Pictures of Canadian Life: A Record of Actual Experiences

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Nothing can be drearier or more monotonous than a trip to Canada in the early season of the year. After you leave Ireland, you see no ships—nothing but the sea, grey and dull as the heaven above. Now and then a whale comes up to blow, and that is all; and when the wind blows hard, you get nothing but big, lumpy waves, which set the ship rolling, and add only to the discomforts. And then you are on the Newfoundland banks, where you may spend dull days and duller nights—now going at half-speed, now stopping altogether, while the fog-horn blows dismally every few minutes, and whence you can see scarcely the length of the ship ahead.

Like Oscar Wilde, I own that I am very much disappointed with the Atlantic. The icebergs are monotonous—when you have seen one, that is enough. In the saloon, we are a sad, dull party; even in the smoking-room, one can scarcely get up a decent laugh. I pity the poor emigrants in the steerage, whom a clever young Irish journalist on board, with the instinct of his race, has failed to excite into a proper state of indignation on account of the discomforts of the voyage, and the hardness of the potatoes—always a matter of complaint in all the ships that I have ever been on board of.

The raw, cold, damp fog has taken all the starch out of the steerage passengers, always the first to grumble on sea, as they are on shore; yet on one occasion they did go so far as to send a deputation to the captain, and what, think you, was their grievance?—that they had no sauce to their fish!—a grievance of little account, when one thinks of the sauce we had served up in the saloon.

As a rule, the steerage passengers are a difficult body to deal with; they seem so helpless, and require so much looking after. Mr. Jones has enough to do to look after his. If they lose anything, however paltry, he is appealed to. If they require anything not provided in the bill of fare, he is sent for. It is very clear to me that his party have great advantages. He has taken down all their occupations, and when we arrive at Quebec they will all, if possible, be provided with employment, and will be at once forwarded to their destination, without loss of time or expenditure of cash. Many of them are also assisted by his Society with small sums of money, and in every way they are helped as few other emigrants are.

We have on board a party of fifty-one lads, sent out by Dr. Bowman Stephenson, who has a depôt somewhere near Hamilton, and a helper is on board to take care of them. Some of them are of very juvenile years, and, it is to be believed, in Canada will find a far more favourable lot than they ever could in the streets and slums of the East End.

‘What are you going to do?’ said I to one of them the other morning.

‘Please, sir, I am going to be adopted,’ was the reply; and adopted he will be by some worthy couple who, having no children of their own, are ready to give the little outcast a home such as he never could have found in the old country.

We have also an agent on board, who, for a certain sum, agrees to take young fellows out and to find them suitable situations. That is a course I should not recommend. A young fellow had far better keep that extra cash in his pocket, get out as far into the North-west as he can, there hire himself to some settler, who at this time of year is sure to be in need of his services, and then in a year or two he will be able to get a grant of land on his own account, on which, after three years of real hard work, he will be able to live in peace and comfort, and to achieve an independence of which he has no chance on our side of the Atlantic.

It quite grieves me to think of the poor farmers I have known at home, wasting their time and capital and strength in a hopeless effort to make both ends meet, who might be doing well out here, with the certainty that their families will be left in a comfortable position as far as this world’s goods are concerned. One thing, however, I must strongly impress upon the emigrant, and that is, the necessity of coming out in the spring.

It is madness to cross the Atlantic in the autumn; when he lands at Quebec, he will find nothing to do, and must live on his capital, or starve till next spring; and if I might recommend a ship, it certainly would be the Sarnia, on which I now write. She is slow but sure. Her commander, Captain Gibson, is all that a captain should be—not a brilliant conversationalist, not one of those men who set the table in a roar; but cautious, skilful, fully alive to the responsibilities of his position and the dangers of his calling. As to the dangers, it is impossible to exaggerate them. There are more than a thousand of us on board, and were anything to happen, not more than three hundred of us could, I should think, be crowded into the boats, provided that the sea were quite calm, and that we had plenty of time to leave the ship; and in a panic and in bad weather, it is clear that even such boats as the Sarnia is supplied with would be of little avail. Safety seems to me a mere matter of chance. You hit on an iceberg, and down goes the ship with all on board, leaving no record behind.