Adventurers and Exiles
The Great Scottish Exodus
Marjory Harper is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Aberdeen, where she also did her undergraduate and postgraduate study. She is the author of a two-volume survey of emigration from north-east Scotland (1988) and of Emigration from Scotland between the wars: opportunity or exile? (1988). She has co-edited (with Michael Vance) Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia, c. 1700—1900 (1999) and (with Allan Macinnes and Linda Fryer) Scotland and the Americas: A Documentary Source Book (2002).
She lives in rural Aberdeenshire.
Adventurers and Exiles
The Great Scottish Exodus
Marjory Harper
This paperback edition published in 2004
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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eISBN 978-1-84765-099-3
To the memory of my parents
CONTENTS
Maps
List of illustrations
1 Traditions of Emigration
2 Expelling the Unwanted
3 Attracting the Adventurous
4 The Recruitment Business
5 Helping the Helpless
6 Leaving and Arriving
7 The Emigrant Experience
8 The Temporary Emigrant
9 Issues of Identity
Notes
Acknowledgements
Select bibliography
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. ‘The Caledonian Voyage to the Money-Land’ (Edinburgh City Art Centre)
2. ‘A Coronach in the Backwoods’ by George W. Simson, 1859 (National Museums of Scotland)
3. The Caledonian Gathering, Melbourne, 1 February 1892 Illustrated Australia News) (State Library of Victoria, IAN01/02/92/12 J. MacFarlane from
4. Pewter communion token from Otago, New Zealand (Dunblane Museum Trust)
5. Memorial to the Scottish settlers who came to Belfast, Prince Edward Island, in 1803 (Andrew Shere)
6. Silver snuff box, inscribed to John Sutherland, a government emigration agent, 1849 (National Museums of Scotland)
7. Advertising for immigration to Canada by the federal authorities, 1905 (Canada, Immigration Branch ollection, National Archives of Canada, PA-75938)
8. Advertising for agricultural settlers by the Canadian government agent (Scottish Farmer, 29 January 1927, p. 133. Mitchell Library, Cultural & Leisure Services, Glasgow City Council)
9. Quarrier’s Orphan Homes of Scotland and Mount Zion Church, Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire (Quarrier’s)
10. Scottish immigrants arriving at Quebec, c. 1911 (William James Topley, National Archives of Canada, PA-10227)
11. Scottish immigrants on board train, Quebec, c. 1911 (William James Topley, National Archives of Canada, PA-7758)
12. Group of immigrants arrive at CPR Station, Winnipeg (Provincial Archives of Manitoba, L. B. Foote Collection N2066, 23 February 1927)
13. Jessie MacLaren McGregor (Edinburgh University Library)
14. William Tomison’s School, Orkney (Glenbow Archives, NA-630-6)
15. Apple tasting, Coldstream Ranch, Vernon, British Columbia, 1890s (The Earl of Haddo/National Trust for Scotland)
16. Scottish Church, Collins Street, Melbourne, 1874 (State Library of Victoria, H36540, Charles Nettleton, 1826.1902, from Melbourne Views, 1880)
17. Melville Church, The Scotch Colony, New Brunswick, 1878 (Andrew Shere)
18. Statue of William Wallace, Druid Park, Baltimore, Maryland (Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum)
19. Past Presidents of the Caledonian Society, Montreal, 1889 (McCord Museum, Montreal)
20. Curling on the St Lawrence, composite, 1878 (McCord Museum, Montreal)
1
TRADITIONS OF EMIGRATION
‘When colonisation came into vogue, he [the Scot] was foremost among colonisers.’ 1
The Scots have always been a restless people, ‘wonderful at living anywhere but in Scotland’. 2 In the nineteenth century their restlessness exploded into a sustained surge of emigration that carried Scotland almost to the top of a European league table of emigrant-exporting countries and created in the process a powerful, enduring image of a land of both exiles and adventurers. Yet the wanderlust that infected 2 million Scots in those years was no new phenomenon. Since the Middle Ages at least, Scots had habitually sought adventure or sanctuary in England and throughout Europe, before they began to turn their eyes westward, initially to Ulster in the seventeenth century, and then by the eighteenth century across the Atlantic to the Americas. The remarkable nineteenth- century diaspora at the hub of this book was therefore built on firm foundations and a variety of interlocking — and sometimes competing — traditions of demographic upheaval.
The statistics of emigration
On what statistical basis can we argue that the Scots were ‘notoriously migratory’? 3 Reliable figures are impossible to come by until the 1850s, but it seems that in the first half of the seventeenth century Scotland probably lost about 2,000 people a year, mostly young men, out of an estimated total population of up to 1.2 million. Less is known about the period between 1650 and 1700, but while the overall loss was probably similar, the gender mix was more balanced, with young males accounting for perhaps a tenth (rather than a fifth) of the emigrants. Although 70 per cent of the haemorrhage of approximately 1 million people from the British Isles in the seventeenth century came from south of the border, the Scots — whose population base was four to five times smaller than that of their English neighbours — seem to have been proportionately more disposed to emigrate, perhaps not surprisingly given their more meagre domestic opportunities. Emigration statistics in the eighteenth century are even more elusive, with the exception of an eighteen-month period from 1773 to 1775, but the emphasis clearly shifted from England to Scotland and Ireland. Estimates suggest an overall Scottish exodus of 75,000 between 1700 and 1780, made up of 60,000 Lowlanders and 15,000 Highlanders. At the same time, it is reckoned that there were 80,000 emigrants from England and Wales and 115,000 from Ireland. In the last two decades of the century the biggest outflow was from Ireland, while 10,000 out of approximately 15,000 emigrants from Scotland now came from the Highlands.
All this activity laid a firm foundation for the nineteenth century, when emigration became a significant European phenomenon. Over 50 million Europeans went overseas between 1815 and 1914, mainly from Britain and Ireland in the first half of the century, from parts of Scandinavia and several German states in mid-century, and from Italy and other areas in southern and eastern Europe by the early 1900s. For all these emigrants the United States was the main destination. Information-gathering also improved gradually in the course of the nineteenth century, although there was probably a
significant amount of under-recording in the early years, when shipping was still fairly decentralized, and passengers might be embarked at remote locations, unknown to the authorities. As far as the British Isles were concerned, from 1815 the Colonial Office published annual tables of emigrants who had left for various non-European destinations, then from 1825 details were given of emigration from the constituent parts of the British Isles to these destinations. After 1872 responsibility for collecting emigration and immigration data was taken over by the Board of Trade, and detailed passenger lists survive from 1895. Approximately 22 million emigrants left the British Isles between 1815 and 1914, the yearly exodus ranging from 33,222 in 1838 to 656,835 in 1912. The biggest departures proportionally were from Ireland, from where more than twice the number of the entire Irish population of 1801 had emigrated before the end of the century. Most of them left in the wake of the Great Famine in the 1840s, although this tends to be obscured in the statistics by the classification of emigrants according to port of departure before 1853. Since the majority of Irish emigrants took their transatlantic passage from Liverpool, they appeared in the English figures up to and including 1852.
In the same way, a large number of Scots who embarked at Liverpool were excluded from the Scottish returns for the first half of the century, while several Irish who embarked in Glasgow were registered as Scottish emigrants. Problems also occur when we try to identify the regional origins of emigrants, for although the records list a large number of ports until 1872, passengers often came from much further afield to embark or were picked up later at an unrecorded port. Between 1872 and the systematic retention of passenger lists from 1895, the task of identifying regional origins becomes well-nigh impossible, since Scottish emigrant departures are listed only under Glasgow, Greenock and ‘other Scottish ports’ at the same time as easier railway communication encouraged even more Scots to continue to embark at Liverpool, London and Southampton.
But partial information is better than no information at all. The records indicate that Scotland sent 1,841,534 citizens to non-European destinations in the years 1825—1914, an unknown but significant proportion of whom were probably first-generation Irish, especially by the twentieth century. Of the emigrants 44 per cent went to the United States, 28 per cent to Canada and 25 per cent to Australasia. But whereas the USA received most emigrants from Britain and Ireland in every single year from 1835 to 1909, the Scots’ preference for Canada persisted until 1847, and was demonstrated in three subsequent years, before Canada reappeared as the favoured destination of all but Irish emigrants from 1910 to 1914. Scotland’s overall contribution to emigration from the British Isles in the nineteenth century — just over 12 per cent — might at first glance seem like a drop in the ocean compared with the departure of around 8 million from England and Wales and over 5 million from Ireland, yet it represented a significant loss to a small country whose total population in 1911 was less than 5 million. The departure of almost 2 million emigrants in the nineteenth century was equal to 42 per cent of Scotland’s population at the 1911 census, whereas emigration from England and Wales in the same period represented less than 25 per cent of the total population of 1911 — even less, if we take into account the false inflation of the English statistics before 1853. As in Ireland, emigration was always an essential part of the fabric of Scottish life, and a commonplace device for self-improvement, to a much greater extent than south of the border.
Internal migration
Migration and emigration are inextricably linked, and mobility within Scotland always constituted a significant, if statistically elusive, component of population change. Migrants, who were mainly young adults of both sexes, moved within rural areas and from rural to urban settlements, in an expanding pattern of relocation. Impartible inheritance among tenant farmers in the Lowlands clearly created a migratory climate, as did periodic bouts of famine and shortage. As farming became increasingly commercialized, tenant farmers were forced off the land by rising rents, consolidation of farms and the phasing out of sub-tenancies, particularly in the eighteenth century, although in some border counties the process had begun as early as the 1660s. The six-monthly or annual contracts under which farm servants were employed gave them no incentive to put down roots either; on the contrary, many changed employers at every biannual feeing market, steadily enlarging the area within which they circulated. Dispossessed farmers and farm servants also migrated to planned villages, eighty-five of which were planted across Lowland Scotland between 1700 and 1840, to function as market centres and embryonic industrial enterprises, as well as repositories for surplus agriculturists and tradesmen. For some, the move to planned villages paved the way for subsequent, longer-distance migration to urban centres, which began to develop dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly around the River Clyde. All this had a major impact on the demographic map, for whereas Scotland in the seventeenth century had been one of the least urbanized countries in western Europe, by 1800 17.3 per cent of the Scottish population lived in towns, and Scotland had risen to fourth place in the league table of western Europe’s most urbanized societies. Much of this urban growth was achieved by migration, not only from the towns’ rural hinterlands but also from the Highlands, where migration to the Lowlands had been an integral part of the region’s economic structure since at least the early eighteenth century. Commercialization had begun to affect parts of the Highlands even before the parliamentary union, particularly on the estates of Clan Campbell in Argyll, and in the eighteenth century buoyant southern markets for cattle, fish, timber, slate and later kelp, wool and mutton led to higher rents, competitive bidding for tenancies and a whole new socioeconomic order that lined the chieftains’ pockets at the expense of their clansmen. Temporary migration was a common response of young Highlanders who sought to contribute to their family’s rental payment from wages earned in Lowland agriculture, industry and domestic service, as well as in the Clyde fisheries and in military service. John Knox, the traveller and writer, claimed in the 1780s that half the young women in the southern Highlands went south for harvest work, and most eighteenth-century Highland migrants came from Argyll, Easter Ross and the eastern part of Inverness-shire.
While evidence of eighteenth-century migration is difficult to quantify, contemporary sources leave us in no doubt that it was an integral part of Scotland’s demographic make-up. The records of poorhouses, Gaelic churches and Gaelic societies reflect the substantial presence of Highlanders in the urban Lowlands. Throughout the country, the clerical contributors to the Statistical Account of Scotland, the indefatigable Sir John Sinclair’s parish-by-parish chronicle of Scottish life at the end of the eighteenth century, made repeated references to the causes and effects of migration. In rural parishes across the country consolidation of farms was blamed for much depopulation, although the search for higher wages and better conditions was also a common cause of movement. Some ministers were highly critical of the attitudes of migrant Highlanders. The minister of the parish of Daviot and Dunlichty in Inverness-shire referred to them scathingly as ‘partial emigrants’, whose seasonal migration impeded agricultural improvements, was ‘inimical to the general prosperity of the people’, artificially raised local wages and encouraged the introduction of extravagant luxuries among the lower classes. The minister of the parish of Kincardine, in the same county, was more blunt in his criticism of lazy and avaricious migrants.
Many of the young men and women move southward, when the day lengthens, and the weather becomes mild. By low living, and hard labour, they return with comfortable profits, great part of which they lend out at exorbitant interest, and, during the inclemency of the seasons, they live with, and are a burden on, their friends and acquaintances, especially such as necessity has obliged to borrow their money, and who are not punctual in paying either principal or interest. These are evils to be remedied only by finding proper employment for the people at home. 4
The minister of Kilmallie, also in
Inverness-shire, feared that the ‘heroic spirit and martial ardour’ of migrants to the Lowlands would soon be extinguished by ‘debility and effeminacy’, a problem which was presumably unlikely to afflict the large numbers from the Highlands in particular who were reported as having enlisted in the army. Migrants’ attitudes were not uniform, for while some of Cromarty’s seasonal migrants had failed to return from the south, the natives of Mortlach in Banffshire allegedly could not beat the homeward path quickly enough. As the minister observed, ‘Such is the attachment to one ’s native soil, that it is seldom deserted but either from necessity or the gratification of an ambitious desire; and as soon as circumstances will permit, or the passion is cured, it is commonly resorted to again.’ 5 Not far away, the people of Duffus in Morayshire had come to favour migration over emigration because of the reports of disappointed emigrants.
About the end of [the] last war, some individuals went to North America, a few of whom returned and settled at home, bringing bad tidings of the country, which their imaginations had figured to be the fairy-land of wealth. Since that time, those who would have gone to America, had the prospect been favourable, have preferred a home emigration to the southern parts of Scotland, particularly Glasgow, Paisley &c. And from this part of the north, there is, and always has been, a constant succession of adventurers issuing forth to the British capital, the East and West Indies, and other parts of the empire. 6
Ministers of urban parishes were more likely to record in-migration, as in the central-belt parish of Lanark, where ‘a great proportion’ of the people were Gaelic-speaking Highlanders from Caithness, Inverness and Argyllshire. They included 200 would-be emigrants from Skye, who, while their ship was stormbound in Greenock in 1791, had been recruited by David Dale for his cotton-spinning mill at New Lanark. In order further to deflect the interest of restless Highlanders from America, Dale had subsequently provided houses for 200 Highland families. As a result ‘a considerable number’ had come to work at New Lanark in 1793, although some from Barra had apparently returned from New Lanark disillusioned, after Dale ’s terms had failed to match their expectations. 7 The Highland community at New Lanark is still commemorated, both in New Lanark’s street names — notably Caithness Row — and in the little cemetery adjacent to the modern, and sensitively restored, heritage site.
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