Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  After waiting upon Mr McCombie of Jellybrands, a member of the Association, understanding from him that there was a probability of much good being done by visiting various districts in the county, I at once resolved, with his advice, to hold meetings at the following places — Peterculter — Inverury — Kintore-Newhills — Woodside — Ellon — New Machar — Banchory-Devenick — Udney — Banchory-Ternan — Keig and Tough, and Aberdeen. The remainder of the week was devoted to preliminary visits to most of these places, to making arrangements for the proposed meetings, and to interviews and correspondence with individuals likely to advance the object.

  A meeting was held at each of the above places; all of them were well-attended, and not by Free Churchmen alone, but by members of different Churches, particularly the Establishment; in several instances farmers were present from distances of 5 and 7 miles, and in many instances of 4, 3 & 2 miles from the place of meeting. The Clergy, Elders and Deacons of the Free Church, in every instance, gave their friendly co-operation in imparting an interest to the proceedings. The meetings were intimated on the preceding Sabbath from the Pulpits of the Free Churches, and sometimes of the Established Churches, and by Handbills distributed through the Parish and neighbouring Parishes; and many of the audience on each occasion manifested their interest in the statements made by asking questions and purchasing copies of the Otago Journal, of which and other papers a large number was sold and distributed gratis.

  As to immediate fruits, I am able to report only two families; who purpose to proceed to the Settlement by the April or following Ship, and before sailing to purchase two Properties. I left with them Letters of Introduction to the Bankers. There is the strongest reason to believe, however, that much good will arise from what has been done. In Aberdeenshire, from all I could learn, small farms are being absorbed by union into large ones; and in Keig and Tough, on the property of Lord Forbes, many leases are out and I was told the tenants have received no intimation that they will be renewed. The conjecture was therefore most reasonable for directing attention to Otago; and the Clergymen and others in the several districts assured me that my Statements had excited great interest, would be discussed and pondered, and would produce a fermentation in the minds of many ending with the desired result. As a help to this, I succeeded in getting the address at Aberdeen reported in four of the Newspapers, of different politics, there published. 32

  One of the 247 pioneers who sailed from Greenock to Otago in December 1847, under the personal supervision of Thomas Burns, was James Adam, an Aberdeen shipwright. Ten years later, when the provincial government sent him back to Britain as an agent, several settlers offered to pay the passages of their friends if Adam could induce them to come to New Zealand, and during the following year he directly and indirectly encouraged 4,000 new colonists, 800 of whom were related to existing settlers. The influence of Burns and McGlashan in Adam’s own decision to emigrate was made clear in his guidebook, TwentyFive Years of Emigrant Life in the South of New Zealand, originally published in 1857 but reprinted on the occasion of Adam’s second recruitment visit to Britain in 1873:

  On a dark night, nearly thirty years ago, I was passing through Belmont Street, Aberdeen, when I accidentally heard that two gentlemen from Edinburgh were to address a meeting in the Free South Church on the subject of emigration to the South of New Zealand. Having for some time entertained the thought of emigrating to America, I resolved to hear what could be said about the remote islands of New Zealand and its [sic] cannibal inhabitants … The addresses of both gentlemen were very short, and the information of a very limited kind, for they were speaking of a country which they had never seen, and of a life to which they were utter strangers. I was, however, favourably impressed with what Mr Burns said … I had sense enough to know that toil, and perhaps danger, were the concomitants of life in New Zealand; but the simple fact that Mr Burns had resigned his charge and cast in his lot with the emigrants, and would sail with the pioneers, gave confidence in the statements of the reverend gentleman. 33

  Adam was by no means the only Antipodean agent sent to Britain. As the various provinces of Australia and New Zealand began to attain self-government, so they began increasingly to appoint their own itinerant selecting agents. They included John Thorne of South Australia, H. S. Ranford of Western Australia and, most notably, Henry Jordan of Queensland. Having emigrated from Derby to Sydney and then Brisbane as a dentist and missionary in the early 1850s, Jordan returned to Britain in 1860 as an immigration agent for the new province of Queensland. Over the next five years he lectured and published widely, working closely with provincial newspapers to ensure widespread coverage of his work and with the Black Ball Line and its local agents to transfer his recruits on 5 per cent commission. His lectures were reinforced by press advertisements and handbills that emphasized the free land grants offered to full fare-paying passengers, as well as the assisted passages offered to poorer emigrants who could take up labouring jobs. In 1863 he undertook a lecture tour in the north of Scotland, and Queensland’s sudden rise in popularity with Scottish emigrants in 1865 — when as many as 1,510 emigrants sailed from Glasgow — was undoubtedly attributable to Jordan’s enthusiastic canvassing. 34

  Some of our evidence about the impact of Antipodean agents in the late nineteenth century comes from complaints made by their Canadian rivals. In 1874 the Canadian government agent in Glasgow noted that ‘a very considerable number’ of that year’s potential recruits had been diverted from Canada to New Zealand as a result of the latter’s offer of free passages. The same point was made more explicitly by Angus Nicholson, Canada’s Special Immigration Agent in the Highlands:

  All the competing Emigration Agencies formerly reported on, are still at work as actively as ever. The New Zealand and Australian authorities are particularly alert, the streets of every town and village being always well ornamented with their bills and placards offering free passages and other inducements to emigrants. Not only so, but nearly all the newspapers being subsidized by means of their advertisements, are doing their full share in the same direction. 35

  In at least three annual reports to Ottawa — in 1881, 1882 and 1883 — the Canadian High Commissioner in London complained that the New Zealand government’s offer of free passages to domestic servants, and the availability of £2 and £5 passages to New South Wales, were thwarting Canadian efforts to attract settlers, who had to pay their own fares. But more serious still were the activities of the Queensland government, which in the 1880s offered free passages to farm labourers and domestic servants, and assisted passages to selected tradesmen. Then, after being suspended during the early 1890s, Queensland reintroduced free passages by the end of the decade. As a result, in 1898 almost 400 Scots allegedly went to Queensland, as, according to the Carnoustie-based Canadian agent, Thomas Duncan, emigrants’ attention was once more diverted from Canada by booking agents who were interested only in securing their commission along with the Queensland government’s bonus of 10s 6d per adult. These complaints were reiterated eleven years later when an inspection of the Glasgow agency area revealed that, owing to better bonuses and more unambiguous encouragement, ‘some of the booking agents have practically stopped working for Canada, and are now doing their best for Australia’. 36

  Surprisingly little reference was made by these Canadian officials to competition from American agents, although the United States attracted more Scottish emigrants than any other destination in the course of the nineteenth century. Following the largely unregulated and sometimes ‘reckless’ recruitment campaigns of Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and particularly Texas in and before the 1840s, twenty-five of the thirty-eight states had developed official — and more circumspect — immigration programmes by 1870. Michigan led the way in 1845, while other northerly states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota followed suit, as state governments and railway companies sent their representatives to compete for emigrants from Britain and Europe. 37 In 1872 Angus Nicholson made mention of Nebraskan agent
s at work in the Highlands, in the same year as W. J. Patterson, after touring Britain and Europe at the behest of the Canadian government, identified a long list of competing agencies as well as the prospects for future Canadian recruitment. ‘The immense emigration which takes place annually from Great Britain and the Continent to the United States’, he noted, ‘affords abundant evidence of the systematic activity of the various agencies set in motion to promote and increase it.’ 38 Foremost among these agencies was the state of Minnesota, which had not only a highly salaried manager in London but also a Scottish representative, the Reverend Robert Kerr of Forres, who had recently returned from the state to promote a temperance colony in the Red River Valley, on land along the line of the Northern Pacific Railway.

  Immigrants of all nationalities were recruited not only for rural America but increasingly to work in factories, mines and other industrial enterprises. This trend became particularly controversial towards the end of the century, as American labour grew increasingly resentful of the way in which employers used aliens to repress wages, break strikes and destroy attempts at union organization. When in 1885 the hostility took legislative form, agents had to tread warily to avoid falling foul of the Alien Contract Labour Law, which was designed to prevent the introduction into the United States of foreign contract workers to perform work that was the prerogative of native labour. George Berry was one agent who did not tread warily enough. In 1886 he came to Aberdeen promising at least eighteen months’ work to up to 165 contract labourers who would accompany him to Texas to help construct the new State Capitol. Having failed to tell his recruits that they would be breaking a strike called by the American Granite Cutters’ Union in protest at the use of cheap convict labour, he fell foul of the legislation, as did his boss, Gus Wilke, the main contractor, who in 1887 was fined $64,000 for violation of the Contract Labour Law, a penalty that was later reduced to $8,000 on appeal.

  Equally controversial, though for different reasons, was an agricultural colonization scheme undertaken by the government of Cape Colony between 1877 and 1883. Encouragement to emigrate to the Cape had always been intermittent, low-key and heavily qualified, as economic and political problems, combined with continuous border unrest, made South Africa a less attractive proposition than North America or the Antipodes. The sudden demand for labour after the discovery of diamonds led to the appointment of a London-based emigration agent in 1873, and by the end of 1875 the sale of Crown lands had financed the importation of nearly 3,300 British emigrants for employment on farms and railway construction. Further legislation in 1877, by which Crown lands were set aside for immigrants, led to the introduction of several shiploads of Scottish and German agricultural labourers to the Eastern Cape, where it was hoped they would form a buffer against incursions by the Xhosa of the Transkei, and pacify farmers who had been complaining about the theft of stock and insufficient labour. During 1877 361 Scots from the counties of Aberdeen, Argyll, Ayr, Dumfries, Lanark and Perth were given free passages to East London and King William’s Town, and settled in districts that were allegedly ‘the finest in Cape Colony for farming’, where ‘for the industrious and persevering man of frugal and sober habits the chances of success are great’. 39

  Unfortunately, neither the new settlers nor the residents of East London saw things in the same light as the Cape immigration authorities. According to a correspondent of the East London Daily Despatch, one of the Scots immigrants told him that while ‘he liked the place well enough … the promises he had before he left Scotland, as regards the advantages he was to have in making himself a little better than he was at home, were a complete swindle’. The East Londoners, for their part, complained that many of the new arrivals were ‘not the class the colony wants, or, I fear, the Govt fancies it is getting’. Far from being agriculturists, they ‘have not the slightest knowledge of, or taste for, such a vocation … [but] simply become loungers and hangers on about some public works learning lazy and dissipated habits, neither doing well for themselves, their families, or the country of their adoption’. 40

  A combination of border unrest and economic recession led to the temporary suspension of immigration in 1878. Although the 105 Scots who followed in 1880 were mostly ‘a respectable lot of people’, they were equally unwilling to turn their hand to agriculture and incurred the wrath of immigration superintendent, J. B. Hellier, for making false statements about their treatment to the press and for seeking wage labour rather than taking up their land immediately. According to Hellier, misleading assertions by W. Burnet, the Cape government’s agent in London, that farm labouring work was readily available, ‘which is about as contrary to the fact as can possibly be ’, had encouraged too many men without means to come out to East London. 41

  In 1881 an even more controversial scheme was launched when Edinburgh-based John Walker, formerly an estate manager and magistrate in Shetland, was appointed as a temporary special agent, first to inspect vacant land in the East London district and then to recruit up to 300 agriculturists for a ‘Scotch settlement’. Walker, who also had some Australian experience, was awarded a salary of £700 per annum, as well as travelling expenses, to recruit either tenant farmers under specific contracts or bona fide agricultural settlers with at least £50 capital. His appointment did not meet with the approval of the East London Daily Despatch. A strongly worded editorial on 12 October 1881 questioned his competence and expressed concern that public money was being wasted on a scheme that seemed likely to benefit only the landowners. Men such as Walker, it argued,

  when they come to the Colony, and assert themselves in this way and that, really ought to come before the public and present their credentials, and get themselves understood, before allowing the Government to broach their unknown names as guarantees for important undertakings … All that we want is to see them real settlers, and the parents of settlers, tillers of the soil, and the eventual backbone of the country. Nobody begrudges what is done for them, so long as this end can be assured. But we do not want them nominally occupying the soil, and secure of the tenure of it, but really earning a continuous living on the public works or in private establishments in town.

  Two months later, similar views were expressed in a letter from a farmer who, while admitting the need for extensive immigration, argued that it was both cruel to the settler and detrimental to the development of the country for the government to ‘lure people out by land or free passage and then leave them in the lurch’ by failing to tell them of the drawbacks of distance from markets, the paucity of good land and the high start-up costs. 42

  Perhaps the Crown Lands Commissioner, J. X. Merriman, had these press criticisms in mind when on 17 December 1881 he chastised Walker for overzealous advertising:

  I cannot too strongly impress upon you that it would be misleading people were they to be induced to come out here under the idea that they will get ‘first class’ land. They will, in fact, get the leavings of the older colonists — good enough land, especially in Kaffraria, and land on which an industrious hard-working man may make a living … but it would be a misnomer to call it first-rate and the Govt is, before everything, anxious not to give a handle to those who may accuse it of misleading statements. The country is good enough, and the climate and the conditions of life are certainly easier than in Canada, for instance; but it is no Tom Tiddler’s ground, where a fortune is to be picked up without working for it. In any future advertisements or circulars, I beg that the land may be described as ‘fair’ and not as ‘first-class’. 43

  Undaunted, Walker continued to ignore orders not to exaggerate and repeatedly exceeded the authority granted him by the Cape government, browbeating Burnet in London and forcing him to secure passages for categories of settlers not included inWalker’s original instructions.Theresult was considerable discontent among colonistswho had erroneously expected grants of public money to estab-lishthemontheir farms.Tothe disgust of Hellierandhis colleagues, several either abandoned or never took up their holdings, ref
using to sign leases which they claimeddidnotaccordwithpromisesmadetothembeforetheyleftandcontinuing to make ‘unreasonable demands’ for financial assistance and larger acreages. The location at Kei Mouth was a virtually roadless wilderness, remote from any markets, and with a preponderance of poor landwhere stock did not thrive.Acor-respondent of the East London Daily Despatch castigated the colonists for inciting native labourers to disobey orders to leave the farms where they were squatting, whilethecolonistsberated‘aweakandimbecilegovernment’forineffectivepolic-ing and claimed that they had been ‘inveigled from home and comfort to mere abjectpoverty throughthe instrumentality of unscrupulousagentsanduntruthful pamphleteers’. 44 Amidst all these claims and counter-claims, theKeiMouthsettle-ment withered on the vine, a fiasco orchestrated by a fly-by-night agentwhomthe East London Daily Despatch denounced as ‘an imposter or a fool’. 45

  The network matures:

  Canadian agents in Scotland

  Available evidence indicates that the agents who made the most consistent and telling impact on Scotland were those who represented Canada after Confederation. But even before 1867, steps were being taken to promote and fund agency work. In 1852 the Province of Canada created a Bureau of Agriculture, with responsibility for promoting immigration, and two years later the legislature granted its first funds for that purpose. In 1859 a Canadian information office was opened in Liverpool, and itinerant agents appeared intermittently in Scotland and elsewhere, promoting particular provinces. One of those agents was James Brown, a native of Inverarity, Angus, who had emigrated to New Brunswick in 1810 and in 1830 was elected to the House of Assembly. While that province had received a steady stream of settlers in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the economic downturn of the 1840s stemmed the flow. The appointment of Moses Perley as a London-based agent in the 1850s made little difference, and by 1860 the provincial authorities were uncomfortably aware that barely a tenth of emigrants from Europe who landed in New Brunswick actually settled there. After the Saint John Mechanics’ Institute had run a prize essay competition on ‘New Brunswick as a Home for Emigrants’, the provincial authorities selected one of the three winners, James Brown, to tour Britain and Ireland, where he delivered sixty lectures in an eleven-month period in 1861 and 1862, and distributed large quantities of literature. The immediate catalyst for his appointment was the recent Glassville scandal, when William Glass, a Presbyterian minister and immigrant of twenty years’ standing, had obtained a large plot of land near Woodstock and had returned to his native Aberdeen to recruit colonists. Concerned about bad publicity arising from poor conditions on the passage and the high price paid by the emigrants for infertile, uncleared land to which Glass had no rights, the provincial government recruited Brown to repair the damage and rehabilitate New Brunswick in the eyes of would-be emigrants. His diary, his published report at the end of his assignment and a substantial volume of correspondence together give us an insight into how he approached that task.