Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers: English Settlers in Atlantic Canada by Lucille H. Campey (review)

It is an interesting irony that in Canada, a nation once described by Arthur M. Lower as 'the principal architect of the British Commonwealth', the migration experience of Irish and Scottish settlers has received far more attention than the exploits of the English colonists and pioneers. In Atlantic Canada, Hibernian and Highland societies (to say nothing of the Acadians) celebrate their culture and often subsidise academic programmes to study their history and language. Yet the English, universally considered the founding or dominant historical group, are rarely celebrated (and more often maligned) or studied as a distinct ethnic community. Unlike their Irish and Scottish counterparts, who remained focused on public displays of ethnicity or nationalism, the English, safely within the confines of John Bull's empire, did not 'wrap themselves in Saint George's flags and dance around maypoles' when they arrived in Canada (p. 281). In an attempt to plug a rather large historiographical hole, Lucille Campey has turned her scholarly attention away from 'high-profile Scots' to the more 'inconspicuous English', and has produced a very readable volume on English settlers in Atlantic Canada (p. 13).

Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers is the first of three books by Campey to examine English migration to Canada (the others will focus on Ontario and Canada West). In a broad and wide-ranging survey covering disparate experiences of English settlers throughout the Maritimes and Newfoundland (and over two centuries), Campey offers her readers interesting and often heartfelt accounts of the trials, failures and successes of migrant life. The reader is privy to the dissatisfaction of Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, dispersed settlement in New Brunswick, economic prominence in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland's West Country settlers. The book also has chapters on the 'Home Children' (those young destitute girls and boys sent to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work as farm labourers or domestic servants), early migration from Yorkshire and the experiences of sea-crossing. The accounts of those North Atlantic voyages were perhaps the most compelling read.

While well researched and easy to read, the book is interpretively weak in areas and some of the historiography is rather dated. Although it will unquestionably serve as a good resource for students interested in English migration to Atlantic Canada, its greatest source of readership will certainly come from genealogists. Campey has filled the book with passenger lists (the lists containing information on the 'Home Children' were particularly interesting) and vessel information for English ships landing in various Atlantic Canadian locales. Moreover the footnotes are packed with interesting and useful genealogical data. My own forbearers 'went out' to Newfoundland from Wiltshire in the early nineteenth century, and I was therefore particularly drawn to the exploits of the West Country Merchants (such as the Slade Family) in places like Fogo Island and Twillingate. This book added context to my own family narrative and will undoubtedly do the same for others.

Although Planters, Paupers and Pioneers does not represent an authoritative examination of English migration to Atlantic Canada, it does offer a broad contextual resource for students and genealogists, while addressing a glaring gap in the study of migration in Atlantic Canada.