Forgotten Patriots: Canadian Rebels on Australia's Convict Shores

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Most of our history books tell us that after the ill-fated 1837
rebellions in Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie fled to the United States,
there were a few hangings and some banishment, and Lord Durham’s
famous report was followed by Lord Elgin’s acceptance of responsible
government. Seldom do we hear of the 150 Canadians and Americans who
were imprisoned for months in cruel conditions, and subsequently shipped
in manacles to prison hulks in the English Channel and from there to the
prison colonies in Tasmania and Australia, where people were treated
with “brutality ... almost beyond the imagination of men of their
religious and family backgrounds.”

In this well-documented and well-written popular history, Jack Cahill
outlines the events of the rebellions and tells of the indiscriminate
way in which suspected sympathizers were rounded up. At one point, there
were 885 men imprisoned in Upper Canada and 850 in Lower Canada. A few
were hanged, most were released, and some were transported. In greater
detail, Cahill describes the voyages to Australia and the excruciating
situation there, overseen for a time by two men with Canadian
connections, both remembered in Australia for their brutality: John
Franklin, later lost in our arctic, and George Arthur, Lieutenant
Governor of Upper Canada in the years immediately following the
rebellions. Cahill’s sources include accounts by some of those who
eventually returned to North America. There are helpful maps,
illustrations, several appendixes, and an index.

If one person lingers in the reader’s memory, it is Maria Wait,
regarded as an angel by some of the men for her brave and extraordinary
campaigns, in both Canada and England, to win freedom for her husband.
Sadly, the book concludes with the revelation that she died giving birth
to twins “almost nine months to the day after she took her husband
into her arms on his triumphal return from the end of the earth.”