Edward Winslow knew what he was doing.
It wasn`t going to be easy, but Winslow, a Harvard graduate from Plymouth, Mass., was confident he could lead thousands of Americans to survival and eventual prosperity in a wilderness one of his followers called
”the roughest land I ever saw.”
They had little choice. These were no ordinary Americans. Soon they would cease to be called Americans at all.
These were the Loyalists. The 35,000 or so who were to sail into the natural harbor at the mouth of the St. John River in 1783-84 were
representatives of perhaps 300,000 people who decided it was more honorable to stay true to their king than to join with the rabble in rebellion against England.
For their loyalty, they had been branded as tories and traitors. For backing the wrong side, they were persecuted and prosecuted; their property was confiscated and burned. To most, it became obvious they should move–soon. Thousands already had settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the war, forever altering the population of a province that had been dominated by Indians and Acadian French. Winslow had been one of the agents who helped prepare Halifax for many more thousands in 1783.
But, according to Christopher Moore, author of ”The Loyalists”
(Macmillan of Canada, 1984), the 36-year-old officer had grander ideas:
”As the representatives of the loyalist regiments that were prepared to leave New York, and as the newly appointed secretary to the military commander of Nova Scotia, Winslow found himself in a position in which `it is as much in my power to assist my friends as any one man in the province,` and from his first landing there he became the visionary and the promoter of a loyal society on the St. John.” (The river valley was then part of Nova Scotia.)
Winslow returned from his explorations with words of praise that would rival those in a modern real estate brochure. He extolled the beauty of the forested land, its rich timber, the area`s fishing and agricultural potential and the presence of an excellent natural harbor at the site of Saint John, the city. (The city`s ”Saint” is spelled out. Its river is abbreviated: ”St. John.”)
He perhaps forgot to consult a woman who later reported she climbed atop Chipman`s Hill, in the center of town, and ”watched the sails disappearing in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came over me that, although I had not shed a tear all through the war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and cried.”
It`s possible she suffered from the same sort of pouring rain that dumped itself on the Loyalist Days Parade 201 years later.
Rain or no rain, several thousand Canadians lined King Street as the parade found its way from King`s Square, a park whose walks form a British Union Jack flag, downhill to Market Square, passing by Market Slip where the first loyalists landed in May, 1983. (This year, Loyalist Days are to be celebrated July 21-27.)
Apparently, the rain has become a tourist attraction.
”You can count on it to rain during Loyalist Days. We`re used to it,”
said a patron in the Brigantine Lounge, a bar in the new Hilton International Hotel a dozen yards from Market Slip.
The mile or two of pipers` bands, pompon girls, politicians and Shriners didn`t seem to mind. Nor did the members of a small detachment of greencoated soldiers, Americans representing the New Jersey volunteers, the largest loyalist regiment to fight beside the British during the revolution.
Behind them marched about 30 redcoats, Americans representing Delancey`s Brigade of New York. They were followed by a handful of fifers, distinguished from the other soldiers by the white pipings chevroned down the length of their sleeves.
Finally came the camp followers, women playing the roles of the wives of the regiments.
Many of these Americans descended from loyalists who remained in counties such as Richmond (Staten Island), N.Y., war or no war. Most of their neighbors were loyalists and therefore less inclined to loot and burn.
The paraders spent the entire Loyalist Days week in authentic period tents, not much larger than pup tents, which housed four or five persons apiece. They ate the bean-heavy rations allowed to the original volunteers and brigadiers, and their women cooked and laundered just as their forebears did. ”Cooking, cleaning and laundering; that`s what the camp followers did, that`s why they were needed,” said Regina Cole of Glenview, who played the wife of her real-life boyfriend, Todd Braisted of Dumont, N.J., the company lieutenant.
”You couldn`t be a camp follower unless you were married to a soldier of the regiment. If your husband died in battle, you had to marry another soldier right away to stay with the regiment,” Cole said as she helped Braisted put on his uniform coat. (He was preparing to drill in a vacant area near the campground at the New Brunswick Museum, across the harbor from central Saint John.)
The original soldiers of the New Jersey Volunteers and Delancey`s Brigade were among those from 22 units that disbanded after arriving in Saint John in the fall of 1783, after an estimated 4,200 civilians had arrived.
How they were recruited bears some mention. Barton Claus of Saint John, a DeLancey`s Brigadier, produced a copy of a document that had appeared in and around New York City sometime after the 13 colonies declared their
independence.
The document aimed itself at ”all true men between the ages of 16 and 65” who were ”to hold themselves in readiness to muster with their county militia for the defense of His Most Gracious Majesty`s Dominions against all foreign enemies, rebels, seditionists and other evilly disposed persons whatsoever.
” . . . Brigadier General DeLancey`s Brigade, long famous for its trouncing of the dastardly and damnable rebel Yankees on a stricken field, has a few vacancies for gallant and handy recruits. Such men will receive regular rations, pay and clothing under the warrant of His Majesty–whom God preserve!–and generous settlement provisions when this present conflict is happily and victoriously concluded.”
After the victory went elsewhere, the new colonists in Saint John spent a rough winter. But, steadily reinforced by new arrivals, most made it through to 1784, when Edward Winslow asked for and received the royal charter that made New Brunswick a province.
Not all loyalists were considered good men and true, not even by other loyalists. Many of the New Brunswickers would gladly have sent Benedict Arnold back where he came from.
The notorious Yankee traitor settled in Saint John and proceeded to make a nuisance of himself. After suing a local citizen for what Saint Johners considered specious reasons, he was hanged and burned in effigy. Arnold went on to live in England.
During the two centuries since the American Revolution, Saint John has lost its status as the provincial capital to an upstart community 100 miles upriver, Fredericton. But at 114,000, the port city is still New Brunswick`s largest.
It retains its charm even in its street patterns, which remind the visitor of Boston or Santa Fe, where few street patterns exist. Like many attractions in Saint John, the New Brunswick Museum might best be found by aiming for something else.
Once found, however, the museum offers the visitor some of the paintings that grace many a high school history book. Perhaps the best known is ”The Death of General Wolfe,” by James Barry. It depicts the young general dying in the arms of a comrade before his troops captured Quebec during the French and Indian War.
The visitor also can see artifacts from Japan, China, the Pacific islands and from the Eskimo and Indian cultures native to Canada.
Of particular interest are garments worn by the Micmacs and Maliseets, who inhabited New Brunswick and Nova Scotia before the explorer Gomez sighted the mouth of the St. John River in 1525 and named it Rio de la Buelta (an archaic Spanish usage which probably meant ”returning river”). Champlain renamed it Riviere St.-Jean in 1604.
Besides sporting an impressive historical district, Saint John is honeycombed with parks and unoccupied areas. One, Rockwood Park, is about half the size of the city. It offers a zoo, golf, a nature trail, trail rides, hiking rails, a children`s farm, a tent and trailer park, boating on two of its 15 lakes and cross-country skiing.
When the sun shines, Saint John sparkles with colors during the summer and snow during the winter. But New Brunswickers are particularly proud of their autumnal colors, which rival those of the northern Midwest or New England–when the sun shines.
Saint Johners take what some think is a perverse pleasure in the city`s fogs, which are frequent and which, they say, are as cozy as any London has to offer.
The city`s best-known attraction, Reversing Falls, were created by the tides of the Bay of Fundy–no one seems to know who Fundy was–reputed to be the strongest tides in the world. Twice a day, the tide fights its way upriver to a point where it actually reverses the flow of a number of rapids.
New Brunswickers defer to no one in the enjoyment of a district cuisine.
Most unusual is a dried purple seaweed containing something less than the lethal amount of iodine called dulse (pronounced ”dulss”). It has a salty taste that doesn`t always produce a smile from the person who tries it the first time.
In New Brunswick, however, the stuff is devoured as potato chips are. Dulse is prized as much for its slightly rubbery texture as its tangy taste. It also performs as a spice. Dried and powdered, dulse adds a zippy seaside flavor to chowders, casseroles, even biscuits.
Another food of note is a fern called a fiddlehead. Like spinach, it can be eaten as salad greens or cooked.
The quality of seafood is what the visitor might expect from a province due east of northern Maine. Many Saint Johners point the lobster lover to Grannan`s in Market Square, a renovated rank of onetime warehouses facing the wharf near Market Slip.
The city is accessible by air from Toronto and Montreal, via Air Canada and Eastern Provincial Airlines.
Passamaquoddy Bay, which New Brunswick shares with Maine, is about 80 miles west of Saint John. Among its islands are Campobello, the resort made famous as the vacation home of Franklin Roosevelt.
The bay`s most representative town is a resort, St. Andrews, which dominates a small peninsula pointing southeast toward Eastport, Me., and Deer Island, New Brunswick.
Many of St. Andrews` original residents were loyalists, but they arrived by a different route from those of Saint John. They came up through Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts, and settled on the eastern side of the Penobscot River, thinking they had finally reached British territory.
In 1842, 59 years later, Daniel Webster concluded the last in a series of treaties with the British, treaties that would ensure that someday the United States and Canada would be friends. But the children and grandchildren of the Penobscot loyalists, true to king and country, wanted none of it. Their feeling was that they had been literally sold down the river.
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty ceded the eastern side of the Penobscot to the Americans, extending Maine east to the St. Croix River, which empties into Passamaquoddy Bay. So the determined emigrants packed up their houses, floated them down the Penobscot, went up the coast a couple of hundred miles and reassembled their homes in St. Andrews.
Their loyalist forebears might consider it heresy, but the anglophone New Brunswickers are as friendly to Americans as the guidebooks say they are. So are the descendants of the French Acadians who stayed put when their families and friends took the Evangeline route to Louisiana. And their cordiality is not just because the Canadian dollar has shrunk to 70 to 80 percent of the U.S. dollar, making all of Canada a good tourist buy.
Maybe it has more to do with their loyalist heritage, which has produced less violence than the culture that was left behind. Whatever, New Brunswick impresses the visitor as being the most civilized province in an eminently civilized country.
