Military

New Brunswick soldiers and their families have given generously to the Natural History Society and the New Brunswick Museum. Their donations relate to service in conflicts in various parts of the world during the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included are military uniforms and accoutrements and a wide range of souvenirs and mementoes reflective of the soldiers’ experiences abroad.

This component focuses on the latter, the many and diverse items soldiers chose to bring home, fascinating embodiments of a world they had never experienced before and exotica to show their friends and families. Among these, the strongest representation is from two conflicts in Africa, the South African War (1899-1902) and one in the Southern Nigerian Aro Expedition (1901-1902). Some of the items may be battlefield trophies, others were likely purchased or otherwise acquired as souvenirs. The circumstances of how, when and where they were made or acquired elude us since none of the donors accompanied their gifts with such documentation. Most of the cultural attributions have been determined by research. The general situation was vividly described by Annie Elizabeth Millish in 1900:

The boys from time to time have sent home a large number of souvenirs, among them being Orange Free State and Transvaal flags, china and silverware engraved with stamp of the O.F.S. Republic, Zulu testaments, Basuto Bibles, Kaffir and Serelong prayer-books, Dutch-English dictionary, quartz from the mines of Johannesburg, petrified wood from Zand River, Boer babies’ stockings, pipes used by the Boers several inches in length; and in Cronje’s Laager they picked up exploded dum-dum and mauser bullets, pieces of shrapnel even a range finder stamped “British War Office” supposed to have been captured from the English, a Boer woman’s belt, evidently a late possession of Mrs. Cronje’s hard tack skeins of wool, Kruger coins, and many other curios. (Our Boys Under Fire [Charlottetown: Examiner’s Office, 1900], 87.)