bible reading. He had been struck by the prophetic verse about a future kingdom of enduring peace, abundance, and justice for all in Psalm 72: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea.”
The royal entourage began its journey from Saint John to Fredericton by travelling along the scenic Kennebecasis River on a short completed section of the financially-troubled European and North American rail line, a line that was intended to facilitate trade with Europe from the ice-free ports of Halifax and Portland, Maine. Then, along with the lieutenant governor and members of the Legislative Council and the House of Assembly, the royal party boarded the steamer, the Forest Queen, for the trip up the Saint John River, the main thoroughfare between Saint John and Fredericton.
The capital was named for Frederick, second son of George III, the monarch supported by Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. The province was named for the city of Brunswick, George III’s ancestral home in the duchy of Brunswick-Lunenberg located in modern-day northern Germany. Fredericton was beautifully situated with its Anglican Cathedral, stately lieutenant-governor’s residence, and fine houses located on well-wooded grounds along the banks of the majestic river. From his window at Government House, Acland was entranced by glittering torch lights as some Maliseet in a settlement on the opposite shore speared fish along the river at night.
On Sunday morning, Acland attended both an early communion service and the main service, sustaining what was deepest in him. The cathedral, completed in 1853, was built under the direction of Bishop John Medley, the first bishop in New Brunswick after it became a separate diocese from Nova Scotia in 1845. As a member of the Oxford Movement and a proponent of Gothic Revival architecture characterized by pointed spires, interior tracery, and deeply symbolic ornament, Medley had made the building of the cathedral a priority. In contrast to the plain simplicity of both Low Anglican churches and other Protestant denominations, he was responsible for the controversial and ultimately influential introduction into New Brunswick of a High Church ideal that linked the path to personal holiness to beauty in church buildings, liturgical music, and formal ritual, including the belief in the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. Acland also visited Saint Anne’s Chapel which was used for services before the cathedral was completed and intended as an architectural model for parish churches. It had been designed by the cathedral’s architect and was largely paid for by Bishop Medley.
On Sunday afternoon, Acland swam from a timber raft, wrote to his daughter, Sarah, and read from Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851) by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Haliburton, a judge, fervent supporter of the British monarchy, and third-generation Loyalist, was a widely popular author at the time for his humorous tales about the adventures of Sam Slick, a brash Yankee pedlar. In Rule and Misrule, he argued that through default of British colonial authority New England bore the seeds of republicanism and democracy from its beginnings. By contrast, both French and British North America had come into being under truly colonial circumstances and ought to remain colonies, a position he reversed in 1862 in acknowledging the advisability of Responsible Government.
Acland notes a conversation with the Duke of Newcastle on the religious views of Queen Victoria, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and on three prominent converts to Roman Catholicism. The queen was a devout Protestant with a preference for simple services in the manner of Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer. She had an intense dislike of the formal ritual and deep symbolism of the High Church Movement which had a close affinity with Roman Catholicism. In the religious fervour of the period, tensions with the High Church Movement were at times intense, particularly as it was instrumental in a wave of conversions to Roman Catholicism. The Duchess of Buccleugh and the Duchess of Hamilton, two of the queen’s friends in the Scottish peerage, had converted to Roman Catholicism, as had Henry Manning, a prominent cleric in the Church of England who was made Roman Catholic Bishop of Westminster in 1865 and then cardinal in 1875.
The park across from Government House opened by the Prince of Wales was an early instance of the public park movement which began in the 1830s and gathered momentum in the 1880s. Its twenty acres of pasture land had been offered for a municipal park and gardens by William Odell, the last New Brunswicker to fight a duel, an act that led to his excommunication by Bishop Medley in 1848. The park movement accorded with Acland’s own medical vision of health as well-being not only of body but also of mind. In his Memoir on the Cholera he advocated measures for public health, especially for the socially disadvantaged, that included access to air, exercise, and inexpensive sports like cricket and quoits to lighten hearts and alleviate weary nervous systems.
After many years of debate, in 1859 the University of New Brunswick opened its doors as a non-denominational, provincially-supported institution. It had evolved from King’s College, an Anglican college granted a royal charter in 1827, and two earlier institutions dating from 1785. The subject of universities without a religious foundation and open to all religious denominations was debated intensely, particularly in England, as contrary to the essential nature of universities which from their beginnings in the twelfth century had considered religion integral to college life. In 1883 in an address at King’s College, London, which had been established in 1829 on a religious foundation, Acland lamented the trend in secular education towards the exclusively materialist perspective of science that swept away the yearnings of the spirit. He argued that a unity of the humanities, science, and the spiritual domain was the basis for the highest education.
The throngs that joyously greeted the Prince of Wales in a working-class area by the harbour were part of the massive migration that began at the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815, gained momentum in the 1830s, continued through the next two decades, and was augmented by the Irish exodus during the famine in the 1840s. Saint John, in particular, became a port of entry for poorer British immigrants as the huge volume of ships carrying timber to Britain could return profitably with a human cargo, its passengers finding both deplorable shipboard conditions and the cheapest fares to North America. Many were employed as carters and teamsters on the steamer wharves or in the several nearby sawmills as part of the British timber trade which increased exponentially after Napoleon’s blockade on Britain’s Baltic timber sources. In 1807, 27,000 loads of timber were exported to Britain from its North American Colonies; by 1860 the trade peaked with about 600,000 loads exported annually. The growth of the timber trade is indicated in the statistics in 1838 for the British firm of Robert Rankin in Saint John and its parent firm in Lower Canada, Pollock, Gilmour, and Company. The company operated 130 vessels, employed 18,000 men at its sawmills, on its wharves, and in its forests, and owned 2,000 horses and oxen for its hauling operations.