Sheep farming — and displacement of the Maoris — also dominated much of the emigrant experience in New Zealand. In 1878 George Wrey, of the Cun-ninghame of Thornton family in Ayrshire, after travelling throughout New Zealand, bought a 1,500-acre sheep farm for £10,500 and £3,000 worth of stock as an investment ‘to improve and sell again for a price sufficient to cover any loss of interest or more if I can’. Such practices, he assured his aunt, were ‘considered very safe and there are agents out here whose entire business consists in making these investments and collecting and remitting money home ’. He also repeatedly wrote of the beauty of the landscape, on one occasion contrasting the lush foliage of the South Island with ‘the dry arid appearance of Australia’. 42
From time to time Scottish farmers settled in more obscure locations, not always with great success. In 1825 198 northern Scots, mainly demobilized soldiers, tradesmen and shepherds, sailed from Cromarty to Venezuela in order to establish an agricultural colony in the arid Topo Valley, between La Guaira and Caracas. The colony came into being as a result of the rash of speculative foreign investment in Venezuela which followed liberation from Spanish rule in 1821 and the creation of the centralized Republic of Colombia under Simón Bolívar’s presidency. The government in Bogotá, bankrupted by a decade of war, desperately needed foreign capital and technology to stimulate economic development, and British mercantile houses, eager to exploit the new Latin American market, were happy to oblige. Huge loans were negotiated, and ambitious plans drawn up for agricultural development through the government’s allocation of land to companies such as Herring, Graham and Powles. Shortly after that firm had been awarded 316,160 acres, in return for a promise to introduce settlers and promote cultivation, it founded a joint stock company, the Colombian Agricultural Society of London, to promote colonization, select settlers and finance the venture. John Ross, parliamentary correspondent of The Times and a former Church of Scotland minister, recruited and led a colony of Scots to one of the proposed locations near Caracas, where they were to grow cotton, coffee and indigo. Each colonist was promised up to fifty acres of rich agricultural land, free tools and seed, and eight months’ provisions.
Within a short time of arriving at their snake-infested, cactus-covered, arid and stony destination, the colonists realized they had been deceived, but their demands for better land or compensation were rejected by the Colombian Society and by the British consul at Caracas, Sir Robert Ker Porter. Although the Caracas newspaper El Colombian (which was owned by Herring, Graham and Powles) initially praised the ‘sober and industrious habits’ of the settlers, Porter regarded them as a ‘worthless, drunken set’, responsible for their own misfortunes. His assessment may have been the more accurate, since excavations at Topo show numerous broken bottles and drinking vessels, and John Ross — who left the colony in July 1826 — had a reputation for heavy drinking. When a serious financial crisis in Britain in 1826 bankrupted the Colombian Society, the Topo colonists were in desperate straits. ‘We have nothing now in our view but starvation and a lingering death to ourselves and families in a place where we can not get work or wages,’ they wrote to Porter in April 1827, but it was only when their petitions reached the government in London that the consul was forced to take action. Since by that time the imminent disintegration of the Republic of Colombia had made it impossible to relocate the Scots safely in Venezuela, arrangements were made for their removal to Canada, where by the end of 1827 they were successfully resettled on Canada Company lands at Guelph. 43
The trials and tribulations of the 250 Scots who founded the Monte Grande colony near Buenos Aires, also in 1825, echoed those of their countrymen at Topo. The newly independent Republic of Argentina, under Bernadino Riva-davia, was anxious to foster European ideas and institutions and, like its counterpart in Venezuela, sought to do so by offering substantial land grants to immigrants who would settle on the shores of the River Plate. Attracted by the apparently generous promise of assistance in establishing an agricultural colony, John and William Parish Robertson, two brothers from Kelso, recruited colonists, mainly from the Borders, and sent them out on the Symmetry from Leith in May 1825. By that time, however, the Robertsons had rejected the poor-quality land offered by the Buenos Aires government and had instead purchased 16,660 acres from two Scottish ranchers, George and John Gibson. Despite exaggerated promises and scanty planning, the colony prospered briefly, but soon fell victim to the political and economic instability brought about by Argentina’s war with Brazil and the subsequent replacement of Rivadavia’s Europeanized liberal regime by the nationalist dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Although Rosas saw the importance of maintaining trade with Britain and therefore did not mistreat the Scottish colonists, civil unrest in the area in 1829 drove many of them out to Buenos Aires or other parts of the province, while those who stayed continued to face harassment from marauding soldiers throughout the two decades of Rosas’s rule. Jane Rodger, who was only four when she emigrated from Scotland with her parents, had vivid (if perhaps embellished) recollections eighty years later of the lawlessness of an era when life was cheap:
My father now joined in partnership with a Mr. and Mrs. G., and they carried on a large dairy farm. Father imported some pigs from home, had quite a large business and did very well … At this time the country was more and more unsettled. Rosas was outside, and Lavalle in, Buenos Aires. There were bands of Indians wandering about who were Rosas’s men. Lavalle ’s soldiers were also wandering about, stealing, murdering and causing the greatest alarm. It was well named ‘The Reign of Terror’. My father said that Mother must go with us children, but she said, no, if he could not go she would not leave him. So for a time we remained on, always in danger. 44
It was only after they were attacked in their own home by sword-wielding intruders who hacked their dog to death that the family moved temporarily to Buenos Aires, returning a year later to find that their property had been ransacked and razed to the ground.
Danger to life and limb was also a hazard faced by the Scots who were brought out to the Eastern Cape between 1877 and 1883 to form agricultural settlements on border land from which the Xhosa population had recently been displaced. Before the end of 1877, while the Kaffir War raged, most of the first arrivals had fled their farms in the Gonubie district to settle in the towns, many never to return to the land in which some had invested savings of up to £100. When James Mackenzie from Stirlingshire ventured out to his farm after some months in East London, he found the buildings in flames, while the Bryson family from Loch Lomond spent two enforced years in East London before settling on their farm. Travel was hazardous not only on account of banditry but also because of the poor infrastructure, with few proper roads and hardly any bridges, so that on a number of occasions settlers were drowned when attempting to ford swollen rivers. Others were murdered, gored to death, decamped to the diamond fields or lost their lands through insolvency. Nevertheless, and despite his irritation with the Cape’s London agent for sending out men with inadequate means to sustain themselves on the land, J. B. Hellier, Superintendent of Immigrants at East London, was optimistic about the prospects of the two contingents of Scottish settlers who had arrived by the time he penned his first report in 1881:
Care has been taken to locate the immigrants on good arable land, and with a good supply of water whenever possible. All the immigrants appear to be satisfied with the land allotted to them, and many of them express themselves hopefully as to their future prospects. With scarcely an exception, those who have settled on their land have enjoyed most excellent health, and some of them say that they have got rid of ailments from which they used to suffer, and that they are getting quite young again. Several of them have been making inquiries, and some have made applications to get their relatives out to this country … The Scotch immigrants who landed in 1877 and 1878, and who are settled in the East London districts, have also suffered much from the drought, but reaped the advantages of the present good season, the best
they say, or rather the only good season they have had, since they came into the country. No doubt this better season will encourage these men to cultivate more ground; and a few more such seasons will lead most of the men now working on the harbour works and railway line to stay altogether on their farm, and give their undivided attention to its cultivation and improvement. Some of these immigrants who have lived altogether on their farms have done very well, and I think that they promise with better times to be a very prosperous part of our colonial population. 45
In most locations, farmers’ accounts of emigrant life were positive, particularly if they were looking back over a fairly lengthy period of settlement. Disappointment was most commonly expressed by unassimilated new arrivals, those who had acquired land precipitately and, especially, the victims of fraudulent, misleading or badly designed colonization schemes. From the pampas to the prairies, the forests of New Brunswick to the plains of Kansas, Lowland and Highland colonists alike deplored the disparities between agents’ images and the harsh realities of pioneer farming, with the fires of doubt and disappointment often being fuelled further by the opportunity for collective grumbling afforded by these isolated, introverted communities. Yet family and community networks were also vital support mechanisms, and many emigrants — as their correspondence demonstrates — sought the practical assistance, or simply the company, of fellow countrymen.
Not surprisingly, success and contentment seem to have been more easily attained in the relatively settled society of eastern Canada than in the pioneering environments of the Antipodes and South America, although loneliness was a recurring complaint among some settlers on the prairies. Adaptability, health and perseverance, rather than previous experience, were the determinants of success; despite being a builder, not a farmer, William Gibson turned his hand successfully to prairie agriculture, whereas John McBean, who came from a rural background, had little enthusiasm or stamina for farm work. In other ways, however, the emigrants’ backgrounds spilled over into their subsequent experiences. While self-confident Lowland farmers emigrated with a determination to make the most of overseas opportunities, the miseries of cleared Highlanders often followed them to the new world, at least initially. Yet inauspicious beginnings did not necessarily preclude successful settlement. Indeed, for Highland exiles, the achievement of prosperity in the face of adversity satisfied the demands of poetic — and sometimes retributive — justice, as in Alexander MacKenzie ’s juxtaposition of the wealth and comfort of the descendants of cleared Highlanders in Glengarry County with the bankruptcy of the ‘grasping sheep farmer who was the original cause of their eviction’ from the Scottish Glengarry. 46 Ironically — and unlike many of their Lowland counterparts — Highland emigrants seem to have found the transition to Australia easier than that to Canada, perhaps because they emigrated through carefully financed and monitored government schemes rather than under the auspices of parsimonious landlords.
The artisan experience
Emigrant farmers may have faced a life of unremitting toil, but they were generally their own masters. The same could not be said for many artisans, which perhaps explains why their experiences — at least those we know about — were more liberally peppered with reservations and complaints. For some tradesmen, however, lack of independence was less important than the anticipation of high wages, particularly if they were saving with a view to acquiring a farm or a business of their own. James Thompson, the Aboyne baker, emigrated in 1844 with no clear plan in mind other than a vague intention to go to the Toronto area, where a cousin was farming. Armed with a letter of introduction to Henry Essen, a Scottish minister in Montreal, who quickly found him a baking job with Scottish employers, he spent a comfortable winter under the roof of a fellow countryman. ‘Since my arival [sic] in the city,’ he wrote to his father on 14 June 1844, ‘I have been living in a lodging house kept by Mr McHardy who twelve years ago was a coach guard on the Deeside road. We have always beef steak and potatoes to breakfast and also to tea and roast beef and potatoes to dinner besides a number of other dishes.’ 47 At Essen’s St Gabriel Street Church he could mix with many fellow Scots and also heard a number of visiting Scottish preachers, while one of his employers kept him well supplied with copies of the Aberdeen newspapers. Although he had to work harder than at home and, as a new arrival, was not paid at the top rate, he still managed to save £15 from his year’s wages. He was impressed with the standard of living in Montreal, where servant girls ‘dress almost as fine as their mistresses’ and he had seen ‘fewer ragged people than in Aberdeen’. 48
In June 1845 Thompson moved west, where for four years he baked for the Irish navvies who were canalizing the St Lawrence near Edwardsburgh. Although his wages were lower than in Montreal, conditions were better, with no night work, and when construction work ceased for the winter Thompson worked in the local store. In October 1847 he took a fortnight’s holiday, during which he visited his cousin’s farm, Niagara Falls and Buffalo, but in 1849, ‘on account of the dullness of business in Edwardsburgh and in Canada generally’, he decided to seek pastures new and went to Chicago on the recommendation of Andrew Elliott, the canal contractor who had recently employed him. 49 He stayed eight months there, working as a lumber merchant’s clerk, but by March 1850 he had decided to join the gold rush to California, where by 1853 had made enough money by a combination of mining, baking and logging to afford a trip home, and, on his return, the fulfilment of his goal, the purchase of a farm in Edwardsburgh.
James Thompson did not marry until a year after he had set himself up as a farmer. Artisans were more likely to be single men — or to leave their families behind — when they emigrated than those who went straight on to the land, not least because a family was often more of a liability than an asset to a tradesman whose employment opportunities fluctuated and whose lifestyle might well be itinerant. They were also, Charlotte Erickson has argued, more likely than farmers to seek support networks beyond the family, through workmates and acquaintances from their own ethnic communities. 50 Both traits were evident in the case of Thompson, who regularly remitted money to his family at home, and referred frequently in his letters to practical assistance he had received from fellow countrymen. They were also evident in the correspondence of James McCowan, a smith from Perthshire, who in 1819 told his correspondent of encounters with other Scots in Richmond, Virginia, and how he had tried unsuccessfully to use one of those contacts to remit money home:
You know David Imrie Wright from Methven he was at the Wood of Trowen. He Came here about the 10 of July and Cant get no work here at his trade. He told me all the news about the Place but had no word about you as I expect that you did not no that he was comeing to it. And there was one from Perth by the Name of Buchen after som Maney and I wished to Send home some to My Father and Mother but he told Some of them that He did not no what time he wold get his Busnes settled, but I must try and get some opportunity of Sending Some to Them this fall … it is hard to get it Sent home at this time for you Do not know who to trust here for they are all Roges here. 51
As Chapter 3 demonstrated, the United States, with a more developed economy than its northern neighbour, attracted significant numbers of Scottish tradesmen, factory operatives and manufacturers, not least to textile communities in New England. From the 1820s, emigrants from Paisley and Kilmarnock flocked to the carpet-manufacturing centres of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Thompsonville, Connecticut, respectively, while the workers brought out to Newark, New Jersey, and Pawtucket and Fall River, Massachusetts, by the Paisley thread-making firms of Clark, J. & P. Coats and Kerr, earned double the wages they had been paid in Scotland. By the end of the century, some of the Scottish artisans who were ultimately displaced by cheaper American workers had succeeded in moving into managerial positions and even proprietorship. 52
But not all artisans had the assurance of employment or settled down immediately. Many spent several years ‘on tramp’, changing jobs in pursuit of higher wages and better working c
onditions, often with a view to investing in a farm or ultimately returning to Scotland. Adaptability was a prerequisite, and many new arrivals had to endure a period of low wages until they gained experience. While some complained of the irregularity of employment, loneliness and lack of assimilation were probably more serious consequences of their itinerant lifestyle, as they moved from town to town and boarding house to boarding house. David Laing, an unskilled day labourer, never fully adapted to life in the United States, despite emigrating (probably from the Edinburgh area) at the age of eighteen and marrying a woman from Pennsylvania. In 1858 he moved to Indiana, but by 1873 his marriage had foundered and he had moved to Logan-port. ‘I am working in a large rail road shop at the machine busness,’ he told his sister. ‘We have 86 locomotive engins to keep in repair & four hundred miles of road to keep up. Our formen are nearly all English and Scotch men & many of the men also. I am running a machine & have good easy situation.’ Despite his occupational progress, the recurring theme of Laing’s letters was one of profound loneliness:
I have read your letter at least twenty times since I received it … If I were only able, I should be so happy to go over to see you; but my health has not been good since I was in the Army, I have had several spells of illness. I think a trip home would do me good but I must not think of it. It only makes me more unhappy, but, Johan dear, I do want to see you all so much. 53
Although he had good lodgings with a widow and her son, he bewailed having ‘no home’, and anticipated that the son’s forthcoming marriage would require him to move, ‘as he will not wish to trouble his bride with a lodger. Well such is life, so I have always been driven about in the world.’ 54 By 1874 he was living with his daughter, the youngest of his five children, whose husband worked alongside him in the locomotive works, but after she died in 1876 her husband remarried and Laing, forced back into lodgings, feared losing touch with his infant grandson:
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 35
