Sailor’s Hope: The Life and Times of William Cooper, Agrarian Radical in an Age of Revolutions (review)

In colonial Prince Edward Island, the struggle for democracy was inextricably linked to the land question. Large swaths of the island had been granted in the 18th century to British landlords on the condition that they develop their estates. Few did, and the result was the escheat movement: a multi-generational struggle to revoke these grants and transfer title to the tenant farm families who worked the land. Rusty Bittermann argues that in order to understand the complexities of this struggle, we need to place it in the much larger context of a revolutionary age, for the life story of William Cooper, a leading figure in the escheat movement, is not an island story. It is a story that criss-crosses oceans and circumnavigates continents. By reconstructing Cooper’s life journey, Bittermann establishes the intimacy of relations between the local and the global. He, thus, effectively challenges the presumed centrality accorded to better known colonial reformers, such as William Lyon Mackenzie and Joseph Howe, by illustrating the world in and through a relatively small place.

Sailor’s Hope was the name Cooper gave to the farm he leased in 1819 at the top of Howe Bay on the island’s east coast. It was there that his wife Sarah Glover gave birth to nine of their ten children. But neither farming, nor family, structures this biography. The book opens with an exploration of rural Scotland, where in 1786 William was born to a poor craft family in the village of Lochee near Dundee. His father died while William was still a young boy and, after working as a herder, at the age of eleven William went to sea. His rise to mastery of a small sailing vessel by 1811 allows Bittermann to examine the maritime world linking London, Portugal and British North America. The focus then shifts to William’s diverse activities after first settling on the island. His experiences as an agent for an absentee landlord and as owner/operator of a grist mill would shape his understanding of the specifics of the land question, which was so central to his role as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly and as the island’s emissary to the Colonial Office in the 1830s.

When the reform initiative he had led failed, William turned his attention in the 1840s to ‘making property.’ Bittermann details the ups and downs of an enterprising father, who despite quarrelsome sons, engaged in both ship building for the imperial market and myriad inter-colonial and imperial trades. Here, the invisible hand of the market is replaced by the very visible and active hands of men busy creating markets, while the abstract swings of trade cycles are replaced by real losses and the occasional profit. In the wake of repeated poor harvests and no improvement on the political front, Cooper proposes to his extended family that they emigrate to California. Many accept and, in 1850, they build an 88 ton vessel and sail it around the tip of South America to San Francisco. The crush of men in the rush to gold created a speculative environment more to the liking of his sons than William, who makes the fateful decision to return alone to PEI to settle matters there. Cholera strikes soon after his departure and Sarah is the first of seven family members to die. Most of the surviving members resettle in the Eel River valley of northern California, where three of William’s adult sons would die at the hands of Native American resistance to settler colonialism. William’s return to PEI thus becomes permanent, and he once again agitates for a just settlement of the land question. His debates with first the Liberals and then the Tories illustrate clearly how, and to a certain extent why, the 1850s mark the end of this revolutionary age. William Cooper died on June...