Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

The pain of seasickness was compounded by the peril of stormy weather, when the passengers were often in mortal terror. As Isabella Henderson — who advised those back in Scotland to stay there — recalled four days into her voyage to Dunedin:

  We have encountered foul winds and now I could tell you what it is to have death brought very near to you. It came on at ten in the evening and continued all night. We were all shut downstairs, the lights put out, tins and dishes rolling in all directions. Everyone put into the greatest excitement, vomiting, in every direction children, the vessel heaving mountains high, the ship to our side was two or three times under the water. I felt very composed yet at times I felt overwhelmed with fear at the very thought of being ushered into eternity in an unprepared state for all your sins come rushing before you. 29

  Shipwreck was a very real danger for those who sailed on emigrant ships, as was fire, particularly on wooden vessels with open braziers and unguarded oil lamps. While it is not surprising that such catastrophes rarely feature in passage diaries, official investigations and press accounts catalogue the many mishaps that befell nineteenth-century emigrants in transit. Lurid emigrant shipwreck was grist to the mill of many Victorian newspapers and journals. Between 1847 and 1851, forty-four ships were wrecked on the transatlantic crossing and 1,043 people were drowned, including 248 who died in 1847 when the Exmouth was driven ashore on the coast of Islay shortly after leaving Londonderry for Quebec. On 28 September 1853 the Annie Jane, sailing from Liverpool to Quebec with a French-Canadian crew, a cargo of iron and around 400 steerage passengers, including almost 100 Glasgow artisans, was wrecked in the southern Hebrides. The A1-registered ship, newly built in Quebec in May, had already returned to Liverpool once for repairs after being damaged in a gale when it was dismasted again by another equinoctial storm, this time foundering in the surf and rocks of Bagh Siar on Vatersay. The ship split into three pieces and about 350 people were drowned. As naked and mutilated bodies were washed ashore, they were buried in a common pit, the site of which is now commemorated by a granite memorial. By the end of the year an inquiry had blamed the tragedy on improper stowage of the cargo, too few crew and ‘useless’ Canadians. Two Glaswegian survivors, blacksmith Angus Mathieson and joiner Abraham Brooks, recalled the events leading up to the shipwreck as well as the disaster itself. Mathieson testified to the captain’s intransigence when the ship was damaged shortly after setting out for the second time:

  That they again experienced tempestuous weather, and the ship had scarce reached the same point in the Irish Channel which she had formerly weathered, when she again lost her foretopmast, maintopmast and jibboom. That the weather at this time was very tempestuous and coarse, but the captain still stood on. That some days afterwards the ship was labouring very heavily, and the passengers apprehending serious danger had a meeting amongst themselves, at which it was resolved to petition the captain to make for a port. And a petition was accordingly drawn up and presented to him; but instead of reading or paying any attention to it, he pitched it overboard, observing that they (the pas-sengers) had got him to put about upon a former occasion, but that he would have satisfaction out of them the second time. It was a person of the name of Ross, from Glasgow, a cabinet-maker, who drew up the petition and presented it in the name of the emigrants to the captain. He was drowned at the loss of the ship.

  Brooks, in his evidence, highlighted the death throes of the Annie Jane:

  The wind blew a perfect hurricane. We now sighted Barra Head light-house, and great efforts were made to clear a reef of rocks which lay to seaward, and we were successful, but the captain seeing it impossible to clear the light house put into Veternish Bay. This occurred on the 28th day of September. After running her into the bay the captain ordered the yards to be squared, which was accordingly done. Directly after this the ship grounded. This might be between twelve and one o’clock in the morning of the 29th of September, and having had my spell at the pumps before this, I went to the poop door, and holding on by it I saw that the fore part of the ship was rapidly giving way. My brother came behind me at this time and was desirous that we should get upon the poop deck; I remarked to him that it was almost impossible to stand upon the poop, the breakers were so high, but to come further aft as the ship was rapidly giving way forward. We accordingly proceeded aft till we were stopped by the bulkhead, which separates the second cabin from the cabin. We stood there for about ten minutes: by this time a number of the passengers between decks were drowned by the sea rushing in upon them before they could get upon deck. Likewise about a hundred joiners and others, who rushed to the poop deck and clung to the boats which were lying with their bottoms upwards, were all swept overboard by a heavy sea which broke over them, with the exception of one young man of the name of Charles Smith who clung to the mast. The passengers rushed aft to the poop. At this critical period the lamp which hung at the centre of the poop went out, and left them in complete darkness. At this time some one handed me an axe, and with the help of the ship’s carpenter I succeeded in breaking away the bulkhead and getting through to the cabin. One of the passengers, named Thomas Galbraith, in endeavouring to make his way from the poop to the cabin was ordered back by the captain, and refusing he was throttled by him, but, nevertheless, made his way to the top of the poop. At this time my brother, another passenger, and myself made our way through the companion and clung to the poop, where we remained till about seven o’clock in the morning, at which time, it being ebb tide, we were enabled to wade ashore about breast deep. Of the whole passengers and crew there were one hundred and two persons saved. 30

  Other perils of the voyage were more unambiguously manmade. Emigrants who were brave enough to cross the Atlantic during the Napoleonic Wars were advised to travel in well-armoured ships, and as late as 1837 a clergyman sailing from Leith wrote of the danger of piracy on the high seas, perpetrated by ‘a set of desperate men often I believe Scotch’. The main cabin of his vessel, the North Briton, was furnished with guns and cannon as a defence against these pirates, who, he claimed, were prevalent in tropical latitudes, attacking becalmed ships, murdering all on board, stealing the cargo and sinking the ship with the passengers shut in the hold. 31

  Disease was a much more serious and persistent problem than piracy. Epidemics could spread rapidly in the squalid, unventilated steerage, particularly among passengers whose resistance had been worn down by poverty, reduced further by unwholesome food and water and aggravated by unhygienic shipboard practices. Jessie Campbell spoke disparagingly of the Highlanders who made up a large part of the steerage passengers on the Blenheim:

  Capt Gray and the doctor complaining woefully of the filth of the Highland emigrants, they say they could not have believed it possible for human beings to be so dirty in their habits, only fancy using the dishes they have for their food for certain other purposes at night, the Dr. seems much afraid of fever breaking out among them, this would really be a judgment on us, poor as I am no consideration on earth would tempt me to trust my little family in a ship with Highland emigrants if I still had the voyage before me. 32

  To Jessie Campbell’s horror, one steerage passenger on the Blenheim was diagnosed with smallpox three weeks into the voyage, although the infection did not spread to others and he subsequently recovered. John Anderson, a steerage passenger to Dunedin in 1862, described graphically — if somewhat ungrammatically — the outbreak of illness and the callous attitudes on board the City of Dunedin, where the floor of the hospital was three inches deep in water:

  one of the young married men beside us has been badly this week those in the hospital are not better their [sic] is trouble amongst us the docter [sic] does not know what it is nor nobody in the ship ever saw or heard any thing like it it affects the brain at once two of them in hospital is that way one of them is very bad he came out during the night and was raving to himself on the deck till the sailors put him in the door is not locked and the docter orders nobody to attend on them two of the young women besides us were
quite well last night one of the[m] turned bad in the night and has been raving even on the other one felt sick after breakfast and tonight she is as bad as the other the docter gave her a powder which made her worse she was in awful agony with it the docter and captain came down at 10 o clock and spoke to them then went on deck again never asked if any one was going to attend them or anything that is the treatment you get on board if you live you live and if you die you die it is all one to them. 33

  Shetlander John Tulloch, who almost died of typhoid on the voyage to New Zealand in 1863, blamed an incompetent doctor and a drunken captain for some of the forty-four deaths aboard his ship, while Isabella Henderson, who travelled steerage to Dunedin, also in 1863, spent much of the voyage caring for her sick ‘mess mates’ on a ship where whooping cough was rife. Jane Findlayson, who sailed to New Zealand thirteen years later, recalled a fatal outbreak of measles among the children and an occasion when her delirious messmate tried to commit suicide. 34

  For some emigrants, particularly children, the voyage was an end rather than a beginning. For obvious reasons, the Grim Reaper was much more likely to be mentioned in narrative diaries and letters than in promotional guidebooks. Passengers who were not involved in these tragedies sometimes commented on them with considerable detachment, while ships’ crews could be completely callous, particularly on the Atlantic run as opposed to the more tightly supervised Antipodean voyages. Robert Cromar of Slains in Aberdeenshire, who kept a diary of his voyage from Aberdeen to Quebec in 1840, mentioned a number of burials at sea:

  Sunday 26th … Child belonging to one of the passengers died in the afternoon, and rolled up in the fashion of the dead at sea … Monday 27th … The child put overboard at half past five in the morning, none on deck but the child’s father, two of the passengers and the seamen. I was too late of getting up to see the funeral ceremony but one of the sailors told me that the corpse was merely laid on one of the hatches and turned overboard into the sea without any ceremony whatever than a hearty curse from the Captain to one of the sailors for not turning the hatch in the proper way. I thought he might have let the cursing alone until the corpse was out of sight at any rate. The child’s mother appears to be very sorry about it but no word nor appearance of any kind among the passengers of such circumstance taking place. 35

  The deaths of two young girls on the Helenslee en route to New Zealand in 1863 were recorded with considerably more sympathy by Mrs D. Bonthrow. The first child to die ‘used to run about the liveliest and most merry of all the little ones and when the Bagpipes were played by the Highland Pipers on board she would jump and clap her little hands so gleefully’. The second child to die, a month later, had never recovered from the effects of measles and her funeral, unlike the fiasco witnessed by Robert Cromar, was ‘a solemn thing’, with the body laid on a flag-draped plank, and a large gathering of crew and passengers paying their respects with psalms and prayers. 36

  But the recollections were most poignant when the writer had experienced a personal tragedy. Alexander Robertson left Monymusk in Aberdeenshire for Canada in April 1846, taking passage from the port of Aberdeen with his wife and seven children. Fourteeen days into the voyage, Ann Robertson gave birth to a premature child, which survived for less than two days. On Sunday 3 May, Ann herself — weakened by dysentery, seasickness and childbirth — also died, and was buried at sea after her infant daughter. On 29 May the vessel docked at Quebec and, after clearing quarantine, the family proceeded by steamboat to Montreal, where they were met by relatives who had emigrated earlier. By late July the Robertsons had established themselves on a farm near Montreal, but within a year Alexander too had died, and the subsequent fate of the seven orphaned children is not known.

  The tragic events of the voyage were described in a detailed and surprisingly articulate journal purportedly kept by thirteen-year-old Charles, the eldest of the Robertson children, and in two letters later sent by Charles and his father to relatives in Scotland. 37 These documents reflect some of the crushing desolation of bereavement experienced by both father and son, and also give us a child’s-eye view of everyday life aboard an emigrant sailing ship, Charles’s sentiments lurching between hope and despair in tandem with the lurching of the ship and his mother’s fluctuating condition. Charles Robertson’s diary began on the day the vessel left Aberdeen and ended on the day it docked at Grosse Ile quarantine station. It is worth quoting at some length:

  T[uesday] 14th. Left Aberdeen past three. On deck ere out between the pier head. Put the children to bed. My mother sick … ship heaving a little tonight. W[ednesday] 15th. Drizzling rain with high wind. Past Peterhead by 6 o’clock a.m … about 4 o’clock a child fell down the hatchway and cut its head very severely. They were obliged to sew it up … In sight of John O’Groats Castle there came a pilot boat alongside and offered to take the ship through the firth for 15 shillings, so we bargained with them.

  Thursday 16th. Got through the firth. Had a terrible night of lurching past Dunnet Head lighthouse. The pilot was of no use to us — the captain raged terribly at him. The ship you would have thought would have turned on her broadside. Every minute shows us groups of hills, some of them very perpendicular. We are passing some ships that passed us in the firth like fury. There are a good many sick. We have had a good breeze of wind today. The children are running about on deck as though they were quite at home.

  Saturday 18th … There are not so many people sick today. My mother I think will soon get better. She is on deck at present … About four days have we been on the sea and I like her better than I expected at first.

  Sunday 19th. Got out of bed about 7 o’clock. The ship is going about 7 knots an hour — a knot is about a mile. The most of the passengers are keeping below as they can hardly stand on deck. The spray of the sea is coming on deck of the ship like a shower of rain, but no matter, for all that we are getting on at a good rate. My mother is still sick but there was some of the passengers who have not got out of bed yet.

  Tuesday 21st. Last night 7 o’clock I saw a shoal of whales, some of them spouting. Today we are going at the rate of 3 or 4 knots an hour. My mother is a good deal better. Two ships in view. The sea fully as calm as yesterday. Towards evening we were going 6 knots an hour. One of the ships kept before us all day but now we left her like fury.

  Friday 24th. Going at the rate of 7 knots an hour. The ships that were before us yesterday are out of sight behind us now. My mother is still sick. Most of the people have got out of bed here now.

  Monday 27th. Terrible morning of wind and rain, the sea raging terribly. The pishpots are tumbling everywhere — some of them are not raising a delightful smell. My mother very sick today …

  Tuesday 28th. One sail in view, but we can scarcely see her for the wavings of the sea … My mother was delivered of a girl during the night. She was not able to nurse it, but a woman on the other side of the ship took it, but it hindered none of them long.

  Thursday 30th. The sea is very calm now. The child was let overboard today and two stones attached to it to make it sink. We are not over clean here but we work away the best way we can.

  Sunday 3rd. The day dawned, bringing along with it a day of sorrow which I shall ever remember. Tonight about nine o’clock my poor mother drew her last breath and on Monday she was moored to her watery [grave] at 12 o’clock …

  The children little know their want. As yet the 3 littlest know nothing about it. Tuesday 5th. Sunday was very misty and by night it came terrible lightning accompanied by torrents of rain, as if the elements were rejoicing that her soul is harboured safely into the harbour of eternal life, where I hope she wears a crown of glory. They say we are on the banks of Newfoundland and the mist is a little cleared today, and a ship in view …

  Monday 11th. The mist is worse than yesterday and we are sailing among a flock of icebergs. Some of them are squeezing the ship’s bottom and making her timbers shake. Some of the passengers are sitting preserving themselves as if the last day were come �
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  Wednesday 20th. Yesterday we dropped anchor at 12 and drew at 7. We had the tide with us and a good breeze. By 4 o’clock this morning we were anchored at the quarantine station. It is stationed at Grouse [Grosse] Island. The doctor was not a quarter of an hour looking over us … We are anchored at Quebec now. She has a most romantic appearance. We are stationed among a wood of ships. There appears to be a great many ships here. The country is far prettier than I thought, far more than old Scotland. We are expecting to heave away for Montreal tonight. Oh, but one is left lying on the sands of Newfoundland. Lonely is her grave among the blue waves of the Atlantic. No-one will tread the grass that sprouts from the sod that covers her. Her bed is a sheet of water.

  Two months later, in a letter to an uncle in Monymusk, Charles enlarged on the circumstances surrounding his mother’s illness and death. He admitted that she had bitterly regretted the decision to emigrate and had complained that ‘seasickness was the sorest sickness she ever had’. She had not been shown much sympathy by the captain or other passengers, but her own family had done everything possible for her under the circumstances, ‘so we have no stain impressed on our minds’. By this time Alexander Robertson had sent home to his parents-in-law a heart-rending account of his wife ’s death, written during the final stage of the voyage up the St Lawrence, when ‘I often lean on the side of the ship that my poor wife was last seen’:

  I take up my pen to acquaint you with the dreadful affliction that has befallen me in the death of my wife…She grew ill as we left the point of the pier with sickness and continued to grow worse as we went further on. Some days she was a little better and able to be on deck, and often did we flatter ourselves that she would soon be better, but the weather grew bad and she was taken with dysentery, which reduced her to great weakness, when one dreadful night she was taken with the pains of labour. There was two midwives on board and she was safely delivered of a female child … alive but very small … It lived the next day and through the next night or morning, when it died … My wife was still in a fair way on Sunday [but] that day she grew worse, ere about nine o’clock at night, when her soul took its flight to that pure land where there will be no more sorrow nor trouble and where I long to follow. Oft since then I have lain beside my poor children and looked back to the many happy nights we have spent together, never, never to be recalled. The children do not feel their want — it is me alone that does suffer, but their time will come. I often wish that we would be driven against some rock, that we might all have the same grave.