Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  The Leslies were to be accompanied on their expedition by Ernest Elphinstone Dalrymple, whose father’s estate of Logie bordered the Leslie estate in Aberdeenshire. According to Patrick, Ernest, who had come to Australia with George and Walter, ‘tells me his funds & I will put him in the way of investing them best’. While Ernest was ‘a very nice companion’ who was likely to make a good settler, Patrick Leslie was less complimentary about Ernest’s inexperienced and domineering brother Alastair, who had also come to Australia, but who he hoped would settle some distance away, ‘for I am determined my Brothers & him should not be associated’.

  Patrick’s letter consisted largely of detailed instructions regarding the shipment of workers and, to a lesser extent, stock from home. The unsupervised nature of work on the vast cattle and sheep farms rendered it imperative that a proprietor employ servants on whom he could rely, but the Leslies and their acquaintances were dissatisfied with the existing channels of supply, not so much convicts as bounty emigrants, whom Patrick condemned as ‘the sweepings of the Parishes they come from’. 66 Perhaps he was also prompted by the example of Hugh Gordon, another emigrant acquaintance whose family estate of Manar also bordered Warthill, who had already acquired some Scottish emigrants as his servants. At any rate, rather than engage in the lottery of acquiring labourers under the bounty schemes, Patrick asked his father to send out six handpicked men from his own estate — a carpenter, a blacksmith, two stockmen and ‘two complete servants’ who were particularly skilled with horses — promising to pay them the colony’s going rates of £18 to £25 a year. While he would prefer the carpenter and blacksmith to be single, the stockmen and horsemen should be married, especially if their wives could work as dairymaids and harvesters. ‘If they were newly married & no children so much the better but on no account would I take more than one child to each couple & if they have none so much the better,’ he added. Patrick even had potential recruits in mind:

  W. & G. talked of Adam Singer’s second son as wishing to come out. Perhaps he would make one of the farm servants if he is old enough. You may also remember a lad Willie Lyon who was once hind at Warthill and a capital worker. W. & G. say he was at Middleton of Blackford when they left. If he were to get married he might be one of the farm servants. I daresay he could soon find a wife & they then if married for the occasion would not have any children when they arrived — however you my dear Father are a better judge of who are the best men to come out & if you will do so we will be very much obliged but I certainly would like people from Warthill as they should be attached to us very likely. Now I think I have said all I remember about the men & you can tell them if they choose to come out to me I will hire them & they will only have to let me know through you when I am to expect them. If Wm. Lyon is not married I would just as soon have him. 67

  Correspondence from Scotland clearly reflects the way in which the Leslie brothers stimulated emigration from their home area to New South Wales, through informal networks and word-of-mouth encouragement in which their parents played an integral part. In August 1840William Leslie responded to his son’s request by shipping out an Aberdeenshire bull and two cows under the charge of James Fletcher of Culsalmond, a ‘steady active young fellow’ who had first visited the Warthill estate four months earlier ‘to ask the best mode for getting out to New South Wales’. Although the bull died while crossing the Bay of Biscay, Fletcher, who was ‘well recommended as a good servant’, was retained by the Leslies when he arrived in Australia. 68 Meanwhile, a former Warthill ploughman, Sandy Wright, was by August 1840 earning £40 a year as overseer on Patrick’s rented farm at Dunheved near Penrith, after Jane Leslie had taken him under her wing. Having told her sons that Wright looked to them ‘for advice and protection till some situation can be found for him’, she wrote again in 1839, in a letter to Walter carried out by Wright himself. He had, she explained, used up all his cash to fit himself out and was therefore in need of work, but expected that all his difficulties would be over once he met the Leslie brothers, and was confident of earning a good deal more money in Australia than at home. Jane urged her sons to do their utmost to assist Wright, who

  may not be full of good manners but having good upright intentions will improve after he has seen a little, & how others do, for as yet he never has been out of his Father’s house and is what may be termed rather a green Horn and I wish he was safe and sound in New South Wales. I have heard a love match made him determine on this step, as his Parents were against the Marriage and would not give him any part or portion of the farm — so some say the match is given up, and others say they will meet in Abdn and be married and go together. 69

  She also mentioned the imminent departure of another local emigrant, James Durno, who wished to invest his capital in New South Wales. He was of good character and well brought up, and was relying on the Leslies’ experience to guide him in the wise investment of his savings. He left Leith on the North Briton in December 1839, bearing with him a part of Jane Leslie ’s journal, a letter from William Leslie to his sons and a packet for the Dalrymple brothers from their family.

  It is unclear if the Leslies subsequently employed Durno, but by September 1840 at least one other Aberdeenshire Scot was working at the Leslies’ newly established sheep station at Canning Downs. Patrick wrote to his parents with the details:

  We have another Aberdeenshire man with us he has been with me 2 years he is up with Watty — one of the most valuable fellows I ever met with a most invaluable man to us he is … This man’s name is James Hay he comes from Tarland his father is a carpenter there and he is also a carpenter by trade indeed he is everything & is Watty’s factotum & from knowing all about us he is much attached to us — he knows Warthill well & knows you my dear Father by sight very well he has an uncle residing near Foudland estate hills — & I know some of your Tenants are near relations of his … If you should be any chance ever be near Tarland it would be very gratifying to Hays father to know he is ‘wi kent folk’ and doing so well. 70

  William Leslie was in no doubt about the value of having acquaintances from home in a strange land. In a letter to his son George in 1841 he mentioned by name the various employees who had been sent out and, like Patrick, stressed what an advantage it was to ‘have kent folk near in a wilderness’. 71

  In 1840 Patrick Leslie had led an expedition to the Darling Downs, discovered in 1837 by the Scottish botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham — an acquaintance of the Leslies — but thirteen years later still north of the limit of settlement. He chose the area that was to become Canning Downs for his first sheep station, leaving Walter in temporary charge until he moved there in 1842, along with his brother George, Ernest Dalrymple, Sandy Wright, James Fletcher and another Scottish emigrant, Archibald Farquharson. Throughout the 1840s the Leslies were the leading pioneer settlers in the area, and their activities continued to attract attention back home. In 1845 their father received yet another appeal from a neighbour whose son wanted advice and the promise of employment:

  My son James has taken it into his head to go to istralia and if he is determined I shall not seek to hinder him … I am shure that ther is non that can give a more true account of it than you can do. I am hapy to say that he is a very stu[r]dy young man and of sober habits he is a great youse to me but if it wer for his good I should be willing to part with him — was flattering myself that you having so many of your sons ther that he might have a chance of getting a situation from som of them but you will wreat me soon what incoragment ther is in going to that coutry. 72

  After a brief trip home in 1844, Patrick returned to Australia, first to Brisbane, where he built a house. In 1847 he sold this property and bought another station on the Darling Downs, Goomburra, where he remained until he returned to Britain in the mid-1850s. George Leslie, who took over the running of Canning Downs in 1847 but managed it at a distance after he too returned to Britain, used the Scottish press and the government nomination scheme to recruit employees until he sold th
e property in 1854.

  Investors as well as employees from the neighbourhood of Warthill continued to be attracted to Australia. Not only the Dalrymple brothers but also, among others, Charles, James and Norman Leith Hay, three of the sons of Colonel Sir Alexander Leith Hay of Rannes and Leith Hall, began sheep farming on the Darling Downs in the 1830s, before selling out to Patrick Leslie in 1853 and moving inland in search of a larger holding. Alexander Anderson Seton, of Mounie, another local laird and cousin of the Leslies, had clearly read some of Patrick’s enthusiastic letters when visiting Warthill, and as early as 1837 gave his nephew David a letter of introduction to his distant relative in New South Wales. The concentration of influential Scottish interest led in turn to the investment of a considerable amount of Scottish capital in the development of the Australian pastoral industry in the 1840s, primarily through the formation of two Aberdeen-based investment companies. The North British Australasian Company (founded in 1839) and the Scottish Australian Company (founded in 1840) subsequently provided much of the capital which financed the opening up of a chain of sheep stations in New South Wales and northern Queensland in the late 1840s and 1850s.

  The Leslie family’s interest in overseas investment was not confined to Australia. William Leslie, the eldest son, was the first to fly the family nest. In 1833 he went to Canton to work for his uncle, Walter Davidson, who had business interests there as well as in Australia. In 1844, returning to the East from a visit home, he stopped in Ceylon, where in a move provoked partly by the instability created in China as a result of the Opium Wars, he bought land for development as a coffee plantation. On the advice of a friend, he wrote to his father, ‘I offered for and presume shall have got a tract of land for a Coffee Estate which my friends Jas and Geo Smith shall commence upon and attend to until one of my Brothers can come out and undertake the management of it.’ He anticipated that each successive season would reveal more and more the ‘immense resources’ of the coffee industry, and continued:

  I calculate that allowing £300 p. annum to whoever may come and take it in hand, all my Outlay and Expenses will be repaid in 5 years and in under 5 years the property of 300 acres of coffee will give us back equal shares of fully £500 p. annum each as Income and this allows for every probable contingency. I should like George to come up at first as he is most systematic and likely to commence the thing right; in 3 years the Estate would be all planted and most of it bearing when all that would have to be done would be to keep it as it is. 73

  Although William was to be disappointed in his expectation that his younger brothers, who at that time were still in dispute with Walter Davidson, would be eager to leave New South Wales and join in his new enterprise, his estate was not short of Scottish neighbours. Most arrived in Ceylon during the 1830s and 1840s, when the coffee mania was at its height, and a disproportionate number came from Aberdeen and its hinterland, some via earlier employment in the East India Company. They included Robert Boyd Tytler, born in Peterhead and brought up in Inverurie, who in 1834, aged fifteen, had been sent to Jamaica to work on the sugar plantation of a family friend. Two brothers were already in the service of the East India Company, and in 1837 he moved to Ceylon, on the invitation of a relative who was a partner in the business of Ackland, Boyd and Company. That firm was in the process of establishing several coffee estates in Ceylon, and Tytler was initially employed as a manager before acquiring land of his own. In due course he became one of the island’s biggest estate owners, as well as a member of the Legislative Council. Two of his sons followed in his footsteps, as did his brother-in-law, and these men formed part of a large community of expatriate north-east Scots who had a huge influence on Ceylon’s economic development, for while it was claimed that 95 per cent of the overseers on Ceylon’s coffee plantations were Scots, 50 per cent of that number were said to be Aberdonians. 74

  Thus in Ceylon as in Australia the Scottish connection extended beyond the big investors to the workforce required to man the plantations, a workforce that was recruited through private networking rather than public advertising. William Leslie, like his brother in New South Wales, asked his father to select and send out a reliable overseer, at a starting salary of £50 or £60 per year, to be raised to £100 once he had proved his competence. And like Patrick, he too thought one of the Singer family might be a suitable candidate:

  I shall want a good honest well brought up and educated young Scot for a Superintendant [sic] on my Estate and I wish that my dear Father would have an eye to any Lad of the above description … not very stout, as the heat might disagree with him. A man who understood something of surveying and road making and all that kind of work would be preferable — but I should like one from near home whose honesty and general character would be known to you. One of Robert Singers Boys if grown up would be just the very person I want. 75

  There was also substantial Scottish investment in North America during the nineteenth century, an era when, thanks largely to the surplus capital generated by the textile and shipbuilding industries, ‘Scotland was changed from one of the poorest to one of the most prosperous countries in Europe.’ 76 In the late 1830s a number of Aberdeen-based companies invested in the Great Lakes area, encouraged by George Smith, an emigrant from Old Deer who, having speculated successfully in land, spearheaded the Illinois Investment Company in 1837 and in 1839 founded the first bank in Chicago. Later in the century, Scots invested an estimated £6.5 million in the American West alone, 77 and although the interest of many went no further than their shareholdings, the sheep and cattle industries in particular generated a significant amount of emigration. Some Scottish herdsmen rose from small beginnings to establish empires of thousands of acres and huge flocks of sheep, dominating the industry in states such as Wyoming and Idaho. Particularly successful were Archie, Peter and John McGregor, whose parents had moved from Mull to Canada in the 1850s and who began raising sheep in Washington State in 1882. To the east, Andrew Little, who emigrated from Moffatt in 1894 as a wage labourer for a fellow Scot, ultimately became known as ‘the sheep king of Idaho’, the most famous of many Scots in a state that by 1918 was the world’s second largest sheep centre. Seven of Little ’s eight brothers eventually joined him in the Boise Valley and his fame was such that on one occasion he allegedly received a letter from Scotland addressed simply to ‘Andy Little, USA’. 78 Like the Leslie brothers, many of the successful entrepreneurs — including Little ’s first employer, Bob Aikman — assisted several of their fellow countrymen to come and work for them as sheep herders, and many of these employees later became independent flockmasters.

  In the 1870s and 1880s Scottish investors, with companies based mainly in Dundee and Edinburgh, also played a significant part in funding the development of the cattle industry of the western states, while some of those who emigrated as ranch managers became legends in their own lifetimes. John Clay, for instance, successfully managed the Swan Land and Cattle Company in Wyoming, while Murdo Mackenzie presided over the Matador Land and Cattle Company Ltd and served as head of the American National Livestock Association. Both men were powerful and highly respected throughout the West, traits which did not characterize some of the ‘remittance men’ who sojourned in the West and were often more interested in the good life than in good husbandry of land and resources.

  By no means all overseas investment was in land. Scots also sank capital and engineering expertise into mining ventures in South America as well as further north. James Duncan (1859—1938), a stonemason from New Leeds in Aberdeen-shire, went to Bolivia in 1882 along with a workmate whose uncle had extensive silver and tin mining interests at Oruro. Branching out on his own account after three years, he made a fortune out of tin, eventually returning to Scotland to direct operations from the estate he bought, which itself became a notable centre for the breeding and fattening of livestock. Railway development was also popular with investors. Aberdeenshire emigrant Alexander Mitchell, a protégé of George Smith of the Chicago Bank and Wisconsin’s
richest citizen in the mid-nineteenth century, supplied much of the capital for expanding and equipping an efficient railway network throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, while Andrew Carnegie built his famous fortune not least on the manufacture of steel for railroad construction. 79 The Scottish cousins George Stephen from Dufftown and Donald Smith from Forres were the financial masterminds behind the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, while on both sides of the border much of the actual construction was undertaken by Scottish navvies. 80

  The industrial emigrant