The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1The Ocean1775

  CHAPTER 2The Atlantic Seaboard1775

  CHAPTER 3The Baie1775

  CHAPTER 4The Baie1775–76

  CHAPTER 5The Nepisiguit1776

  CHAPTER 6The Miramichi1776

  CHAPTER 7The Miramichi1777

  CHAPTER 8The Miramichi1781

  CHAPTER 9The Southwest Miramichi1785

  CHAPTER 10The Miramichi1785

  CHAPTER 11The Miramichi1791

  CHAPTER 12The Point1802

  CHAPTER 13The Point1814

  CHAPTER 14The Millstream1830

  For Sigrid Anna Stephenson Taylor

  Intrepid, incorrigible, intelligent—like Charlotte

  Charlotte’s World

  PREFACE

  The Bay

  2004

  Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes and illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

  The rising sun is stretching out over Alston Point as I cycle along the boardwalk on the Baie de Chaleur in northern New Brunswick. A glint catches my eye and I glance sideways, trying to keep the bike upright on the narrow path. The morning rays are bouncing off a newly installed bronze plaque. Curious, I leave the bike and wade through knee-high shimmering sea-grass to find out what warrants a marker at the end of Youghall Beach.

  The inscription sends shivers up my spine. Line by line it spills out details I’ve been searching for. Recently erected government plaques do not usually resolve historical mysteries. But seeing this one, I realize that while I was toiling away in the archives and searching for birth and death dates in family Bibles trying to piece the Charlotte Taylor story together, an archaeologist had discovered a connection I’d overlooked.

  More than two hundred years ago, this point of land, not much more than the end of a sand dune really, had been the site of the only trading post in the vast northeast. The proprietor, Commodore George Walker, ran a brisk trading business between England, the West Indies and this place, Nepisiguit. One of the men he worked with was Captain John Blake, who would become Charlotte Taylor’s first husband.

  Charlotte was a woman who upset many preconceptions. Her descendants say she fled her home in England with the family’s black butler, bound for the West Indies. Historians claim she was the first woman settler on the Miramichi River. How she got from what was supposed to be sanctuary in Jamaica to John Blake’s tilt on the Miramichi was a mystery. George Walker seems the likely shepherd, the man who not only brought her to these shores, but also the one who arranged her marriage to Blake, ten months after she arrived. This spot, memorialized in bronze, is where Charlotte Taylor began her life in Canada in 1775. I’m certain of it.

  She is far from me in time and circumstance but connected to me by the ties that bind. Her often remarkable, sometimes questionable and certainly redoubtable story is told every time my family gathers.

  Charlotte Taylor lived most of her life just one hundred kilometres south of this beach. Every summer during my youth, we would travel from the family cottage at Youghall to visit my mother’s extended clan at Wishart’s Point and Tabusintac near the Miramichi. And at every gathering, the aunts and uncles, my parents and grandparents would sit around the kitchen table of the old farmhouse—the very house Charlotte herself had built in 1798—telling tales of the woman who first baked bread at this hearth.

  She was a woman with a past. Not exactly a gentlewoman. It was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England, although there wasn’t much that seemed genteel about the settler my elders always referred to as “that old Charlotte.” Words like lover and land grabber drifted down from the table to where we kids sat on the floor, but the family also had a powerful respect for her, as if their own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to imagine the real life she lived and how she ever survived it.

  The family house we return to today is where she raised her many children and plotted her next step in the survival stakes of settling in the New World. Land grants could make or break a family’s fortunes. Immense forests thick with spruce were both enemies and friends to settlers who desperately needed to clear the land and plant a crop so they’d have enough food to survive the winters, and to trade the tall timbers in the region’s burgeoning lumber business. The Tabusintac River, which loops around three sides of Wishart’s Point, was the waterway Charlotte depended on for news and for material goods. It was also her route back to the rough-hewn world that was the Miramichi River, where she had first settled in 1776. The relentless coastal winds that blow from the northeast and the northwest, whipping up storms from the sea as well as brutal winter blizzards, are as much a part of life around the old homestead today as they were when Charlotte struggled with the elements. The geese that flock to the fields in spring, and gather again for their autumn flight, still stop to feed on her land.

  As a child, one of the rituals of my summertime visits was a trip to the Riverside Cemetery for a prayer service. The time-worn grave markers of Charlotte Taylor and her offspring are mixed in with the new marble tombstones in this peaceful place perched on a cliff overlooking the Tabusintac River. Her marker, a moss-covered, pock-marked stone that measured a foot by six inches and lay flat in the green grass, was simply labelled “Charlotte Taylor, 1755–1841.” The magnitude of the memory versus the size of the marker troubled me as a child. What had she done to warrant such minimalist treatment at the grave and such nonpareil biography at the dinner table?

  From the riverbank beside the burial ground, you can see her homestead at Wishart’s Point in the distance and gaze over the uncluttered wilderness she would have confronted every day. Standing here, you can imagine her struggles and triumphs, from the time she staggered to the shore until a canoe, paddled by the Mi’kmaq, carried her to this resting place.

  On dark winter nights back home in Montreal, my siblings and I would beg for more stories of the “olden days” and ask our mother endless questions about Charlotte Taylor, our great-great-great-grandmother.

  “She came to this country with nothing but a trunk full of clothes that suited a lady more than a pioneer,” she’d tell us. Her own father (my grandfather) was born just forty-five years after Charlotte died. “He told us the stories about burying food in a pit by the river so they’d have something to eat in the winter. We stored food in the same pit when I was a girl,” my mother said. But like my grandfather, she used to raise her eyebrows and make remarks about the unbecoming behaviour of a woman who had three husbands. My Uncle Burt used to wink at the gathered family and say, “Sly old Charlotte had her way with men and with their land as well.” What had happened to her husbands? I once asked whether she had killed them. My question was met with hoots of laughter that only served to heighten my fascination.

  She was a woman whom historian William Ganong called “a remarkable early settler.” Her obituary in the Royal Gazette of Newcastle described her as “a respected woman who was the third British settler” in the region. But hers is not a story of a woman in starched white petticoats and a beribboned bonnet, displaced from the Old World and trying to re-create it in the new one. She managed to keep her ten children alive through the American Revolution that was fought on her doorstep, the Indian raids that burned out her neighbours and the droughts and floods and endless winters that challenged her wit and tenacity. She was of this place.

  I have spent ten years on and off searching for hooks to this el
usive woman and became hooked myself—on shipping schedules from 1775, on Mi’kmaq history, on settler survival skills and the clash of Acadian, Loyalist and pre-Loyalist personalities.

  In 1980, during the Old Home Week celebrations that are held every five years in Tabusintac, the memorial service at the cemetery featured the unveiling of a prepossessing new headstone for Charlotte that heralded her as “The Mother of Tabusintac,” a fitting epitaph since almost every family from here can trace its roots to her. The stone stands first in the cemetery as you enter by the main gate. It is made out of granite, tough enough to withstand the storm of time—just like the woman herself. And it also has an error, rendering her death date as 1840 when, in fact, she died in 1841. There’s nothing inscribed that speaks of the compassion and grace in her rugged life, or hints at the rogue in her.

  After Old Home Week in 1995, when I got back to my desk as editor-in-chief of Homemaker’s Magazine in Toronto, I decided to write my editorial letter about her, wanting to share the story of one of the earliest settlers in Eastern Canada with my readers. As a result, the magazine received letters from her descendants from all over the world. They came from England and Saudi Arabia, from the United States and Kenya, and expressed the same passion and pride I’d known since childhood. I wrote to each of these far-flung branches of Charlotte’s family tree and asked for their memories and memorabilia. In return I learned of her winter trek by snowshoe from the Miramichi to Fredericton, more than two hundred miles away, and of her bitter quarrels with the Loyalists who came to the river after the American Revolution. Almost all of my correspondents mentioned a liaison with a Mi’kmaq man.

  The archives in New Brunswick provided facts about births, marriages and deaths, and also handwritten, sometimes desperate petitions for land titles. Historians such as Ganong, and before him the explorer and erstwhile entrepreneur Nicolas Denys, faithfully recorded the details of those early days in what would become northern New Brunswick.

  It wasn’t yet a province when Charlotte set foot there. Canada was still ninety-two years short of its official birthday. All of the territory east of Quebec was called Nova Scotia except for the tiny Isle Saint-John, which was renamed Prince Edward Island in 1799. The Mi’kmaq (called Micmac by the settlers) were considered mentors by the Acadians, wily traders by men like Commodore Walker and savage enemies by the British military. When Charlotte arrived, the Acadians who hadn’t taken refuge from the expulsion in Mi’kmaq camps were staggering back to the land after twenty years in exile. Tabusintac, the Miramichi and Nepisiguit (present-day Bathurst, New Brunswick) were part of a vast wilderness that claimed the lives of many soldiers, settlers and traders.

  Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history, walking the same path as the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians, the privateers of the British-American War and the Loyalists. Her story is shaped by the howling nor’easters, the isolating winters, the grind of daily survival and the devastating circumstances that stalked her growing family.

  Her adventurous spirit is what’s on my mind as I stare at the marker on Youghall Beach on a July morning before the rest of the world is awake. At this wondrous time of day, you can leave your footprints like first tracks on the sandbars. You can watch, at a silent distance, a great blue heron pausing to feed on the shoreline. Sun dapples the water of the Baie de Chaleur, creating dazzling mirrors of light. It strikes me that Charlotte could have seen this too.

  Did she walk these sandbars before paddling south to the Miramichi? Was she a runaway frightened by her new surroundings or thrilled by her sudden bolt from home? I know only one other thing about her life before she landed here, a secret that she carried with her from England.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Ocean

  1775

  It’s just an hour after dawn on the first Monday in May 1775 when the Anton lurches its bulk away from the docks at Bristol and sets sail for the West Indies. Charlotte Taylor is at the rail, rivetted to the huge square sails puffing out like bullies in the wind and bucking the ship into the open sea. A tall woman with flame-red hair tied in a knot at her neck, she keeps her eye to the bow as if setting her own course and her back to the land she has left behind. Standing beside her at the rail is Pad Willisams, her lover and co-conspirator in the hurried exit from Charlotte’s family, Pad’s job as butler in the Taylor household and a truth they each had only a part of.

  A hastily packed trunk is stowed with the cargo. The calico sack she’d prepared for the voyage, and now realizes is pathetically inadequate since the trunk cannot be opened again until they reach shore six to eight weeks from now, is slung over her back.

  A scrofulous man of indiscriminate age eyes her repeatedly from his place by the forward capstan. He’s one of the woebegone collection of humanity she’s travelling with—mostly men in their twenties and thirties and one young boy with freckles on his nose who seems to be in the employ of the haughty Captain Skinner. They all stare shamelessly at the white woman and the black man by her side. Pad has pulled together all the stiff dignity of the butler he had been just days earlier, but she can feel the anxiety that thrums through him. She is somewhat surprised to realize that she isn’t daunted by the stares, the days ahead or the consequences of leaving her family’s country home outside of London. Standing in the brisk wind on the deck of a sailing ship just a week after her twentieth birthday, Charlotte Taylor is unafraid—maybe even elated.

  She’s still leaning on the portside, watching the water, letting the wind blow on her face when she allows herself to cast her thoughts to what she has run away from. The terrible row with her father when he learned she’d been “consorting,” as he called it, with Pad. The endless rounds of tea, the suffocating rules and her mother’s predictable attacks of the vapours whenever there was a hint of excitement in the household. She smiles in anticipation of the life ahead. A marriage to the dashing Pad, a home in the tropics. She’s grinning at the prospects when Pad interrupts her reverie to suggest they go below and secure their living quarters.

  The quarters are cramped; the ceiling is so low they have to duck their heads. The bunks are arranged in two rows, one on each side of the dreary lower deck with damp curtains hanging between them to lend an illusion of privacy. There are hooks on which to hang their possessions and a lopsided stove in the centre. The only light and fresh air is from the hatch to the upper deck; the quarters smell of mildew and rotten wood. Indeed, the black streaks of rot crawling up the legs of the cots speak of the months at sea, the flourishing business of carrying human and other cargo across the ocean as many times as the weather will allow between May and October, never stopping long enough to refit or repair.

  They pick a bunk at the end of the row and tie their sacks to the hooks before exploring the rest of the lower deck. There are stalls toward the stern filled with animals—two steers, four sheep, a ragged flock of chickens and three fat pigs. Charlotte looks at each and lingers on the soft, uncomprehending eyes of the steers that will become meals for the passengers and crew. Tucked under the bow in a wedge-shaped hold are the ship’s stores—burlap sacks of flour, sugar and grain, cases of biscuits, salt and limes. Charlotte and Pad walk back to midship, where a wide hatch is battened shut on the deck.

  “What’s down there?” Charlotte asks a stocky sailor who is hurrying aft.

  “Cargo, madam,” he says. “Plenty a’ cotton cloth and wool. That’s what makes ’em rich, madam, shippin’ the likes a’ that.”

  My trunk is down there too, Charlotte thinks ruefully.

  THE YOUNG LAD who’d caught her eye when they left the dock is friendly, puppyish and not too shy to tell her his name is Tommy Yates when she finds him exploring the lower deck.

  “Me dad was the one who got me on board,” the boy confides gravely. “He brought me to the dock and hired me out to the captain. He told him I was sixteen, an’ I’m but thirteen.”

  “Thirteen?” Charlotte looks at him closely. “Are you even that?”

  “Oh yes, madam.
Honest, I am.”

  She had thought him no more than a scrawny eleven.

  When he is not scrambling up the rigging at the captain’s orders or crawling through the hold below the sleeping quarters to fetch something the captain needs from the cargo, Tommy finds his way to Charlotte’s side. In the first week at sea, she heard about his fourteen brothers and sisters, the drink that made his father what he was and the mother who was so sickly she could hardly manage to stagger from her bed.

  Charlotte shares her own story with him—putting a more varnished spin on her departure than is the case. She tells Tommy that she and Pad are married and that her father, General Taylor, doesn’t approve of the relationship so they decided to leave home for the West Indies and start a new life.

  She entertains the winsome boy with details of the world she left behind, imitating her nanny’s priggish etiquette. “She insisted I sit like this all day long,” says Charlotte, perching herself on a bench and exaggerating the pose—her back ramrod straight, her legs bent at the knee and turned slightly sideways and her hands folded together in her lap. She makes him laugh when she describes her antics in the straitlaced household—refusing to marry the man her mother had chosen for her, looking contrite when her father admonished her, galloping around the estate on her horse and lingering at the stable with Pad. Tommy thinks it’s a blissful life she’s left, but even this boy can see the rebel in the woman he has befriended.

  Throughout those days Pad often lies marooned in his cot. The seasickness is terrible for him, while Charlotte hardly feels the transition from land to water. Sometimes she wonders if Pad’s real sickness is the knowledge of what he has done, leaving all he knew behind, and worry about what might lie ahead.

  “They’re such little waves,” she pleads, but he only turns his head and is silent. At night, by a guttering candle, she makes entries in her diary with her best quill, dipping ink from the biggest bottle she’d dared carry.