Gananoque, Upper Canada, June 1792
The batteau going up river from Ganonoque is not ready, so John White leaves his baggage on the wharf to be loaded later and sets out on foot for Kingston, accompanied by Chief Justice William Osgoode. In the long weeks they have spent together sailing from England, they have become good friends. White is glad to have Osgoode’s company on this overland trek, and if they “stick to their guns” (an expression he learned from a military man on board their vessel), they will arrive at Kingston in time for Colonel Simcoe’s swearing-in as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada.
They have no compass, nor do they need one. “Walk westward, keeping the river on your left hand,” a logger told them. White has never seen such a blue sky or woodlands so green and thick. The air he breathes is scented with pine and a wildflower the natives call bunchberry. The broad river is dotted with at least a thousand islands, some of them no more than small lumps of granite with a pine tree or two sticking up among the rocks.
He’s a bachelor again—at least for awhile—and in a few years, when he is established at Niagara, the new capital of the province of Upper Canada, he will have his wife and children come out. Perhaps by then he will have a spacious stone residence—there is so much stone in this new country—and servants will be plentiful and cheap.
“I’ve never been happier,” he says to Osgoode. “In fact, I feel like one of Dionysius’s satyrs.”
“S..s..satyrs?”
“When I was in Jamaica, some fishermen brought up from the bottom of the sea a statue of a satyr. When they got the barnacles scraped off it, there it was, the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen: a nude male dancer in bronze with his hair thrown back, his arms flung wide, one leg kicking behind him, and his eyes, oh those eyes, they had such a crazy look of ecstasy.” He laughs at the memory, and then he makes an impromptu leap into the air.
Osgoode laughs with him. “Very good, White. And I know you’re cold s..s..sober too—unlike the s..s..satyr. But maybe it’s these insects that are making you dance?” He swats at one of the critters that have landed on his forehead.
“Mosquitoes they’re called, so an Indian told me.” These tiny, pestilent “buzzers” are, in fact, the only thing bothering White at the moment. Except for the heat. The noonday sun now tops the sky. He’d been a fool to buy all those new coats and breeches before he left England. The garment he has on now—a coat of superfine with a velvet collar and buttons—might be fine for tea with the Colonel and Mrs. Simcoe, but it is ridiculous in this weather. More important, he’s starting his new life with a tailor’s debt of sixty-seven pounds.
He looks over at Osgoode. His friend is wearing a jacket of fringed buckskin he got from an Indian woman on the wharf at Quebec in exchange for a linen handkerchief. While at times Osgoode seems not to know where to set his feet next, on other occasions he puts them firmly on the right path.
They stop for a pipe opposite a tiny island of granite a few yards off shore. It is hot on the rock where they sit, and the water beckons, reminding him of youthful summer days on the River Wye near Hereford. He stands up, strips off his fine jacket and breeches, his shirt and stockings. The wig he left in his baggage. In this new country, he intends to wear it for formal occasions only.
“Come on, Osgoode,” he yells, leaping into the water. It’s deliciously cold, and he strikes out at once for the island. He plunges his head and shoulders beneath the surface and swims with a school of trout, trying to keep pace with the stragglers. At Hereford, he was sixteen, alive with the exhilaration of youth, the certainty that everything was possible. And now at twice that age, the promise of success stirs him again. In a new life, in a new land, a man of intelligence and drive cannot but succeed.
He holds his breath to bursting, and when he surfaces, like a cormorant, he finds himself close to a square-cut rock that forms the first step of a granite staircase leading to the top of the tiny islet. Up, up he goes, reaching the pinnacle where he looks down on Osgoode standing in the water clinging to the rock on which they had smoked their pipes. “I can’t s..s..swim,” he calls, “I’ll hold on here.”
A man who can’t swim in a country of lakes and rivers? Surely that must be a metaphor for failure. I’m set to dive into whatever comes.
With a hoot of derision, he plunges downward into the crystalline depths.