Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  George Elmslie, a merchant in Aberdeen, was chosen as the pioneer who would seek a suitable location for the establishment of an ‘Aberdeenshire colony’. He left Scotland on 30 June 1834, with instructions to make the purchase from Adam Fergusson if the land matched up to his glowing accounts of it. In Toronto he joined forces with an old friend from home, Alexander Watt, and the two men travelled to Fergus in search of land.

  By autumn 1834, however, Fergusson’s canvassing had worked so well that there was not a large enough block left for Elmslie and Watt to purchase. But, liking the location, they managed to find suitable land about two miles further down the Irvine River, at Elora. Elmslie recorded his impressions in his diary:

  I was now satisfied. We had found a block suitable in all respects for our projected colony. The quality of the soil, as indicated by the trees and their size, was equal to any we had seen; watered in such a manner as we had nowhere seen; the streams living, clear, rapid, and the chief of them on a limestone bed, and therefore healthy; the society was superior to what we could have anticipated — the newer settlers almost entirely Scotch, the older, around and in the neighbourhood of Elora, respectable, intelligent Englishmen. 49

  Elmslie and Watt returned to Toronto, where Elmslie negotiated with the vendor for the purchase of 1,200 acres at Elora. Watt was inclined to favour the township of Whitby, where settlement was further advanced and where several of his old acquaintances were located, but he was persuaded by his recently arrived sisters and brother-in-law to follow Elmslie’s lead, and he duly purchased 800 acres at Elora.

  Having completed the negotiations, Elmslie moved to Nichol, sent home word of his purchase and began to clear the sites of his own home and those of his friends who were to join him later. In one of his five letters which appeared in the third edition of Counsel for Emigrants, he referred to the proximity of ‘a knot of Scotch, many of them from Aberdeenshire’, including George Wilson, formerly an advocate in Aberdeen, and the Fyvie emigrants, George Skene and James Duguid. 50 Just as planned, in spring 1835 a party of around twenty emigrants came out from Aberdeen to take up the holdings which Elmslie had bought on their behalf, in a settlement which was named ‘Bon Accord’, after the motto on the coat of arms of their native city. They included Robert Melvine (who was to die of tuberculosis within six months), his wife, child and two servants; Peter Brown, his wife, six children and maid; and John Davidson, a carpenter, whose subsequent articles about Canadian bush life were published in the Aberdeen press. Two further contingents followed in the same year, including two of Elmslie ’s sisters, as well as Alexander Dingwall-Fordyce, a wealthy Aberdeen businessman and acquaintance of Adam Fergusson, who took up a 600-acre farm in the township, and David Chalmers of Aberdeen, who purchased 1,000 acres.

  The exodus continued unabated throughout the 1830s, with most of the emigrants sailing on timber ships from Aberdeen to Quebec. Other north-east Scots made their way to Nichol Township after initially stopping elsewhere in Upper Canada. George Barron, for instance, had emigrated from New Deer some years before he arrived in Bon Accord. He had saved his fare out of his wages as a farm worker, taking the precaution of saving enough extra money to take him back to Scotland if he did not like Canada. He had then gained valuable experience of Canadian farming techniques in the older settlements around Whitby before moving to the still-uncleared territory at Bon Accord in 1835. William Tytler from Kincardine O’Neil, who emigrated in 1835, had a look around various settlements before deciding to locate in Bon Accord. Having made that decision, he then advised all his friends and relatives to follow his example, which they did, for among the 1836 arrivals were his two brothers, sister and brother-in-law. Travelling on the same ship as Tytler was the Hay family from Slains, who briefly took up farming in Seymour township, Northumberland County, before Tytler persuaded them to move to Bon Accord, where they had several acquaintances. There they were joined in 1836 by their former neighbours from Slains, Robert Cromar, his father and sister, who, like the Hays, lodged temporarily with the widow of Robert Melvine, to whom they were related.

  Although Bon Accord’s pioneer settlers came from a variety of occupations at home, most intended to take up farming, even if they combined it with a trade or profession — George Elmslie, for instance, like John Fletcher, was both a farmer and a schoolteacher. Many brought large families with them, and their emigration was clearly provoked not only by their own desire for land but also by a determination to secure a better future for their children. Surviving letters to the pioneers from relatives who had remained in Scotland show that they too were concerned about the deleterious effects of agricultural changes at home, and the pros and cons of farming in Canada. In June 1836 William Beattie of Broomhill, Strathdon, wrote to his brother George at Nichol, complaining about rising rents and asking him to look out for a partially cleared farm in his neighbourhood. A year later, after a bad harvest and late spring, William Beattie junior wrote to his uncle, remarking on the ‘streams of emigrants going to America this year’, while his brother John, writing four months later, reiterated the complaints about crop failures and problems with his father’s lease:

  We are losing greatly every year, and we have sent this letter to you to let you know how things are going on, and as soon as you receive it you will be as good as write us immediately by post, to let us know your fair and candid opinion whether you think it best for us to go to you or stop where we are. I have told you what way we are here and you know yourself what sort of prospects there is for us with you … My Father wants to know what a farm of 100 acres with 6 or 7 acres clear could be bought at in Nichol, & he also wants to know the value of wild land all together without any clearance upon it. 51

  It was presumably on the basis of George Beattie ’s positive advice that William and Elizabeth Beattie and their two sons emigrated to Nichol in 1839.

  Money and connections

  Most of those who settled at Bon Accord and Tilbury East viewed emigration as a positive investment of their capital and talents. None was impoverished, and several were men of some means who could afford not only to pay their own passages but also to purchase farms on arrival, with no need to seek preliminary wage labour. Some, like George Elmslie, Alexander Watt and Alexander Ding-wall- Fordyce, employed contractors to clear sections of their substantial properties, while others came to take up lands which their parents had purchased on their behalf. Confirmation that much emigration was not a flight of the poor is found in guidebooks, press correspondence and advertisements, which often took it for granted that readers had the wherewithal to invest in land. ‘For the matter of a few hundreds of pounds’, the Chambers brothers reported in 1834, farmers could obtain fertile lands in Britain’s colonies or in the United States ‘which, in a short time, by active exertion, will repay all that is expended upon them, and remain a permanent and valuable freehold for their family’. Even £100, invested by parents on behalf of their sons in North America, ‘would make them proprietors of farms, and stock them sufficiently with all that is necessary for thriving and becoming healthy’. 52 Readers were regularly reminded that a sum equivalent to a year’s rent at home could buy an improved property in Canada, while the lamentations of those who claimed that Scotland was losing its most enterprising farmers and farm servants suggests that the problem was not lack of savings in the rural community but an inability to invest those savings profitably at home.

  Further corroborative evidence of the relative prosperity of many Scottish settlers is found in reports of the departure and arrival of shiploads of emigrants, particularly in Alexander Buchanan’s reports of emigrant vessels arriving at Quebec. ‘They are all in good circumstances, and are amply provided with means to proceed to their destination,’ he observed of two shiploads from Aberdeen and Hull in July 1840, while two vessels from Glasgow, which arrived in August 1856, brought ‘respectable farmers and agriculturists, generally in comfortable circumstances’, all of whom emigrated ‘to join friends’. His reports fr
equently bracketed English and Scots emigrants together as settlers of a ‘superior class’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘respectable in appearance’, who were ‘in comfortable circumstances, and intend to enter at once upon the occupation of land’. 53

  Buchanan’s comments on the frequency with which emigrants came out to join friends and family, often with the aid of remittances or prepaid tickets, also remind us of another crucial catalyst in chain emigration, the provision of practical, pecuniary assistance from pioneer emigrants to those who had initially remained at home. The significance of this phenomenon was reinforced by a report in the Illustrated London News in April 1857 which, after commenting on the spring sailing from north-east Scotland to Canada of about 1,500 emigrants, mainly young, newly married agricultural labourers, observed that ‘large sums of money continue to be received from settlers in Upper Canada, who had previously gone out’ and predicted that ‘before many years, few agricultural labourers will be left at home ’. 54 Eight months earlier, James Thompson, who had emigrated from Aboyne in 1844 and worked at his trade as a baker in Canada and the United States until he had earned enough money to buy a 150acre farm in Ontario, funded the passages of his elderly father, his sister and two children of a deceased sister. Until then he had been maintaining them in Scotland, a responsibility which increased in 1855 when his father lost his job as bridgekeeper to the Marquis of Huntly following his employer’s bankruptcy. Long aware of his family’s precarious finances, James had first suggested in 1849 that his father and his brother Sandy might emigrate. In 1851 he noted that Sandy’s wage as a ploughman was insufficient to maintain a family and during a visit home in 1852 he gave him some money towards his passage to Canada, promising also that ‘if he decides on coming here I shall see that he has a house to go in to on arrival’. 55 Sandy, however, did not take good care of money. By May 1854 he had spent up to £20 of the remittance, and although his father banked subsequent sums sent by James, Sandy was not included in the family party that joined James Thompson and his wife at Edwardsburgh in 1856.

  Some Highlanders too seem to have possessed funds, foresight and the support of friends. The 200 Long Island emigrants whose departure from Tobermory in 1835 was witnessed by Lord Teignmouth had, he claimed, ‘received no assistance in the prosecution of their undertaking from any quarter; were in high spirits, and much encouraged by the accounts which they had received from their friends who had preceded them’. Highland emigrants, he continued, ‘generally carry out sufficient capital to enable them to settle; are located on their arrival, whether in Canada or in the United States, usually among their own kindred or former neighbours, who have paved the way for them; or enjoy the benefit of arrangements framed for their accommodation by government or by societies’. 56 Even during the famine, the picture was not entirely negative, as middling crofters, particularly from Argyllshire, continued to finance their relocation through the sale of cattle and other assets. Over 300 well-clothed and provisioned emigrants from Islay and Kintyre who sailed from Glasgow to Quebec in July 1847 had, according to the North British Daily Mail, ‘paid for their passage money’, while evidence to the Napier Commission thirty-six years later suggested that a total of 1,200 unassisted emigrants had left Islay for North America and Australia between 1841 and 1851. 57 In 1848 the Scotsman reported that of the 5,165 steerage and 277 cabin passengers — mainly west Highlanders — who had left Glasgow and Greenock in the first six months of that year, ‘a good number … were in possession of considerable sums of money and were well supplied with clothes and provisions for the voyage ’, while a shipload of Highlanders who sailed from Ardrossan around the same time had taken ‘a good quantity of property’. 58 More than three decades later newly arrived settlers at Wapella reminded their correspondents in the Hebrides that emigrants to the prairies should have £100 on arrival ‘for their farm implements and house furniture ’. 59

  Opportunities for investment

  Most Scottish emigrants were people of modest ambitions and modest achievements. A significant minority, however, saw in the vast open spaces of the Antipodes or the Americas major investment opportunities which, although often connected with land, went far beyond the limited horizons of a family farm. In 1825, the year before Britain granted recognition to the Republic of Argentina, John and William Parish Robertson, two brothers from Kelso, signed a colonization contract with the Argentine government under which they promised to introduce at least 200 European families to land which the government would grant in perpetuity. By May 1825 they had recruited 220 Border Scots, who within three years established a thriving agricultural and cattle-raising colony at Monte Grande near Buenos Aires before the settlement fell victim to the unstable economic and political environment of the new republic. A generation later, in New Zealand’s South Island, Scots were disproportionately represented among the runholders, particularly in Otago, but also in Canterbury and Hawkes Bay. Holdings ranged from over 315,000 acres to a few hundred acres, and Scots were generally employed as shepherds and station managers. While some of these investors had come straight from Scotland, others had cut their sheep-farming teeth in Australia, where, as Eric Richards has noted, ‘corporate enterprise from Scotland in pastoral pioneering was a phenomenon of the middle years of the century’. 60

  Prominent among landed entrepreneurs in Australia were three of the ‘surplus younger sons’ of William Leslie, laird of the estate of Warthill in the parish of Old Rayne in Aberdeenshire. Their sheep-farming investments not only lined their own pockets but also brought about the emigration of several of their father’s tenants, who were attracted overseas by the prospect of lucrative employment with employers who were already known to them. The Leslies’ interest in Australia began in 1805 when their uncle, Walter Davidson, went from Aberdeenshire to take up a 2,000-acre land grant in New South Wales. Although he did not remain permanently in the colony, he developed extensive business interests there, and when he required an overseer for his pastoral estates, he offered the job to his nephew. Thus it was that in 1834 nineteen-year-old Patrick Leslie was sent out to New South Wales. His objective, in the words of his uncle, was ‘to form a Nucleus for a grand Leslie family property’ on which he would subsequently be joined by his brothers Walter and George. ‘I do predict,’ wrote the optimistic Davidson to the Leslies’ father, William, ‘that the Warthill property, good and solid as it is, will be nothing to your family’s Australian property twenty years hence if these 3 dear Youths’ lives be but mercifully spared.’ 61

  Until such time as his younger brothers could be sent out, Patrick was instructed to assess the viability of Davidson’s proposal. He was first taught the art of sheep management by settlers from Devon, the Macarthurs of Vineyard, near Sydney, before being sent in 1836 to manage Davidson’s property at Col-laroi on the Krui River. Patrick warned his parents against encouraging casual acquaintances to come to Australia on his recommendation but he shared his uncle ’s optimism about the colony’s prospects and suggested that his youngest brother, Tom, should also be ‘broken in’ for emigration:

  He must push his fortune some way in the world and as well he does here when he will have his three brothers and also much better scope & many more advantages than in any other part of the world that I know of. By the time he is old enough to come out I will be an Old hand in the Colony and can take him well under my wing. 62

  Tom Leslie did not in fact go to New South Wales, but Walter and George arrived in March 1839. They were less impressed than Patrick with the drought-ridden colony’s prospects, George describing New South Wales to his parents within four months of landing as ‘a very nice agreeable country for a person to stay a few years in but to settle ultimately in it would never enter my head’. 63 George never subsequently disguised his intention to make money in Australia in order to spend it in Britain, a sentiment that was shared by Walter, who told his sister that he ‘should not like to remain in this country after having made myself independent for whatever people say there is neit
her society nor amusement like what there is at home ’. 64

  Perhaps the younger brothers’ reservations were attributable partly to a bitter quarrel that had broken out between Patrick and his uncle as a result of Patrick’s allegedly inefficient accounting and general mismanagement of the estate. Resigning his position at Collaroi in the very month that his brothers arrived in Australia, Patrick began to look for a property where they could farm independently. In a long letter to his father two months later, he complained of Davidson’s shabby treatment of him and justified his own conduct, before outlining the brothers’ future plans:

  We mean to be proprietors of cattle and horses only connected with agriculture and not to have sheep for I am convinced that sheep will not pay now as they used to do for we have to hire all our men & sheep farming requires such a very great number of hands besides cattle & horses. We mean to form our stations to the northward on a large river shed which will bring us near Sydney by means of water carriage … We will not have to purchase our Land there for a length of time very likely but I may find it advisable to purchase one section on which to build & commence farming operations. Now we are to go into partnership in this way I find one half the Stock of Cattle & of mares & pay one half the Expenses of everything connected with the concern. W. & G. find the other half of the stock & pay the other half of the expenses between them & of course one half the profit is mine & the other half between W. & G. We were obliged to do it in this way as W. & G. could not afford to get each the same quality of stock I have. If they could have done so it would have made the Expenses fall lighter on me however it was impossible unless they borrowed money which I would not do on any account. We have got between 30 and 40 breeding mares and I mean to maintain about 50 or 60 if we can — If we find the country where we go is fit for sheep or so open as to allow of keeping a very large number of sheep in a flock so as to diminish the number of shepherds we might get some sheep also but that must be determined when we see what sort the country is. I intend to rent a farm somewhere in this part of the country and I will keep one horse stock and 40—50 of the best of our cows there to breed bulls for the herd. 65