Sisters in the Wilderness by Charlotte Gray

immigrants aboard, collided with the Anne in the dark. There was an ear-splitting crash as the larger vessel’s bowsprit came thundering down on the Anne , threatening to swamp her. Passengers on the threatened ship swarmed onto the deck, screaming with fear, and Captain Rodgers was immediately surrounded by several frantic women clinging to his knees.
    Susanna was lying in her cabin when the pandemonium erupted. Grabbing her baby, she hurried out onto the deck to see what had happened and quickly took in the scene: the towering bulk of the Horsley Hill, looming out of the darkness over the Anne; the hysterical women immobilizing the captain. She heard the cracks of splitting timbers, the splash of waves, the confused shouting of sailors. Immediately, she rose to the occasion and ordered the women to follow her below deck. Ignoring the foul smell of unwashed bodies and vomit, she made them sit still and pray quietly. By sheer force of personality, and despite her own alarm, she remained cool and in command. “British sailors never leave women to perish,” she told her companions, with apparently unshakable assurance. Until close to dawn, her authority held. The incident must have reassured Susanna that, even in the New World’s melting pot of peoples, the natural authority of the educated classes held sway and she could make herself heard.
    Although the Traills began their Atlantic crossing a week after the Moodies, they made far better time. After leaving Thomas’s relatives in the Orkneys, they went directly to the port of Greenock, outside Glasgow. There Thomas paid fifteen pounds each for his and Catharine’s cabin passage to Montreal in a fast-sailing brig, the Rowley . The Rowley was not a regular passenger ship: its hold was filled with a cargo of rum, brandy and sugar. The Traills’ only companions were two young men and the captain’s goldfinch.
    Catharine had fallen very sick just before embarkation and was unwell for much of the voyage. At one point both the captain and the steward feared that she would die before landfall. But she gradually recovered, and in letters home describing the crossing, her chief complaint about the voyage was boredom. “I can only compare the monotony of it to being weather-bound in some country inn,” she wrote to her mother. She didn’t even have Voltaire to fall back on, as Susanna had, let alone a newborn baby. “I have already made myself acquainted with all the books worth reading in the ship’s library: unfortunately, it is chiefly made up with old novels and musty romances.”
    The most unnerving fact for Catharine was the way Thomas sank into gloom. Thomas was singularly ill-equipped to deal with the voyage. Despite his bookish interests, he had not furnished himself with a library to last six weeks. He had none of John Moodie’s interest in catching fish, shooting birds or chatting up the crew and passengers. Instead, he moped. Catharine tried to convince herself that Thomas’s low spirits were a typically male response to cramped quarters: “Where a man is confined to a small space, such as the deck and the cabin of a trading vessel, with nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to do, and nothing to read, he is really a very pitiable creature.” She resorted to playing the role she had so often played within the Strickland family: the resilient optimist, who raised everybody’s spirits. When a long-faced Thomas started pacing the deck, she rose from the bench where she was sitting and sewing and walked alongside him, her arm linked through his. She enthused about all their plans for the future and the excitements that awaited them in Upper Canada. But there was a hard-headed realist underneath the Pollyanna cheerfulness. She realized that this was an inauspicious start to their marriage and emigration. She confided to her mother that the plans she had described with such gusto “in all probability