Maria Stuart Proctor's Halifax, Nova Scotia

Maria Stuart Proctor was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia to Captain Charles Proctor and Margaret Proctor, one of the youngest of seven children. By the time of her birth her father was a well-established shipping merchant, a member of the Halifax Legislative Assembly, a justice of the peace, a surveyor of highways had served on the grand jury and was a trustee of the Halifax Common, as well as a major, and then lieutenant-colonel in the local militia and warden of St. Paul's Church. He had but recently finished service as a commissioner for laying out the naval dockyards. The town this Protestant New England officer had helped found as one of General William Shirley's veterans of the 1744 Louisbourg campaign by the early 1760s had become the British Navy's main bases in North America.¹

Halifax  had replaced the old capital of Annapolis Royal on the Bay of Fundy. A diverse collection of over one thousand mainly British and Central European Protestants, intended to swamp the French Catholic native Acadians, settled on a site which provided 'a very safe and commodious [harbour] for shipping.' The town was slow to grow and not well-protected, but its presence ensured New England would face little danger from the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. The rapid establishment of the rudiments of a naval base did not make the British settlers feel any more secure about the loyalty of the surrounding French-speaking Acadians who were determined to maintain a studied neutrality ct between the French and the British. As war with the French loomed in 1754, the British determined to expel the Acadians. Somewhere between 6 and 7,000 men women and children, their farms, barns and houses plundered and burnt, were driven off the peninsula by the end of 1755, never to return. Charles Proctor was probably one of those involved in this ethnic cleansing. Women and men were loaded on to different transports. Families were carelessly separated. 'I fear some females were divided and sent to different parts of the globe', one young British official lamented. Many were never re-united.²

Maria's childhood perceptions were shaped not by the peninsula wilderness where the few Acadians remaining had fled, and after them the New England Yankees who had supplanted them on primitive out-settlements, but by the town of Halifax and its harbour and by the great naval base a mile or more from the houses of the prosperous on the bay's northern shores. It is unlikely that Maria, her siblings or her friends saw little of what went on in the dockyard. It was closed in by 'a stone wall about eight feet high.' In any case it was a place for the young and for respectable women to avoid. As far back as Maria could remember, the notorious grog shop of Mrs. Gunnel and Mrs. Haws had stood on a rise near the dockyard walls or when its license was withdrawn, had continued business in a nearby alley, where it catered for 'the lower class of people.' 'Drunkenness was prevalent at this place' one Admiral of the North American Squadron complained. The huge consumption of rum there by sailors working at the dockyard and by the riff-raff of the town bred violence, robbery, house-breaking, even murder.³ It was not a place for the likes of the Proctors'.

Halifax itself was 'built on the slope of a hill', and 'sheltered by woody hills on each side 'on the West side of the Harbour', most of its houses one-storied wood structures. Its most prominent buildings were its three churches, one of them, St. Paul's, where Charles Proctor was the warden and where Maria Proctor would marry Lieutenant David Collins in 1777. Seamen and soldiers who came to this military base found it 'very sterilr' and unprepossessing with its unpaved streets and the compacted road running a mile's length through its centre, despite the bulky citadel on a hill above the town with twelve 24-pounders and the brick barracks, both in the upper part of the town. There were different quarters fir English, Irish and Dutch, the Dutch spreading out behind the dockyard. Several batteries lay in or about the town but over the years these would end up 'in ruins.' The few gardens and orchards looked 'insignificant' in a treeless landscape. On market days, such as they were, 'Indians' came out of the nearby woods. Those trees closest to the town were burnt during the Seven Years' or French and Indian War, and were still 'living rotten in the ground.' '[N]ot far from the Town' a strong square battery of twenty cannon on George's Island at the harbour mouth defended its approach, but this, too, would fall into disrepair. Maria Proctor, 'born and bred a gentlewoman' with a fascination for literature and writing shared the visitors' distaste for her home town but with her it extended to the very idea of colonial life. New South Wales, where her future husband would serve as Judge-Advocate, she described as 'that infernal place, Port Jackdon',though she had never been there.⁴

Naval activities dominated Halifax, from the careening yard and like facilities at the dockyard the ever-present flotillas of frigates, sloops and men-of-war 'in the Harbour opposite the Dockyard' and its wharves. Every night Maria saw ships' lanterns bobbing in the dark heard ships' bells and the creaking of wood and rope, sailor's voices carrying on the air. The long beam from the light house set on a rock near the harbour entrance pierced far out to sea in the gloom, through the thick morning fogs so much a part of Nova Scotian life. An abundance of fish, 'cod, haddock, mackerel, hallebut, cheart, ...' and the like was readily available in the harbour. Probably schooled at home by a tutor or her mother, Maria's recreations were limited to play on the town common, strolling through the weekly market and the days of public celebration, such as the plethora of royal anniversaries and Guy Fawkes' Day, with bonfires and illumination along the shore and the constant recurring booms of naval salutes. The latter so much a part of her daily life that they became almost unnoticed background noise.⁵

A small child in 1765. on market day Maria Proctor may have occasionally seen the brawny matser's mate from the Launceston, John Hunter, at the town market, just as her elder siblings in the first years of the Seven Years' War may have spotted the nondescript ship's master, James Cook, whose claiming of New South Wales for Britain and descriptions of Botany Bay just south of Port Jackson in 1770 would have a fateful effect on her later life. Though at the time Maria Proctor never dreamt it, if she saw him, the twenty-eight year old Hunter would be post-captain on Governor Phillip's Sirius, the ship that would carry her future husband as Judge-Advocate to Botany Bay. Together, with Phillip, Hunter and Collins would discover Port Jackson, 'a noble and a spacious harbour, equal if not superior to any in the world', the place that would become David Collins's home for nine long years from her side. Hunter would serve as a naval officer on the criminal court in New South Wales over which her husband would preside, share his interest in the study of Aboriginal Australians and their language, and, perhaps most devastatingly for Maria, would persuade Collins to remain yet another year longer than was originally intended when he, Hunter, succeeded Phillip as Governor. On his return to England in 1800, he would secretly provide Collins with letters and notes from which Collins would fashion the second volume of his great annals of early colonial life, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, published in 1802. The work went some way to restoring Hunter's reputation, ruined by his financial mismanagement of the convict colony and the spite of his enemies in its uncontrollable soldiery.⁶

There was a darker side to Halifax life. Soldiers and sailors pursued single women to their front doors., and attempt forced entry to further their acquaintance. A general fear of house-breaking by the town's criminal element had householders far too ready to resort to firearms sometimes with tragic consequences. Flogging of military offenders was public and commonplace though sometimes held in abeyance in the harsh winter lest the lacerated flesh of the offender mortify. Hanging for capital crimes was frequent.⁷

The first tangible sign of the coming revolution in the thirteen colonies to the south came in 1763 when the passing by the British Parliament of the Proclamation Act of 1763,forbidding European egress to Native American lands west of the Appalachians saw a sudden influx of Yankee migrants to Nova Scotia, mainly to the out-settlements, replacing the banished Acadians. The colony's population nearly doubled from 9,000 to about 18,000. The vast majority of these New Englanders did not protest the Stamp Act in 1765 or the later Townshend duties. More peaceable, they accepted that the local establishment of unruly town governing bodies would not be indulged by the Governor in Halifax or those merchant traders like Charles Proctor who dominated the Legislative Council and the local Assembly.⁸

More noticeable to Maria was the constant presence of ships in the harbour - her father's merchant sloops and other ships and up to twenty-one men-of-war who were stationed at Halifax from August 1763, though the majority of the latter would have been patrolling for smugglers in Massachusetts and southern waters. Soldiers passing through the garrison, sent off to the out-settlements or further north to Newfoundland were also an every day sight. Maria may have picked up intimations of trouble for the faraway King and his Government emanating from New England, but the most fearful experience of her early childhood when she was perhaps about eight years old, came in the great hurricane of April 1768. Over twelve hours the careening yard and wharves at the dockyard were seriously damaged. Houses were flooded to at least a depth of three feet, but most significantly for the Proctor family 'more than fifty ships and shallops ' within the harbor 'either sank at the wharves or beat to pieces. ... not a single wharf but is in great measure destroyed. This,' one mariner remarked 'is truly deplorable in so poor a place as Halifax. Many families are totally ruined.' Among those families was probably the shipping merchant's, Charles Proctor. Proctor would never recover his fortunes. When Maria married David Collins in 1777 she brought little financially to the marriage.⁹

Despite the fall in family fortunes Charles and Margaret Proctor ensured that all of their children were well-educated and the girls, Maria and her sister Sara, 'delicately brought up.' From the half-repaired wharves, under the direction of the new commodore, Samuel Hood, regiments embarked at Halifax were dispatched to Boston at the end of 1768 to quell civilian unrest there. Halifax saw several changes of commander of the North American Squadron as well as changes to the extent of the squadron's jurisdiction. Neither event would have had a great impact on Maria. The pressure on naval resources in Massachusetts meant that by 1774 smuggling along the coastline of Nova Scotia became endemic, to the disgust of the Governor Francis Legge. The Yankee smugglers probably were unneeded competition for Charles Proctor, struggling to restore his shipping business after the hurricane. The business failure was too much for him. By mid 1774 Proctor was dead, devastating his family, including the ten or eleven year old Maria. To make ends meet her mother began to take in military lodgers. Apart from the presence of officers about them, though, the only indications of the troubles across the border the Proctors might have noticed was a sudden shortage of bread in town  (which was more serious than might at first be thought to modern eyes, as bread was the daily staple diet of rich and poor, military and civilian alike) and less ships in the harbour. 'We have but one small Vessel twice this Winter to Trade with us' complained Governor Legge. The fishermen working out of the port, he said, 'were the very refuse ... who could not get employ at Newfoundland.' ¹⁰

1John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne, 2999, p. 11; Brian Cuthbertson and Gillis Architects, 'Thomas Scott and the Scott Manor House', Research Paper Produced for Halifax Historical Council, pdf, not paginated; Nova Scotia Historical Society, History of Halifax City, Halifax, 1895, pp. 62, 60-61, 69; Ronald Rumpeky, (e.) Expeditions of Honour, The Journal of John Salisbury, 1962, p. 173; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia A History. Volume One. Beginnings, Oxford, 1998, pp. 43-44.

2Atkinson, Europeans in Australia, Vol. I, p. 43; Julian Gwyn. Frigates and Foremasts. The North American Squadron in Nova Scotia Waters, Vancouver, 2001, pp. 23-24; Elizabeth Mancke. The Fault Lines of Empire. Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, c.1`760-1830. New York. 2005, p. 11; Joseph Lee Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel. The Thomas Sullivan Kournal, Bowie, 1997, p. 41; J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, Stanford, 1974, p. 37; George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts. A Study in Massachusetts=Nova Scotia Relations, 1630-1784, Montreal, 1973, pp. 201, 211; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles. American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, New York, 2011, pp. 153-154.

3John Grenier, The First Way of War. American War Making on the Frontier, New York, 2005, p. 65; Boyle. (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, p. 42; Neil R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775, Annapolis, 1973, pp. 57-58; Julian Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat. The British Navy and the Halifax Dock Yard before 1820, Ottawa, 2004, p. 11.

4Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, pp. 41-42; Currey, David Collins, p. 25; Archibald Robinson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762-1780, New York, 1930, p. 82' Maria Collins to Under Secretary Peel, Ham, 11 May, 1011 in Currey, David Collins, p. 310; Maria Collins to David Collins, London, 9 October, 1792 in ibid., p. 72.

5Robertson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, p. 82; Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, p. 41; Extract of A Letter from a Midshipman on Board the Chatham, dated Nantasket Road, March 23, 1776 in Clark (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 4, pp. 473-474; Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, p. 34.

6J. J. Auchmuty, 'Hunter, John 1737-1821' in Australian Dictionary of Biography On Line. Despite its age and brevity Auchmuty's biographical sketch of Hunter is far superior to the recent full-length book biography, Robert Barnes, An Unlikely Leader. The life and times of Captain John Hunter, Sydney, 2009; Beaglehole, Life of Captain James Cook, Chapter III, passim; Currey, David Collins, pp. 32, 43-44, 108-109, 127, 161-162; David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. I, (ed. B. H. Fowler, Sydney, 1975, p. 5.

7Nova Scotia Historical Society, History of Halifax City, pp. 60-61; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 11; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, pp. 57-58; Beaglehole, Life of Captain James Cook, pp. 34-35; Letter Book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, 1776, americanrevolution.org

8Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles, p. 156; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775, New York, 1952, p. 119; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, pp. 216-217.

9Robert W. Tucker and David Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire. Origins of the War of American Independence, Baltimore, 1982, pp. 128-129; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, pp. 29-30; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, pp. 14-15; Currey, David Collins, pp. 29-30.

10Currey, David Collins, p. 25; John Shy, Toward Lexington. The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution, Princeton, 1965, p. 336; Stout, The Royal Navy In America, . 127-8, 137; Allen Everett Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor. A Study of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1749-1799, Montreal, 1993, p. 95; John A. Tolley, The British Navy and the American Revolution, Columbia, SC, 1987, p. 11; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, March 6^th, 1775, in William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. I, Washington, 1964, pp. 126, 128.