Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  I suspect that the persons who, in Glasgow, join these societies, are not reduced to the lowest state of destitution, and therefore, have spirit enough to bear the idea of a transatlantic voyage. But in Paisley they are in such a state of destitution and depression, that the very idea of removing is horrible. I have seen cases in which people, who, when beginning to be in distress, would willingly have emigrated, but who, when they had tasted the full measure of wretchedness, would not. 28

  Highland hardships: coercion and emigration

  Lowland weavers were not the only distressed and discontented Scots to petition the government for assistance to emigrate. Equally vociferous were Highland petitioners, who argued that they were being marginalized and pauperized by the socio-economic transformation of the Highlands. Although they were less successful than the weavers in their pleas for government intervention, they were subsequently to emigrate in far greater numbers, over a much more prolonged period and with much greater controversy than the weavers. Indeed, as we have seen, images of destitute Highlanders dominated public perceptions of Scottish emigration throughout and beyond the nineteenth century, setting the context for a long-running and passionate debate on the ethics of expelling the unwanted.

  Like their Lowland counterparts, nineteenth-century Highland emigrants could look back to an earlier tradition of unwilling exile. For some, like a party from Barra in 1770, the sole catalyst was poverty, which had driven them from an island where ‘it is cold, the land is thin, and there are too many of us’. 29 According to the Register of Emigrants, however, most were pushed out by a combination of economic and social dislocation, arising from rising rents, crop failures and the widespread restructuring of estate management. They included 106 passengers from Stornoway to Philadelphia in May 1774, all of whom emigrated ‘in order to procure a Living abroad, as they were quite destitute of Bread at home’, and another fifty-nine emigrants to New York in November, who left ‘on Account of their being greatly reduced in their Circumstances’. A contingent from Strathspey that left aboard the George of Greenock was driven out by ‘High Rents and Deerness of Provisions’, while those who went to Wilmington, North Carolina, in August 1774 spoke primarily of ‘high rents and oppression’, complaints that were echoed by a shipload of Breadalbane emigrants, sailing from Greenock to New York in June 1775. The repercussions of commercial sheep farming were cited by a group of reluctant Argyllshire emigrants to Wilmington in September 1775:

  The Farmers and Labourers who are taking their Passage in this Ship unanimously declare that they never would have thought of leaving their native Country, could they have supplied their Families in it. But such of them as were Farmers were obliged to quit their Lands either on account of the advanced Rent or to make room for Shepherds. Those in particular from Alpine [Appin] say that out of one hundred Mark Land that formerly was occupied by Tennants who made their Rents by rearing Cattle and raising Grain, Thirty three Mark Land of it is now turned into Sheep Walks and they seem to think in a few years more, Two thirds of that Country, at least will be in the same State so of course the greatest part of the Inhabitants will be obliged to leave it. The Labourers Declare they could not support their families on the Wages they earned and that it is not from any other motive but the dread of want & that they quit a Country which above all others they would wish to live in. 30

  The complaints of eighteenth-century Highland emigrants pale into insignificance when compared with the bitter experiences of their mid-nineteenth- century successors. As the Highland economy went into severe retreat in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, landlord optimism about wholesale estate reconstruction evaporated and emigration — which they had earlier opposed tooth and nail — came to be regarded as the main remedy for overpopulation and increasing poverty. The collapse of the kelp, cattle and distilling industries severed the tenants’ major income sources and forced them into even greater dependence on the potato, while their landlords responded to the prospect of falling rentals by allocating more and more land to commercial sheep farming, the only sector of the economy that was still buoyant. Even by the 1810s, the ‘dread of want’ that had characterized emigrants in the 1770s was being replaced by the urgent realities of destitution and widespread eviction. Faced with deteriorating conditions, Highlanders who had previously left on their own initiative in order to escape rising rents and unacceptable tenurial arrangements were increasingly pushed off the land, often to be replaced by sheep. For some the euphemistically entitled assisted passage became the only alternative to starvation at home, and any concept of emigration as a negotiated movement was replaced by potent and indelible images of enforced exile.

  The Highlanders’ distress was documented in a number of petitions made to the Colonial Office on their behalf. Donald Sinclair of Dunbeath, Caithness, who had previously recruited emigrants on behalf of Lord Selkirk and later sent them out on his own account, asked the government in November 1818 to assist the emigration of ‘several thousand families in the North of Scotland’ who, having been ‘removed and their possessions turned into sheep walks’, were ‘quite destitute and … very desirous of going to North America’. 31 In the same month Donald Logan of Rogart in Sutherland, a timber merchant who had also supervised the emigration of fellow Highlanders, urged the government to provide sufficient funds for him to continue that work:

  I am originally a native of this county (Sutherlandshire) and emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1803 and having in 1807 understood that by reason of various new arrangements many of my friends and acquaintances were put out of their lands and otherwise rendered uncomfortable — I returned to my native county and got about one hundred and twenty of them removed this season to North America. But many were unable to pay the half of their passage and some not able to pay almost anything at all after settling their debts in the country. Under these circumstances several hundred of the minor tenants who understood no other line of business than farming and whose farms the proprietors have considered more lucrative to lay under sheep are removed to either waste ground or other allotments so exceedingly unsuitable as to render it alike the interest and the desire of those unhappy people to seek shelter in some more propitious quarter of the world.

  Like the weavers whose petitions were simultaneously flooding into the Colonial Department, the Highlanders were allegedly ‘dutiful and loyal subjects’, whose ‘peaceable dutiful disposition’, ‘moral and exemplary habits’ and ‘unremitting indefatigable industry’ made them ideal candidates for colonizing British North America. But Logan feared they were more likely to be overlooked than the weavers, since ‘the distance of the residences of these people from Edinburgh and there being no local agent so far North, put it out of their power to avail themselves hitherto of the protection lent by Government to poor persons in like indigent and critical circumstances in Scotland’. 32

  The Highlanders’ plight was also reflected in some of the petitions presented to the select committee on emigration in 1826—7. From Fort Augustus came a request for information on passage regulations made on behalf of 337 people who ‘are desirous of going to Canada, but are utterly unable to pay for their passage ’. From Duirinish in Skye came a petition for assisted passages to America from forty-four small farmers and labourers who, ‘from the depressed state of agriculture and the cessation of public works, have been reduced to poverty and deprived of their farms, which have been converted into sheep walks’. Their complaint was echoed by fifty-one petitioners from Glengarry whose ‘wretched condition’ afforded them no means of paying their own way to Upper Canada. And from Moidart and North Morar came pleas for assistance made on behalf of a total of 528 individuals who ‘have been reduced to the lowest state of poverty by the minute subdivision of land, and by the failure of the herring fishery’. Some of the North Morar petitioners claimed that if the government helped them to cross the Atlantic, they could then call on the assistance of ‘numerous friends in Canada and Nova Scotia’, a reference to earlier emigration that wa
s reinforced in several other submissions. 33 Some petitioners promised to repay any advances made to them, and one army veteran from Dornie in Kintail also assured the government of the Highlanders’ loyalty:

  Applicant states, that he not only applies on behalf of himself and family, but that of a number of families of his neighbours (in the Western Highlands,) who are most anxious to emigrate to British America; that these families are without the means of subsistence, as they cannot even get a bit of ground to plant potatoes, nor any employment; that it would be a great blessing, if Government assisted them to emigrate to Canada, and that they would cheerfully pay back any money that might be advanced for that purpose in a few years; that they would not desert to any foreign state, but on the contrary serve their King and country. States that, for his own part, he is in the same situation with the other poor families who wish to emigrate, and although he served many years in the army, he did not claim a pension, as his friends were comfortably situated; but reverse of fortune obliges him now to apply for a free passage to Canada, which he will repay with interest; that necessity compels this application on the part of himself and others. 34

  Landlords and factors too lobbied the government to subsidize emigration from their estates in the 1820s, but on their own conditions. ‘If the Proprietors are not allowed to exercise very considerable influence in selecting the Emigrants,’ warned Duncan Shaw, factor of the Clanranald estates in 1827, ‘assistance will be given where it is not required, the most wealthy and industrious of our population will emigrate, and we will be left with the dregs.’ 35 Shaw’s proposal that proprietors, factors and clergy should select emigrants whose relocation in Canada would then be funded by the government fell, not surprisingly, on deaf ears, as did most similar requests. Having tried unsuccessfully in 1823 to obtain state funding to remove tenants from one of his Inner Hebridean islands, Rum, Maclean of Coll dipped into his own pocket three years later when, cancelling all their arrears, he bankrolled the removal of 300 of the 350 islanders to Cape Breton at a cost of £5 14s per adult and then leased Rum to a single sheep farmer. According to Alexander Hunter, who superintended the emigration, some were willing to go, but others ‘did not like to leave the land of their ancestors’, and the episode falls into the growing category of forced clearance rather than voluntary relocation. The landlord’s motive was profit, not philanthropy, for the new tenant paid nearly three times as much annual rental as those who had been evicted. Maclean’s subsequent approach to the government for assistance in removing 1,500 redundant tenants from his estates was unsuccessful, and as landlords came to realize that state assistance was a vain hope, increasing numbers began to fund their own emigration schemes. 36

  The rising tide of support for Highland emigration among policy-makers is evident in subsequent public commentary about the region’s crumbling economy. In a prophetic statement made in June 1837, shortly before a combination of bad harvests and potato famine created a major subsistence crisis in the west Highlands, Robert Graham warned the House of Commons that state-aided emigration was the ‘most effectual’ remedy for the region’s recurring problems:

  To whatever extent in other ways employment can be found, emigration, in one shape or another, must continue to take place. Probably it would, in the long run, be the most expedient, the most efficient and the most economical expenditure of the public money if His Majesty’s Government were to assist in establishing a system of emigration on a great scale. To give effectual relief, it must be done generally, and on a great scale; if it is done partially, and to a small extent, the relief will not be recognized … if the Government is to embark in this, the sooner it is begun the easier it will be effected. The time is favourable for doing it; and if done, it were well to do it before the undertaking becomes too gigantic.37

  Four years later, Graham’s views were echoed by a select committee appointed specifically to investigate Highland distress and ‘the practicability of affording the people relief by means of emigration’. Reflecting the unanimous views of witnesses, it reported that there were between 45,000 and 60,000 people too many living on the western seaboard. Extensive state-aided emigration, the committee concluded, was the only way to ease the burden of overpopulation on landlords, as well as an essential preliminary to effective long-term recovery for the region. 38

  Three years on, in 1844, the Scottish Poor Law Commissioners’ report referred to a steady haemorrhage of impoverished Highlanders, particularly from Skye and the Outer Hebrides. Witnesses such as the Reverend Dr Norman McLeod of Glasgow and John Bowie, manager of several west Highland estates, both of whom had given evidence to the 1841 select committee, remained steadfast in their support for emigration as a preliminary form of poor relief. McLeod knew of ‘no other way in which the Highlands of Scotland can be put on a footing with the other districts of the country’ and cured of their long-term economic ‘evils’, while Bowie claimed that since 1839 he had overseen the emigration of 3,250 islanders, all of whom had been ‘successfully and comfortably removed, without pressure or force ’. 39 And in 1851, while the Highlands and Islands were still in the grip of the devastating potato famine that beset the region for virtually a decade after 1846 — an event which has been described as ‘one of the greatest economic and social disasters in Highland history’40 — Sir John McNeill, chairman of the Poor Law’s Board of Supervision, toured twenty-seven of the worst-affected parishes with a view to ascertaining the most effective means of relief. His report, as well as the evidence of several witnesses in the Hebrides and western mainland, discredited charitable relief and unequivocally endorsed assisted emigration. Charles McQuarrie, a merchant in Bunessan, Mull, declared:

  I see no prospect of relief for the population, without emigration. Many who declined to emigrate, would now desire to go if they could find the means. I am of opinion that if a thousand persons were to emigrate from the Duke ’s property, it would not be too much, and that there is no way in which the proprietor could more advantageously employ funds, than in aiding emigration.

  Further north, in Skye, McQuarrie’s views were echoed by Thomas Fraser, Sheriff Substitute of the island, who was ‘reluctantly driven to the conclusion, that a considerable emigration is indispensable to restore the people of Skye to the condition of a self-supporting population, and that it would not be safe to trust to any system of amelioration, unaided by the alleviation of the burden which emigration would afford’. Angus MacDonald, ground officer on Lord MacDonald’s Sleat estate, agreed that there was ‘no possible means of extricating’ the destitute population of Skye ‘unless they can be enabled to emigrate ’, a view that was echoed by — among others — the parochial boards of Lochcarron and Gairloch on the Wester Ross mainland. 41

  To what extent were these recommendations put into practice, and with what repercussions for the emigrants themselves? The government, ideologically committed to laissez-faire economics, remained reluctant to subsidize Highland emigration throughout the traumatic 1830s and 1840s. Relief for victims of the first potato famine came, not only in the form of provisions from destitution relief committees, but also by the extension to Scotland of a scheme which used money from Australian land sales to assist the passages of eligible emigrants — that is, those under thirty-five with character references and farming skills. Most of the 5,200 Scots who left under this bounty programme between 1837 and 1840 were Highlanders, many of whom allegedly begged to be sent to New South Wales, where there was a pressing demand for agricultural labour. While the selecting agents’ emphasis on élite recruitment provoked some conflict with destitution relief committees, which accused them of selecting the cream of Highland society, the scheme was administered flexibly, and regulations were often relaxed to permit elderly or unemployed relatives to accompany eligible emigrants on specially chartered ships. The Inverness Courier was in no doubt that the Highlanders wanted to emigrate, at least from Lochaber, where in May 1838 over 1,200 signed up to leave: