Elliott, Bruce, 2004-2005: Emigrant Recruitment by the New Brunswick Land Company: The Pioneer Settlers of Stanley and Harvey.

********************************************************************************

Table of Contents, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, Previous << 14 >> Next, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37

 

An enthusiastic account of the party's arrival had already been reprinted from the British Colonist for the home audience:

We have great pleasure in announcing the arrival, on Saturday last, of the ship D'Arcy from Berwick-upon-Tweed, after a very pleasant passage of 33 days, having on board 110 settlers for the N.B. Land Company.   These people are regular practical farmers, of good character, and highly respectable appearance, and such persons as are destinated, at no distant date, to make apparent the agricultural capabilities of this fine province, and to produce the bread stuffs that have been hitherto imported into this country, thereby removing a reproach upon our industry, which has too long disgraced us.   These people bring along with them the unsophisticated and gentle manners of "Merry England," with the beautiful associations of Border Ballad and Border chivalry.   Much credit is due to Captain Kendle, for his judicious choice in peopling the Company's Land with a race of intelligent, hardy, industrious, and virtuous yeomanry.   We feel assured that they will be favourably received, by the inhabitants of the district to which they are destined.   We understand that hundreds more await only the favourable report of these people, to waft themselves and their little ones to this land of promise.   - British Colonist, New Brunswick paper. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

This nostalgic depiction of the Border English no doubt owes something to the ethnic predilections of the Colonist' s editor as well as to the novels of Sir Walter Scott. ⁽⁴¹⁾  But it must also be read in light of the fact that immigration into New Brunswick by this time was overwhelmingly Irish and increasingly Roman Catholic. ⁽⁴²⁾  This was to prove an explosive mix in the succeeding decade.   The arrival of Protestant English agriculturalists was therefore welcomed by residents concerned about the changing social and ethnic composition of the colonial population.   This press account of the Berwick immigrants stands in remarkable contrast to the outpouring of journalistic outrage that had greeted the Company's proposal for juvenile immigration two years earlier.   Kendall did not see this laudatory report immediately as he and his family arrived a month later on the Liverpool from the city of the same name.⁽⁴³⁾

_________________________________________________________________________

(40) Berwick Advertiser, 13 August 1836, p. 4, col. 4.

 

(41) On the influence of Scott on the creation of a Borders identity, see Claire Lamont, "The Discovery of the Borders: Sir Walter Scott" in Donald Omand, ed., The Borders Book (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1995), 147-59 and Iain G. Brown, ed., Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott: the Image and the Influence (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003).

 

(42) Peter Toner, "The Origins of the New Brunswick Irish, 1851", Journal of Canadian Studies 23, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 104-19.

 

(43) New Brunswick Courier, 2 July 1836, p. 2, col. 5.