The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor: The First Woman Settler of the Miramichi

The epic true story of Charlotte Taylor as told by her great-great-great-granddaughter one of Canadas foremost journalists. In 1775 twenty-year-old Charlotte Taylor fled her English country house with her lover the familys black butler. To escape the fury of her father they boarded a ship for the West Indies but ten days after reaching shore Charlottes lover died of yellow fever leaving her alone and pregnant in Jamaica. Undaunted Charlotte swiftly made an alliance with a British naval commodore who plied a trading route between the islands and British North America and travelled north with him. She landed at the Baie de Chaleur in what is present-day New Brunswick where she found refuge with the Mikmaq and birthed her baby. In the sixty-six years that followed she would have three husbands nine more children and a lifelong relationship with an aboriginal man. Charlotte Taylor lived in the front row of history walking the same paths as the expelled Acadians the privateers of the British-American War and the newly arriving Loyalists. In a rough and beautiful landscape she struggled to clear and claim land and battled the devastating epidemics that stalked her growing family. Using a seamless blend of fact and fiction Charlotte Taylors great-great-great-granddaughter Sally Armstrong reclaims the life of a dauntless and unusual woman and delivers living history with all the drama and sweep of a novel. Excerpt from from The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor: Every summer of my youth we would travel from the family cottage at Youghall Beach to visit my mothers extended clan in Tabusintac near the Miramichi River. And at every gathering just as much as there would be chickens to chase and newly cut hay to leap in so there would be an ample serving of stories about Charlotte Taylor. . . She was a woman with a past. The potboilers about her ran like serials from summer to summer at weddings and funerals and whenever the clan came together. She wasnt exactly presented as a gentlewoman although it was said that she came from an aristocratic family in England. Nor was there much that seemed genteel about the person they always referred to as old Charlotte. Words like lover and land grabber drifted down from the supper table to where we kids sat on the floor. There were whoops of laughter at her indiscretions followed by sideways glances at us. But for all the stories passed around it was clear the family still had a powerful respect for a woman long dead. We owed our very existence to her and the anecdotes the older generation told suggested that their own fortitude and guile were family traits passed down from the ancestral matriarch. For as long as I can remember Ive tried to imagine the real life Charlotte Taylor lived and more how she ever survived.