A Canadian Heroine

Maria Smith Wait

As Quebecers, we’ve heard a lot about the Patriotes, those early rebels who wanted to create a republic and throw the Brits the hell out. Louis-Joseph Papineau, their leader, has become an iconic figure, and the independence movement has rewritten that part of our history as a nationalist, all-French hagiography. The movement was not a French–English conflict and the Patriotes would not have passed a law protecting the French language as their first action had they won. Theirs was a genuine rebellion, a class struggle, and it happened across both Lower and Upper Canada – Quebec and Ontario. The enemy was a powerful British elite, or more accurately, an elite composed of colonial business leaders who sucked at the teat of the colonial office advising the governors sent over from Great Britain, always with a view to protecting their own privilege.

The Upper Canada patriots saw themselves as reformers, and originally their demands were reasonable, as were those of the Patriotes. Eventually, though, they were pushed beyond the point of reason and took up arms to throw off the yoke of the Family Compact, the disparaging name they gave to the colonial elite. Their rebellion was bloody, but no more effective than that of the Patriotes, and it also had heroes and martyrs. One of its heroes, in fact a heroine, was a young woman named Maria Smith Wait, a woman whose story should not be forgotten.

Maria was a young mother when her twenty-four-year-old husband, Benjamin Wait, was arrested and tried as a rebel. Wait participated in one of the few successful campaigns of the rebellion. On June 20, 1838, the rebels surrounded ten members of the Queen’s Lancers who were sleeping at Overholt’s Tavern in Thorold (then called Saint John’s West). After an exchange of volleys in which three were wounded, the rebels stacked straw around the foundation and threatened to set the tavern on fire. The troops surrendered and were marched off into the woods, stripped of anything useful and left. Soon, though, the rebels were running to the American border in the face of a huge contingent of Loyalist militiamen and Wait was captured on June 24. While the Loyalists continued looking for the other rebels in the woods near the border, Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur visited Wait in prison and offered a free pardon and money if he would inform on the others. His adamant refusal consigned him to the gallows and on August 11, he heard his sentence: On August 25 he would be “…hanged by the neck until you are dead, and your body shall be quartered.”

His young wife, Maria Smith, was the ward of Robert Randal, a radical member of the House of Assembly and she had a rebel’s heart. She moved with her baby to near the jail, bringing her husband food and solace, but was pushed away as often as she was successful, one time with a bayonet against her chest. Finally, she determined to seek his release by going over Arthur’s head. Major General Sir George Arthur was the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (Ontario) under Lord Durham and everyone around her warned her against going to Quebec. Not only would it be an arduous, expensive journey, she would call down the wrath of Lieutenant Governor Arthur, they warned her.

Before he was knighted, Colonel George Arthur was the governor of Van Deiman’s Land, the prison colony on the island that we now call Tasmania, south of Australia. He had accepted the posting on condition that he would have dictatorial powers and he holds the distinction of having been the most vicious governor in the prison’s history, erecting the gibbet so that it was visible from his house, and hanging 1,508 people during his thirteen-year tenure. He was also responsible for instituting the system that would result in the complete extinction of the original people of the island. When he finally left in 1837, both the colonists and the prisoners celebrated for days. This was the monster that the young Maria confronted.

For her trip to Quebec, Maria took with her the eldest daughter of another prisoner, Sarah Chandler. She was told that bringing Chandler would weaken her case, because then she would be asking for two men to be saved. Again she rejected the advice. People rallied around Chandler, the eldest of several children, feeling she would have a better chance of being heard, speaking for her condemned father. Friends supplied her with a letter of introduction to Lord Durham, but when Maria asked her to get one for her too, she declined “…either from excessive bashfulness or some other reason unknown to me.”

Together they travelled to Quebec, marching off the steamer right to Durham’s lodgings. The aide-de-camp, Colonel Couper, was not encouraging but took Chandler’s letter of introduction, indicating to Maria Wait that there was nothing he could do for her. After being told for two days to return later, with the departure of their boat and any chance of returning before the executions becoming slimmer, Chandler dissolved in tears and Wait put her foot down, telling Couper she would not leave, saying, “Any further delay is the equivalent of a refusal by Lord Durham … and that means we’ll get back to Niagara just in time to embrace the bodies of our loved ones … I can’t leave here until his lordship listens to me.”

They never met Durham, but he was touched by their intervention and ordered a stay of execution to give him an opportunity to examine the facts. Lord Durham, nicknamed Radical Jack for his progressive position, would have been well aware of his lieutenant-governor’s Australian reputation and he had already stopped the hangman many times in Lower Canada, choosing instead to exile the Patriotes, the first group of whom were sent to Bermuda.

With an official copy of his letter in hand, the two young women boarded the next steamer hoping to return to Niagara in time to save Maria’s husband and Sarah’s father from the noose. The letter, requesting a delay of the execution had to be delivered and its orders enacted before August 25, the day scheduled for the hangings.

Their journey home took them to Coteau du Lac with a few days left and there they learned that if they took the next boat in the morning, Lieutenant Governor Arthur would be on board. Notorious for his ruthless administration in his previous posting in Australia, Arthur was determined to hang these two more men to make an example to the people of Upper Canada. He was a monster by any definition, but eighteen-year-old Maria was not fazed by his reputation and requested a meeting in the ladies’ quarters of the boat in order to personally present Lord Durham’s letter. At that meeting, she did not back down either. Arthur told her, “I cannot accede to the request and prevent the due course of the law upon offences of this nature.” Maria’s response was vehement, reminding him that she was bringing instructions from his senior, Lord Durham, who had personally assured her that her husband would be spared, at least until he, Durham, could investigate the matter. When Arthur insisted on his course, the young woman responded, “Will the execution of these men restore to the people … the lives and property which they have lost by previous aggression?” “By no means, but the example may deter others from similar transgressions,” was Arthur’s answer.

Maria Smith Wait proceeded to lecture the lieutenant governor on the causes of the rebellion, citing examples and criticizing the “lamentable state of Canada …” but afterwards Arthur voiced his rejection and brusquely left the cabin. Undeterred, as though he had simply behaved like a recalcitrant child, she penned a letter to Lord Durham, explaining the behaviour of his lieutenant governor, but before she had finished, he returned with his private secretary. He requested she tell the secretary of her communications at Quebec, which she readily did, and informed him of the letter she had just written.

“[B]efore you communicate my answer to Lord Durham…I have granted a respite to your husband … but there must be more executions.”

When Maria reached Cornwall, she sent the letter to Lord Durham anyway, not trusting Sir George Arthur. Her doubts proved to be well-founded since from there on she was obliged to play a cat-and-mouse game to ensure that the instructions arrived before the scheduled hanging, which was to take place between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM on August 25.

Arriving home on the 22^nd, she found the hangman preparing for his task and he would not accept her testimony of the stay of execution. The sheriff, Alexander Hamilton, was away. To complicate matters, she learned that her baby daughter, in the care of its grandmother, had become ill. She resolved to go back to Toronto where she discovered the Assembly was in session, but she was simply patronized by officials there. Next, she approached Bishop George Mountain of Montreal who happened to be visiting, and he reassured her he would do what he could. Her only course remaining was to return to Niagara and hope that the reassurances she had received were true.

Sir George Arthur delivered the stay to Sheriff Hamilton but delayed their meeting until it was impossible to catch the last boat back to Niagara. When Hamilton realized the seriousness of the situation, he stood up to the bully and managed, with difficulty, to get hold of the governor’s own boat for the return.

Arriving six hours before the execution, he delivered the orders to the hangman, and the lives of the two men were spared. Their misfortunes, though, were far from over. Their sentence was commuted to exile in the very prison that Sir George Arthur had ruthlessly run on Van Dieman’s Land.

Their voyage, with other rebels from both Upper and Lower Canada, passed through London and took 150 days, covering 16,000 miles, in chains, in darkness, under the deck. Extremely crowded conditions, non-existent sanitation and poor food led to illnesses and deaths. Upon their arrival at Hobart, Van Dieman’s Land, some could not walk and were forced to crawl from the ship. On dry ground, their first sight was a scaffold and the imminent hanging of four prisoners, while further on they saw 200 half-naked men in heavy chains working on a road. The French Canadians had been kept on board, destined for Norfolk Island, the “Isle of the Doubly Damned,” the worst of the prison colonies. But in their case, the Catholic Church of Lower Canada managed to get a message to Bishop Polding, who met the prison ship when it stopped at Sydney. After interviewing the prisoners, he took personal responsibility for them and their fate was less severe.

There was no Catholic Church available to intercede in the cruel fate of the Protestants in Van Dieman’s Land, but Maria Smith Wait did not give up. She begged for favours and scrounged enough money to find her way to London, England to continue the fight for her husband. She even sought an audience with the Queen. Contacts she made did their best to dissuade her from her plan of following her husband to the other side of the world, and instead they bought her passage home and gave her letters of introduction in order to allow her to lobby the new governor.

Upon her return, she did just that. She even succeeded in getting the Assembly to request leniency for Canadian prisoners in Australia and, over time, stories of her lobbying arrived among the prisoners. She was their hope, and her name inspired the prisoners to keep on in desperate circumstances. Some were locked into harnesses and made to pull rock-filled carts for miles under the hot southern sun while their footwear and clothing rotted. The treatment of the resisters was worse, from the lash to solitary confinement. None knew the length of their sentences and were told they were there for life.

Most of the prisoners in the camps were from the poorer parts of England. They had been arrested for petty crimes often committed in order to survive, and a good number of them escaped into the wilds of Van Dieman’s Land, giving rise to dangerous gangs who raided the colonists’ homes. The fate of Benjamin Wait and Samuel Chandler proved to be a blessing. Wait was so ill he was sent to the hospital but he soon recovered, and he and Chandler were set to comparatively light tasks on the commissary general’s farm.

The Canadians were educated men, many of whom had owned property, and they contrasted with the common felons from the slums of England. That alone was not always enough to get them out of chains, but good behaviour was rewarded after six years with a ticket to leave. That meant simply the right to work for individual colonists on private properties for virtually no wages, if they could convince a colonist to hire them. It did not guarantee them food, or even a roof. It was far from being free but was preferable to their chains. Their only hope of escape was to stow away on American whaling boats, but these boats were thoroughly searched and fumigated before they could leave the harbour, and fines were levied against the whole crew if a stowaway came coughing out of the hold.

Maria’s efforts to have her husband pardoned contributed to reducing all the Canadian prisoners’ time in chains to two years before they were considered ready to have a ticket to leave. It contributed as well to their ability to at least try to take control of their own destinies. Many attempted escape and failed, sending them back to the camps and the chains. Wait and Chandler’s turn to try came in August 1841, three years after they had faced the noose in Niagara. Chandler, a Mason, used his small allotments of free time to meet and shake hands with American whaling captains. He was patient and one day a sea captain recognized the secret Masonic handshake and offered to help him escape.

Their plan was as desperate as they were. Neither had knowledge of the sea, but they agreed to meet the whaler 40 miles out to sea in a channel that they could only imagine. As the day approached, they made their getaway dressed as fishermen and used their little bit of money to hire a boat that they did not really know how to use. Still, they found their way out to the channel, but in their anxiety arrived several days ahead of the agreed upon time and soon ran out of food and water. Drenched and numb, they eventually decided to row back to the shore, but at the last minute a sail appeared, and they signalled it a few times fruitlessly until it finally hove to and took them on board. It was the American whaling boat.

After seven months at sea and time spent in South America after a shipwreck, they finally arrived in the United States.

They were not the first escapees to arrive in the United States. James Gemmell, another prisoner, got there first, and when they arrived they learned that Gemmell had declared that it would have been impossible had he and others not obtained a pardon thanks to the lobbying of Maria Smith Wait. Another convict, an American who had been captured aiding the rebels’ cause, wrote in his memoirs, “Her devoted and heroic services, embalmed in our hearts, shall be handed down to other generations as a bright example of conjugal fidelity and active philanthropy, worthy of an immortality of honour.”

By August 1842, Maria, her daughter Augusta, and Benjamin were reunited in Niagara Falls, New York. They spent their first months together writing Letters from Van Dieman’s Land, a compilation of his letters and her petitions. In May 1843, a mere nine months after their reunion, Maria gave birth to twins, but their lives together were not to be. Both she and one of the twins died from complications.

Today, if you look through Canada’s respected Dictionary of Canadian Biography, you will find a short entry describing Benjamin Wait and another describing Samuel Chandler. You will also find the long biography of Sir George Arthur. Benjamin Wait’s entry does include a few mentions of Maria, but she is absent from the other two. Thankfully, others remember.