Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Discipline was often exercised on crew and passengers alike. Jessie Campbell recorded one such incident early in the voyage of the Blenheim:

  One of the sailors was complained of for the 4th time to the Capt. for being lousy and eating the lice, Capt. put him in irons on the poop, the rascal struck the Capt. on the face, he still wears the mark, one of the emigrants impertinently interfered and wished to rescue the sailor. Capt. Gray was going to punish the emigrant likewise until he begged his pardon and acknowledged his error. 61

  Many years later, Jane Findlayson noted the summary justice meted out to a cabin boy who, having stolen some money from the second mate’s room, ‘was put up on the top mast for four hours, he was stiff with cold e’er he came down’. 62 When John Anderson sailed to Otago in 1863, he recorded two skirmishes involving passengers. One concerned two steerage travellers who came to blows over a female cabin passenger during a dance. The other concerned an intoxicated cabin passenger:

  one of the cabin passengers got himself drunk and fell headforemost down our stair the captain ordered him to his berth he refused to go and the boatswain was ordered to take him in they had a fine strugle [sic] before they got him in he called the captain a damned swindler the captain ordered irons to be brought and the boatswain sat in his berth with him all afternoon and night till he got sober. 63

  In 1862 Isabella Henderson — whose sense of propriety was offended by a prank involving the debagging of the doctor by some of the female steerage passengers — declared that there was ‘not a more perfect School for Scandal than on board ship…There is nothing but tittle tattle on board. Everyone dissatisfied with their next neighbour. There is one very black sheep in our vessel. She makes a deal of mischief throughout the whole community. We have a very mixed lot.’ 64 William Shennan too complained that there was ‘nothing but quarrelling and fighting from morning till night’ aboard the Melbourne-bound Crusader in 1870, the worst offenders being a large contingent of Cornishmen. Occasionally there were tangible scandals, as when Shennan recorded the birth of a stillborn child to one of the single women. 65 In 1876 Jane Findlayson and her friend Agnes shared a mess with six other girls, two Scots, three Irish and one English, ‘all agreeable clean girls’, she commented on 2 October at the beginning of the voyage. On 7 December, however, she had a different tale to tell:

  I am ashamed to tell you that one of our girls was confined of a daughter last night at half past 9, the doctor sent us all off from where he was, our place is sort of two apartments with only a short stair between us so just fancy 28 girls put out of our place, some of them took their beds with them and lay on the floor, we did not do so but on a form, we spent most of the night telling stories and any little bits of fun to amuse ourselves, we got back to our beds about 6 in the morning and stayed till dinner time. This has caused a talk all over the ship, when any of us goes out the men will pass remarks such as ‘Who is likely to be laid up among the single girls’. The girl is from Ireland, a farmers daughter and had she not come away her father would have shot her, it was unfeeling of them to banish her away amongst strangers. The doctor is very kind to her, she is pretty well considering, the baby tho’ small is a plump little thing. God knows what will become of her when she is well and landed.

  Two days later, however, the baby was found dead, seemingly accidentally smothered by its mother. In Jane Findlayson’s opinion, ‘she is a young girl not 19 without much sense, she appeared to be in a sad state about it, poor thing, its best away as it puts us off our sleep for an hour or two’.

  A few passengers positively enjoyed the voyage. While still en route to Port Phillip, John Mackenzie closed his account in philosophical vein, stressing the varied experiences of the previous ten weeks:

  The month of November has closed over my head and with it my book. Now at seventy-one days, I think nothing of a week or two, it would be but a play to go to America and in fact its nothing to come to Australia … speaking of the passage those who are in good health during it, can’t but enjoy it, there is an ever varying change of scene, the grandeur of the storm — the beauty of a calm — the bright and variegated sunset — the rainbow ‘based in ocean span the sky’ — the light and sublimity of the stars, the clear blue sky changed for a clouded thunderstorm — torrents of rain, and the burning heat of a tropical sun. Various latitudes, climates and temperatures, various tribes of birds and fishes, shooting and fishing, smoking and drinking, walking and talking, reading and writing, eating and sleeping, suffering and laughing, is something of whats to be seen and done on a voyage to Australia. 66

  The immigrants arrive

  Whether the voyage had been a pleasure or — more typically — an ordeal, most passengers were eager to reach journey’s end. Excitement usually rose as the ship neared its destination, especially for Antipodean passengers, who, unless they had touched at the Cape of Good Hope, might have been out of sight of land since leaving Scotland. Dr Grahame Todd and Jessie Campbell, who came to the pioneer Wakefieldian settlement at Wellington, New Zealand, in 1840, were both disappointed that the best landing place had not been identified in advance, and that the appropriate surveys had not been made by the New Zealand Company. Todd, who arrived with 120 Scottish settlers on the Bengal Merchant, complained that those landed at Port Nicholson often had to wade ashore in waist-deep water, while Jessie Campbell bemoaned the high winds and ‘wild appearance’ of the country. 67 The first impression of the pioneers who went to Otago seven years later was of a sea of mud, and even in 1862William Smith claimed that Stafford Street in Dunedin was ‘the most miserable place for mud under the sun’. 68

  Some ships were detained in quarantine, to the passengers’ frustration. In 1831 Canada built a quarantine hospital for emigrants on an island in the St Lawrence. For several years the ever-increasing volume of sick and destitute emigrants arriving at Quebec City had been imposing an intolerable strain on civic resources. Referring to the situation between 1826 and 1832, Lord Durham wrote:

  I am almost at a loss for words to describe the state in which the emigrants frequently arrived; with a few exceptions, the state of the ships was quite abominable; so much so, that the harbour-master’s boatmen had no difficulty, at the distance of gun-shot, either when the wind was favourable or in a dead calm, in distinguishing by the odour alone a crowded emigrant ship. I have known as many as from 30 to 40 deaths to have taken place, in the course of a voyage, from typhus fever, on board of a ship containing from 500 to 600 passengers; and within six weeks after the arrival of some vessels, and the landing of passengers at Quebec, the hospital has received upwards of 100 patients at one time in the Emigrant Hospital of Quebec, for whom there was no sufficient accommodation …69

  In 1831, however, as cholera began to sweep Britain, the colonial authorities decided to build a quarantine station at Grosse Ile on the St Lawrence River, thirty miles below Quebec City. Henceforth, no emigrant ship was allowed to proceed upriver until the vessel itself, its passengers, crew and all their bedding and clothing had been scrubbed and approved by government inspectors. Any who showed signs of disease were detained in the new hospital and a tax of 5s per head was levied on each adult passenger, in order to create a fund for sick and destitute emigrants. In 1832 and again in 1834 the hospital had to cope with major outbreaks of cholera, before an even worse epidemic — this time of typhus — occurred in 1847, most of the victims being impoverished emigrants from famine-ravaged Ireland.

  Even the most stringent precautions could not prevent the spread of these dreaded diseases to Quebec and Montreal. When Susanna Strickland arrived from Leith with her Orcadian husband, J. W. Dunbar Moodie, in 1832, cholera was raging in Montreal, and the fear of infection hung heavily in the air:

  The sullen toll of the death-bell, the exposure of ready-made coffins in the undertakers’ windows, and the oft-recurring notice placarded on the walls, of funerals furnished at such and such a place, at cheapest rates and shortest notice, painfully reminded us, at every turning of th
e street, that death was everywhere — perhaps lurking in our very path; we felt no desire to examine the beauties of the place. 70

  But most Scottish diarists made only passing mention of Grosse Ile, for, unlike New York’s depots, it was always just a quarantine station, not a general reception area. Ships certified to be medically clean — like Robert Cromar’s Hercules in 1836 and Alexander Muir’s Lord Seaton in 1845, both out of Aberdeen — did not have to land at the island but could proceed straight to Quebec.

  In order to mitigate the nefarious activities of runners, the huge numbers of emigrants arriving at the port of New York were from 1855 received at the former fort and concert hall of Castle Garden on Manhattan Island. Run by the Commissioners of Immigration, it operated a labour bureau and sold the new arrivals food, as well as railroad and canal tickets at fair prices. It also forced them to take a bath before they were dispatched on their onward journey, usually within six hours. By the 1880s, however, the administration of Castle Garden had been vitiated by corruption and in 1892 a new immigration depot was opened at Ellis Island, managed by federal government officials and supported by federal funds. After the original wooden building burned down in 1897, its stone replacement became the gateway to America for over 12 million immigrants of all nationalities until it finally closed its doors in 1954.

  10. Scottish immigrants arriving at Quebec, c. 1911.

  On the other side of the world, the quarantine station for passengers to Otago was an offshore island. When John Anderson’s vessel was quarantined there for fourteen days in 1862, he enjoyed the discomfiture of the ‘cabin gentry’, who not only had to mingle with the steerage passengers whom they had formerly kept at arm’s length but also ‘had to cook and do everything for themselves’. 71 Jane Findlayson too enjoyed the freedom of the island, where married couples were accommodated at one end, single women at the other, and single men at a safe distance on an adjacent island. Most major debarkation centres also had emigration depots, or barracks, for the temporary accommodation of new arrivals.

  For the majority of emigrants the journey was not over when the ship finally docked. Relatively few Scottish emigrants settled in Lower Canada, although large numbers of paupers, lacking resources, initiative and contacts, loitered about Quebec in the usually misplaced hope of finding work. These paupers were often forwarded westwards at the expense of the Canadian Immigration Department, whose chief agent, Alexander Buchanan, was particularly critical of landlords in the Highlands and Ireland, who in the mid-nineteenth century expelled impoverished tenants with minimal assistance, frequently only enough to enable them to reach Quebec. Emigrants with sufficient resources generally took the advice of guidebooks not to linger in the ports but proceeded at once to Upper Canada, where employment opportunities were allegedly much better than in the east, and where more fertile land was available for settlement.

  For many, however, the onward journey was as long, arduous and expensive as the passage across the Atlantic. From Quebec they continued up the St Lawrence to Montreal, sometimes without disembarking or more commonly transferring to river steamboats. In 1820 the one—two-day journey cost 15s but in the 1830s, when inland steamship travel was more commonplace and there was more competition on the river, the steerage or deck price fell to 5s. Fire was a constant hazard and accidents were frequent. The steamer Montreal, for instance, was gutted on 25 June 1856, while carrying 500 Scottish emigrants up the river, and 253 lives were lost. Until the St Lawrence canal was completed in 1848 the Lachine rapids, west of Montreal, prevented the passage of steamboats. The emigrants could either walk or — like Alexander Muir — go by stagecoach across the nine miles between Montreal and Lachine, where at the head of the rapids they took to the more manoeuvrable bateaux or Durham boats to continue up the river to Prescott. The journey along this 160-mile stretch of water could take up to a week, with the passengers sometimes having to disembark and pull the bateaux when the river became impassable. During this time the crew and passengers either camped in the open or sought shelter in taverns and shanties. Emigrants who entered Canada from the USA could, after the completion of the Erie and Oswego canals in the 1820s, take a steamer up the Hudson River and then transfer to the 362-mile-long Erie canal for the northward journey to Oswego on Lake Ontario, from where they could take a steamboat to a variety of Canadian towns on the northern shore of the lake.

  By whatever route the emigrants reached their final debarkation point, they generally faced yet another journey by stagecoach, oxcart and foot if their future home was a settlement in the bush. First impressions of the new home often fell far short of expectations, even for middle-class settlers like Susanna Moodie and her husband:

  About a mile from the place of our destination the rain began to fall in torrents, and the air, which had been balmy as a spring morning, turned as chilly as that of aNovember day…Just then, the carriage turned into a narrow, steep path, overhung with loftywoods, and, after labouring up it with considerable difficulty, and at the risk of breaking our necks, it brought us at length to a rocky upland clearing, partially covered with a second growth of timber, and surrounded on all sides by the dark forest … I gazed upon the place in perfect dismay, for I had never seen such a shed called a house before … The prospect was indeed dreary. Without, pouring rain; within, a fireless hearth; a room with but one window, and that containing only one whole pane of glass; not an article of furniture to be seen, save an old painted pine-wood cradle, which had been left there by some freak of fortune. 72

  Although by the second half of the nineteenth century steamships and railroads had replaced sailing vessels, wagon trains and ox carts, improving technology did not solve all the emigrant’s problems. New York’s notorious reputation gripped Robert Louis Stevenson’s fellow passengers as they approached the port in 1879:

  As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat staggered, by the cautions and the grisly tales that went the round. You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake the next morning without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind. 73

  When subsequently trying to book his railroad ticket, however, Stevenson was forced to admit that the scene at the ‘wretched little booking office ’ left a lot to be desired, with ‘a Babel of bewildered men, women, and children’ being verbally abused by a ‘bearded, mildewed’ emigration agent, ‘his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering’. ‘The whole system,’ concluded Stevenson, ‘if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers’, an impression which was confirmed as he made his weary and unpredictable way to the west, discovering in the process that ‘haste is not the foible of an emigrant train’. 74

  Just after the turn of the century, Aberdeenshire emigrant George Sangster described his experiences on landing at Halifax after a transatlantic voyage on the Allan Line ’s SS Corinthian from Glasgow: