From Lochnaw to Manitoulin: A Highland Soldier's Tour Through Upper Canada

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Enlistment in the military services has always offered opportunity for
adventure and foreign travel at the state’s expense. When that state
ordered the affairs of an extensive empire, and one’s family possessed
the status and connections to secure a commission, those opportunities
could be compelling indeed. For 17-year-old Andrew Agnew, who was
ultimately to become the 8th Baronet of Lochnaw, the vehicle of
adventure was the 93rd Highland Regiment of Foot, which he joined in
1835.

This volume contains a slim journal of a two-month tour of Upper
Canada, from mid-July to mid-September 1839, that took young Agnew from
Toronto to the Manitoulin, by way of Lake Simcoe and the Severn River,
thence to Sault Ste. Marie. He and his small party returned to Toronto
via Mackinac Island and the Michigan shore of Lake Huron to Amherstburg,
then east along the north shore of Lake Erie. While the ostensible
object of the tour was to “impress the natives with the grandeur of
the British Military” during the annual ceremony of gift-giving (which
drew some 1500 Natives from the far reaches of the upper Great Lakes
basin), only a small part of the journal encompasses that event. What we
see through the Agnew’s eyes are the scenery, the conveyances, the
customs, the military establishments, and the Native peoples of the
remoter regions of Upper Canada and Michigan.

Scott McLean has taken care to place the journal in historical and
biographical contexts, providing an excellent introduction and epilogue.
The volume is a small but worthwhile addition to the printed original
sources illustrating the history of Upper Canada.