Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Depression was not confined to the agricultural sector. Since the 1820s the Scottish herring fishery had grown steadily in scale and profitability, with buoyant markets and prices. In 1884, however, it experienced a major reversal which lasted until the end of the decade and resulted in significant emigration from a community which until then had shown no interest in going overseas. The change of heart was clearly provoked by financial hardship, as curers went bankrupt, fishermen and ancillary workers such as coopers lost their livelihood, and the whole fishing enterprise slowed down considerably. In fishing centres such as Peterhead and Fraserburgh, where the health of the herring was an index of the general health of the town, poor law records during the 1880s and 1890s contain several applications for relief from the dependants of fishermen and coopers who had emigrated in an unsuccessful attempt to keep themselves and their families above the breadline.

  The press record too confirms not only that emigration, sometimes temporary, was taking place from fishing communities but also that it was often controversial and regarded very much as a last resort. In remarking on the ‘extraordinary rush’ of emigrants from the country in 1888, the Aberdeen Journal mentioned, for the first time, that fishermen were participating in the movement, predicting that before the end of the summer over 150 fishing families would have emigrated. Throughout the spring it went on to document departures from a number of fishing centres, as fishermen, curers, coopers and also tradesmen whose businesses were suffering as a result of the crisis decided to cut their losses. A number of Banffshire fishermen, including fifty families and young men in Findochty and a large number of tradesmen from Buckie, had sold their houses and gear in readiness to emigrate, mainly to British Columbia, where Alexander Begg, a native of Caithness, was trying to establish a colony of Scottish fishermen. Begg’s original scheme to transfer 1,250 Hebridean crofter families to Vancouver Island was rejected by the provincial government, which feared the arrival of hordes of destitute Highlanders, unable to repay their advances and likely to become a public charge on the province. The attempt to extend the experiment to east coast fishermen was, however, opposed by the British government, which would not countenance subsidizing emigration beyond the only part of Scotland that it recognized as a distressed area. 75 There was also considerable press hostility to fishermen’s emigration, as well as some deliberate misinformation about overseas conditions. While the Fraserburgh Herald did not object to the departure of redundant coopers and curers, it denied that there was any need for fishermen to emigrate. It urged them to be patient, in the expectation that ‘by and bye the business will assume its former flourishing condition’, and warned those contemplating going to British Columbia ‘to look before they leap’, since ‘by leaving home, fishermen may findwhen it is too late that they have sown the wind only to reap the whirlwind’. 76

  An economic upturn in 1889 and 1890 brought further confirmation that fishermen emigrated out of desperation rather than desire. ‘Emigration from the district fell off considerably during the year,’ commented the Aberdeen Journal with reference to Fraserburgh in 1889, adding that ‘this fact … guarantees that the wave of depression has commenced to roll back’. 77 A year later it claimed even more explicitly that Fraserburgh’s emigrants were expelled by adverse circumstances: ‘Another proof of better times is the marked falling away of emigration. For two or three years back there was a continual stream going from the town and district to America and other parts of the world, but within the last twelve months comparatively few people have considered it necessary to leave the old home.’ 78 On the whole, the period from the early 1890s until 1914 was one of prosperity and growth in Scottish fishing, and there is little evidence of emigration, although ancillary tradesmen sometimes emigrated if they could not attract sufficient business. Isabella Milne, a cooper’s wife, applied to Fraserburgh Parish Council for assistance in 1909 after ‘her husband left for America 2 months ago because he could not get work in Fraserburgh’. 79 In January 1911 the Aberdeen Journal predicted that around 300 emigrants, mainly coopers and their families, would leave Fraserburgh that season for Canada, particularly for British Columbia, as a result of the competition created by barrel factories in the town, and in December it confirmed that an exodus of 350 had indeed taken place. 80 Again in May 1912 the same newspaper reported the departure of several hundred people from Fraserburgh that spring, mostly the families of coopers who had already settled abroad. But it went on to indicate a more serious problem in the east coast fishing community. Whereas in 1890 110 boats had fished out of Stonehaven, fifty miles to the south, by 1911 this number had fallen to fifty-two, and competition from German trawlers had greatly reduced the value of the catch. Once again, emigration seemed to many to be the only remedy.

  Even little Stonehaven with its 4577 people has arranged for a special train to be run from its station to Glasgow this month to take 200 men, women and children from the neighbourhood for whom Scotland is so hopeless that they are leaving her for ever. Sturdy fishing folk these whose forbears came over with the Danes. But what can their little 15-ton cutters and yawls do against the thirty German steam trawlers that are constantly flooding the market of Aberdeen with shots of 700 tons of cod caught on a three weeks’ voyage to Iceland? 81

  A government committee in 1914 reported that the major problem facing Scotland’s commercial fishermen was their inability to afford the huge cost of converting to steam drifters or steam trawlers. Witnesses in a number of fishing centres claimed that financial hardship was the main reason for renewed emigration from these communities; indeed, perhaps more fishermen were emigrating now than during the earlier crisis, for in the 1880s many more had had their capital tied up in boats and had been unable to emigrate. By 1914, however, far fewer fishermen could afford to take up a share in a steam drifter or a steam trawler, and those who faced the prospect of simply becoming deckhands on a vessel in which they had no personal interest might well resort to emigration. John May and James Sim, fishermen in Inverallochy and Fraserburgh respectively, told the committee that fishermen and their families were taking the unusual step of emigrating to Canada, simply because they could not accumulate enough capital to buy a share in a boat or nets. According to May:

  There are thirteen emigrants leaving St. Combs because of the hard living. If the Government could advance money at reasonable rates, I know that we could save £100 annually, which would mean a very large sum out of a fisherman’s earnings … I have never seen a fisherman emigrating from my locality in my life before. These are the first of our fishermen that I have ever seen emigrating. 82

  On the Moray coast, Alexander Cowie, a fish salesman in Lossiemouth, confirmed that about six young men had emigrated from there to Canada within the previous two years, prepared to take ‘anything that turned up’. They too had been discouraged by the difficulty of raising enough money to participate in fishing on a shareholding basis. 83 And James Slater, a fisherman in Buckie, alleged that the capital needed to acquire and maintain a steam drifter was often not offset by the vessel’s subsequent earnings; he claimed to know of at least one skipper and mate who were emigrating because they could not afford the high operating costs of this new, highly capitalized fishing. 84 R. W. Crowly, an engineer and journalist in London, recommended that the government should advance loans to fishermen to equip their boats with motors, for unless some such incentive were offered the current ‘constant emigration’ would continue and increase. John Buchan, a retired Peterhead fisherman, supported Crowly’s forlorn hope that state loans should be advanced to young fishermen in order to prevent further emigration, for several such emigrants had already left his district for Canada, forced out by financial hardship. 85

  Conclusion

  In highlighting some of the ways in which emigration was employed as a response to destitution and disgruntlement among a range of occupational groups across Scotland, the spotlight has inevitably fallen most sharply on the Highlands. But although it was there that famine and
clearance wreaked particular havoc and attracted greatest opprobrium, as well as producing the most dramatic and concentrated examples of unwilling emigration in probably the entire history of the Scottish diaspora, economic hardship and negative sentiments were not the exclusive preserve of Highland emigrants. At the same time, neither Highlanders nor Lowlanders were one-dimensional pessimists. Despite the demonization of Highland emigration by polemicists who have depicted it as an uninterrupted tragedy of savage clearance perpetrated by capricious landlords on an unwilling tenantry, the emigrants were characterized by variety rather than uniformity of background, motives and experiences. They responded to opportunities as well as threats, and disillusionment and destitution were frequently eclipsed by the anticipation of betterment.

  3

  ATTRACTING THE ADVENTUROUS

  ‘This is a country of hope, and the other of fear for the future.’ 1

  For most emigrants, hope and adventure were far stronger sentiments than despair and resignation. Whatever the time period and location, and however distressing the circumstances that had unsettled them, bitterness was rarely unmixed with an element of ambition, even among cleared Highlanders and unemployed artisans. At the very least, they anticipated an improvement on conditions and prospects at home, often for the sake of the next generation as much as for themselves. Very few were so paralysed by poverty or persecution that they did not seek betterment, albeit emigration might be regarded as a last, desperate and unwilling resort. But by no means all emigrants were destitute, disillusioned or hounded out. Many had cash in their pockets as well as hope in their hearts, and carried with them a clear plan for the future as well as the means to implement their ideas. They were not reluctant refugees from a backward rural economy, but voluntary exiles from a vibrant, industrializing and increasingly urban society which offered good employment opportunities and a rising standard of living. Shiploads of emigrant Scots were, according to contemporary commentators, ‘furnished with funds’2 and opponents of emigration frequently expressed concern at the loss of the flower of the population, those who were rich in skills and enterprise as well as in capital.

  Why, then, against a background of expanding domestic opportunities, did so many Scots emigrate? Primarily because overseas alternatives, particularly in underpopulated countries which were rich in resources, were more attractive to Scots with marketable skills than openings in Scotland’s low-wage economy. While some emigrants made an explicit comparison between domestic discouragements and overseas opportunities, others, without any particular axe to grind, simply saw the potential for profitable investment of their labour, talents or capital in the vast virgin territories or burgeoning cities of the New World or the Antipodes. Nor were there any major psychological barriers to surmount, since by 1800 Scotland had such a well-established culture of mobility, in terms of both internal relocation and entrepreneurial emigration overseas. In the course of the eighteenth century the focus of Scotland’s overseas enterprise clearly shifted from Europe to America. By 1774—5, when the Register of Emigrants offered a fleeting statistical insight into the extent of transatlantic movement, North America and the Caribbean had become the major destinations for Scottish emigrants, bolstered, no doubt, by the vital and durable connections that had also developed in the military, political, administrative, commercial and intellectual arenas. By no means all the statements captured in the Register reflected poverty, unemployment or distress. Most of the twenty-four passengers on the Magdalene, which sailed from Greenock to Philadelphia in August 1774, went for reasons of health or business, while at least some of the emigrants on two subsequent ships to the same port went to follow their business, to see friends or family or to ‘better their fortune ’. 3 All eleven passengers aboard the Jamaica Packet, which left Kirkcaldy for Antigua in October 1774, ‘Emigrate in hopes of earning their Bread in a more easy Manner than in their Native Country’, while several of the eighty-one emigrants aboard the Jackie, sailing from Stranraer to New York in June 1775, anticipated ‘good employment’, ‘making rich’ and ‘a better way of doing’ as well as family reunions. 4

  Even in the eighteenth century Scottish emigration was therefore clearly associated with positive precedent, family connections and economic ambition, characteristics that became even more evident as time went on. Just as there was an industry of anti-emigration propaganda and literature that equated all emigration with destitution and despair, so there was an even bigger industry of guidebooks, pamphlets, newspapers and letters that skilfully targeted and fed the unfulfilled ambitions of a restless nation throughout and beyond the nineteenth century. Continuities and changes in these mechanisms themselves, as well as in the nature of the encouragement they offered and the destinations they recommended, indicate something of how, why and whither the ambitious and adventurous, as well as the destitute and disgruntled, were persuaded to emigrate and guided in their preparations. Since the clearest continuity, throughout the entire nineteenth century, lay in the unremitting stream of positive propaganda that was given to farming opportunities, particularly in Canada, the focus rests primarily on different dimensions of the lure of the land.

  Communal colonization schemes

  ‘This is a country in which the farmer may make rich and the poor man live,’ wrote an emigrant in Boston to his father in Galloway in 1772. 5 That many others shared his view is evident both in the frequency with which agricultural opportunities were discussed in correspondence and in the popularity of American land speculation among Scots in the late eighteenth century. Relatively prosperous tenant farmers reacted to rising rents and falling prospects by forming themselves into emigration companies with written constitutions and share subscriptions, publicizing their activities in pamphlets and sometimes dispatching representatives to evaluate American lands and make purchases if appropriate. The Scots American Company of Farmers, constituted at Inchin-nan in Renfrewshire in 1773 ‘for purchasing and improving of lands’ in North America, had 138 members, who quickly raised £1,000 by selling shares at £2 10s each. 6 After two delegates, sent to America in March 1773, had spent seven months exploring various options, a 23,000-acre tract was purchased at Ryegate in New York on the advice of the theologian and politician Dr John Wither-spoon, who was speculating in land at Ryegate along with the Pagans, a family of Glasgow merchants and shipowners. 7 A year later another Scottish emigration society, the United Company of Farmers for the Shires of Perth and Stir-ling, purchased a 7,000-acre tract at Barnet, near Ryegate, after £500 had been subscribed and two of the 100 subscribers sent out to reconnoitre a site had made contact with Witherspoon and the Inchinnan pioneers.

  Within a few years, however, the American Revolution brought these enterprises to a premature end and put paid to further land speculation in the United States for some time. The focus of emigrant attention therefore shifted elsewhere and for a brief period in the late 1810s fell on the Cape of Good Hope, Britain’s possession of which was confirmed at the Congress of Vienna. First to draw attention to the Cape’s potential was Benjamin Moodie, who in 1817 responded to a downturn in the fortunes of the family estate in Orkney by selling up and recruiting 200 Scottish mechanics and labourers, mainly from around Edinburgh, whom he took to South Africa under eighteen-month or three-year indentures. Such was the demand for their labour that he was able to recoup his expenses by selling the indentures — sometimes to the recruits themselves — for more than double the amount he had spent on their passages. Two younger brothers followed him to South Africa, where Donald subsequently became one of the founders of Natal and John sojourned for ten years before returning to Britain, marrying the authoress Susanna Strickland and settling with her in Canada in 1832. Although all three brothers obtained government land grants at the Cape in 1820, Benjamin Moodie was dissatisfied with the outcome of his venture, claiming that colonial government officials had failed to support him as promised, while many of his recruits were hired, without his permission, by employers who failed to pay him any
thing for the indentures they had purchased. Unsuccessful attempts to prosecute these defaulters plunged him into debt, as did his efforts to take action against shippers who assisted some of his recruits to leave the colony illegally. The heads of the recruits were allegedly so turned by the monetary rewards offered by competing employers that many of them broke their engagements and reneged on their debts to Moodie, who commented ruefully that ‘the change that took place in their conduct would have been scarcely credible to any one who knew the same men in Scotland’. 8