Memory loss and forgetfulness are associated with aging, but the 84-year old Charles Robert Peterkin possessed a sharp mind that unconsciously hoarded details of his life as a boy. The incidents and adventures that shaped his youth were firmly and precisely etched on his brain, begging to be recorded.
In 1925, relaxing in his Toronto home, Charles recalled the highlights of a mid-19th century Scottish boyhood that began in the village of Woodside near Aberdeen. He closely observes the activities around horse-drawn canal boats, and mail coaches whose drivers in flaming red coats announced their arrival with a blast from a long horn. He had a particular fondness for a remarkable teacher, Mr. Michie, whose physical attributes and style of schooling were well known at the time.
As a boy Charles had been called Charlie. His father had been a weaver in the Grandholm Mill, one of several textile mills that sustained the country’s industrial economy. When the milling industry foundered due to cheaper Asian imports his father opened a grocery and spirits business on the main road that led to the north. Unemployment steadily worsened and for many Scots the writing was on the wall: emigration would be the only way out. But where to go? After contemplating the possibility of Wisconsin or Canada, James Peterkin, a widower, decided on Toronto.
On April 16 of 1853, with his father and six siblings, the 11-year old Charlie set sail for Quebec City on the sailing ship Berbice of Aberdeen. Charles writes that the ship left harbour on unlucky Friday, a day of the week usually avoided for departures. Apparently the ship’s crew predicted calamities and sure enough the Berbice sprang a lead mid-Atlantic. The crew and all male passengers were pressed into pumping seawater until the ship limped into the harbour at St. John’s, Newfoundland for ten days of repairs. They then set sail towards Quebec City up the St. Lawrence River. Would it be smooth sailing from then on? Hardly! The Berbice collided with a rock off Bic Island with the 143 passengers stranded for four days and nights, sleeping on tree boughs and existing on bare rations. Eventually they arrived in Kingston. Here James Peterkin boarded a steamboat that unknown to him was headed for Rochester, New York, and not Toronto, leaving his seven children on the dock. But all was well when on June 9 the Peterkins were reunited on a wharf in Toronto harbour.
Settled in a courtyard house on King Street Charlie helped to support the family by fishing off Taylor’s Wharf, returning home nearly always, he wrote, with a long string of fish: Perch, Black and Silver or White Bass. While it was still summer, Charlie hired himself out to farmer James Pollock, sr., who lived just east of the Don River in a log house surrounded by ten acres. By 1854 Charlie was working for a Scarborough pioneer family, the Adna Pherrills, where he delighted in a myriad of chores, hard work, and the company of the Pherrill children. The saga ends two years later after he had moved 140 miles north to Craigleith on Georgian Bay where he worked on the farm of Andrew Fleming, the father of Sir Sanford Fleming, Scottish-born founder of Standard Time. Here he transported wheat, plowed fields, chopped firewood, made candles, burnt lime in a kiln, battled chipmunks that had infested a barn, fished for trout, and bearing an important message rose a horse like the wind to Collingwood to catch one of the new trains to Toronto. And here it ends in 1856.
In an Epilogue Charles’ post-Recollections life unfolds. It follows him for seventy-five years through a brief stint as a soldier in the battles against the Fenians, a long career in Toronto as a wood turner and prosperous mill owner, and respectable Ruling Elder of the Presbyterian Church. We finally leave him during the last years with his second wife, living under reduced circumstances, but intent on setting down the “Recollections, Incidents and Adventures of a boy born in Scotland.” He was truly, as Lucille Campey has suggested, “an extraordinary, ordinary man!”
A boyhood journey: Scotland to Canada in 1853, by Charles R. Peterkin.
Edited by Mary F. Williamson, Charles Peterkin’s great-granddaughter.
Preface by Lucille H. Campey
ISBN 978-1-77136-362-4
100 pages, 60 illustrations
List price $12.95
AVAILABLE JUNE 2015
Charles Peterkin's Journey 