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Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

Page 18

by Marjory Harper


  While William Allan enjoyed good relations with the Sutherland estate management, the same could not be said of Thomas Dudgeon, a local farmer who in 1819 formed the short-lived Sutherland and Transatlantic Friendly Association to raise money to encourage emigration from the estate to America. The estate ’s opposition to Dudgeon — who, it claimed, was motivated by a desire ‘to satisfy an old grudge he has to the family’ — ensured that the Association’s fund-raising efforts were doomed to failure, and it collapsed within six months. Extracts from the letter book of estate factor and land agent, Francis Suther, reflect something of the hostility to the way in which Dudgeon was raising public awareness of the Sutherland clearances, coupled with a fear that his Association was simply a front for encouraging rebellion within the estate. His report to James Loch on 24 July 1819 implies something of a local conspiracy to defraud would-be emi-grants:

  Dudgeon had another meeting on Saturday at which upwards of 1000 persons they say were present brought from all quarters [to Meikle Ferry] in expectation of their receiving money … from the most distant parts of Caithness. Dudgeon’s business of that day was the reverse of giving them pecuniary aid. He got money off them to subscribe to a paper the purpose of which when returning home they did not know and for which subscription each person paid at least 6d to Mr Dudgeon or his buddy in the swindle Gibson of Tain academy a teacher, besides Thomson the third fiddle in the trio who keeps the public house of the Ferry. 21

  Criticism of Highland agents may have stemmed partly from the wider controversies that bedevilled emigration from that region, but Lowland shippers did not escape censure. In 1844 Mathew Somerville of Glasgow raised an unsuccessful action in the Court of Session against Samuel Hemmans, the government emigration officer at Greenock, at whose instigation Somerville had been imprisoned for three months for defrauding a Colonsay family by selling them tickets for an emigrant ship which had already sailed. Despite challenging the decision on fourteen legal technicalities, Somerville ’s conviction was upheld on the grounds that it had breached the Passenger Act of 1842 in several ways. As Hemmans pointed out in his submission:

  In the month of August 1843, a family of poor highlanders, of the name of McNeill, consisting of the father, two sons, and a daughter, arrived in Glasgow from the island of Colonsay, with the intention of emigrating to Prince Edward’s Island in North America. The father was 65 years of age, and scarcely, if at all, able to read English, and the others were unable to speak a word of the language. They arrived in Glasgow on the 2nd of August, and on that day John McNeill, the father, called on the suspender, at his office in Glasgow, for the purpose of making a bargain with him for a passage fromGlasgow to Liverpool, and thence to Quebec. After considerable discussion, the suspender agreed to secure the passage of the McNeills from Liverpool, in a vessel called the ‘Ayr-shire,’ and to carry them from Glasgow to Liverpool, for the sum of L.6 in all. McNeill accordingly paid the suspender a deposit of L.4, the balance of L.2 being, according to agreement, to be paid in Liverpool. The suspender made out a contract ticket…and this ticket he read over to McNeill. In reading it, he stated the sum of L.6 as the whole passage-money, and L.2 to be paid in Liverpool, in terms of the bargain. He also stated to McNeill, that the ‘Ayrshire ’ was to sail on the 5th of August, and that he and his family would arrive in Liverpool in time to take their passage by her; at the same time instructing him not to show the ticket to any one until he got to Liverpool. These instructions McNeill obeyed. He started from Glasgow for Liverpool, by steamer, on Thursday the 3rd of August, and arrived in Liverpool on Friday the 4th. He there found the Ayrshire had sailed on the morning of that day; and it turned out that, so far from having intended to sail on the 5th, she had been advertised to sail on the 18th, 20th, 26th, 29th and 31st July preceding — that she had cleared at the custom-house on the 1st of August, and had only been detained till the morning of the 4th by contrary winds. It was also found that the ticket did not bind any person connected with the ship, and that no provision had been made for a passage for McNeill and his family, on any terms, in any vessel. On applying at a party of the name of Sherlock, to whom the suspender had given a letter, McNeill was amused, for some days, with hopes of a passage in another vessel, but was ultimately put off; and on his case falling under the notice of the emigration agent in Liverpool, he discovered, for the first time, on hearing the ticket read by that officer that it bore not L.6, but L.11 as the passage-money, and that L.7 instead of L.2, was to be paid in Liverpool. The suspender had probably calculated on McNeill preferring to pay the extra sum to returning, and if McNeill had had the money, his anticipation might probably have been correct. But, unfortunately, the extra L.5, more than exhausted the poor highlander’s stock. Accordingly, after living a week at his own expense in Liverpool, and after paying to Sherlock & Company 23s. for provisions for the voyage, which he never received, he spent the remainder of his money in returning to Glasgow with his family, and had to find his way with them back to Colonsay as he best could. 22

  Even in Aberdeen, whose shipping agents were rarely the focus of public complaint, shipowner and passage broker Alex Cooper was fined £10 in 1855 in respect of each passenger whom he had illegally detained by issuing fraudulently dated tickets. 23 Other fraudulent agents who refused to honour their agreements, sold worthless tickets, operated dangerous or overcrowded vessels, disembarked passengers at the wrong ports or generally flouted the passenger acts were periodically embarrassed in the press, as well as the courts, and in 1851 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal complained about the uncaring attitude of timber traders, who ‘seem to export or take away emigrants pretty much as a kind of ballast’. 24 On 4 January 1884 a disillusioned emigrant to the Canadian prairies warned readers of the Aberdeen Journal ‘not to put too much faith in the representations of land and steamship agents, whose only care is to reap the profit of passing emigrants through their hands’. And in 1907—8, R. B. Arthur of Aberdeen came under bitter and sustained fire from a contingent of labourers whom he had recruited for a six-month contract with a lumber company at Clarke City in Quebec.

  While assiduous ticket agents could be a godsend to hard-pressed full-time recruitment officers, they could also be a thorn in the flesh. Longside tailor William Maitland was frequently hauled over the coals by the Canadian immigration authorities for carelessness in making passage arrangements and neglecting to submit his claims for bonus payments until several months after the emigrants had sailed. More seriously, in 1912 he was convicted in Aberdeen Sheriff Court of failing to supply contract tickets to two farmservants whom he had booked for Canada. William Walker and Peter Simpson, both of Echt in Aberdeenshire, had paid a deposit of £1 in return for assisted passages to Ontario and subsequent employment as farm labourers. When Maitland’s failure to hand over contract tickets bearing the vessel’s name and the appointed sailing date resulted in their missing the boat, the agent was fined £2 and told to improve his business practice. Two years later Maitland was described by G. G. Archibald, Canadian government agent for the north of Scotland, as ‘a peripatetic sort of agent’who on the one hand generated a ‘large business’ but on the other hand also provoked ‘many complaints … about his failure to implement his promises with regard to looking after the baggage etc., of settlers’. Much worse, however, was the complaint made by an unnamed Toronto newspaper about the ‘damnable lies’ allegedly spread by a Blairgowrie agent, Andrew Spalding, who was ‘engaged in this mean and despicable method of making a fat living out of lean and poor people’ and ‘should not be left outside prison walls’. 25

  Some of the best-documented complaints against turn-of-the-century booking agents were made by overseas governments in respect of the calibre of their recruits. Too many emigrants, they claimed, were being indiscriminately selected and inadequately supervised by men who knew nothing of the destinations to which they sold tickets and whose only concern was to secure as much commission as possible. Although the Canadian government representative for t
he north of Scotland found MacKay Brothers were ‘very active and energetic’ in their work in Aberdeen in 1911, he sometimes found it necessary to restrain them, since ‘in their anxiety to do business they are sometimes inclined to overstep the mark in advertising’. 26 But the ultimate sanction against overenthusiastic booking agents was revocation of the commission they had received on recruits who were deemed unsuitable by the receiving countries or who did not take up the stipulated occupations of farm work or domestic service. Many of these emigrants were young women. In 1913 the Canadian immigration authorities received a strongly worded letter from a solicitor in Napanee, Ontario, regarding two unsatisfactory domestic servants who had been sent out by MacKay Brothers of Aberdeen. Mary Rait had allegedly ‘belonged to the criminal class before she left the Old Country and has since been deported. She was sent to Mrs. W. J. Dollar of Napanee and defrauded her out of her passage money and was absolutely useless as a servant and was of a very bad moral character.’ Isabella Mitchell, who had been hired as a cook, ‘did not profess to know anything about cooking, was absolutely filthy about her personal habits and no respectable housekeeper would want her about the premises’. It was not right, protested the solicitor, ‘that people should be permitted to defraud Canadians out of passage money for useless so-called servants, as neither of these girls were fit to enter the premises of any respectable person’. 27 A year later MacKay Brothers were denied a bonus on a girlwho had not only shown no serious intention of taking up domestic service but had also been arrested for vagrancy. According to the immigration authorities, this was ‘only one of several cases which have lately come to our attention where girls booked by you to Canada have not made good’. In 1917 the spotlight of criticism fell on Paton’s agency, which had sent to Toronto an unmanageable young woman, Rose McIntyre, who ‘was not much use as a domestic, had no experience and was careless, indifferent and lazy. She does not want to stay in domestic service, but wants to play the piano in amoving picture show.’ After surviving only one week with her first employer, the cigarette-smoking Rose stayed for a month in her second position, until bad timekeeping led to her downfall. In addition to keeping her employer’s baby out for five hours longer than she should have done, ‘on another occasion on her Sunday off she did not return untilWednesday’. After a six-week sojourn with a third employer, Rose worked briefly in a munitions factory, before eloping to the United States, leaving her mother in Scotland to settle her debts. 28

  Booking agents were criticized for apathy as well as avarice and careless recruitment. Of the 190 northern Scottish agents on the Canadian government’s books in 1909, ninety did virtually no business, while only 20 per cent of the 241 booking agents in the Glasgow agency were active and enthusiastic. Some 50 per cent were ‘fair’ and 30 per cent ‘quite indifferent or useless’, and there was a great reluctance among them to shoulder any of the expenses — even the advertising expenses — of a lecture, although it was they who would reap the benefit in the shape of bonuses. 29 By the turn of the century the crumbling reputation of booking agents brought them under the scrutiny of the Dominions Royal Commission, with a view to tighter regulation of their activities. In 1917 the Commission recommended the licensing of passage brokers and their agents by a central emigration authority, with each agent paying an annual licence fee, as well as submitting detailed accounts and records of bookings, but nothing was done, and complaints continued sporadically throughout the 1920s.

  The network expands: the birth and growth of professional agencies

  An honest and active shipping agent could be a key player in the recruitment process. Some of these men, as we have seen, had business interests in the places to which they sent emigrants, or went to some lengths in promoting the welfare of their clients. But by the steamship era most of them were primarily administrative cogs — albeit important cogs — in the wheel of an increasingly profes-sionalized recruitment network whose priorities were dictated by overseas governments and railway companies.

  Full-time agents began to appear intermittently in the British Isles in the 1830s and by the 1870s had become a permanent fixture. In 1839 Dr Thomas Rolph, an English emigrant to Canada, appointed himself as an itinerant agent in Britain, stressing Canada’s advantages over Australia, particularly for Highland emigrants. From late 1840 until December 1842 (when the Colonial Office discontinued his appointment) he was an official agent, and during this period he liaised with Dr Norman McLeod in the production of the Gaelic emigration-promoting magazine Cuairtear nan Gleann, as well as organizing the short-lived British American Association for Emigration and Colonization, of which the Duke of Argyll was president. 30

  Recruitment for Australia in the late 1830s and 1840s was in the hands of agents representing the government and colonial bounty schemes. One of the most important operators, appointed by New South Wales in 1836, was ship’s surgeon Dr David Boyter, with a roving commission and instructions to liaise with T. F. Elliot, the British government’s Agent-General for bounty emigration, and his two sub-agents at Greenock and Leith. Although the indefatigable Boyter travelled the length and breadth of Scotland, he made a particular impact in the Highlands, where his campaign coincided with the repercussions of the first major potato famine. At times his selective recruitment aroused the antagonism of destitution relief committees, which accused him of taking the cream of the population and leaving behind the old, the ill and the otherwise ineligible. Boyter, naturally enough, defended himself on the grounds that he was employed to select useful colonists for New South Wales, not to provide an escape route for impoverished Highlanders, although that might well be a byproduct of his work. His meetings certainly drew the crowds, and most of the 5,200 Scots recruited under the government bounty scheme between 1837 and 1840 were probably Highlanders. On 30 May 1838 the Inverness Courier reported that news of his arrival at Fort William, ‘like the fiery cross of old, soon spread through every glen in the district, and at an early hour on Monday, thousands of enterprising Gaels might be seen ranked around the Caledonian Hotel, anxious to quit the land of their forefathers and to go and possess the unbounded pastures of Australia.’ By February 1839 Boyter was based at Blairgowrie, and by August at Tobermory, from where he sent an encouraging advertisement to the Inverness Courier, published on 28 August:

  By recent official accounts I have received from New South Wales, the arrival of all the Emigrant Ships from the Highlands was mentioned (with the exception of the Asia which was not due.) It appears that the people were well received, and immediately employed at a high rate of wages. Some difficulty was felt by those who had large young families. In consequence of this gratifying information, I propose dispatching the last ship for the season from Cromarty, some time in the month of October, being found the best month in the year for a speedy passage. It is therefore requested that all those intending to take advantage of this opportunity, will send in their names by the 10th of September, that a ship of suitable size may be engaged for their conveyance.

  Applicants were reminded to obtain testimonials, and not to make any arrangements until Boyter had issued them with a certificate of approval.

  Boyter’s work was matched by the efforts of Dr John Dunmore Lang to recruit Scottish settlers under the colonial bounty scheme for his brother Andrew’s estate in the Hunter Valley, 100 miles north of Sydney. Lang, a native of Greenock and the colony’s first Presbyterian minister, secured almost 4,000 impoverished Highlanders in 1837, continuing a long-standing tradition of clerical involvement in the encouragement of Scottish emigrants that had included Father James MacDonald’s recruitment of 210 Catholic Highlanders for Prince Edward Island in 1772 and Norman McLeod’s global odyssey, which saw him lead a shipload of 400 emigrants from Assynt to Cape Breton in 1817, on to Australia in 1849, and finally to Waipu in the North Island of New Zealand in 1851. 31

  It was the province of Otago, in New Zealand’s South Island, that was to provide the most striking example of clerical agency in the nineteenth centur
y. George Rennie ’s proposal in 1842 to found a Presbyterian colony in New Zealand was given added impetus by the formation of the Free Church of Scotland the following year, and by early 1844 over 200 people had registered their desire to emigrate and purchase land. By the time the pioneer expedition left in December 1847, the efforts of the Reverend Thomas Burns of Portobello had ensured the wholehearted commitment of the new Free Church to the scheme, and had opened the way for the establishment of Otago as a specifically Free Church colony. Burns toured Scotland, winning the support of fellow ministers, who often invited him to promote the scheme from their pulpits. But the reluctance of these same ministers to involve the Church in ‘worldly’ transactions led to the establishment in 1845 of the Lay Association of the Free Church, the body which was to be instrumental in negotiating with the New Zealand Company for the early settlement of Otago. John McGlashan, secretary of the Otago Association from 1847 until its dissolution in 1853, was another active propagandist. Not only did he edit and distribute many thousand copies of the Otago Journal, of which there were eight issues published between 1848 and 1852, he also advertised widely in provincial newspapers, and gave verbal as well as written encouragement, sometimes touring the country in company with Thomas Burns.

  In a series of lectures delivered in Aberdeenshire in January 1850, McGlashan was at pains to alert disgruntled farmers to better prospects in New Zealand. Shortly afterwards, at a meeting of his Association’s directors, he defended his decision to conduct a recruitment campaign in Aberdeenshire, rather than proceeding to Inverness in accordance with instructions. Although the change of plan was dictated partly by weather conditions, there was also a more positive reason:

 

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