First Person. Valerie Knowles

      Cairine Wilson as a young girl.

      In sharp contrast to the peaceful surroundings of Mount Royal was the busy port area which abutted onto the broad St. Lawrence River. The first port in the world to be electrified, Montreal now welcomed the arrival of vessels from some thirteen steamship companies, one of these being the renowned Allan Line. Pre-eminent on the Atlantic, it had been founded in 1854 by a group of friends led by the Scottish-born Montrealer, Hugh Allan, later Sir Hugh Allan.

      Just north of the docks and the warehouses, but well within earshot of the shipping sounds and the factory whistles, was the impressive financial and commercial district. Here, clustered on Notre Dame and St. James Streets, could be found an array of fine buildings that had been erected in the economic boom of the 1860s when architects vied with each other to design impressive facades. Reflecting the unabashed pride of their owners, these edifices flaunted carved and garlanded walls, pillared porticoes and entrances decorated with a profusion of detail. Now, in the 1880s, they were being eclipsed by larger and even grander buildings, some of which were built to meet a growing demand for rental office space; Montreal was moving into the office age, a phenomenon that continues unabated today.

      Despite all the changes that the city had undergone over the years, however, the sharp division that had always existed between French and English-speaking Canadians remained. It expressed itself most visibly in the choice of residential area. For, if one took St. Lawrence Main as a dividing line, nearly all the inhabitants living east of it were Frenchspeaking while virtually all those west of it were English-speaking, whether of English, Scots, Irish or, in rare cases, American origin. Only occasionally did the two groups overlap the conventional barrier.

      Commenting on these “two solitudes,” a contemporary observer wrote:

      Montreal is a striking exception to the text that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Its divisions are so fundamental and persistent that they have not diminished one iota in a century, but rather increased. The two irreconcilable elements are Romanism and Protestantism; the armies are of French and English blood. The outlook for peace is well-nigh hopeless, with two systems of education producing fundamental differences of character, and nourishing religious intolerance, race antipathy, social division, political antagonism, and commercial separation.

      Nevertheless, this city of disunion flourishes as the green bay-tree, with a steady if not an amazing growth, which is due chiefly to the separate, not the united, efforts of the races.¹

      In this thriving port and manufacturing centre the Mackay family played an important role, having been established there for over fifty years, thirty of them highly prosperous ones. Cairine Wilson’s father, Robert Mackay, was a wealthy man in his own right and one of Canada’s leading businessmen. Her mother, Jane Baptist Mackay, had similar bourgeois roots, being the daughter of George Baptist, a successful logging merchant, who had emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1832 and later created an industrial empire in Quebec’s Saint Maurice region.

      The first Mackay relative of Cairine Wilson to settle in Canada also emigrated from Scotland to Quebec in 1832. He was her great-uncle, Joseph, the third youngest of ten children born to William and Anne Mackay. The Mackays lived in remote Sutherland, a rugged county of heather-clad moors and precipitous mountains that overlook long dark lochs. Here, in the beautiful strath of Kildonan, William was a small tenant farmer, or crofter, until he and his family were uprooted by the notorious Highland clearances. Today almost forgotten, except in the Highlands, the “clearances” was the name given to the removal of crofters and subtenants from their holdings to permit the conversion of tilled land to pasturage. Actively supported by the law and by the established Church of Scotland, they were widespread in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth when sheep farming was introduced by many Highland landlords seeking a better return on their dwindling capital. On the Duchess of Sutherland’s estates alone, where the Mackays were tenants, some fifteen thousand crofters were evicted from their crofts between 1811 to 1820, armed force often being used to drive them from their homes.²

      The first warning of the removals that involved the William Mackay family came in October 1818 when a man roused the Reverend Donald Sage at the manse in Achness to report that the rent for the half-year ending in May 1819 would not be collected because plans were being made to lay the districts of Strathnaver and Upper Kildonan under sheep. The actual evictions took place the following spring when, thirteen days before the May term, an army of burners — sheriff-officers, constables, factors, shepherds and servants from Dunrobin Castle, the Duchess of Sutherland’s home, — descended on the townships along the Naver and on Kildonan and torched the victims’ homes one by one. In this devastating Clearance, reports Donald Sage in his Memorabilia, “The whole inhabitants of Kildonan parish, nearly 2000 souls, were utterly rooted and burned out.”³

      Some of the dispossessed emigrated to Canada and the United States while others accepted small, inferior lots of land on the coast, the theory being that they could maintain themselves by reclaiming waste land and supplementing its produce by collecting and eating edible seaweed. William Mackay eventually settled at Roster in Caithness,⁴ that bleak, almost treeless county that occupies the extreme northeast of Scotland. There Joseph spent his days until he left for Canada in 1832, the year of the great cholera epidemic. With him went a fund of heart-breaking stories concerning his family’s eviction from Kildonan, lore which would be passed down through succeeding generations of Mackays in Canada and which would eventually help to shape Cairine Wilson’s thinking on immigration and refugees.

      Twenty-one-year-old Joseph probably sailed from the Highland port of Aberdeen in the late spring or early summer of 1832 on one of the many overloaded emigrant ships that carried half-starved and ailing passengers to North America. Among the sickly passengers would be many who had contracted cholera, either before setting out or on the voyage. However, it appears that the young man was not among them. Nor did he catch the disease after his arrival in Canada, where it was introduced by the Carrick when it docked at the quarantine station below Quebec on 8 June 1832. That Joseph did not contract the disease is surprising because Montreal that summer was in the grip of a cholera epidemic. No matter where he went in the demoralized town, Joseph would not have been able to escape the mournful sound of the incessantly tolling death bell or the spectacle of coffin displays and posted advertisements for cheap funerals. He would probably even have come across whole streets that had been depopulated either by death or by the flight of panic-stricken inhabitants to country villages. It was certainly not an auspicious beginning for a stranger in a new land, as his brother, John, realized when he wrote to Joseph from Roster on 20 February 1833:

      I write you these lines in hopes of hearing from you and of your state and to let you know of our state. We have received 2 letters from you the one sent to Aberdeen we found first which gave us great relief to hear of you being in life, and health in the place where the Lord cut down so many by Death, we would write you sooner if not your father was poorly a long time but he is now getting better, and myself is still the same, all the rest in good health and the whole of them lamenting you to be in a wild savage country, and that you might do well enough near your own parents besides being among such as you mentioned, you have left the place where there is hardly any example and your expence will ballance the outcome of your trade.⁵

      Probably no other letter better illustrates two leitmotivs that run through the Mackay family history and Cairine Wilson’s adult years: a deep religious faith and an interest in sound business practice. Joseph himself certainly exemplified these traits. However, unlike his dour brother, he was of a sunny, optimistic nature. Despite John’s forebodings and entreaties to return to Caithness, Joseph stayed on in the New World, setting up as a tailor and merchant on Montreal’s Notre Dame Street, not far from the busy harbour. It was to this address that his concerned father, William, wrote on 24 October 1834:

      Dr. [Dear] Child we are something tedious concerning the great expence of your houses and trade and that we could not fully understand what are you selling out to make up your expence you know also that our wishes and desires