As time goes By
As Ottawa prepares to mark Colonel By Day, Randy Boswell takes an offering overseas in hopes of balancing history’s cruel judgment of the man behind the Rideau Canal.
I’ve stolen a chunk of the Rideau Canal, I confess, and given it to Lt.-Col. John By.
It was a small gift from the present to the past, from Canada’s capital to this village in southeast England, to mark the annual Civic Holiday in Ottawa — known locally as Colonel By Day.
The quarter-pound piece of pilfered concrete was offered, in a way, to tilt the scales of justice just a titch more in favour of the much-maligned military engineer who, nearly two centuries ago, led construction of the 202-kilometrelong boating route that connects Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River.
Today we appreciate the immensity of By ’s achievements. The canal — still fully operational 10 generations on — is now a prime, year-round tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage Site, a celebrated marvel of 19th century engineering that’s listed alongside the Pyramids of Egypt and Machu Picchu on the UN register of humanity’s most impressive creations.
And Ottawa, the modern city that evolved from Bytown — By’s namesake village and work camp, founded to launch the canal project in 1826 — is now the worldclass capital of a G7 nation. It’s also a great place to live — and not just for the skating, running, cycling and canoeing along the picturesque canal that By built. (But thanks for that, too, JB.)
Yet, By was a bitter and broken man by the time he died in February 1836, just four years after the 1832 completion of the canal. He was laid to an uneasy rest in the small cemetery here at St. Alban’s Frant, the Anglican parish where By had retired in some dishonour to his sprawling country estate, Shernfold Park.
He had been accused of unauthorized overspending in carrying out the massive infrastructure project in backwoods Canada, his good name sullied for reasons that had more to do with political posturing among Whigs and Tories in reform-era Britain than any actual mismanagement of canal construction on By’s part.
Over budget? Yes, by a lot. But By had repeatedly warned that initial estimates were far too low, and the wilderness setting far more challenging than anyone had anticipated. He was also explicitly directed by his superiors not to await approval of parliamentary expenditures before getting the job done.
By, who privately said he felt “illused” in the ugly affair, defended himself ably and with the utmost professionalism. Historians today are largely in agreement that he was not only unfairly treated, but should have been universally lauded and even knighted for his landmark feat of engineering.
“That an eminent engineer and devoted public servant should be so castigated,” one of By’s biographers, Robert Legget, once seethed, “is so far removed from world-renowned British standards of justice and fair play that it is, today, completely inexplicable.”
By went to his grave — prematurely at age 56 — under a cloud of controversy. At the unhappy end of his truncated life, he had been robbed of the respect he was owed for his many contributions to the British Empire and denied the adulation he especially deserved for building the Rideau Canal.
So, this little gift to the colonel, brought from the city he founded — a symbolic bit of stone from the most enduring monument to By’s ingenuity and sterling sense of duty — seemed a fair gesture of gratitude. I gave John By a keepsake shard of his magnificent canal to reassure him that history is now firmly on his side.
“Stolen” is, perhaps, too strong a word. No hammers or chisels were used in the making of this story.
There’s a construction zone near the corner of Clegg Street and Colonel By Drive in Old Ottawa East where a nearly finished pedestrian bridge now reaches across the canal to the Glebe. Thanks to the grinding, shaking action of the bridge-builders’ machines, immediately outside the fenced-off work site I found some crumbled concrete atop the canal’s eastern wall, near the base of a pillar supporting the canal’s iron safety rail.
As anyone who jogs or cycles along the canal knows, such blemishes appear from time to time anyway, and they’re no reflection on the workmanship of Lt.-Col. By and his crew in pre-Victorian Upper Canada, nor of their modern successors at Parks Canada. Cracks and crumbles are routinely patched as part of the ongoing maintenance of the historic waterway. While there have been concerns in recent years about deteriorating walls along some stretches of the canal, part of what makes this heritage boat channel a global gem is its generally superb state of preservation.
I’m pretty sure no one will care that I nicked a wedge of dislodged masonry. I picked up a palm-sized piece that seemed about the right weight and thickness to honour Colonel By and still carry in my pocket to England without generating concern at airport security stations.
A smooth, polished side distinguished it as a man-made object rather than an ordinary stone — a difference that the ghost of a skilled engineer like By would surely notice and appreciate.
Then, with a black Sharpie, this simple message was inscribed: “For Lt. Col. J. By, Aug. 6, 2018.”
A well-timed trip to the U.K. for a separate research project would put me in London for a full week ahead of Colonel By Day on Aug. 6. An hour-long, southbound train ride would get me to Frant, where the earthly remains of John By — along with those of his wife and two daughters — lie buried in the churchyard.
From photographs, I knew that a gravestone topped with an elegantly sculpted urn marks By’s resting place, and that the right angle of a cross carved on the family tomb would offer a discreet, secure nook for the fragment of Ottawa history I was bringing with me.
If you’ve ever strolled around the ByWard Market, driven along Colonel By Drive, attended Colonel By Secondary School, visited the Bytown Museum or caught a film at the ByTowne Cinema, you’ll know that Ottawa still remembers and honours Lt.-Col. John By in various ways.
It wasn’t always so.
For a century after the canal was completed — and particularly after the name Bytown was changed to Ottawa in 1855 — remembrance of By’s exploits diminished.
The centenary of the canal’s completion in 1932 renewed interest and pride in the life and career of Colonel By. Today, there’s an impressive statue in Major’s Hill Park overlooking the Rideau Canal headlocks, a five-storey Colonel By Hall engineering building at the University of Ottawa and a fountain dedicated to By in Confederation Park.
And every year, on the first Monday in August, Ottawa and other communities along the Rideau Canal celebrate Colonel By Day.
Most citizens of Ottawa know that the Rideau Canal and the founding of Bytown are By ’s greatest legacies — and the main reason for his enduring presence in the capital.
But here are five things you probably didn’t know about Colonel By (and neither did I before planning my visit to his grave):
1. Colonel By was a lieutenant, a captain, a major and finally a lieutenant-colonel in his military career. He never actually held the rank of colonel. But by convention, someone holding the lower rank of lieutenant-colonel (as By did from December 1824 to the end of his life) may be referred to as “Colonel” in casual conversation and other unofficial circumstances. Plus “Lieutenant-Colonel By Drive” is a bit of a mouthful.
2. By was not a one-hit wonder as a military engineer. While the Rideau Canal was his signature achievement, he also oversaw reconstruction of the Cascades Canal on the St. Lawrence River southwest of Montreal in 1805-06, led early work in the building of four Martello towers at Quebec City in 1808 (three survive today as a National Historic Site) and spent nearly 10 years as Commanding Royal Engineer of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey north of London — constructing factories, designing machinery and generally maintaining the rich supply of firepower vital to the British military during and after the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars.
Mark Andrews, the author of the 1998 John By biography For
4. King & Country, has ingeniously noted that “the rockets from By’s Waltham Abbey works continue to this day to have the unique distinction of appearing in the U.S. national anthem: ‘the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’ ” — the famous reference by anthem composer Francis Scott Key to the British attack on Fort McHenry, at Baltimore, in 1814.
3. In a military museum not far from the storied Plains of Abraham, there’s a remarkable scale model of old Quebec City — a perfect wooden miniature of the former capital of Lower Canada as it appeared near the dawn of the 19th century. This masterpiece of pre-War of 1812 military defence planning was painstakingly built by then-Lieutenant John By and a fellow member of the Royal Engineers, the talented surveyor and draftsman JeanBaptiste Duberger. The story of By and Duberger’s Model of Quebec, completed in 1808, is surprisingly little known, despite the fact that this three-dimensional depiction of Quebec — as the basis for improvements made to the defences of the fortress city just ahead of the 181215 war with the U.S. — likely helped deter an enemy assault on British North America’s most important military stronghold.
“In the end, Quebec’s fortifications proved far too formidable for an American attack,” Canadian War Museum historian Jeffrey S. Murray has written in a lengthy study of the Quebec model published in Terra Nostra, his 2006 book about landmark Canadian cartographic creations.
The model is also a one-of-akind historical artifact with its own riveting backstory, including the likelihood that By exploited his role in its creation to climb the career ladder in Britain’s Royal Engineers and eventually score his most coveted assignment, nearly 20 years later: heading construction of the Rideau Canal.
Repatriated from England in 1910 after prolonged transatlantic negotiations, the meticulously handcrafted mini-city spent about 70 years in 20th century Ottawa before its restoration by curators at the Canadian War Museum and subsequent shipment back to Quebec City, where it has been on permanent display at Parks Canada’s downtown Artillery Park heritage site since 1981.
Col. By was not merely a peacetime military engineer and behindthe-scenes officer. He was also a combat sapper. While the Rideau Canal was built for strategic defence reasons — namely to foil an American invasion of Canada — it was completed nearly two decades after the end of the War of 1812, by which time the U.S. was a much less hostile neighbour. So the canal was used principally as a commercial shipping route in the 19th century and later became the recreational heritage attraction it is today.
But years before the canal was built, in 1811, By gained direct experience of war’s violence. During the Peninsular War, when Britain was struggling to resist the spread of France’s Napoleonic empire in Spain and Portugal, By was deployed to the region to serve as a battlefield engineer in two key engagements. During the long, bloody and eventually successful fight to take the gateway fortresses of Almeida and Badajoz from the French army, By and other engineers directed the digging of trenches, the battering of fort walls and other actions aimed at dislodging French forces. By became ill and was sent back to England before the victories were achieved. But he earned prize money for his service at Almeida under the command of then-Lt.- Gen. Arthur Wellesley — the future Duke of Wellington and hero of Waterloo.
He was also the man who, first as a top military planner and then as British prime minister in the late 1820s, became the leading champion of the plan to build the Rideau Canal. That’s why Canada’s Parliament Buildings are located along a street named Wellington.
5. No authentic portrait of Lt.-Col. John By is known to exist. There are two silhouettes — one of By as a junior officer, the second from middle age — that are believed to be the only legitimate likenesses of the man. But such pictures provide no sense of the Royal Engineer’s facial features or demeanour. By possessed the silhouette of his older self, and presented signed copies of it — along with engraved silver cups — to each of the six key contractors involved in the Rideau Canal project upon its completion in 1832. (Occasionally, a version of that image has been published with By’s imagined facial appearance filled in by an unknown 19th or 20th century artist).
One other image that has been published frequently to represent By — including on his Wikipedia page — is an undated watercolour sketch by the unidentified artist “C.K.” showing a uniformed British military engineer from the early 19th century. It’s held in the collection of the Royal Engineers Museum in Britain.
“Although the painting accurately depicts a Royal Engineer and there are similarities with the physical description that we have of By,” writes Andrews, “there is no conclusive evidence upon which to confirm that it truly is of John By.”
Not long after By died, fellow British engineer Richard Bonnycastle took a trip to Canada and travelled on the Rideau Canal.
“If ever a man deserved to be immortalized in this utilitarian age,” Bonnycastle wrote in 1842, “it was Lieutenant Colonel By. In an unexplored part of the country, where the only mode of progress was the frail Indian canoe, with a department to be organized, workmen to be instructed and many difficulties to be overcome, he constructed a truly remarkable work.”
Seen as a renegade spender by some of his contemporaries, as an unjustly besmirched genius by his defenders, Col. By and his legacy can be legitimately viewed in other ways, too.
History, we’ve come to learn, is best interpreted from multiple perspectives. As one of the two figurehead settlers (along with Philemon Wright of Hull) who symbolize the colonization of the Ottawa- Gatineau area’s traditional Indigenous territory, By could reasonably be seen as a principal agent of dispossession of the First Nations people who had inhabited the region for thousands of years.
As the chief mover and shaker on a 19th century military megaproject that involved the damming and dredging of pristine rivers, the flooding or draining of fragile wetlands and countless other acts of indifference to the natural environment, it’s also probably fair to say (with 21st century hindsight) that By and his team committed a kind of ecological atrocity.
And as the man responsible for a supremely dangerous undertaking in the deep woods of pioneerera Canada — one that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of workers (mainly from malaria, but also from numerous construction accidents) — a labour advocate might persuasively argue that the visionary overseer of the building of the Rideau Canal was also, in retrospect, a profoundly negligent employer.
An expert chronicler of the canal’s history, former Parks Canada historian Robert Passfield, has written thoughtfully about the issue.
“In sum, the labour situation on the Rideau Canal was perceived from the viewpoint of the needs of a major canal engineering project,” he states in the 2013 book Military Paternalism, Labour and the Rideau Canal Project.
“Yet that commitment was tempered by a genuine concern for the health and well-being of the workforce on the part of Lt.-Col. John By.”
Still, there is no “last word” on such subjects. History is an endless cycle of debate, discovery and reinterpretation. Our picture of Colonel By, like that of other historical figures, is ever-changing, contested, elusive.
I’m hardly the first pilgrim from Ottawa to visit Lt.-Col. By’s gravesite in Frant. Former mayors Stanley Lewis and Charlotte Whitton are known to have made the journey here to pay homage to the capital’s founder during their respective terms in the 1940s and ’50s. Over the years, several members of the Historical Society of Ottawa, writers such as Legget and other city residents have passed through the gates of St. Alban’s churchyard and quietly acknowledged the Colonel’s accomplishments across the Atlantic.
The society, in fact, has erected a plaque next to By ’s tomb to remind visitors that “Colonel By founded the city which became the Capital of Canada” — and sends small payments to the church for upkeep of the gravesite.
I recently joined the society’s board of directors and came to Frant bearing the gift of an illustrated book about the Rideau Canal to thank St. Alban’s parishioners, on behalf of the HSO, for taking special care of the By monuments and family tomb.
(In 1997, the Historical Society gained permission to place a plaque on the wall of St. Thomas’s Hospital in the London district of Lambeth, near By’s birthplace. It tells passersby about this Briton’s “outstanding engineering feat” in the early 1800s that has become a “heritage treasure” in modern times.)
Inside the church at Frant, there’s a memorial tablet dedicated by Esther March, By’s widow, which laments the loss of a man “zealous and distinguished in his profession, tender and affectionate as a husband and father” and blames his death on a “painful illness” — ague or swamp fever, which befell many who toiled on the canal — “brought on by his indefatigable zeal and devotion in the service of his King and Country, in Upper Canada.”
Margaret Wickens, a St. Alban’s parishioner and the area’s leading John By aficionado, says few people in Frant or elsewhere in Britain are aware of the Colonel’s enormous impact on the history of Canada and the destiny of its capital city.
“The achievements were absolutely amazing,” she says, “but the treatment he received afterwards has always struck me as so sad. That’s what really hurts.”
Colonel By, to be sure, paid a heavy personal price to bolster Canada’s defences in his lifetime, and to lay the foundations of a prosperous, postcard-pretty national capital. A chip of canal wall isn’t much to acknowledge all that By bequeathed to the future. But it’s there with him now — and just in time.
His day is coming.
The achievements were absolutely amazing, but the treatment he received afterwards has always struck me as so sad.
Former Citizen reporter Randy Boswell is a history writer and a journalism professor at Carleton University. He’s also a director of the Historical Society of Ottawa.