Raise the Flag & Sound the Cannon

Description

The period was 1842 – 1849. The diary started in England where a bankrupt solicitor named John Rumsey from High Wycombe, was banished to America. The diary covered the sea voyage to New York, the canal boats to Lake Ontario and the steamers and barges to Canada. During Rumsey’s lengthy stay in Montreal he met an Irish servant who had fallen on hard times. Rumsey tried to help him. According to his diary: This being a country in which great things sometimes come from little beginnings, I suggested to a poor Irish servant, the vending of a corn medicine. I gave him a recipe, a fine name for it and an elaborate account of its merits. I mixed up the first fourteen bottles, the Queen’s Printer gave publicity to it and after sending the bottles among the Canadians, my Irish friend is now practising his profession in the wide spread and free soil of the Yankee.The diary ended the day his lodgings and the Montreal parliament buildings burnt down in 1849. While I wrote the biography, I felt that it was no way to end a book — and so began the birth of the novel, Raise the Flag & Sound the Cannon …

(ID 173)