The Madness of Major General Eyre Massey - Halifax, Nova Scotia- 15 May 1777.

On the morning of 15 May, a day of pouring rain, while the ever-active Commodore Sir George Collier was absent on a naval cruise, David Collins received a a very disturbing order from the garrison's commanding officer, Major-General Eyre Massey to pass on to the Surgeon of Marines. Massey had decided to fortify St. George's Island, the site of the King's Naval Hospital in Halifax Harbour. All the Hospital's sick were to be removed to the mainland immediately.and all its 'Medicines, Instruments, Beddings and other Stores' taken out of the Island's storehouses were to be thrown out into the street for the inhabitants of the island to plunder if not removed within 'three or four days.' Dutifully he passed it on. Thus, at noon, with the downpour still raging, the 'Town sergeant', a lieutenant, and Hill, the Surgeon of Marines landed with their empty boats and a contingent of marines on St. George's Island and turned the sick seamen out of their beds. Some were 'at the point of death, others with fevers & various other disorders', others 'with wounds still open & dangerous.' They were forced onto the waiting boats, wet, cold and shivering, and rowed across to 'the Gun Battery', where they were abandoned in the teeming rain. No shelter was found for them by the town's surgeons 'for twenty-four hours.' To the anger and horror of the townsfolk these walking wounded were left to 'wander about the Streets' seeking cover from the drenching wet where they could, reliant on the pity of civilians and soldiers alike. ;This cruel Treatment must be fatal to them', complained one doctor, frantically looking for a place to house them. The townspeople turned their anger on the 'Bedlamite' general, and would, Collier later wrote, have 'torn him limb from limb' if they had got their hands on him. Collier demanded Massey's recall, to no effect, but by the end of the month did put an end to the madness with the return of the Hospital to the island,

1Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts,pp. 60-61; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat,p. 43; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor,pp.113-114.

Tracing Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer III

Some further evidence has come to light about Philip Schaeffer. Unfortunately none of it is particularly conclusive so the reader should be aware that whatever tentative conclusions I have made about him and his daughter Elizabeth in this post are more based on assumptions than firm historical evidence. This is partly due to the contradictory nature of some of that evidence.

A Phillipe Scheffer is listed as a sergeant in the company of Captain Germann, a Hanau company mustered at Njimegen on 23 March, 1776. [Bruce E. Burgoyne (trans.) Hesse-Hanau order Books, a Diary and Rosters. Heritage Books, 2006, p. 238.] If this Scheffer is our Philip Schaeffer, a possibility as Scheffer is a variant spelling of Schaeffer in the 18th century Hessian records, it means he possibly served in Canada from about mid-1776. At this stage of my research into the Schaeffers this is inconclusive, but if so, it may mean he served at Saratoga in 1777 and was captured there after Burgoyne's defeat there later that year. If that is the case he would have ended up a prisoner in Virginia, and still been a prisoner when he married, in which case Elizabeth Schaeffer may have been born in an American prison camp, assuming his wife, not yet identified, was with him. These conclusions are all based on as yet non-evidential assumptions which have yet to be tested.

Another (or the same) Philipp Schaeffer is listed as a second lieutenant in the Free Battalion of Hesse Hanau 1782, 1783, enlisting on January 15, 1781. [Max von Eelking, The German Allied Troops in the North American War of Independence, 1776-1783, (trans. J. G. Rosengarten), Albany, NY. 1893, p. 349] in which case Schaeffer came late to the war and his daughter Elizabeth was born probably near Frankfurt probably in 1780. [Michael Flynn, The second Fleet. Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1790,North Sydney, 2001, p. 581].

On the other hand, there is clear evidence that some Hesse-Hanau troops did not depart for North America until after those regiments that left in 1776, probably in early 1777. These Hessians belonged to a Jaeger Corps, as did Schaeffer and they served first in New Jersey, then in the Philadelphia campaign. [von Eelking, op. cit.,pp. 100-105.] Schaeffer may well have been with this group. If so, he would have been part of the British occupation force in Charleston, South Carolina in 1780, and Elizabeth could have been born in Charleston, assumimg Schaeffer was accompanied by his wife.

Maria Stuart Proctor's War - Halifax, April 1775-March 1776

When undeclared war broke out on 19 April 1775 at Lexington/Concord, three Royal Navy vessels were in the Halifax careening yard. Immediate instructions were sent to the 28-gun HMS Tartar to remain in Halifax Harbour 'for the protection of the King's Yard and Stores.' Still, those more knowledgeable about Nova Scotia, aware that the 9,000 odd New England Yankees in the colony were not liable either to support or rebel against British policy, had little else to worry about than the sudden, single torching of hay meant for the military garrison. Their real fears centred on the possibility of the Americans invading or rebel pirates from Machias, twenty miles south of the province. For Maria Proctor, about to reach the marriageable age of twelve, in a world where marriage for a woman was 'an economic necessity', the departure of four companies of the 65^th Regiment for Boston, leaving behind only three companies, totalling sixty-seven officers and men, seemed to promise a bleak future. There was no immediate prospect of gaining a potential husband with the immediate dearth of officers available. The arrival of the first refugee Loyalists from Boston or news that two Loyalist regiments were soon to be stationed in Nova Scotia¹ did little to raise her spirits.

The capture of HMS Margaretta by the Machias privateers and the news of Bunker Hill had an effect on Nova Scotia's Governor Francis Legge that spread through the town and could not have escaped notice by the Proctors. He proclaimed loyalty oaths be administered to all newcomers from the American colonies, the first of a long series of proclamations ranging from a six month ban on the export of arms, ammunition and saltpetre, a prohibition on aiding the rebels in New England to a ban on the distribution of American newspapers sympathetic to the rebel cause. The net effect of his suspicions, which, in June 1775 were not entirely well-founded, was to alarm the Halifax population and offend the Nova Scotia Yankees on the out-settlements. For Maria it must have been an uneasy time, especially if, in moments of solitude, she displayed the intense anxieties which dominated her adult life.²

To add to her unease, late June, 1775 saw an outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Halifax. The pastor of St. Paul's, the Proctor family's church, exhorted his congregation to have themselves inoculated. Maria was probably among the first of his parishioners to heed his advice on July 1, when two of the town's doctors inoculated two hundred civilians and nineteen orphans. She may have known some of the first smallpox victims buried at the church on 23 July. These probably were Americans possibly known to her father through his Yankee origins. One hundred and forty people had died of the disease by December 1775 and about 200 soldiers fell ill with it.³

Among the merchant class a panic erupted over the activities of the Machias privateers in the Bay of Fundy, the sea approach to Halifax. One merchant refused to let his three vessels, loaded with hay for Boston, leave the harbour. '[W]e could not suffer the loss ourselves', he wrote in explanation to Boston, a sentiment undoubtedly sympathised with by the Proctors, failed merchants themselves. Further reminders of war came at 'about ½ past 10' on the night of 8 July, when a fire broke out at the naval dockyard in the 'Paint [Section] of the Boat-house'. The sparks swirling from the flames spiralling into the night air alarmed the town; fire was the greatest dread imaginable for colonial wooden towns of the eighteenth century. Maria Proctor probably stood in the crowd on the Halifax hillside watching the ominous red sky with great apprehension. Fortunately the fire was brought under control quickly but the morning after rumours spread it had been lit deliberately by rebel sympathisers in an attempt to destroy the yard's powder magazine. The sense of menace over Halifax grew as, thereafter, militia patrolled the streets at night looking for non-existent rebels. Governor Legge increased the guard around the ordnance store in the yard, leaving his own quarters without a sentry. Perturbed by the report of Halifax's lack of fortification, crumbling batteries, and that out of the 65^th Legge had only thirty effective men, the rest being unfit for service, Admiral Graves sent orders from Boston that a marine guard be used to defend the naval yard.⁴

Halifax began to change in ways that Maria Proctor could notice. One hundred and forty two artificers arrived from the home dockyards of Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. These shipwrights, caulkers, house carpenters, joiners and labourers mounted 'guard every night for the protection of the yard &c.' One day in early September the children of the town, the young Proctors among them, were delighted by the sudden appearance of a recruiting sergeant and drummer beating up the main street. They were raising local recruits for the Loyalist Royal Highland Emigrants. Seven young men joined. Governor Legge, who had his own plans for raising one thousand men across Nova Scotia, quickly put an end to such efforts. Men-of-war began arriving in the harbour with prizes of rebel privateers captured in the Bay of Fundy. Workmen, hurrying against the frost and rains of the coming autumn, could be seen building temporary timber 'Block houses & Palisades' outside the Navy Yard. These would form a retreat for 'the People of the Town' should Halifax come under attack, and could easily be defended by them.⁵

The first snow, brought by a nor-wester, arrived about early October and had well and truly set in by the end of the month. Halifax was used to Royal Navy personnel but the increased numbers from the 64-gun Somerset, stationed to protect the dockyard and stores during the winter, the smaller Cerberus, there for careening, and the dismasted Orpheus, soon joined by the Fowey, carrying two small contingents of Loyalist troops raised in Boston, would not have escaped Maria Proctor's attention. It was common knowledge, too that the HMS Scarborough was patrolling the Bay of Fundy 'interrupting the American privateers. As in Boston, the navy was always short of crew. Press-gangs boarded Halifax merchantmen in the harbour and scoured the town streets, taverns close by the dockyard. The Proctor family, like everybody else in Halifax, feared a possible shortage of fuel 'and other necessary Supplies' should seamen shun the port to avoid impressment. The General Assembly made a special appeal to the Governor that 'Seamen belonging to the Vessels in Nova Scotia ma y not be impressed', a plea which would be ignored by the new Commander-in-Chief of the Port and Commissioner of the Dockyard, Commodore Marriott Artbuthnot, when he arrived in the Roebuck on 31 October, since more men-of-war meant the need for more presses.⁶

Though with Arbuthnot's arrival much work was immediately begun on improving the Naval Yard's fortifications, the only signs of preparation Maria might have seen were the stationing of a naval schooner at the harbour mouth to signal an attack by sea and the positioning of the Somerset and Roebuck to cover the shore before the yard and a hill close by its wall. Somewhat worrying for the people of Halifax was news from the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia to the mainland, of 'a large body of Rebels' led by Jonathan Eddy and John Allen, former members of the National Assembly. '[T]heir direction,' Commodore Arbuthnot remarked dismissively, 'was unknown.' For the moment, nothing came of this discontent. Much more alarming was the news in early December, as troops from Ireland brought the total strength at Halifax to six hundred men, that Montreal had fallen to the rebels on 13 November.. That great fear of the Nova Scotians that the army of Generals Philip Schuyler and Richard Montgomery would turn east to Halifax was re-awoken. Partly in response to these fears and partly because of the increasingly frequent depredations of American privateers along the Nova Scotia coast Governor Legge instantly declared martial law throughout the province.⁷

Apart from the ubiquitous presence of a supposedly more vigilant military, 384 of whom were stationed in Halifax, (though eighty-three of those were already ill when they arrived), one of Governor Legge's proclamations was perhaps more noticed by Maria Proctor. Thomas Proctor, probably a relative, was one of the Justices of the Peace to whom any and every visitor from the American coilonies had to 'report ... to signify their names' and addresses and give an explanation of their business in town. If they failed to do this within two hours of arrival they were to be 'treated as spies.' With such sentiments Maria undoubtedly heartily concurred. Years later she would describe the French revolutionaries as 'that infernal crew' because of their regicide. On Christmas Eve another troop transport from Ireland carrying three companies made its way into the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy, now 'hazardous and dangerous' with ice floes, to dock at last in Halifax Harbour. On Boxing Day the Proctor children watched saoldiers struggling with cannon 'without Carruages', dragging them from various points around the town toward the naval yard.They felt safer from the enemy, like the other townspeople, assured the sudden influx of troops would 'totally prevent any situation that may have been meditating against us either at present or in the future.' Halifax was now crowded with troops and the camp-followers that came with them. With the Loyalist Royal Hughland Emigrants arriving in early to mid-Januarythere were 300 women with their baggage with nowhere to put either. The barracks were falling down in parts with no means to repair them.  Even so, the Proctors had not yet again boarded officers. Of the fresh troops arriving in Halifax 'not more than 500' were 'very sickly.' Governor Legge's attempts to raise a militia and taxes to pay for them prompted 'universal ferment.' It was not a task that Thomas Proctor as a J.P. would have relished. The plan was so resisted it was abandoned. Civilian fears in the town were not assuaged, either, by the return of the Somerset to England or the despatch of the Roebuck to Virginia, leaving only the Savage and the Cerberus in the harbour, with the Cerberus being careened beacuse it had twice run on rocks. ⁸

Probably the most noticeable activity through the winter was the floating of logs out of the adjoining wilderness by yard workers and sailors down streams into the harbour for the dockyard to turn into spars and mainmasts. By early February though 'the harbour was totally froze up.' On the dinner table Maria would have found meat running short. Little news came from the thirteen rebellious colonies. Perhaps with some relief the townspeople noticed the influx of loyalists from the south had 'been much lower than was expected' and those who had come had proved mainly self-sufficient. By the end of March, however, the first of the troop and refugee stransports from Boston began to anchor in Halifax Harbour. Among the military was Maria Proctor's future husband, David Collins.⁹

1 John R. Elting, The Battle of Bunker's Hill, Monmouth Beach, NJ, 1975, p. 18; Vice Admiral Samuel Graves to Philip Stevvens, Preston,Boston, July 28, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 1, p. 997; Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire,p. 77, Tiley, The British Navy and the American Revolution, p. 37; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 102, 105, 276, f/n. 34; Liza Picard, Dr. Johnston's London. Life in London, 1740-1770, London, 2001, p. 188; Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, p. 165; Bridget Hill, Women,work and sexual politics in eighteenth century England, London, 2003, p. 192

2Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire,p. 87; Currey, David Collins, pp. 73-75, 120-121.

3Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 108, 103, 106.

4Day & Saoult to William Sherriff, Halifax, July 28^th, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR.Vol. 1, p. 993; Admiral Graves to Philip Stevens, Preston, Boston, July 28, 1775 in Clark, ibid.,p.997; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia, to General Thomas Gage, Halifax, July 26^th, 1775, in Clark ibid., p. 975; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, July 31^st, 1775 in Clark, ibid., p. 1014; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, p. 231; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 19.

5Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 25; Minutes of the Executive Council of Nova Scotia, 28^th September, 1775, in William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, Washington, 1966, p. 224; Captain Alexander McDonald to Col. Allen McLean, Halifax, 18^th Sept., 1775 in Letter Book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, americanrevolution.org; Diary of Simon Perkins, Liverpool, 30^th September, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 246.

6John Ferling, Almost A Miracle. The American Victory in the War of Independence,New York, 2007, p. 93, for contiguous weather details; Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, pp. 57-58; 'Narrative of Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, RN, Halifax, October 31^st, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, pp. 855-657; Address of the Nova Scotia General Assembly to Francis Legge in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,p. 657' Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, HMS Roebuck,Halifax, 6^th November, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid., p. 900.

7Commodore Narriot Arbuthnot to Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, [8 November 1775[ in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 2, p. 926; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stephens, [18 November, 1775] in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,pp. 1083-1084; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts,p. 231; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, Halifax Yard, 7 November, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 2, p. 912; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stevens in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, Washington, 1068, p. 251; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, p. 107; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, Octr. 17, 1775, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 485; Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, December 5^th, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid., p. 1280.

8 Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 276-277, f/n. 44, 148;Proclamation by the Governor of Nova Scotia [5^th December, 1775 in Peter Force, (ed.) American Archives,S4,v,4,p. 722; Maria Collins cited in Currey, David Collins, p. 121. ; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stephens, Halifax Yard, 26^th December, 1775in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, p. 251' Governor Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 22 december, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,p. 303; Captain Alexander McDonald to Major Small, Halifax, 9^th January, 1775 in Letter-book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, americanrevolution.org ; P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires. Britain, India and the Americas,1750-1783,Oxford, 2005, p. 3565; Governor Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, January 12^th, 1776 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, pp. 742-743; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, Jany 15^th, 1776 in Clark, ibid. p. 792.,

9Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, pp. 104-105; Journal of Bartholomew James, February 10, 1776, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, p. 1192; Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman on board HMS Orpheus,dated Halifax, 15^th February, 1776 in Clark, ibid., p. 1300; Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1934, p. 571; Governor francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, 1`8^th March, 1776, William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR, vol. 4, Washington, 1969, p.358; Robinson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, p. 32; Currey, David Collins, p. 23.

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.

Some Thoughts on Maria Proctor Collins

Maria Proctor was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, probably about 1763, though her actual birth date is unknown. She married David Collins in late 1777 in St. Paul's Church, Halifax.. I suspect she was probably about 14 at the time of her marriage, mostly because of an extraordinarily difficult childbirth in England a year or so later. The child did not survive and Maria's health was wrecked for the rest of her life. Henceforth she aged swiftly and became a semi-invalid, suffering from severe chest comp;aints and eventually, epilepsy.

From all accounts she was a very lively young girl with a deep interest in literature. This interest in writing was one of the reasons, apart from the physical, she found the dashing young David Collins attractive. Another was a deep distaste for colonial life. Collins was a way away from Halifax, and Halifax was indeed a place to be away from. Throughout her childhood and young adulthood she had known little else than rumours of rebellion from the thirteen colonies to the south, then, after April 1775, fears of invasion and the threat of actual rebellion in 1777 from a small clique of Nova Scotia Yankees. Though Collins was not involved in putting down this revolt on the Chibucto Peninsula north of Halifax, some of his comrades almost certainly were.

Maria Collins brought practically nothing as a marriage settlement to her union with Collins. It is clear from all her letters to him over the years that he was indeed the great love of her life. She deeply resented his time away from her, at the siege of Gibraltar in 1782, and later, during the years that he spent in New South Wales as Judge-Advocate. Though she never came to Sydney, or for that matter, later Van Diemen's Land where Collins was Lieutenant Governor,, she hated the convict colony with a passion. In the first place she thought it was disastrous for Collins's career advancement; and it is likely she felt some resentment at Collins's relationship with the convict woman Ann Yeats who bore him two children and was thereby a taunt to Maria's own childlessness.

Separated from her husband she fashioned a career for herself as a novelist. No copies of the novels survive (the family collection was destroyed in World War II) and if she used a nom-de-plume we do not know it.) All indications are that she was very skilled at her craft and wise in the ways of publishers. It is possible she helped David Collins write his An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. She certainly edited a later shorter edition which Collins's biographer, John Currey, noted was of a superior literary standard to the first.

Maria Collins had come from a well-to-do colonial family. Her father, Charles Proctor, was, among other things a successful shipping merchant, though his business suffered in the economic fluctuations emanating from the revolutionary fervour to the south and it collapsed shortly before his death in 1774. To keep her in the manner to which she had been accustomed since birth, David Collins borrowed heavily, ultimately a disastrous course of action, as he was a hopeless financial manager in the first place. At his death in 1810, Maria was plunged into penury, that even a government pension granted a few years later did not entirely relieve. She died blind and with few possessions near Plymouth in 1830.

Tracing Phillip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer - II

Further research into Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer has caused me to revise some of my conclusions in my earlier post on them. It seems likely that Schaeffer arrived in North America about August 1776 and certainly no later than October, and that he was posted to New York with the Hesse-Hanau Jaegers. Details of his military activities between 1776 and December 1779 are still to be researched, but I am pretty sure most of them will either be in the Hesse-Hanau Orderly Books and Letters aforementioned and in Johann Ewald's Diary of the American War. A Hessian Journal which I have yet to buy.

There is now much more clarity about Schaeffer's personal life. It is now reasonable to assume that Schaeffer married in New York some time between August 1776 and probably September or October 1778, which would place Elizabeth Schaeffer's birth somewhere around the middle of June 1779, making her about ten in 1789-90. As noted in the earlier post it is possible her mother was either English or an American Loyalist because of Elizabeth's bilingual skill in both English and German; or , if her mother was a German camp follower, she could have simply began to pick up English from growing up in New York between 1779 and 1783.

Lieutenant Schaeffer definitely took part in the South Carolina campaign of 1779-1780. He is mentioned by name several times during the 1780 siege of Charleston in both Letters and Diary of Captain John Ewald, and the Diary of Captain Johann Hindrich. After his service in the South he returned to New York where he was stationed in Brooklyn and later on Long Island. He almost certainly went to Quebec in Canada, arriving there on 15 September 1781. From about the 22nd of that month he served  at various posts along the St. Lawrence, though I have not yet fully researched his later Canadian service. Almost certainly, he had Elizabeth and his wife with him. We have evidence of women and children being on (and dying on) the transport ship Montague that took the Hessians to Quebec. It is likely he returned to England from Canada in 1783, where he settled with his  family. He did not return to Hanau. When Elizabeth's mother died*, Schaeffer decided to begin life afresh. Probably through influential contacts he had made in the British Army in North America, he gained an appointment as a convict supervisor in the recently founded convict colony at Port Jackson, New South Wales. With his poor English, no one could have been less suited to the task. In September 1789 he embarked with Elizabeth on the Guardian bound for Botany Bay, via Cape Town. 

*The Schaeffers must have been reasonably well off during their time in London. I have not been able to find any record of Elizabeth Schaeffer's illness or death in the various London records of the poor, assuming she shared the same first name as her daughter's.

Poem #3

POEM FOR CORNELIS VLEESKENS.

You haven't changed.

The years went by, and you didn't change.

Oh, the hair is thinner,

but the voice is still distinct,

the poems as good, or better.

(One I read the other day

almost moved me to tears -

only good poems do that.)

Poetry's in our DNA,

some elusive thread

making us see the world

differently.

Its in the eyes.

People see it in your eyes,

eyes unmasking everything.

That's why we're looked at strangely.

People admire poets,

but they fear them too.

I don't have to tell you that.

This poetry writing business,

you can't rip it out once it gets inside your head.

A muse turns up.

something makes you angry,
you glimpse a leaf about to fall
from an English beech misplanted
in the Antipodes,

the past creeps back

and wants you to remember,

so it all starts off again,

one line comes and then another

and then another

and words come tumbling from your mouth

in the middle of the night

as you stumble to find the light-switch

and paper and pen

to get it all down before its gone.

After that,

you can breathe.

Sometimes I sit crying at the computer,

trying to get this stuff out.

And I can hear the gods laughing in the sky

or wherever they're kept nowadays.

Tracing Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer I

I had not expected to be working on the career of Philip Schaeffer for the chapter on the British in Halifax for which I am now completing the research, but a reference on Hessians stopping over in Halifax about July 1776 sent me off in search of him. Schaeffer was a Jaeger (light infantryman) with the Hesse-Hanau contingent sent to North America. We know an infantry regiment, including light infantry left Hanau at the end of March, 1776, bound for Portsmouth, England, but as yet I have not been able to ascertain whether this was Philip Schaeffer's regiment or whether his regiment was a later regiment that departed in May 1776. Presently I'm waiting on Hesse-Hanau Orderly Books and Letters which I hope to receive shortly.which will, I hope clarify this confusion. It is possible Schaeffer was in one of the three Hanau infantry regiments that campaigned with General John Burgoyne and was among those taken into captivity after Burgoyne's defeat at the battle of Saratoga in October 1777. On the other hand, Schaeffer may have belonged to Hanau regiments that arrived in America at a later date and fought in the West Indies. Hanau regiments do not appear to have been involved in the 1780 siege and capture of Charleston. [cf. Bruce E. Burgoyne, Georg Pausch's Journal, Bowie, 1996.]

Where Schaeffer was in 1779/1780 is a matter of some significance because in either 1779 or 1780 he had a daughter, Elizabeth. It would appear, since the girl became fluent in English, that her mother was either English or a Loyalist American. Schaeffer's English was notoriously poor and in later life Elizabeth seems to have translated for him. Even if Schaeffer was imprisoned in Virginia  or Maryland it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he married as a prisoner to a Loyalist supporter. What is clear is that some time between 1780 and 1783 Schaeffer returned to England with Elizabeth and his wife, whom at this point I have not been able to identify. Some time before 1789 she died. [Michae lFlynn, The Second Fleet. Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1790, Sydney, 2001, p. 531; Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel. The extraordinary story of the Lady Julian (sic, Juliana) and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay, Sydney, 2001, p.163.]

In 1789 Philip Schaeffer was appointed a superintendent of convicts in New South Wales. In September 1789 he boarded the Guardian, bound for New South Wales, with his daughter Elizabeth, now ten years old. Elizabeth was the only female on the frigate. It would appear she was a mature looking ten year old, as the Guardian's master thought she was fourteen years old. Captain Riou, RN, who would have known, since she evidently dined with her father at the captain's table, recorded her age as ten in his log.The Guardian reached Cape Town on 24 November, 1789 and after taking on stores and livestock departed for New South Wales on 11 December. [Flynn, op. cit., p. 531; M. D. Nash,(ed.) The Last Voyage of the Guardian, Lieutenant Riou, Commander, 1789-1781,Cape Town, 1990, p. xxiii, f/n.2; Flynn, op. cit., p. 25.]

On Christmas Eve she struck an ice-berg. For two days, with her pumps working desperately, Riou struggled to save his ship. On the twenty-sixth, having jettisoned half  of his cargo, Riou put 60 of his crew as he could into life-boats. Of these only fifteen survived. Philip and Elizabeth Schaeffer remained on board the stricken ship which was taken in tow by a passing American ship and brought back to Cape Town. There, on 19 February, 1790, Elizabeth, Schaeffer and the other convict superintendents were ordered on board the Lady Juliana, which had arrived in Table Bay. [Flynn, op. cit., p. 25; John Nicol, Life and Adventures, 1776-1801, in Tim Flannery (ed.) Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration,Melbourne, 2000, p.128; Nash, op. cit., p. 168 and f/n. 19.]

The Lady Juliana arrived at Sydney Cove on 6 June, 1790. There is no further record of Elizabeth. Schaeffer was not successful as a convict superintendent because of his lack of English. Before long he was given a grant of land near Rose Hill, where in December 1791 he was visited by the marine captain Watkin Tench. Though Schaeffer told Tench he came to Sydney with a ten year old daughter, Elizabeth appears to have been no longer with him. It is the last record of her in the sources. Schaeffer was not a successful farmer, though he did produce the colony's first wine. He died in poverty in his eighties in the Sydney Benevolent Home, apparently abandoned by his second aged convict wife. He had no more children. [Flynn, op. cit., p.19; Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in Flannery, (ed.) op. cit., pp. 220-222; Flynn, op. cit., pp.531-532.]