Prologue

A Strange Land

I felt that I was a stranger in a strange land; my heart yearned intensely for my absent home. Home! the word had ceased to belong to my present – it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home?
– Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush.

Susanna, unable to stay in the dank interior of the cabin, had come back on deck for some cool air and a last look at the panorama of Quebec City. She stood tall and straight at the railing of the brig Anne and watched as the moon rose and cast mysterious gleams upon the landscape. Towering pine trees seemed to frown down upon the St. Lawrence River, which flowed rapidly between rugged banks.

How could she possibly find words to describe this sublime landscape? And yet she felt a familiar pressure, the desire to capture it on paper for others to experience. At twenty-eight, Susanna had left London a well-known literary figure, and she had copies of her first volume of poetry in her luggage. She had married John Dunbar Moodie a little more than a year ago, on April 4, 1831. Now they had a baby, and like hundreds of emigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Britain who filled the ships anchored in Quebec harbour, they were seeking a better life in the colony of Upper Canada.

The Anne, jammed between other vessels in the crowded harbour, had suffered serious damage during the night when a larger ship accidentally plowed into its deck. Many of the passengers were awakened by the loud noise and rushed up to see what had happened, Susanna among them.

“What’s all the confusion?” Susanna inquired of Captain Rodgers. Surrounded by a group of women who had become hysterical with fear, he couldn’t speak.

“Let the poor man alone,” Susanna exclaimed, “We must go below deck. We’ll be safer there.”

The force in her voice convinced the dozen or so women to follow her. Susanna hadn’t allowed her own fears to show.

“Let’s pray,” she suggested.

One young woman cried that she didn’t know how to pray.

“Just repeat the words after me.”

And Susanna had begun to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Now, a towline had been attached to a huge steamer, which began to tug the Anne out of Quebec harbour. Enveloped in black smoke and flinging red sparks out of its funnel, the steamer resembled some firebreathing demon. Susanna stood at the railing of the Anne and struggled with her anxious thoughts. Will we even reach our next destination, the port of Montreal? she wondered.

In the darkness she felt like a pilgrim, her head filled with visions, her fate in the hands of Providence, as the ship carried her up the river into a strange new land.

Thomas Strickland purchased the Elizabethan manor Reydon Hall
in Suffolk when Susanna was five. She liked to hide in the attic
to write stories with her sister, Catharine.