1. John GARLAND
Moncton Transcript
STRANGE STORY FROM ALBERT CO.,
How English Lad was Taken Aboard Hostile Warship in St. John and Made Captive.
Hopewell Hill, A. Co., May 15 ----
It may be of interest to some of your readers to know that St. John was once visited by a hostile warship and one of His Majesty's subjects, a little English boy, forced to serve under the enemy's flag.
About the year 1779, a lad of 13 years was attending a boarding school in the city of London. He was the eldest son of John Garland, a wealthy butcher, who supplied for the London market. His uncle, Capt. Brooks, sailed a vessel from England to the American coast. On his return from one these voyages, he visited his nephew at the boarding school, and yielding to the entreaties of the young lad to be allowed to accompany him on is next voyage, he took him away without the knowledge of his parents and against their wishes on account of his youth and the fact that American cruisers swarmed the seas and inflicted heavy losses upon England's shipping. It was in the days of the American revolution.
Young Garland left England with his uncle, little thinking he had seen home and friends for the last time. They crossed the ocean without mishap and entered St. John harbor, presumably for water. But it was not the St. John of today. It consisted of less than a dozen houses, a few homes in the wilderness. Young Garland was delighted and went ashore. In playing with some boys he went out of sight of his uncle's ship , and when he returned it was nowhere to be seen. He wandered around until evening when a press gang from a French man-of-war in the harbor, seized him and carried him aboard their ship. He was forced to perform the most menial labor and for the four years that he remained with them, he endured untold hardships. At the close of the war, in 1783, his captors left him where they found him, and once more he was in St. John penniless, friendless and alone. But the Loyalists were coming in and with a young man by the name of Wilmot, he made his way to Little River, Coverdale, Albert Co., and afterwards located on a farm there.
All this time he had not heard from his friends in England, but after some years a small vessel sailed to the Old Country carrying the mail, taking six months to go and return. He then learned his uncle had been forced to leave him after searching in vain for him (the presence of the French warship no doubt hastening his departure, and was obliged to carry the sad news to the grief stricken parents that some wild animal had evidently destroyed him. Great was their joy to learn that the boy was alive, yet sad to relate, owing no doubt to the unsafe means of communication, he never received any more letters from home. He married in the country and his oldest daughter, Jane (Garland) Steeves, a well known resident of Hillsborough, died in 1901 at the advanced age of 99 years, and her many descendants well remember this story as related by her to them and several of his great grandchildren are now residing here.