From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/English/Bruce S. Elliott
Prince Edward Island
Though Devon was prominent in the early history of both Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, the initial settlement of English in these provinces originated in the activities of distinct networks of merchants trading in different products. The Napoleonic Wars, which transformed the migratory Newfoundland fishery into a resident one and encouraged permanent settlement there, also created the British market for North American timber. As a result, whereas Newfoundland was linked with south Devon and was a supplier of fish, in the nineteenth century Prince Edward Island became tied to north Devon as a supplier of timber. The migration to these areas also differed in that the settlement of Newfoundland involved a slow leeching of permanent colonists from among the much larger numbers who went out for a season or two as fishermen, servants, or labourers. Young men did sign on to go out to Prince Edward Island to oversee lumbering and shipbuilding, and some stayed, but more went out as immigrants intending to farm on their own account. This was an occupation that was next to non-existent in Newfoundland, where arable land was as scarce as merchantable timber.
Prince Edward Island’s population was not, however, predominantly English, and the West Country settlers, though the largest English group, did not account for all its English population. About a third of the island’s population was of Scottish descent in the nineteenth century, with the Irish in second place and the English, in third, accounting for less than a fifth of the population, only twice the number of Acadian French. The English influx dates primarily from the 1817–54 period. Many of the non-resident proprietors of the sixty-seven estates into which the island had been divided in 1767 were English, and several half-hearted attempts were made to settle some of these estates and exploit their resources. Robert Clark, a London Quaker, founded New London in 1774 and settled a hundred people, few of them Quakers, along the creeks east of Richmond Bay. The settlers came close to starvation the first winter and within a year Clark’s colonization efforts ceased.
Substantial numbers of English arrived in the decade following the Napoleonic Wars, but immigration dropped to insignificant levels in the late 1820s, prompted by a depression in the timber trade. Arrivals peaked during the early 1830s, years of economic difficulty and social and political dislocation in England, and then declined again to low numbers later in the decade. Migration carried on strongly through the 1840s but had declined significantly by the end of the 1850s, after which the influx was negligible. In terms of regional origins, more than half of the immigrants came from the West Country (with Devon outnumbering Cornwall by nearly three to one), about 15 percent from East Anglia (much more heavily Suffolk than Norfolk), about 6 percent each from Yorkshire and the London area, and a scattering from other regions.
English immigration to P.E.I. owed much to Napoleon’s 1806 blockade of England’s traditional Baltic supplies of naval timber. Some English and Scottish merchants on the island responded to this market, and within a few years west of England merchants were sending vessels there. It became a common practice to find a well-treed shoreline at a deep cove in some sparsely populated part of the island and put ashore a small party under a master shipwright with instructions to construct a small vessel over the winter and fill it with timber for export to Britain in the spring. The establishment that became James Yeo’s at Port Hill had its origin in one such venture organized in 1818 by Bideford timber dealer Thomas Burnard.
The Pope, Billing, and Peake families, timber importers in Plymouth, all assumed a prominent role in exporting timber from Prince Edward Island to England, and each sent out family members to supervise shipbuilding there. Several of them were to become important in island and national politics. The numbers of immigrants their vessels brought, however, were comparatively small, and by the 1830s far more prospective settlers were embarking at the much smaller north Devon port of Bideford, where Burnard’s nephew Thomas B. Chanter was actively advertising for passengers and stimulating a competitive trade in emigrants. Perhaps 1,700 to 2,000 West Country settlers had arrived on the island by 1845. The largest West Country settlement was just north of Charlottetown on the Winsloe estate.
Bristol was another important port of embarkation, especially in the early years. John Cambridge, a Bristol Quaker who had come to the Island in the 1770s, established sawmills at Murray Harbour and from 1811 onward, responding to the British demand for wood, financed the building of at least twenty large ships that took timber to Bristol, returning with settlers and merchandise. Though his sons continued to be active in island business after his death in England in 1833, most of the ships out of Bristol trading with the island thereafter were the property of north Devon expatriate James Yeo. Some West Country settlers had always taken a ship in Bristol, and this became easier to do after the launching of a steamer service between Bristol and Bideford in 1834.
By contrast, north of England immigration to P.E.I. was concentrated in the early post-Napoleonic years, as it seems to have been in other parts of the Maritimes. Several Hull ships brought large numbers of emigrants to the island in the 1817–18 period, but they ceased calling there at an early date. Few Yorkshire emigrants appear to have arrived via the Miramichi region of New Brunswick or Pictou, Nova Scotia. Their largest settlements were at Little York near Charlottetown, and at Crapaud on the south shore. Five vessels brought about 100 passengers from Cumberland in 1820–21, one at least of these vessels going on to Quebec. Though large numbers of Cumbrian vessels sailed annually to the Miramichi for timber, Cumbrian settlers seem largely to have bypassed the Maritimes and settled in the Canadas.
An organized movement out of East Anglia that contributed largely to central Canada’s population in the 1830s also sent more than 500 settlers to P.E.I. in the same decade, accounting for the commonness of Suffolk as a place of origin in island obituaries and on gravestones. The island dimension of this movement began in a small way in 1829, when twelve immigrants arrived. The following year, fifty more immigrants “of all ages, from the County of Suffolk” disembarked on the island, having first journeyed from Yarmouth to Quebec. Two ships disembarked 160 people from a more sensibly direct passage later that year, but by 1831 Yarmouth ships were stopping at P.E.I. en route to Quebec rather than making the island a primary destination. After 1834 the vessels ceased calling at Charlottetown entirely, although a few Suffolk emigrants arrived in later years, mostly on ships out of London. In all, ten Yarmouth vessels brought 528 passengers, accounting for a fifth of all English steerage passengers landed on the island in the pre-1840 period.
The English formed concentrated settlements in the rural districts, but they also scattered through the central and western parts of the island and a minority found work in Charlottetown (a fifth of the English-born population in 1841, and a quarter in 1861 and 1881). By 1881, when the first federal census was taken in P.E.I., the degree of intermarriage among the various Protestant ethnic groups was substantial, especially in the Port Hill area, where the English constituted less of a solid block than they did in the interior north of the city.
