We are most grateful to be able to reproduce here material from Jane Rupert's edition of Letters of a Distinguished Physician from the Royal Tour of the British North American Colonies 1860 written by Henry Wentworth Acland. The whole edition is available on the web by clicking here.
hile touring the British North American Colonies as physician to the Prince of Wales during the royal tour of 1860, Dr Henry Wentworth Acland met timber barons on the Saguenay and Ottawa Rivers in Quebec and Ontario, sketched the massive log booms waiting for transatlantic transport on the river at Quebec City, and described the saw mills and timber docks in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Acland wrote from New Brunswick:- St John's [Saint John] is a great mercantile port. It occupies chiefly the North side of the harbour. Here all the good houses and ships are. On the opposite side of the harbour are two large suburbs with saw-mills of various works inhabited mostly by the work people. We disembarked from the Steamer at 2, in one of these suburbs, Indianopolis - were received by two or more companies of volunteers who lined the streets - For nearly three miles we wound a way between living walls - decked by fir trees planted by the way side for ornament the whole way, where they were not by nature. I became at last quite overpowered - We passed through an Arch 50 feet high made of boughs of fir trees most beautiful to behold, surmounted by trees 12 feet high. We ended on a pier. By its side were saw-mills - thither we entered - in about four minutes two huge pine trees were sawn into planks, and trimmed on their edges by vertical saws which ascended and descended in the fourth of a second - and circular saws which ripped in 30 seconds a three inch plank 30 feet long. Thence through boats loaded with Lumberers cheering in the most enthusiastic manner we embarked. Is England separated from her Colonies?
"The people in a state of wild enthusiasm crowd into boats & vessels of every description in numbers affecting to look upon, & escort the Prince out of St John's Harbour (NB)." 7 August 1860.
The throngs that joyously greeted the Prince of Wales in a working-class area by the harbour were part of the massive migration that began at the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815, gained momentum in the 1830s, continued through the next two decades, and was augmented by the Irish exodus during the famine in the 1840s. Saint John, in particular, became a port of entry for poorer British immigrants as the huge volume of ships carrying lumber to Britain could return profitably with a human cargo, its passengers finding both deplorable shipboard conditions and the cheapest fares to North America. Many were employed as carters and teamsters on the steamer wharves or in the several nearby sawmills as part of the British lumber trade which increased exponentially after Napoleon' s blockade on Britain's Baltic timber sources. In 1807, 27,000 loads of lumber were exported to Britain from its North American Colonies; by 1860 the trade peaked with about 600,000 loads exported annually. The growth of the timber trade is indicated in the statistics in 1838 for the British firm of Robert Rankin in Saint John and its parent firm in Canada East, Pollock, Gilmour, and Company. The company operated 130 vessels, employed 18,000 men at its sawmills, on its wharves, and in its forests, and owned 2,000 horses and oxen for its hauling operations.
Material relating to Dr Acland
- Dr Henry Wentworth Acland: A Brief Biography
- The Indigenous People of Canada
- Ottawa as Provincial Capital in 1860
- Victoria Bridge, Montreal
Related Material (General)
- A Brief Timeline of Canadian Political History
- The Government of Canada
- Other sites for Canadian Politics and Government
Bibliography
Acland, Henry Wentworth. "Introduction" and "Letter 9: Ottawa" in Letters of a Distinguished Physician from the Royal Tour of the British North American Colonies 1860. ed. Jane Rupert, web janerupert.ca (References to the timber industry are also found in Letters 6,7, and 9.)
Buckner, Philip, ed. Canada and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2008.
_____. "The Transformation of the Maritimes: 1815-1860." The London Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (1993): 13-30.
Macmillan, David S. "Rankin, Robert." In Dictionary of Canadian Biography. vol. 9. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1976. Http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/rankin_robert_9E.html. Web.16 April 2014.
Radforth, Ian. "The Shantymen." In Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.
Created 2 July 2023