A Meeting with Matilda: Thomas Cather's Voyage to America

Thomas Cather, son of landed gentry from Limavady, Co. Londonderry, was just twenty-three when he set sail for the New World. Cather’s Grand Tour took him from New York to New Orleans, down corduroy roads, up the Mississippi, across the frontier and into Indian Country. He discussed politics with Andrew Jackson and lived for a month among the Pottawatomi Indians. In Philadelphia he viewed the original Jeffersonian manuscript of the Declaration of Independence. He was among the first visitors to the newly built tourist infrastructure at Niagara Falls. His journal, later published as Voyage to America, forms part of the long tradition of European travel writing about the Americas, and includes familiar Old World disapproval of American coarseness and greed. Cather’s journal is a sharp account of American habits and culture, but it also offers a fascinating snapshot of the ageing exiles of 1798. For a young man who grew up with the stories and spectres of ’98 in Ulster, America is mediated in part through a United Irish prism. As he moves through America, Cather’s observations might be understood as informed by his late nights with United Irish exiles William Sampson and William James MacNevin at the beginning of his travels. Their stories and songs of the men of ’98 offer lenses through which to view the vast new country, and values to measure it against.