The Invasion of Canada (17 page)

These spoils are augmented by a trove of government-owned furs, bringing the total value of captured goods to £10,000, all of it to be distributed, according to custom, among the regulars and volunteers who captured the fort. Every private soldier will eventually receive ten pounds sterling as his share of the prize money, officers considerably more.

The message to the Indians is clear: America is a weak nation and there are rewards to be gained in fighting for the British. The fall of Mackinac gives the British the entire control of the tribes of the Old Northwest.

Porter Hanks and his men are sent off to Detroit under parole: they give their word not to take any further part in the war until they are exchanged for British or Canadian soldiers of equivalent rank captured by the Americans – a device used throughout the conflict to obviate the need for large camps of prisoners fed and clothed at the enemy’s expense. The Americans who remain on the island are obliged to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown; otherwise they must return to American territory. Most find it easy to switch sides. They have done it before; a good many were originally British until the island changed hands in 1796.

Curiously, one man is allowed to remain without taking the oath. This is Michael Dousman, Hanks’s spy and Roberts’s prisoner. Dousman is given surprising leeway for an enemy, being permitted to make business trips to Montreal on the promise that he will not travel through U.S. territory. He is required to post a bond for this purpose but has no trouble raising the money from two prominent Montreal merchants.

Dousman’s business in Montreal is almost certainly John Jacob Astor’s business. All of Astor’s furs are now in enemy territory. But the South West Company is still a multinational enterprise, and Astor has friends in high positions in both countries. Through his Montreal partners he manages to get a passport into Canada. In July he is in Montreal making arrangements for his furs to be forwarded from Mackinac Island (which has not yet fallen). These furs are protected in the articles of capitulation; over the next several months, bales of them arrive in Montreal from Mackinac. Astor’s political friends in Washington have alerted the customs inspectors at the border points to pass the furs through, war or no war. Over the next year and a half,
the bullet-headed fur magnate manages to get his agents into Canada and to bring shipment after shipment of furs out to the New York market. A single consignment is worth $50,000, and there are many such consignments. For John Jacob Astor and the South West Company, the border has little meaning, and the war is not much more than a nuisance.

A
BOARD THE SCHOONER
Cuyahoga Packet
, entering Lake Erie, July 2, 1812. William K. Beall, assistant quartermaster general in William Hull’s Army of the Northwest, stretches out on deck, admiring the view, ignorant of the fact that his country has been at war for a fortnight and the vessel will shortly be entering enemy waters.

Beall counts himself lucky. He reclines at his ease while the rest of Hull’s tattered army trudges doggedly toward Detroit, spurred on by Eustis’s order to move “with all possible speed.” Thanks to the
Cuyahoga
’s fortuitous presence at the foot of the Maumee rapids, Hull has been able to relieve his exhausted teams. The schooner is loaded with excess military stores – uniforms, band instruments, entrenching tools, personal luggage – and some thirty sick officers and men, together with three women who have somehow managed to keep up with their husbands on the long trek north.

It is a foolhardy undertaking. War is clearly imminent, even though Eustis, the bumbling secretary, gave no hint of it in his instructions to the General. Hull’s own officers have pointed out that the
Cuyahoga
must pass under the British guns at Fort Amherstburg, guarding the narrow river boundary, before she can reach Detroit; but their commander, sublimely unaware of his country’s declaration, remains confident that she will get there before the army.

The schooner rolls in Erie’s swell. The passengers grow queasy, but not William K. Beall. He is enchanted by the vastness of the lake, has never seen anything like it before. He is a prosperous Kentucky plantation owner whose estate on the Ohio River, not far from
Newport, is thirty-six miles square. But this lake! It is hard to conceive of so much fresh water, stretching on beyond the horizon. The only water he has seen since leaving home has flowed sluggishly in the saffron streams veining the dreadful swamps through which the army has just toiled. Beall puts all that out of his mind, basks in the novelty of the heaving deck, opens an appropriate book of poetry – Scott’s
Lady of the Lake
– commits three verses to memory, then catnaps as the Cuyahoga sails toward the mouth of the Detroit River.

He wakes as the schooner approaches the village of Amherstburg, nestled outside the British fort (which the Americans call Fort Maiden). Again he is charmed by what he sees. The little town seems indifferently built, but the countryside is quite lovely – green meadows and sunny wheat fields rippling in the breeze. This southern fringe of orchards is the garden of Upper Canada, but most of the province beyond remains a wilderness, its great forests of pine and oak, maple and basswood broken here and there by small patches of pioneer civilization, like worn spots on a rug. Vast swamps, dark and terrifying, smother the land. Roads are few and in some seasons impassable, being little more than rivers of rutted mud. Sensible travellers move by water, and it is along the margins of the lakes and the banks of the larger rivers that the main communities such as Amherstburg have sprung up. Between these villages lie smaller settlements. Plots of winter wheat, oats, and rye, fields of corn and root vegetables blur the edges of the forest. Here, along the Detroit River, the fruit trees have been bearing for a decade, and cider has become a staple drink. Beall notes that everything appears to wear “the cheering smiles of peace and plenty.”

In the distance an Indian canoe contributes to the picturesqueness of the scene. But as the canoe comes closer it is transformed into a Canadian longboat commanded by an officer of the Provincial Marine, Lieutenant Frederic Rolette, with six seamen, armed with cutlasses and pistols, pulling on the oars.

Rolette calls to the
Cuyahoga
’s captain, Luther Chapin, to lower his mainsails. Chapin is open mouthed. He had expected a friendly hail; now he sees six muskets raised against him. Before he can act, Rolette fires his pistol in the air. Chapin struggles with the sail. Beall and his fellow passengers are in confusion. What is happening? Beall orders the captain to hoist the sail again and press on, but Chapin replies that this is not possible.

Rolette now points his pistol directly at young George Gooding, a second-lieutenant in charge of the soldiers and baggage of the U.S. 4th Infantry Regiment. “Dowse your mainsails!” Rolette orders.

Gooding equivocates. “I have no command here, sir,” he shouts. Rolette fires directly at the schooner, the ball whistling past Beall’s head. The captain pleads for instructions. “Do as you please,” answers the rattled Gooding, whose wife is also on deck. As the mainsails tumble, Frederic Rolette boards the packet.

He is astonished to find the decks jammed with American soldiers. They are not aware that the war has started, but Rolette cannot be sure of that. Nor does he know that all but three are ill and that the muskets and ammunition are out of reach in the hold. All he knows is that he is outnumbered five to one.

This does not dismay him, for he is a seasoned seaman, accustomed to act with boldness and decision. At the age of twenty-nine, this French-speaking Quebecker has a naval record any officer might envy. He has fought in the two greatest sea battles of the era – the Nile and Trafalgar – under the finest commander of his time, Horatio Nelson. He has been wounded five times and, before this newest contest is over, will be wounded again. Now, as William Beall approaches to demand his authority for boarding the schooner, Rolette informs him curtly that an express reached Amherstburg the previous night announcing the commencement of hostilities. Then, losing no time, he orders everybody below decks, posts sentries at the hatches and arms chests with orders to shoot any man who approaches them, orders the helmsman to steer the ship under the water battery at Amherstburg and the band to play “God Save the King.”

As the schooner docks at the naval yard, the passengers are released under guard to the open deck and all the baggage is removed. Now the British realize the magnitude of their prize. For here are discovered two trunks belonging to General Hull containing documents of extraordinary value. Hull’s aide-de-camp – his son Abraham – has foolishly packed the General’s personal papers with his baggage. The astonished British discover that they now possess all the details of the army that opposes them: field states, complete returns of the troops, the names and strengths of the regiments, an incomplete draft of Hull’s own memorial of March 6 outlining his strategy, and all his correspondence to and from the Secretary of War. It is a find equal to the breaking of an enemy code. The entire package is dispatched to Brock at York, who immediately grasps its significance and lays his plans.

The Detroit Frontier

No one on either side, meanwhile, is quite certain how to behave. Has war actually come? Even the British are reluctant to believe it. William Beall, now a prisoner, doubts it. He is certain that his captors have been wrongly informed, that when Hull demands his return he and his companions will be permitted to go on to Detroit.

The British are polite, even hospitable. Lieutenant Edward Dewar, Beall’s opposite number in the quartermaster’s department at Fort Amherstburg, urges the Americans not to consider themselves prisoners but merely detainees. It is all very unpleasant, Dewar murmurs; he hopes the report of the war may prove incorrect; he hopes the Americans will be able to spend their time in detention as agreeably as possible; if there is any service he and his fellow officers can render to that end, they will be only too pleased to do so; he only wishes the packet could have passed by without interruption; if authentic information arrives that war has not been declared, they will be released at once. And so on.

George Gooding declares he would like to dine ashore and put up at an inn. Dewar gets permission from his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Bligh St. George, but points out the C.O.’s fear that the Indians are much enraged at the Americans and advises them to be on guard against attack. The detainees agree to accept billets aboard another ship,
Thames
, where a guard can be stationed. Meanwhile they must be very careful. At this stage of the war, the British are worried at the horrors their native allies may commit on their new enemies. Dewar tells Beall that he fears that the Indians, in a drunken rage, might enter a tavern and murder all the Americans. To underline the danger he tells how an infuriated Indian had recently stepped up behind a man walking with a British officer and tomahawked him. Don’t go out into the streets alone, Dewar warns.

Now, having accepted the parole of Beall and his companions that they will not try to escape, Dewar invites them to his home until their accommodation is prepared. On the wharf, a crowd of Indians look them over. In Beall’s eyes some appear to rejoice at their capture, while others terrify him with ferocious frowns. Gooding, who fought at Tippecanoe, recognizes some of his former adversaries. Harrison’s bitter seed, broadcast on the banks of the Wabash, is already beginning to sprout.

At Dewar’s home there is wine, cider, biscuits. It would be improper, says the Lieutenant, to invite the Americans to dine with him, but he accompanies them to Boyle’s Inn and Public House, apologizing in his diffident British fashion for its poor quality but explaining that it is the best in town. Following dinner, the men leave the inn and, accompanied by a British officer, stroll through the streets through crowds of Indians who the nervous Beall feels are glaring directly at him. Every white man, however, bows politely to the strangers and one even invites them into his house and pours them several glasses of wine.

Many of these are Americans, lured to Upper Canada by the prospect of free land and low taxes. They have little interest in politics, less in war. In a province of some sixty thousand, they form a clear but powerless majority, having been shut out of all public office by the elite group of British and Loyalist administrators who control the government. This does not unduly concern them, for they are prospering on their free acreage. Democracy may be virtually non-existent in Upper Canada, but so are taxes, since the province is financed by the British treasury. Beall is intrigued to discover that the master of his floating prison, Captain Martin of the
Thames
, owns a well-stocked farm of three hundred acres but pays an annual levy of exactly $1.06¼.