Thomas Moore Arrives in Quebec
On August 20, 1804, the Irish poet Thomas Moore arrived in Quebec after seventeen hundred miles of travel through the interior of North America. He had left New York on July 4, journeying up the Mohawk River, through the Genesee Country, and across to Niagara Falls before making the long passage down the St. Lawrence. His letters home to his mother overflow with joy and wonder: “Never did I feel my heart in a better tone of sensibility,” he wrote of the Mohawk valley, and at Niagara he wept at the first glimpse of the falls. The whole journey left him sun-browned, healthy, and brimming with material for poetry.
It was on the St. Lawrence, during a five-day boat journey from Kingston to Montreal, that Moore encountered the songs of the Canadian voyageurs. The wind was against them and the boatmen were obliged to row the whole way, singing long, winding French folk songs as they went. “Our voyageurs had good voices,” Moore recalled, “and sang perfectly in tune together.” One tune in particular stayed with him: “Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré,” a rambling story-song he could only half understand through “the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians.” After returning to England aboard the frigate Boston in November 1804, Moore set his own words to the voyageurs’ melody and published A Canadian Boat Song in his 1806 collection Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. The song became one of his most celebrated works, and a recognized influence on nineteenth-century French-Canadian poetry.
Moore wrote home faithfully, and his mother kept every letter. His letters, journals, poems, and other writings preserve a detailed picture of early North American travel: encounters with the Oneida nation, wilderness inns that charged seven shillings for three men’s supper and beds, and a poet’s ear turning toward the working songs of the men who carried him downriver. The songs we study survive not only because people sang them, but because someone along the way thought them worth writing down.
