History
Historical Items/Documents
Gallery
Elliott, Bruce, 2004-2005: Emigrant Recruitment by the New Brunswick Land
Company: The Pioneer Settlers of Stanley and Harvey.*******************************************************************************
As in the case of the D'Arcy, the safe arrival of the Cornelius was duly reported in the Berwick newspaper, but this time the report was not printed in full:
In a letter received in Wooler a few days ago from one of the passengers of the Cornelius, which sailed from Berwick with a number of emigrants for New Brunswick, it is stated that after a pleasant voyage of about six weeks they had arrived at St. John's all in good health; and that there had been two births on board in the course of the voyage.(78)
We are fortunate that a brief shipboard journal, believed to have been written by a member of the James Nesbitt family, survives (see sidebar). Apart from the usual seasickness and a heavy gale that lasted several days the voyage was uneventful. This time no one aboard died, and children were born at sea to Eleanor and William Grieve on 24 June and to Margaret and David Cesford on 4 July.(79)
On arrival all but two of the families from the Cornelius continued on to Fredericton aboard the Waterwitch steamboat, "where they received the unfavourable news that a stop had been put to the Company's works" .(80) pending the arrival of the new commissioner, Capt. Richard Hayne.(81) They also learned of the complaints of their English friends, which would erupt upon Hayne's arrival, and found the economy of the province, reported upon so glowingly the year before, staggering in the wake of an international financial crisis. They therefore appealed to Governor Sir John Harvey, arguing that "they had not left their native country to which they were much attached, through any disaffection but to improve if possible their situation" .(82) They petitioned to be allowed to clear a tract of land outside the territory of the Company, '"to be sold to them at as reasonable a rate as practicable, to be paid for by instalments within a given period."
_________________________________________________________________________
(78) Berwick Advertiser, 19 August 1837, p. 4, col. 4, courtesy Eric Herbert.
(79) Transcribed by the late Thelma Larner, a Nesbitt descendant, and sent by another descendant, Sharon Howland of Waltham, Mass. to Jocelean Swan Hall of Harvey, and published in the Harvey Lionews , June 1994. My thanks to Jo Hall for this item. The second birth entry was mistranscribed "The 4th a child was born by Margrateses for it on bord": I suspect the true reading is "Margrat Cesford on bord".
(80) John Thompson, "An account of the original Settlement of Harvey", ms. written late in life; copy provided by Jocelean Swan Hall of Harvey. See also New Brunswick Courier, 29 July 1837, p. 1.
(81) Rev. William Randall, History of Harvey Settlement , typescript at PANB, MC 80/818, 1972. My thanks to Denis Noel for directing me to Bill Randall's history. Capt. Richard Hayne was born in Devon in 1804, probably a son of Rev. W. Hayne, Vicar of Plympton, for the latter's daughter Melanie was married at Harvey in 1844 . Hayne served with the Royal Artillery in St Helena and in Canada with the Royal Staff Corps on the Rideau Canal Works. In 1835 he was an employee of the British American Land Company, supervising the survey of that company's St Francis Tract in Lower Canada. He went to England in 1836 and arrived in N.B. the following year, being appointed the NBLC Commissioner on 6 December 1837. He returned to England in 1870 and died in Dittesham, Devon, in 1874. He is recorded with his family in the 1851 census of Fredericton. New Brunswick Courier, 29 June 1844; I.L. Hill, The Old Burying Ground Fredericton, N.B. , vol. 3, pp. 235-43; J.I. Little, ed., Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833-1836 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 159, 223.