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Elliott, Bruce, 2004-2005: Emigrant Recruitment by the New Brunswick Land
Company: The Pioneer Settlers of Stanley and Harvey.********************************************************************************
Curiously, Lieut. Kendall had slammed English workingmen the year before, expressing a preference for the Irish in his annual report to the Company directors in England. Perhaps at that juncture he felt that they would have to accept the rising tide of Irish immigration as a given, or perhaps he intended the tale as a caution to English emigrants not to have excessive expectations. Be that as it may, he was soon on his way to recruit in the Borders. His curious diatribe was an aside to a description of New Brunswick culinary habits: "The mode of cookery at the taverns [in New Brunswick] is any thing but pleasant or agreeable," he had lamented. "Tea will be his beverage morning, noon, and night. Every farm-house has tea at every meal, and this is the great and constant complaint of the English. 'I don't mind the work,' say they, 'only give me beer;' and in default of which they go to rum; it is unfortunately too cheap." Kendall reported that "it is a wholesome draught of table beer that the working man requires, and without which the English labourer cannot, or what amounts to the same thing, fancies he cannot, work. This is one of the principal reasons why the greatest number of emigrants are Irish, on whom the effects of rum, though detrimental, are less so than on those unaccustomed to the use of spirits." He considered it "singular" that though there were "yearly importations, and those from the most disturbed districts of Ireland, where the very parties themselves have been guilty of the greatest atrocities, there is an almost total absence of crime in the province; the few petty thefts that have been committed, I am sorry to be compelled to say, have been almost invariably traced to the English emigrants, who, in general, have been so much petted and taken care of at home, that they are comparatively unfitted to be thrown on their own resources, and linger about the town till their last shilling is expended, instead of setting instantly and determinedly out in quest of work." (44) As it was, the Company intended that the Berwick emigrants be "petted and taken care of", conveyed directly to Stanley and provided with work, provisions, houses, and partially cleared farms.
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