Introduction

The letters of this intelligent, scientific, and artistic man written to his wife during the tour draw us into mid-nineteenth-century life in British North America just seven years before the confederation of four of the colonies established the nucleus of the Dominion of Canada. In these letters, Dr Acland relates conversations with key politicians and makes observations on the period’s energetic revolution in trade networks and transport. Through them we are taken to pioneering institutions foundational to modern science, like the magnetic observatory in Toronto, and to mental institutions that reflect the new, radical change in psychiatric care based on cure through therapy. While the Prince of Wales generated good will in the course of his official duties, in the background Dr Acland effected international connections through his conversations with leaders in the medical and scientific communities.

Dr Acland

A younger son of landed gentry, Henry Wentworth Acland was born in 1815 among the rolling hills of Devon on the large family estate near Exeter. Although destined for a medical career, on the advice of a prominent physician he first began studies in the liberal arts in 1835 at Christ Church, the same Oxford college attended by the Duke of Newcastle, the colonial secretary who headed the royal tour, and many other nineteenth-century parliamentarians, civil servants, and colonial administrators from among the aristocracy and gentry. By this time, Oxford had well recovered from its eighteenth-century laxness, offering an education that instilled an appreciation of fundamental principles. Its students were taught to think through reading the poetry, history, philosophy, and ethics of the Greek and Latin classics: Thucydides’ factual and astute account of the Peloponnesian War and its causes in the fifth century BCE; Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Greek tragedies that plumbed human depths; Cicero’s letters of advice to his son and his meditation on friendship. Because of this experience in the liberal arts as a development of his intellect and his humanity, Acland remained convinced throughout his life that aspiring doctors should also have a grounding in the humanities.

Acland’s studies at Oxford in the 1830s also took place at a moment when the university was profoundly stirred by the intelligent, deeply religious members of the Oxford Movement, the Tractarians. In their tracts, its leaders like John Henry Newman and the scholarly John Keble were seeking to revitalize the Church of England through a reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and a restoration of the vigour of the first centuries of Christianity. Henry Acland’s father and siblings were among those who supported projects associated with this religious revival: the translation of the rich Scriptural commentary of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church, the investigation of councils and controversies in the early Church, and the production of a Lives of the English Saints that captured the imagination of readers. While he was a student at Oxford, Henry Acland walked and talked with John Henry Newman and committed to memory John Keble’s Christian Year, a collection of poetic meditations on the seasons of the Christian liturgical year that accompanied many Victorians on their spiritual path through life. Newman’s ideas on education for which he is equally remembered are also kindred to Acland’s understanding of the importance of the liberal arts for the full development of the human being and his conviction that newly evolving disciplines like the physical sciences should become part of a general education.

In 1840, the day after he finished his exams at Christ Church, Acland began his medical studies at St. George’s, the large London hospital where he walked the wards and attended lectures. The decision to study medicine had been taken for him by his father, Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, who had been impressed during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 by an Austrian nobleman who gave his life to the care of the poor. During his studies in London, Acland was also introduced to the important anatomical collection at the Royal College of Surgeons arranged by Richard Owen, pre-eminent comparative anatomist and future founder of the Natural History Museum in London. Owen also introduced him to the advantages of the microscope which was just beginning to be accepted in medical studies after a significant improvement in lenses in the 1830s.

Acland completed further medical training in Edinburgh in 1845 and in the same year was appointed to teach anatomy at Christ Church. Although the teaching of science was still incidental in the literary world of Oxford, Acland breathed life into its study. To improve the College’s anatomical collection, he went to Scotland to dredge for marine specimens, then a relatively new scientific endeavour. He arranged the specimens in the collection according to their various functions, like the digestive or reproductive processes, following Owen’s system of classification that made anatomy into an intelligible science. Amid some controversy, he also introduced the microscope into the Oxford classroom.

Acland’s teaching of anatomy at Oxford was coincidental with the development in the nineteenth century of various physical sciences. By the 1840s, sciences such as geology and chemistry had begun to establish principles that made them less empirical and more fully teachable as university subjects. Acland believed that knowledge of these principles, like knowledge of the liberal arts, should now be part of a general education. He soon became a tireless advocate for the introduction of the physical sciences within the formal curriculum at Oxford. After his appointment as Radcliffe librarian, he furthered this aim by centralizing into one location the various colleges’ collections of scientific texts and the many periodicals which flourished at that time as an important means of communication among international scientific researchers.

His advocacy culminated in 1861 in the official opening of the Oxford University Museum, now the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which also housed the relocated Radcliffe science library. The enduring Neo-Gothic museum, for which Acland was largely responsible, brought under one roof the university’s collection of fossils, rocks, flora, and fauna that were the object of the nineteenth-century’s scientific investigation into the natural world. By bringing all the sciences into a single centre, the museum articulated an idea of science, promulgated especially by Alexander von Humboldt, which had animated scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century and was fully embraced by Henry Acland. In Humboldt’s idea of the cosmos, the physical sciences were understood as a complex, entire whole and each of the separate sciences was understood in relation to this whole. Zoology and botany, for example, were connected in the mutual relation of plants and animals; geography and meteorology were determinants in the vegetable world. Acland’s centralization of all the sciences at the Oxford University Museum and Darwin’s theory of evolution alike were rooted in this unitive idea of the cosmos.

Like other deeply religious people in the period, for Acland the cosmos included not only the physical sciences but human life and the arts as well. All were parts of a whole illuminated by the sunlight of divine grace. For Acland, there was no conflict between science and religion. However, at the same time, he was made increasingly aware of the emerging divide between religion and the necessarily material view of the world of the physical sciences. At a legendary meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at the Oxford University Museum just days before the departure of the royal tour in 1860, the theory of evolution in Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species was the subject of much conversation among the gathered scientists. It included an exchange between T.H. Huxley, the comparative anatomist who was Darwin’s champion, and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who was a member of the Royal Society and son of William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery politician. In their purported exchange, the materialist facts of physical science were pitted against the spiritual nature of humankind. Because, like Darwin and Huxley, Acland knew that the animating spirit in the debate was not Bishop Wilberforce but Richard Owen, he attempted vainly in subsequent years to reassure the distinguished but intransigent anatomist that his understanding of the spiritual nature of humankind was not diminished by the incontrovertible fact of the close similarity between the human brain and the brain of an ape. He urged Owen not to persist in denying this anatomical fact or to conflate the demonstrable and often provisional material truths of science with the perennial truths of the soul and religion.

Amid the unrelenting demands made on Acland’s time in the decade before the tour as he fought for the inclusion of the physical sciences at Oxford and attended to the construction of the University Museum, he was also a busy practising physician. His large clientele included Pre-Raphaelite artists, patients from the surrounding countryside, the Bishop of Oxford, and university deans. In 1856, he earned an international medical reputation with the publication of Memoir on the Cholera at Oxford in the Year 1854. Based on his work as consultant to the Board of Health and on his active involvement in the practical organization and treatment of cholera patients during the epidemic at Oxford, Acland’s work contributed not only to the literature on the administration of a pandemic but was also a model of medical research. Like John Snow, considered a founder of modern epidemiology, with his observations in London during the same cholera year, Acland’s carefully recorded data, statistical medical map, and analysis of medical statistics, including the connection between a higher incidence of mortality and polluted water sources, continued the search for the cause of cholera which thirty years later was discovered in microscopic bacteria or bacilli. In 1857, both his medical research and his influential contribution to the university made Acland the obvious choice for the appointment of Regius Professor of Medicine, traditionally a royal (Latin, regius: royal) appointment.

In addition to his passion for science and medicine, Henry Acland also took deep delight in art. From mid-century at Oxford he was a curator of the University Galleries, later merged with the Ashmolean Museum, which had acquired a large collection of drawings by Raphael and Michaelangelo in 1841. At the university he exercised an instrumentality in the domain of art similar to the instrumentality he exercised in the physical sciences and medicine. As an advocate for the introduction of Fine Art as a new discipline at Oxford, he succeeded in persuading John Ruskin, the century’s foremost art critic, to become the first Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869. Artists were also among the many guests in the Aclands’ home. In 1855 when Pre-Raphaelite artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burnes-Jones, Holman Hunt, and William Morris were painting tempera frescos in the university’s debating-room, they were the Aclands’ constant visitors. Acland also attended to them as physician, prescribing a winter abroad to slender, copper-haired Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s laudanum-addicted model. When Siddal gave Acland one of her own paintings in gratitude, it became part of his own growing and eclectic collection of art that came to include many of the nineteenth-century’s leading artists.

Drawing and painting were also Acland’s recreation. Amid the multiple demands of his busy professional life, on holidays and travels he kept a sketch book at hand, finding in art a restoration of overtaxed faculties in an attunement of sense, mind, hand, and heart with the landscapes, seascapes, and portraits he painted. He first began cultivating this artistic sensibility during the eighteen months spent in 1837-39 in the Mediterranean aboard a British naval ship after a leading physician and family friend prescribed rest and sea air for his violent headaches. Here in the Mediterranean light, he observed colour and the play of shadows while sketching the Acropolis and sites from antiquity in Turkey and at Tunis.

In his own artwork, Acland also benefited from a warm, life-long friendship with John Ruskin, his fellow student at Christ Church. In a letter in 1841, Ruskin expressed surprise at how little Acland knew about basic techniques in the use of colour and the depiction of shadows. He advised him about the application of yellow ochre mixed with Indian red to make gray for shadows and, in accordance with his aesthetic theory that the direct observation of nature was the artist’s starting-point, advised him to investigate the principles of art through his personal observation of colours and shadows: to ask, for example, how shadows change as the sun moves and why they have such a form or such a depth.

In 1853, Acland spent a week sketching in the Scottish Highlands in the company of Ruskin, Ruskin’s wife, and the painter, John Everett Millais. Acland held the canvas as Millais painted the wild grandeur of a mountain stream cascading through tough metamorphic rock by a dark, overhanging bank sprinkled with common flowers like butterwort and violets. This work, to which Millais later added the figure of Ruskin contemplating the scene, reflects Ruskin’s rejection of any mannerist use of scenery and asserts the Wordsworthian sense of nature as the object of inspired, ontological contemplation. In 1869 the Portrait of Ruskin, at Glenfinlas, now considered a landmark in British art, became part of Acland’s collection, a gift from Ruskin.

In 1854-55, Acland also corresponded with the artist, Samuel Palmer. They discussed the best sites for painting the westerly sun setting into the sea, such as Margate, favoured by J.M.W. Turner. Acland attempted to arrange a week of watercolour instruction with Palmer whose early ethereal landscapes influenced by William Blake are much admired today. However, perhaps the most fundamental influence on Acland’s work was the technique that he had learned as a youth from the Principles of Landscape Drawing, 1816-1821 by John Varley. A friend of the artist, William Blake, Varley outlined four stages in painting landscapes, each of which could stand on its own as complete in itself. The first stage involved a quick pencil sketch recording in a few lines the impression of a landscape. In the second stage, indelible brown ink was added rapidly. In the sepia tones found in some of Acland’s pictures we find the third stage which involved laying in all the shadows very broadly with what was called Cologne earth, a colour made from brown coal. In the final stage, such as in Acland’s compelling portrait of a Mi’kmaq woman painted in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, colours were added in broad, flat washes completed with white for points of special brilliance.

The 250 sketches and paintings of places and people that Acland worked in this way during the tour of North America both complement and supplement his letters.

Sarah & Henry Acland at Oxford

According to a biographer, Sarah was admired for the loveliness of her character. She was a strong, somewhat reserved, intelligent woman who, like Henry, was motivated by a deep interior religious life, by the Lord of love of Dante’s sonnets. She read poetry, contemporary metaphysics, and political science. She attended concerts and lectures on the physical sciences. She was also deeply sympathetic to her husband’s causes: in making the physical sciences and the humanities at Oxford a propaedeutic to the medical training that took place in hospitals; in establishing national standards for the practice of medicine; in improving public health through much-needed municipal sanitation; in creating public interest in the physical sciences. Her eloquent letters written from travels abroad also mirror Henry’s artistic sensibility in her descriptions of changing colours and contours of landscape and in conjuring up people and places.

Henry’s and Sarah’s home on Broad Street in central Oxford, on what is now the site of the Weston Library (formerly the new Bodleian Library), was busy and hospitable. It was run with the help of twelve servants, including a coachman who drove Acland as much as seventy miles a day over rutted roads to visit patients. On the first floor of the house were the doctor’s waiting room for his patients and his office. Through the hospitality the Aclands extended in the rest of their home, they realized the desire expressed by Henry in a letter to Sarah just months before they were married. He wrote of his hope that they might use their privileges not only to their mutual strengthening and happiness, but that “we should live so as to have happiness & peace & truth in some measure to spare & spread about us.” (Bodleian Library, MS. Acland, d.4)

Sick students, visiting scholars, and travellers from abroad in need of lodging stayed with the Aclands. On a daily basis, anyone who wanted to speak to Henry was welcomed at the breakfast table at 8 am. During their early years at Oxford, Sarah invited into their home for Sunday tea Oxford chimney sweeps, children who were often crippled by their work in the narrow confines of chimneys. Then, for many years on Sunday evenings they invited undergraduate acquaintances uprooted from their home life to listen to music in their drawing room, for readings, and conversation. As Sarah and Henry mediated a moral and intellectual grace to students, they again fulfilled an ideal of liberal education for which John Henry Newman, still today esteemed as an educator, had pleaded unsuccessfully in the 1830s. At the same time, they provided a setting for the formation of friendships among students from varied backgrounds which Newman held to be as important to students as their studies.

The constant stream of visitors welcomed in their house throughout the years was drawn from among the full spectrum of Henry’s and Sarah’s friends and acquaintances from Britain and from abroad: poets, artists, bishops, distinguished scientists and professors, visiting medical examiners, Queen Victoria’s sons, Prime Minister Gladstone, and politicians from opposing parties. In the year after her death in 1878, the establishment of the Sarah Acland Home for Nurses is a final defining statement of the mutuality in common cause of Henry and Sarah. Sarah’s friends thought it a fitting, practical tribute to her to found a home for district nurses to serve the poor of Oxford. Henry, for his part, had been a constant, strong supporter of Florence Nightingale since mid-century when she first campaigned to establish nursing in England as a profession by providing hospital training courses for women.

The Letters

Sarah, the recipient of Acland’s letters from North America, was as centrally important to Henry’s heart as she was to their busy home. She was mother to their daughter, Sarah Angelina, and to their seven sons born between 1847 and 1858. Henry, an avid sailor, said that he was always miserable out of her sight unless he was near the sea and then he could endure it. Sarah remarked wryly when Henry acquired a yacht called Gertrude that she was her only rival. Their lives of deep companionship at Oxford are witnessed throughout Henry’s letters from North America, addressed to “dearest wifie,” or “dearest Sarah,” as he wrote of his visits to psychiatric asylums in the Atlantic colonies, of the high standards at the new Faculty of Medicine at Laval University in Quebec, of hospital architecture in colonial towns designed to prevent air borne and water borne diseases through provisions for sanitation and ventilation. She read with interest of his conversations with a young Mohawk on education, with an executive of the Grand Trunk Railway on its bankruptcy, with the Canadian governor general on the nature of law; of his meetings with the colonies’ prominent scientists in fields like geology, meteorology, and magnetism; and of his restorative attendance at Sunday services in places along the way, such as Christ Church, Montreal’s beautiful new Anglican cathedral. Like his letters, his artwork, too, was meant for Sarah. His many portraits of Indigenous people, his sketches of shorelines and townscapes were undertaken as a gift for her. Together, his art and his wide-ranging letters not only mirror the intellectual, social, and political life in 1860 in Canada but are at the same time a testimony to Sarah.

The letters in this volume are the extracts from Acland’s letters which Sarah later transcribed in her fairer handwriting. It includes one letter addressed to his “dear boys,” then aged from two to thirteen, which recounts in simple language the geology of the Saguenay region and a white-water adventure by canoe during a fishing excursion. Constraints of time meant that the letters were written, as Acland says, “under much pressure & generally at night.” At times, such constraints meant that he was regretfully reduced to sending Sarah a concise diary, a simple listing of the highlights of his stay in Halifax, Fredericton, and Charlottetown. At this point in the tour, Acland made the decision to leave the descriptions of processions and dinners and other official events for Sarah to read in the London press and to concentrate in his letters on accounts related to his own professional interests.

Acland’s first letter with its accompanying artwork begins on July 15 as he writes from aboard the HMS Hero during the crossing from Plymouth to St John’s, Newfoundland, for the first of their visits in the four maritime colonies. From St John’s the royal party sailed to Halifax where they were welcomed by crowds for miles along the harbour quais. En route, they stopped at the coal mines in Sydney and passed by the melancholy ruins of Louisbourg, emblem of France’s lost colonial past. Next, they left Halifax to cross the Bay of Fundy to the bustling port of Saint John, New Brunswick. After a day in Saint John, they steamed up the Saint John River to the colony’s inland capital at Fredericton. On August 9, they left Fredericton, travelling variously by steamship, ferry, rail, and horse-drawn coach to rejoin the Hero on the shores of the Northumberland Strait for their crossing to Prince Edward Island, the last visited of the four Atlantic provinces.

Then, as the HMS Hero left behind Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the royal tour began a progress along the great waterways that led through the United Province of Canada, popularly called the united Canadas, and to the interior of the continent. From Prince Edward Island, the Hero and its companion ships proceeded up through the expansive Gulf of St Lawrence towards Gaspé Bay, the point of entry into the united Canadas where they were met by the steamships of the governor general and his executive council. After two days of respite from official duties amid the dramatic natural beauty of the Saguenay, a tributary of the St Lawrence River, they continued further up the St Lawrence, making a splendid formal entry into Quebec City on August 18. From there, aboard an elegantly refitted mail steamer, the Kingston, the royal party travelled up the great river to Montreal, located at the confluence of the Ottawa and St Lawrence Rivers. From Montreal they followed the Ottawa River to Ottawa, site of the new capital of the united Canadas and a throbbing hub of the timber industry. As guests of a lumber baron, they went on an excursion by steam boat and by canoe further up the Ottawa River to Arnprior, continuing their journey the same day by horse-drawn coach along a hinterland road to the rail station of a recently-finished section of a rail line. They arrived by night to a jubilant reception in Brockville on the St Lawrence River.

Here, they rejoined the Kingston to proceed up the St Lawrence to the city of Kingston, the point where the waters of the Great Lakes drain from Lake Ontario into the St Lawrence. From Kingston, they steamed along the north shore of Lake Ontario to Belleville, Cobourg, and Toronto. Rail construction in the last decade made possible their day-excursions from Cobourg to Peterborough, from Toronto to the port of Collingwood on Lake Huron and to London, a site considered by the first lieutenant governor for the capital of the province. They reached the end-point of the Grand Trunk Railway at Sarnia where Lake Huron drains into the St Clair River and the lower Great Lakes. Towards the end of the tour of British North America, Acland and the royal party enjoyed three days of rest at Niagara Falls. Here Acland sketched the sublime falls with its immense volume of water from Lake Erie cascading over the escarpment. On September 29, after visiting Hamilton, the royal party departed from the united Canadas at Windsor, crossing the St Clair River to Detroit where they began their unofficial tour of the United States.

Acland’s paintings and sketches are integral to the letters that describe his experiences during the tour. As he himself cautions, the pictures vary considerably in quality, from very tentative pencil drawings to water colours and lovely ink sketches. His portraits are often less successful than his townscapes and landscapes. Because he sketched and painted only as the occasion or weather allowed, the pictures are unevenly distributed. There are fewer pictures from Toronto, for example, than along the Saguenay and Ottawa Rivers. For her part, Sarah supplemented both the descriptive and pictorial record of the trip with pictures and articles cut from London newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Times which she made into a scrapbook for their mutual enjoyment. Her subsequent transcription of her husband’s letters from the tour was circulated among friends. If, as has been suggested, Acland considered publishing the letters, this present publication more than 150 years later is a belated realization of his hope.

Context of the Tour

The Prince of Wales’ tour of British North America in 1860 was both successful in promoting good will and a media sensation that provided a welcome antidote to Britain’s relentless global entanglements. In the few years before the royal tour, Britain had been involved in three controversial wars: in the Crimea, in India, and in China. During the Crimean War (1854-56), in a contest among the great powers as the Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate, British troops and their French allies had fought along with Ottoman troops especially on the Crimean Peninsula to capture strategic Russian positions, such as the fortress at Sevastopol on the Black Sea. Using the new media of photography and the telegraph, newspaper dispatches reported bungling defeats, inadequate supply measures, and an overwhelming percentage of deaths from disease and exposure to the cold. The Crimean War was soon followed in 1857 by a widespread rebellion against British rule in India, referred to as the Indian Mutiny in Britain and as the First War of Independence in India. In the same year, the ignominious Second Opium War in China began. With the taking of the Port of Canton, the Chinese were forced to lift their ban on opium which western traders had been smuggling through the port in exchange for Chinese goods such as tea and silk. Lord Elgin, iconic governor general of the united Canadas from1847-54, was in Canton in 1860 as British envoy to China demanding ratification of the treaty drawn up after the British victory. Just two days before the Prince of Wales left North America to return to England, Lord Elgin ordered the controversial burning of the fabled summer palace in Peking in retaliation for the deaths of a journalist and military personnel during a diplomatic mission.

The rapturous reception in North America of Queen Victoria’s oldest son, the young heir to the British throne, and its intense media coverage by British, Canadian, and American reporters and illustrators provided relief, then, from turbulent news involving war among the great powers, imperial tensions, and trade aggressions. So, too, in the United States, unknowingly on the brink of civil war, the presidential campaign that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House vied for space in newspapers with the lavish coverage of the royal tour.

The invitation for the royal visit had been first initiated by the colonial legislature of the united Canadas but soon came to include invitations from the four Atlantic colonies and an unofficial, whirlwind tour of major cities in the United States. The immediate occasion was the official opening of the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, then the world’s longest railway bridge. It was hailed as the eighth wonder of the world, not only for its length but for its remarkable engineering mastery over the immense power of ice floes on the St Lawrence River. British contractors, who were then revolutionizing transport as railway builders to the world, had completed this final link in the 1,403 kilometers (872 miles) of track that connected the ice-free Atlantic port of Portland, Maine, to the Canadian border-town of Sarnia, located at the head of the St Clair River and a hub for Chicago’s trade in packed meats, flour, and grain. For its promoters in Britain zealously raising capital among investors to finance the bridge, the railway opened the way for the future exploitation and transport of resources and realized a network of year-round, speeded-up, international trade. For ardent advocates of the railway in British North America, such as the united Canadas’ co-premiers, George-Etienne Cartier and John A. Macdonald, the railway heralded progress and future prosperity within the colonies as it spurred the development of local industries by opening up new markets and by removing serious obstacles to transport in winter.

The invitations extended to the Crown by the British North American Colonies and their acceptance by the monarch were underpinned by what the newspaper reports described as the mutual “bonds of affection” that linked the mother country and the colonies. The fervent outpouring of affection evident everywhere along the tour was rooted to a large degree in the massive migration of some 800,000 British immigrants between 1815 and 1860 who had ties of affection to the country from which they had come, to family and friends who remained in Britain, and a commitment to British institutions, such as parliament and the monarchy. In what is now the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec, forty percent of the populace in Quebec City was British and nearly half of the population in Montreal. Canadian bonds of affection with Britain had been expressed in the colony’s support of Britain during the Crimean War. Queen Victoria’s desire to express her appreciation for the contribution of £20,000 to the Imperial Government by the united Canadas to the war was one of the reasons she accepted their invitation for a royal visit.

While it might seem surprising today amid Quebec’s recurrent claims to sovereignty, the Prince of Wales also received an enthusiastic welcome among the French-speaking populace in Quebec and Montreal. His reception reflects a culture conscious that it had been able to retain within the framework of British institutions the most profoundly important elements of its identity: its religion and language as well as French civil law and a franchise that extended broadly to a population comprised largely of small farmers, or habitants. The co-premier, George-Etienne Cartier, was both deeply aware of his inherited French culture and a monarchist. Although he had participated in the Rebellion of 1837 in protest against the fraudulent abuses of colonial officials, had been accused of treason, and had fled to the United States, he soon after became convinced that the welfare of the Canadas and the protection of French-Canadian identity within it could be achieved best through political means in a system derived from the British constitutional model.

The maturing political development of the British North American Colonies made their desire for federation one of the unofficial focuses of the royal tour. The Duke of Newcastle, who headed the royal party, was the secretary of state for the Colonies, responsible not only for the appointment of governors in British colonies but for their forms of government. It was to the Duke that colonial requests and grievances were addressed. During the course of the tour, he had ample scope for conversation on matters of colonial concern including the subject of confederation. In the capitals of the Atlantic colonies he met lieutenant governors and executive councils. Then, after entering the waters of the united Canadas, the travelling party included Sir Edmund Head, the governor general, and John A. Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier who within a few years were to be key figures in the confederation of four of the colonies which formed the nucleus of the Dominion of Canada.

The opinion on confederation of Sir Edmund Head, colonial administrator in the British North American Colonies for sixteen years, was already well known. He had long been an eloquent advocate of a federation of self-governing colonies allied by ties of affection to Britain. In 1851, as lieutenant governor of New Brunswick he wrote of his vision of a new nation extending from sea to sea in which the forms and the substance of the British constitution should come to maturity. When Responsible Government, based on Britain’s constitutional monarchy, was introduced in New Brunswick, he nurtured the governor’s and executive council’s responsibility to the elected assembly and encouraged self-government through inter-colonial free trade between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Then, as governor general of the united Canadas, even as he dealt with the difficulties of an uneasy relation between two different cultures united under a single legislature, he recognized that the two Canadas were linked by their same essential interests and their common geography with the St Lawrence River in the lower province as the outlet to the ocean for the upper province’s vast system of inland lakes.

At the time of the tour, political leaders within the united Canadas had also opened the way towards confederation. John A. Macdonald, who just seven years later became the first prime minister of the federated colonies, and his co-premier, George-Etienne Cartier, had already effected a definitive break in the contentious political climate of the united Canadas through their political cooperation. Following the direction already indicated by others, in 1856 these conservative leaders in the two provinces made common cause. The beginning of strong party government not only circumvented ethnic division between the colonies but opened the way for a resolution of political tensions through electoral change and enabled political coordination for a larger federated union.

Another unofficial matter for investigation during the tour, resulting from a request made by Queen Victoria personally to the Duke of Newcastle, concerned the particular plight of some indigenous people caught in an impasse by a recent Indian Act. Aggressive or restrictive policies towards Aboriginals had been a subject of protest both in Britain and by Aboriginal people. As pressure from immigration led to the acquisition of more land through treaties in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the treatment of Aboriginals had become a concern to British missionary and humanitarian lobbies. Such, for example, was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, established in 1837. In the same year, a British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginals provided a devastating description of the situation of Aboriginal peoples and made recommendations which were largely ignored. The report protested against the theft of lands, asserted the legal right of Indians to private ownership of land, and suggested the need for urgent intervention in Upper Canada. It also recommended that Aboriginal policy was better under British rather than colonial control which allowed colonial self-interest to prevail. The granting of Responsible Government to the colonies in the following decade shifted colonial power and opened the way to the kind of consequences for Aboriginals that the British Parliamentary Committee had warned against.

The plight of Catherine Sutton, expressed in an audience with Queen Victoria, was an instance of the looming legal problems for Aboriginals regarding land tenure. Shortly before the departure of the royal party from England, in the presence of the Duke of Newcastle, Catherine Sutton (Nahnebahwequay, or Upright Woman) had represented to the Queen the impossible entanglements visited upon her and others by an act drawn up by the governor general’s secretary who was responsible for the Indian Department. It was entitled “An Act to encourage a Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend laws respecting Indians.” Its aggressive assimilationist policy, passed by the colonial legislature of the united Canadas in 1857, was effected in particular through regulation of the legal right of Aboriginal ownership of land, the legal regulation of reserves, and the government control and manipulation of annuities owed in return for the acquisition of land.

Caught in a predicament that foreshadowed further legal restrictions, Catherine Sutton explained to the Queen that more than a decade before the enactment of the Gradual Civilization Act she had been granted 200 acres of land at Owen Sound near Georgian Bay by the Newash Band. She and her English husband had cleared forty acres of land, built a barn and a stable, and then left for Methodist missionary work elsewhere. On their return, they found that through a questionable treaty negotiated with some members of the Newash Band their land had been surveyed into town lots and offered for sale at public auction by the government. She was informed that her written grant to the land was invalid because reserve land was communally owned and the chiefs had no power to dispose of it to private parties. When she attempted to buy back her ceded land at public auction, she was told that in accordance with the Gradual Civilization Act she could buy back ceded land only if she gave up her Indian status. Because she was married to a white man, her request for her accumulated share in the band’s annuities promised from the sale of the land was turned down. As for legal recourse, the Gradual Civilization Act also stipulated that Aboriginals could neither sue nor be sued.

After her fruitless petition to the colonial legislature for either compensation for her loss of land or for title to the land, with Quaker help and the assistance of the Aborigines’ Society she journeyed to England to present personally to the Crown her plight and that of others in similar circumstances. The Queen was sympathetic to Catherine Sutton and her particular case was later resolved. However, just two days after her audience at Buckingham Palace and ten days before the departure of the Prince of Wales for the royal tour, Britain handed over responsibility for the Indian Department to the Province of Canada leaving Aboriginals at the mercy of the colonial legislature, the very people who had much to gain from this power.

While the Duke of Newcastle and government officials discussed colonial matters, the primary focus for the public and for the newspaper reporters accompanying the royal tour was Edward, the eighteen-year old Prince of Wales. Although the young prince had been a source of disappointment as a student to his father, Prince Albert, who was prominent in scientific and literary circles in England, he was affable and socially at ease. At official dinners and in meeting colonials at lengthy levees, he was good-humoured, charming, and tactful. He was a source of delight through his personal, unreserved pleasure in the dancing and music at balls in towns and cities along the tour. At the same time, the tour was part of his own education as a future constitutional monarch when he would become a symbol of institutional unity and continuity with responsibilities for ceremonial duties and for the public relations of the state. It was in this capacity as representative of the Crown that he laid the cornerstone of the new parliament buildings for the united Canadas in Ottawa and opened exhibition halls and public parks. In all these official duties his personal charm assured the success of the tour and captivated the public imagination.

Contextualization of the Letters

My role has been to animate the context of Acland’s broad-ranging observations and to provide a glimpse into the rich background of the observer. For example, I have placed Acland’s judgments on lunatic asylums in the Atlantic colonies and Quebec within the context of the period’s new ideal in therapy that lies at the well-springs of modern psychiatric care. His observations on the geology of coal seams in Sydney and his visits to a meteorological observatory in Montreal and the magnetic observatory in Toronto are framed within the context of the coming of age of the sciences as a modern global enterprise. Dates are indicated for the advent of the steam-driven saws in Saint John, New Brunswick, which revolutionized the massive mid-nineteenth century lumber industry, and the steam-operated grain elevators at Sarnia which increased exponentially the production and shipping of grain. The origin and colonial development of the Orange Lodge is traced in the context of the royal party’s encounter with intractable Orangemen at Kingston and Belleville. In general, I sketch and identify the many and various people Acland encountered who were part of the fabric of life in 1860 in the British North American Colonies: the Indigenous people in his portraits, lumbermen, bishops, scientists, physicians, educators, producers of cod liver oil, mining agents, and lieutenant governors.

Jane Rupert

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