Other bands of Loyalists made their way to Canada by land; some by the military highway to Lower Canada, Whitehall, Lake Champlain, Ticonderoga, Plattsburg, and then turning northward proceeded to Cornwall; then ascending the St. Lawrence, along the north side of which many of them settled. This Champlain route was the common one to Lower Canada, descending the River Richelieu from St. John's to Sorel.
But the most common land route from New York to Upper Canada, chosen by the Loyalists at the close of the war, was to Albany 180 miles up the Hudson river, which divides into two branches about ten miles north of Albany. The western branch is called the Mohawk, leading to Rome, formerly Fort Stanwix. A branch of the Mohawk, called Wood Creek, leads towards the Oneida lake, which was reached by a portage. From Oneida Lake, Lake Ontario was reached by the Oswego river. Flat-bottom boats, specially built or purchased for the purpose by the Loyalists, were used in this journey. The portages over which the boats had to be hauled, and all their contents carried, are stated to be thirty miles. On reaching Oswego, some of the Loyalists coasted along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario to Kingston, and thence up the Bay of Quinté; others went westward, along the south shore of the lake to Niagara and Queenston; some pursued their course to the head of the lake at Burlington; others made their way up the Niagara river to Queenston, conveyed their boats over the portage of ten or twelve miles to Chippewa, thence up the river and into Lake Erie, settling chiefly in what was called the "Long Point Country," now the county of Norfolk. This journey of hardship, privation, and exposure occupied from two to three months. The parents and family of the writer of this history were from the middle of May to the middle of July, 1799, in making this journey in an open boat. Generally two or more families would unite in one company, and thus assist each other in carrying their boats and goods over the portages.
A considerable number came to Canada from New Jersey and the neighbourhood of Philadelphia on foot through the then wilderness of New York, carrying their little effects and small children on pack horses, and driving their cattle, which subsisted on herbage of the woods and valleys. Some of the families of this class testified to the relief and kindness they received in their extreme exigencies from the Indians.
The hardships, exposures, privations and sufferings which the first Loyalists endured in making their way from their confiscated homes to Canada, were longer and more severe than anything narrated of the Pilgrim and Puritan Fathers of New England in their voyages from England to Massachusetts Bay; and the persecutions to which the emigration of the Puritans from England is attributed were trifling indeed in comparison of the persecutions, imprisonments, confiscations, and often death, inflicted on the loyal adherents to the Crown of England in the United States, and which drove the survivors among them to the wilderness of Canada. The privations and hardships experienced by many of these Loyalist patriots for years after the first settlement in Canada, as testified by the papers in the subsequent chapter, were much more severe than anything experienced by the Pilgrim Fathers during the first years of their settlement in Massachusetts. These latter could keep a "Harvest Home" festival of a week, at the end of the first year after their landing in the Bay of Massachusetts; but it was years after their arrival in Canada before the Loyalists could command means to keep any such festival. The stern adherence of the Puritans to their principles was quite equalled by the stern adherence of the Loyalists to their principles, and far excelled by their sacrifices and sufferings.
Canada has a noble parentage, the remembrance of which its inhabitants may well cherish with respect, affection, and pride.
FOOTNOTES:
[134] "Had we pursued a wise course, people of our own stock would not have become our rivals in ship-building, in the carriage of our great staples, in the prosecution of the fisheries, and in the production of wheat and other breadstuffs. Nor is this all: we should not have had the hatred, the influence and the talents of persons of Loyalist origin to contend against in the questions which have and may yet come up between us and England.
"Thus, as it seems to me, humanity to the adherents of the Crown, and prudent regard for our own interests, required a general amnesty; as it was, we not only dealt harshly with many, and unjustly with some, but doomed to misery others, whose hearts and hopes had been as true as those of Washington himself. Thus in the divisions of families which everywhere occurred, and which formed one of the most distressing circumstances of the conflict, there were wives and daughters, who, although bound to Loyalists by the holiest ties, had given their sympathies to the right from the beginning, and who now, in the triumph of the cause which had their prayers, went meekly—as woman ever meets a sorrowful lot—into hopeless, interminable exile." (Introductory Historical Essay to Sabine's Sketches of the Loyalists of the American Revolution, pp. 90, 91.)
[135] Preface to Colonel Sabine's Biographical Sketches of the American Loyalists, or Adherents to the British Crown, in the War of the Revolution.
[136] The Loyalists who were attached to military corps raised in the extreme South were principally of the Southern States, and a large portion of them settled in the Bahamas, Florida, and the British West Indies. "Some of the officers who belonged to the 'Maryland Loyalists,' and some of the privates of that corps, embarked for Nova Scotia, but were wrecked in the Bay of Fundy, and a part perished." (Sabine.)