Time Lord (8 page)

ABOARD THE
United Kingdom
, a steamship plying the North Atlantic between Quebec City and Glasgow in May of 1863, thirty-six-year-old Sandford Fleming, bearded, frock-coated as always, paces the 235-foot deck, twenty circuits three times a day for his daily three-mile constitutional, smoking his cigars, cheerfully conversing with captain, crew, or passengers. His long night in an Irish country railstation lies thirteen years in the future. The Canadian Pacific Railway is barely a fancy at this time.

His early achievements in surveying, land investment, map-making, and his various civic ventures like the Canadian Institute have all prospered according to his forecasts. He has engineered one railroad, the thirty-mile Northern. Toronto is still his home. Ottawa, the future capital of a vast dominion, and the city with which Fleming is most identified, is little more than a canal landing in 1863, named Bytown for its founder, Colonel By. Fleming
will build a mansion, “Winterholme,” in the Adam style in Ottawa, where he will deed a park and a tropical arboretum. That, too, is in the distant future. In 1863, the vast dominion does not exist. Most of it—the Northwest, the area stretching from the Arctic to the American border, and from Manitoba to the Rockies—had been ceded by the British Crown to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1676, and the company still controls it. The maritime east is comprised of three jealously separate British colonies, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, each controlled by its own elected leader, with separate laws and postage stamps—four, if the poor relation Newfoundland is included.

There was not yet a country nor a capital, but 1863 and (especially) 1864 would be crucial years for the maturing of Sandford Fleming and for the idea, if not quite yet the reality, of Canada. In 1864 Fleming would travel over twenty thousand miles for the cause of Canadian unity, some of it in comparative luxury, but much of it in hundred-mile-a-day horse-drawn sleds through the snows of Quebec and New Brunswick. Exactly half of his life had been spent in Canada. Married eight years, he was the father of four (on the way to seven), secure in his reputation as surveyor, an engineer, and a young man of enormous civic involvement, energy, and idealism. He had begun to take on duties that would define his next fifty years. In 1863 he had been given the opportunity to put the two halves of his life, Scotch and Canadian, back together. In the course of his voyage to Scotland, England, and Ireland, he became a public man, a visionary. This was his first trip back. Forty-three more would follow.

The voyage began on a familiar note, Fleming taking moral instruction from every aspect of nature and industry, projecting the heavy, elegiac mood of melancholic uplift. Passing under the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, on the way to Quebec City to meet the sailing of the
United Kingdom
, he noted in his travel journal,
which he kept for the benefit (moral) and entertainment of his children:

The engineering profession, always a high calling—and often a source of profound despair—for Fleming, is the link between science and society. The engineer calculates the cost of change, understands debentures and interest rates, the politically possible, the socially beneficial. He reads the future.

The
United Kingdom
steamed toward Glasgow (he noted) at nine miles an hour, burning eighteen tons of coal a day. Each morning’s brisk circuit with the captain elicited new bits of information, speed and direction, weather and navigation problems. Collisions at sea were deemed improbable, icebergs, oddly enough, a more legitimate threat. He illustrated his journals, sketching whales, fellow passengers, the wrecked hull of a fishing boat floating off the Grand Banks, and smokestacks of distant steamers. The various personalities of Sandford Fleming were all taking shape: engineer, visionary, Canadian, Scot, patriot, networker, Empire Loyalist.

He was on a mission, carrying a petition to the Colonial Office in London. The (mostly) pioneering Scotch settlers in the Red River Colony, near today’s Winnipeg, had chosen him—he was one of them, after all, as well as a reputable surveyor and railroad
builder—to petition London for a railroad link from Upper Canada (Ontario) to relieve their isolation. The only way in or out of the Red River was by the ever-attentive American rail service from St. Paul, or river steamers “down to Canada” (the Red being one of North America’s few north-flowing rivers) to the Canadian border. Thereafter, Canadian river steamers or ox-drawn wagons moved goods and emigrants to the colony. Buffalo herds, fording the rivers, could still force steamers to tie up for a day at a time.

The colonists had sound geographical reasons to feel isolated. The Canadian Shield, the oldest geologic structure on the planet—the granite nubs of ancient mountain ranges, pitted and pocked with lakes and bogs—is an effective barrier to any east-west communication. Beginning less than a hundred miles east of the colony, the land turns swampy and forested, leading to hundreds of miles of bare granite, mosquito-infested lakes, and unsounded tamarack sloughs. A few rough trails had been hacked out by fur-trappers and
coureurs du bois
over the years, following the higher and drier ground, but canoes were the primary form of transportation. The segmentation of Canada around Lake Superior was profound and seemingly inescapable, nothing like the minor annoyance posed by the chain of picturesque hills called the American Appalachians.

Geography and isolation, or fear of annexation, and skirmishes—often bloody—with the Métis (mixed-race French-Indian settlers of the Northwest who were militantly opposed to falling under Upper Canadian authority) were not the only problems. They were not even uppermost. Essentially, the colony could not be linked by rail to Upper Canada until the Northwest Territories, still part of the original Hudson’s Bay land grant, could be legally transferred to an entity called Canada, and Canada did not yet exist. Lower Canada, the French-dominated Quebec, would hardly agree to the vast enlargement of English-speaking Upper Canada. In other words, the vulnerability, loneliness,
and isolation of the Red River colonists—their essential “Who are we?” that defines the Canadian experience—mirrored the problems of British North America in general. Britain no longer controlled it, no longer even wanted it, and was anxious to turn over as much self-government and costs as the Canadians were able to assume. But Canadians felt the need for British protection on the American-dominated continent. In particular, Britain did not want to involve herself militarily or financially with the defense of Canadian sovereignty against the growing threat of American annexation.

In 1863 the Americans were locked in the most crucial year of the Civil War, and already eyeing the British colonies as hostile territory, ripe for annexation. Britain, given its need for foreign cotton, and chary perhaps of the North’s rising industrial might, clearly favored the Confederate side. Many Northerners suspected that Confederates or their sympathizers might conduct raids on Union troops from Canadian havens. Such attacks from Canadian soil, Fleming and others feared, apart from violating neutrality, could be seized on as a provocation for a preemptive invasion, especially by an activist ideologue like the American secretary of state, William Seward. Fleming’s English friend J. W. Wood wrote from London: “The North, whether right or wrong in the whole question of the war, have a good right to demand that our territory shall not be made a basis for such attacks upon themselves.”

Seward, a leading advocate of “Manifest Destiny,” held the notion that the United States was not merely a continental power but destined by its dynamism and the full exercise of its republican virtues to
be
the continent, as his 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia would soon bear out. He did not disguise his designs on Canada and several of the Caribbean islands. Just a few years after the war, during the Ulysses Grant administration, noted Henry Adams in his
Education:
“[Adams] listened with incredulous stupor while Sumner [Senator Charles Sumner,
Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate] unfolded his plan for concentrating and pressing every possible American claim against England, with a view of compelling the cession of Canada to the United States.”

There is no evidence, incidentally, that any but a small minority of British colonists in North America shared the mother country’s sympathies. Forty thousand Canadians volunteered for service on the Union side. Before the year was out, however, Fleming raised a company of seventy home guards in Toronto to repel a possible invasion. Thankfully, his skills and those of his neighbors were never tested.

ONE OF THE
oddities of his voyage aboard the
United Kingdom
that he found amusing, and which he felt his children would especially enjoy, was the ever-earlier lunchtime occasioned by the ship’s rapid progress northeastward toward Glasgow. He figured that lunch was being served half an hour earlier each day, by stomach time, due to their eastward travel. Always the instructor, or the Victorian father, he tried keeping his children close to him as best he could in “real” time by coordinating the North Atlantic time with that of Toronto:

He obviously knew how to compute the time, although his method was, as might be expected, a curious mixture of the natural and rational. He was computing the nautical day, “natural” time at sea, yet not making the “rational” leap into mean (averaged) time. Standardization simply had not yet become an urgent matter, except with regard to the floating lunch hour.

When he landed in Glasgow, he ran into a bootblack, “wee
Robert Gordon,” whose pert, aggressive ways sold him on a shine. He also hired the boy to take him on a walking tour of Glasgow.