HarperCollins, Toronto, 2011
352 pp., illus., $32.99 hardcover
Esther Marie-Joseph Wheelwright de l’Enfant Jésus is fortunate to have as her biographer a descendant: historian and journalist Julie Wheelwright. Julie, a zealous researcher, plays the role of detective, sifting through scraps of puzzling evidence covering three centuries in pursuit of her elusive, almost ephemeral quarry.
In 1703, seven-year-old Esther, great-granddaughter of hellfire and brimstone preacher John Wheelwright, was abducted from her Puritan settlement in northeastern Maine by a war party of French soldiers and Abenaki warriors. Marched, with sixty-eight others, to the Jesuit mission at Norridgewock on the Kennebec River, Esther was adopted by an Abenaki family to replace their own dead child. After the mission moved to St. François in New France, Esther became a Catholic with a new name, Marie-Joseph, and a pawn in the fierce religious war between the French Catholics and the English Protestants.
The Wheelwrights, desperate to get their daughter back, freed her from the Abenaki by providing a native imprisoned by the English. But rather than joyfully returning home, Esther entered the boarding school at the Ursuline convent in Quebec and soon joined the order. She became Mother Superior in 1760, after Quebec became a British colony, and died in the cloister in 1780.
The conversion of a Puritan girl into a religieuse was a triumph for Father Vincent Bigot, who had taken this bright, skinny girl under his wing. For Esther, the convent — a refuge from a murderous world — was a busy and creative community. She taught her pupils dancing and needlework as well as reading, writing, arithmetic, piety, and good manners. In the exquisitely decorated chapel, the nuns sang and chanted their religious observances and gave concerts for parents.
As the decades passed, Esther — believed by the French to be an aristocrat — became an important point of contact between the colony’s elite and her wealthy, influential Wheelwright relatives in New England. After the British conquest, when the nuns had to share their bombed-out convent with the British army’s commanding officer and his staff, Esther’s English roots and diplomatic skills enabled the Ursulines to avoid persecution or expulsion.
As Mother Superior, she was a hard-headed businesswoman. The impoverished nuns manufactured religious objects to sell to churches that had been damaged or destroyed, baked biscuits for the British army, made jam and pastries for the priests, sold produce from their farms and gardens to the local citizens, and crafted embroidered birchbark boxes for the English tourists. “We sell at a high price to the English gentlemen,” she wrote, “yet they seem to consider it a privilege to buy, so eager are they for our work.”
Esther’s strength is Julie Wheelwright’s ability to place her ancestor vividly in the context of her place and time. She tells us about eighteenth-century Abenaki life and beliefs and about the brutal massacres by English, French, and First Nations. Her portrayal of the Ursulines is intimate and revealing, her account of the British siege of Quebec harrowing.
Some of the principal characters, especially the governor of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, could have been fleshed out, and the book would have benefited from more portraits and maps sprinkled throughout the text. But Julie Wheelwright fearlessly drags skeletons — including slavery, espionage, and Esther’s rumoured illegitimate child — out of closets, including her own.
Esther Wheelwright was only one of hundreds of English captives who remained in Quebec and exerted a subtle influence on the colony’s future. We should know more about them.
— Heather Robertson (Read bio)
Heather Robertson's latest book is Walking into Wilderness: The Toronto Carrying Place and Nine Mile Portage, which covers the war between the French, English, and their First Nations allies in the Great Lakes watershed.