Montreal visit impressed young Isabella Bird
She went on to become one of the best- known travel writers of her time
It wasn’t the introduction to royalty that Isabella Bird might have wished for.
On Oct. 17, 1854, the young Englishwoman — she had just turned 23 — left Toronto by steamboat for Montreal. It was a two- day voyage and, as the Arabian lay near its destination on a cold and foggy Oct. 19, she was joined by an old man.
“His lank, white hair flowed over his shoulders,” she later wrote, “and his neckcloth and shirt- front were smeared with blood.” He had had an attack of apoplexy during the night, he said, but fortunately someone, finding him unconscious, “had opened his jugular vein.”
If that weren’t enough to give her pause, the man went on to explain there had been another slit throat, his wife’s. He had done the deed himself, he stated, and now the woman’s ghost was after him. “I looked at his eyes,” Bird wrote, “and saw at once that I was in the company of a madman.”
Then came the clincher: “He then said that he was king of the island of Montreal, and that he had murdered his wife because she was going to betray him to the queen of England. He was now, he declared, going down to make a public entrance into Montreal.
“After this avowal, I treated him with the respect due to his fancied rank.”
Clearly, Isabella Bird had taken the incident in her stride, as she would countless other challenges during her travels over the next half- century. Her accounts of solo journeys to such exotic destinations as China, Tibet, Hawaii, Persia, Japan, Morocco and the Levant made her one of the best- known travel writers of the time.
But her 1854 jaunt to the United States, with a side trip to Canada, was the first of her foreign adventures, and her time in Montreal was a highlight.
She was struck by the obvious French origins of the city, “decidedly foreign in appearance,” contrasting “with the English occupation of it.” The streets were alive with “priests in long, black dresses,” with “native carters in coats with hoods, woollen nightcaps and coloured sashes” and with “soldiers lounging about in the … uniforms of England.” On all sides a cacophony of English, Irish, Gaelic and French sounded, “the latter generally the broadest patois.”
The daughter of an evangelically minded Anglican priest, she was bemused by the Roman Catholic side of Montreal. “The most untiring zeal and kindness” of the Soeurs Grises impressed her.
But she also noted that “the fooleries and puerilities of their churches may excite a smile.” Notre Dame especially provoked her scorn. The huge edifice was meant to be imposing but succeeded merely “in being very extravagant.”
“In one corner,” she continued, “there was a picture of babies being devoured by pigs, and trampled upon by horses, and underneath it was a box for offerings, with ‘ This is the fate of the children of China’ upon it. By it was a wooden box, hung with faded pink calico, containing small wooden representations, in the Noah’sark style, of dogs, horses and pigs, and a tall man holding up a little dog by its hind legs. This peep- show ( for I can call it nothing else) was at the same time so inexplicable and so ludicrous that, to avoid shocking the feelings of a devoutlooking woman who was praying near it by an éclat de rire, we hurried from the church.”
Opinionated, yes, even objectionably so. But she was also indomitable. She left for Quebec City on the steamboat John Munn, and almost immediately it was in a minor collision with another. This caused “a chorus of screams from some ladies whose voices were rather stronger than their nerves.” We can be sure Isabella Bird wasn’t among the screamers.