Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Emigration agents can be defined in a general sense as all who spoke or wrote positively of overseas opportunities, privately as well as publicly, and offered their hearers encouragement — directly or indirectly — to take up these opportunities. A more meaningful and focused definition, however, is that they were individuals or institutions with a vested military, financial, commercial, philanthropic or political interest in encouraging large-scale emigration, as opposed to the relocation of specific individuals or families. Army officers, shippers, land speculators, employment agents, landlords, clergymen, charitable societies and governments all played a part in the recruitment business, not least in Scotland, where we have evidence of emigrants being enticed to America as early as the 1730s. While some of these agents did no more than dip an occasional toe into the waters of recruitment, others developed a sophisticated support structure which ensured that Scottish emigrants, wherever they were bound, and whatever their private support mechanisms, had access to a range of facilitators in planning and implementing their relocation.

  From what sort of roots did the recruitment business evolve? What was the relationship between military and civilian recruitment, or between land speculation and agency activity? What part did shipping agents play in the upsurge of emigration from Scotland in the nineteenth century, and how did their role change as a result of technological advances and the centralization of embarkations? Were different recruitment strategies employed in Highland and Lowland, rural and urban constituencies? What part did British and overseas governments play in the recruitment process? What were the manifestations and effects of the increasing professionalization of agency recruitment? How did amateur — and sometimes maverick — agents coexist with professional recruiters? With what sort of problems and opposition did emigration agents have to contend? Why — and by whom — were they so frequently vilified?

  Laying the foundations: eighteenth-century agents

  Emigration agents in the eighteenth-century Lowlands were generally merchants, shipowners and captains, somewhat shadowy figures who operated a regular transatlantic trade in both merchandise and men. Vessels which imported Chesapeake tobacco or Caribbean sugar and rum frequently took passengers as well as freight on their return voyages to the colonies, most notably from Glasgow, but also from a variety of other Scottish ports. In north-east Scotland, for example, the advertising columns of the Aberdeen Journal reflect the large number of agents involved in overseas trade. Andrew Garioch and John Elphinston, both of whom were tarnished by the Peter Williamson abduction scandal, 2 sent several vessels to Antigua during the 1740s and early 1750s, and on at least one occasion Garioch toured the towns of west Aberdeenshire, ‘so that he can be spoke with … by Servants who incline to indent.’ 3 By 1751 Elphinston was acting in conjunction with Captain James Elphinston, presumably a relative, in operating the Planter, ‘a fine new Vessel’ with ‘good Accommodation’ between Aberdeen and Antigua, but by 1753 he had joined up with Garioch again to advertise the Antigua Packet, with good accommodation for fare-paying passengers as well as for tradesmen and ‘servants of good character’ who wished to indent. And a year later they collaborated in sending the Planter to Antigua and Jamaica, accompanied by Garioch, ‘who is acquainted in those islands’. Indentures were offered at good wages to ‘all men servants from 12 to 40 years old’, but the agents promised to recruit ‘no convicts, nor those addicted to thieving and drinking’. 4 At least seven other local merchants advertised transatlantic passages regularly in the Aberdeen press in the eighteenth century, while twenty-four advertised more sporadically. The vast majority were involved in Caribbean traffic, with Virginia the most regular destination among the mainland American colonies until the 1770s, when it was eclipsed by more northerly areas, including New York, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. In 1773 Captain George Thomson of Old Aberdeen offered readers of the Aberdeen Journal the opportunity to buy 100 acres in Prince Edward Island, and in 1784 the Mercury, which was represented by agents in Montrose, Aberdeen and Inverness, offered £7 steerage passages to Halifax, where there was allegedly ample employment for ‘Masons, House-Carpenters, Black-Smiths, Labourmen and Maid Servants’. 5

  Most agents offered general rather than specific encouragement to emigrants, although exceptions to these bland generalities might occur if the agent or master had business interests in the colonies. Some advertisers were themselves emigrating, or returning to the colonies after a spell at home, and wanted to recruit servants and tradesmen, either for themselves or for business associates. Fraserburgh merchant Alexander Low had a lengthy shopping list when he advertised in December 1751 for ‘Bricklayers, Masons, Stone-cutters, Blacksmiths, Farriers, Cabinet-Makers, Joiners, Tanners, Shoemakers’ to indent with him for employment in Antigua, where they were offered ‘ten to twenty Pounds sterl. Yearly, beside Bed, Board, Washing and Cloathing, with other necessaries for space of four Years’. 6 While most recruiters were looking for single men, encouragement was sometimes held out to women, and occasionally to married men with families. Assurances about the salubrity of the climate were usually confined to advertisements for notorious plague spots, and when international conflict compounded the normal hazards of the voyage, agents armed their ships before sending them off in convoy.

  Some shipping agents also dabbled in land speculation. In 1770 the Pagan brothers of Glasgow teamed up with Dr John Witherspoon, the clergyman who had emigrated from Paisley to New Jersey two years earlier to become president of the College of New Jersey and was later a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. When the Renfrewshire-based Inchinnan Company sent two representatives to Philadelphia in 1773 to scout out suitable land they immediately made contact with Witherspoon, and ultimately purchased 23,000 acres from him in Ryegate Township, New York (later Vermont). But Witherspoon is better known as an agent in the settlement of Pictou, Nova Scotia, by Highlanders, also in 1773. Having taken over the ailing Philadelphia Company in partnership with the Pagans, he set about attracting Scottish settlers to this 200,000-acre wilderness, advertising cheap land and passage at £3 5s per adult. While a few emigrants were recruited at Greenock, the vast majority came from Ross-shire and Sutherland, thanks to the partnership’s local agent, John Ross, a Dingwall merchant and manager of a linen station on Loch Broom for the Forfeited Estates Commissioners. Ross had collaborated with Witherspoon and the Pagans three years earlier in sending 200 Scots to Boston on the Hector, but when the same ship was sent to Pictou with almost 200 Highlanders, it became known as Canada’s Mayflower, the harbinger of Nova Scotia’s Highland identity. 7

  As a rule agents had a rather different role in the economically undeveloped and socially dislocated Highlands from their counterparts in the Lowlands. For much of the eighteenth century there was an ambiguous line between military and civilian recruitment. As early as 1735 Lieutenant Hugh Mackay and Captain George Dunbar were employed by the trustees of the recently established colony of Georgia to recruit a community of ‘industrious, laborious and brave ’ Gaelic-speaking Highlanders to settle in the new colony, both to defend its frontiers against Spain and France and to make their twenty-acre land grants productive. 8 Encouraged by a personal grant of 500 acres in Georgia, and with the help of local clergymen, kinfolk and the Provost of Inverness, whose mercantile business provisioned the emigrants, Mackay launched a successful recruitment campaign in his home territory of Caithness and Sutherland. This success, he wrote to Georgia’s trustees, had been achieved in the face of strong opposition, conducted in the ‘vilest manner’ by ‘under hand Agents instilling terrible apprehensions in people ’s minds’. 9 George Dunbar, meanwhile, had concentrated on winning the ear of some of the leading gentry in Inverness-shire, and had recruited particularly successfully from Clan Chattan. In all, 177 colonists sailed from Inverness in October 1735 on a ship commanded by Dunbar, and three months later established the township of Darien on the Altamaha River, probably so called in defiance of the failed venture at Panama in the 1690s. The Highl
anders soon won their military and agricultural spurs with the trustees. As a result a second contingent of forty-three was recruited in 1737 by one of the settlers, Archibald MacBean, who was sent back to Scotland for that purpose, and a third contingent of forty in 1741 by Hugh Mackay and military recruitment agent James Grey, again with the assistance of Provost Hossack of Inverness.

  While the British government can be seen as an agent of Highland emigration through its sanctioning of military recruitment harnessed to colonization, the paradoxes and dilemmas of such a policy became increasingly acute as time went on. The deterioration of Anglo-American relations in the 1760s and 1770s on the one hand increased the government’s prejudice against an empire of colonization, fostering an anti-emigration stance that endured until the 1810s. Yet on the other hand concerns of imperial security gave rise to sponsored, carefully directed military settlement, on the grounds that the ready availability of a large pool of officers and men would protect newly acquired territory and augment the regular garrison if necessary. At the end of the Seven Years War captains were allowed 3,000 acres, subalterns 2,000 acres and ordinary soldiers fifty acres, while at the end of the American Revolutionary War individual soldiers were allowed 100 acres, with a further fifty acres each for their wives and children. Military officers returned home to recruit settlers for their land grants, leading to the creation of concentrated clusters of Highland landownership in strategic parts of British North America. 10

  Once recruited, Highland emigrants had to be conveyed overseas. Shipping agents, whether tacksmen, military officers, landowners or merchants, were another vital piece in the recruitment jigsaw. Eighteenth-century Highland emigrants, including the first and second contingent of Georgia settlers in the 1730s, often left from Highland ports. Major Simon Fraser’s ships ran so regularly from the 1790s and 1800s that he earned the nickname ‘Nova Scotia’. In 1802, for example, he arranged for 128 Highlanders to sail from Fort William to Pictou. A year earlier the same two ports had witnessed the transfer of 569 Highlanders on two ships, the Dove and the Sarah, under the auspices of Hugh Dunoon of Killearnan in Easter Ross. As a landowner and merchant in Pictou, Dunoon was anxious to recruit emigrants to fill up his possessions, and although good reports were ultimately sent back by the settlers, his activities fell foul of the Highland Society, which was trying to restrict emigration on the grounds that it impeded economic development. Although a civilian agent, he was described by his opponents as a ‘crimp’, which was a derogatory — and largely disused — term for a military recruiter who secured his men by taking advantage of economic hardship in the recruits’ place of origin. Indeed, it was the activities of men like Dunoon, Simon ‘Nova Scotia’ Fraser and a more famous agent, Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk, that gave rise to the Passenger Vessels Act of 1803, a disingenuous piece of legislation which, though ostensibly humanitarian in purpose, was in fact intended to put a stop to emigration by making it prohibitively expensive, as was demonstrated in Chapter 1.

  The Earl of Selkirk: theorist and practitioner

  Whereas Dunoon’s agency seems to have been underpinned primarily by commercial motives, Lord Selkirk — who had rubbed shoulders with Sir Walter Scott at Edinburgh University — had a philosophical interest in overseas colonization. More practically, he also needed to adopt a ‘cause ’ on which he could build a national reputation and thereby convince his contemporaries that he was a suitable candidate to be elected as a representative Scottish peer. The establishment of a colony in British North America seemed to be an appropriate public venture, although the controversy that raged round emigration clearly made it a high-risk strategy. Selkirk’s involvement with colonization schemes began in 1801 when, at the age of thirty, two years after succeeding to his Galloway earldom, he tried to arrange a meeting with Bishop John Chisholm, probably to discuss the feasibility of collaborating in recruiting Catholic Highlanders (who were already emigrating in disproportionate numbers) for a colony in North America. Nothing happened, but the following year, in a change of focus, Selkirk petitioned the British government to pay the passages of a contingent of Irish Catholics whom he proposed to recruit and lead to Louisiana. The government, however, vetoed any interference with the ‘intractable Irish’, and redirected Selkirk’s interest to Highland emigration, promising him an estate in Upper Canada, as well as cheap transport, free provisions and land on good terms for his colonists. By the end of November 1802 the Gaelic-speaking Selkirk and his agents had signed up over 100 Hebridean families for the venture, mainly from the Clanranald and MacDonald estates in Mull, Skye and the Uists. He also built up a substantial flock of sheep on the Baldoon estate, located near the present site of Sault Ste Marie, and advertised in the Lowlands for a few young men to ‘cultivate an estate in Upper Canada’. 11

  But at the same time Selkirk was becoming embroiled in the bitter debate about the ethics of emigration. His claim that he was simply redirecting Highlanders who had already decided to emigrate to the United States convinced no one, and landlord vituperation peaked late in 1802, with the publication of Alexander Irvine ’s Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Emigration. Irvine, the Church of Scotland missionary at Rannoch in Perthshire, offered both a spirited defence of landlord policy and a vitriolic attack on those who ‘go about recruiting for the plantations with the usual eloquence of crimps’, although he did not mention Selkirk by name. 12 It is conceivable that that government’s intention all along had been to rid itself of a thorn in the flesh by steering Selkirk into the spotlight of controversy and now, in the face of rising landlord and public anger, it withdrew its offer to provide him with land in Upper Canada. Faced with a commitment to transport hundreds of Highlanders across the Atlantic and provide them with land, Selkirk was forced to look elsewhere, and in March 1803 he managed to secure cheaply a number of lots in Prince Edward Island, a moribund settlement which desperately needed revitalizing and which could therefore be supported by the British government as a necessary rescue operation. At this stage, however, Selkirk fell foul of his recruits. Most of them had given up leases, paid their fares and deposited money to buy land in Upper Canada, and they resented the arbitrary change of destination to an island which, despite a tradition of Highland settlement, had acquired a bad reputation with emigrants. But just when it seemed likely that Selkirk’s recruits would reengage with other agents bound for other colonies, he was saved — unintentionally — by Parliament, when the Passenger Vessels Act pushed virtually all other shippers out of the emigration business. Since only Selkirk could afford to meet the new regulations without raising fares, he secured not only his original recruits but also several other Highlanders who had sold up in the expectation of going to North America.

  5. Memorial to the 800 Scottish settlers who came to Belfast, Prince Edward Island, in 1803 under the auspices of Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk.

  The upshot was that in June 1803 Selkirk accompanied 800 emigrants to Prince Edward Island in three ships, in what was to become the most successful of his three colonizing ventures. A year later, he launched his postponed Upper Canadian experiment, but the swampy Baldoon site was infested with malarial mosquitoes which devastated the 102-strong colony, the sheep farm was destroyed by invading Americans in 1812, and by 1817 fewer than ten of the original settlers were still there. Selkirk’s final colonization scheme, at Red River on the site of present-day Winnipeg, fell victim to the warfare between the two rival fur-trading companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, and brought him to an early grave. In 1808 Selkirk invested heavily in Hudson’s Bay Company stock and three years later he obtained a controlling interest with the help of his brother-in-law. At that time the Company granted him over 116,000 acres in return for a promise to recruit both Scottish employees for the Company and settlers for a colony at Red River.

  The Red River venture was plagued with problems from the outset. Selkirk’s recruiting activities in Stornoway were opposed by Simon MacGillivray of the North
West Company, who alleged that misleading advertisements were luring Highlanders to an isolated wilderness that was infested with hostile Indians. At the same time one Captain Mackenzie, a military recruiter, obstructed the departure of Selkirk’s ships from Stornoway in June 1811, claiming that he was taking away deserters and other eligible fodder for the Napoleonic Wars. This first contingent, under the leadership of Knoydart-born Miles MacDonell, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an officer in the Canadian militia, whom Selkirk made governor of his new colony, sailed too late in the season to make the full trip to Red River that year, while the Irish and Scottish recruits who comprised the second party in 1812 fought each other on the way. When war broke out between Britain and the United States in 1812, Selkirk — in yet another manifestation of the dovetailing of military and civilian recruitment — approached the military authorities in London, offering to raise a 1,000-strong Highland regiment for service against the United States on condition that the soldiers and their dependants would be shipped from Scotland at public expense and ultimately settled at Red River. When in 1813 the people of Kildonan on the Sutherland estate offered independently to raise a regiment in return for a cessation of evictions, Selkirk seized an apparently golden opportunity to recruit the Kildonan men to his own colours, and relocate their families at Red River. In the firm belief that the government would commission Selkirk to raise such a regiment, the Kildonan tenants’ spokesman, William MacDonald, recruited soldiers and settlers from the Sutherland estate, but when official funding failed to materialize, Selkirk was left with several hundred desperate would-be emigrants to whom he had to break the bad news that only a small number of single men could be taken to North America. In the event, several family groups were also funded by Selkirk and travelled in the ninety-four-strong party on the Prince of Wales from Stromness to Fort Churchill, enduring both a fever-ridden voyage and an overland trek to Red River, where they arrived in June 1814. Within a year most had abandoned the settlement, but some were persuaded to return and were reinforced in autumn 1815 by the arrival of a further contingent from Sutherland. But the North West Company employees, along with their Métis allies, were determined to sabotage the new settlement, which they saw as a threat to their economic security and identity. Things came to a head in a standoff at Seven Oaks in June 1816, when twenty of Selkirk’s settlers were killed, and although he restored order in 1817 with the aid of a contingent of German and Swiss mercenaries, both Selkirk and his colony had been fatally weakened by the struggle, and he died in 1820, financially ruined and largely discredited.