In 1759 Britain won Canada in a 15-minute battle with the French outside Quebec. It was a territory larger than India, over a million square miles, inhabited by 60,000 disgruntled Frenchmen and some scattered tribes of Red Indians.
For the next 100 years the British were hard put to hold Canada against the aggressive expansionism of the United States which had broken away from the Empire to become its most relentless enemy. The British Army stood guard along a 1,500-mile frontier, the longest and most vulnerable in the Empire - in fact it was Wellington who said Canada was 'all frontier and nothing else!'
But under the protection of the British Army hundreds of thousands of immigrants, driven out of the British Isles by poverty and famine, were to arrive in Canada to carve a hard new life out of the wilderness...
