The Great War was also to prove the decisive watershed in the history of the remittance man. For the unsuccessful who felt themselves trapped in uncongenial locations or occupations, enlistment seemed to provide — ironically — a glorious opportunity of escape. Of those who survived the conflict, only a minority returned in a largely futile attempt to take up the threads of their old life in a radically altered social and economic climate. What epitaph should be written on the collective headstone of the remittance men? Some undoubtedly did represent the flotsam and jetsam of British aristocratic society, transients and dilettantes who sowed their wild oats and deserved the harvest of ridicule and financial embarrassment that they often reaped. Others, however, made a positive contribution to the development of the American West, as ranchers, farmers and administrators, while even those who became notorious were generally regarded as eccentric anachronisms rather than a serious threat to the fabric of the society in which they sojourned.
Conclusion
Sojourners have always constituted a significant part of the Scottish exodus, although the technological revolution of the 1850s undoubtedly brought a considerable acceleration in the volume of return movement. Temporary emigrants came from a variety of backgrounds and displayed a range of ambitions. Like permanent settlers, some sojourners fell victim to death, disease, disappointment or destitution. Others, who had intended to settle abroad permanently, changed their minds when the economic climate became too chilly, or family circumstances necessitated their return. Even those who persevered sometimes found it difficult to repatriate wages or savings, a problem that could be particularly serious for families who depended on regular remittances from overseas. Sojourners could also be controversial figures whose effect on their adopted country was not always positive. Caribbean planters were notoriously promiscuous and intemperate, a reputation that they shared with some fur traders and remittance men, while tradesmen who worked as temporary contract labourers in North America were often castigated for strikebreaking and generally undermining the nascent labour movement. In Africa too they were sometimes perceived as money-grabbers who ‘too often think the Colonies exist to yield them a rapid and fat fortune ’. Scotsmen, observed an editorial in the South African Scot in 1905, ‘are too apt to go abroad like honey bees, and to return home laden with wealth …They forget the duties and responsibilities they owe to the country of their adoption.’ 63 Whether temporary emigrants generated more controversy than permanent settlers is a moot point, although it might be argued that some sojourners displayed a particularly ruthless acquisitiveness, while the absence of females from many types of sojourning could have had a destabilizing social effect. What is clear is that career emigrants and casual sojourners alike cultivated networks of fellow Scots with the aim of developing an ethnically based social life as well as enhancing their economic prospects. The significance of such issues in the overall story of Scottish emigration and settlement is the subject of the next chapter.
9
ISSUES OF IDENTITY
‘I’ll do everything all proper here in America, but, at heart, I’ll always be Scottish.’ 1
‘We ’ll take Scotland with us, a kingdom of the mind,’ declared Daniel Munro, the patriarch of the Highland emigrant family in Frederick Niven’s western Canadian novel The Flying Years.2 Emigrants’ expectations, we have seen, embraced much more than the practicalities of finding a farm or a job, making a living and passing on a material inheritance to the next generation. Equally important to the fictional Munro, and to many real emigrants, was the planting of ethnic anchors which bridged the old world and the new and allowed them to integrate memories of home into an unfamiliar environment. Nostalgia for the institutions of the homeland and a desire to seek out fellow countrymen were sentiments by no means unique to expatriate Scots, but in many parts of the world they seem to have cultivated memories of home with a persistence and effectiveness that persuaded not only the emigrant community itself but also the donor and host societies of the cultural vitality and economic vigour of the Scottish diaspora.
A Scottish identity overseas could be fostered in many different ways, both deliberately and subconsciously. Even place names demonstrated specific patterns of movement and sometimes helped to foster ongoing emigration to areas of perceived familiarity. Emigrants who settled in isolated frontier locations, often in colonies of their fellow countrymen, were not forced to confront and conform to other cultures, but could pursue their old way of life virtually unhindered. In Highland settlements, memories of home were manifested most obviously in the preservation of the Gaelic language, but emigrants from all parts of Scotland reproduced the architecture, the hierarchies, the folkways and the institutions of their former life as they sought to establish a new identity in strange surroundings. In many emigrant communities priority was given to the early establishment of a church and a school, institutions frequently perceived — at home and abroad — as the key symbols of Scottish identity. The role of the church was particularly crucial and wide-ranging. Clergymen of all denominations promoted and maintained the cohesion of Scottish communities throughout the world, sometimes by initiating and leading an exodus, but more commonly by simply ministering to the spiritual needs of their uprooted and dislocated compatriots. Although church adherence could offer emigrants cultural and material, as well as spiritual, benefits, there were also many secular vehicles through which Scots could demonstrate and nurture their identity overseas, as well as be helped up the economic ladder. Burns clubs, along with other literary, musical, sporting and piping associations, were usually purely social in function, but the St Andrew’s societies and Caledonian clubs out of which many of them arose often had a charitable as well as a social purpose, offering assistance to Scottish emigrants in difficulty. Freemasonry too offered an avenue of assistance and advancement, while the informal mechanisms of correspondence, family and community networks and chain migration were of incalculable importance in creating a home from home.
The construction of a Scottish identity overseas was shaped by the emigrants’ background. In particular, the sense of exile that pervaded much of the Highland exodus may have predisposed some emigrants to create an image of communal solidarity and stoicism that their Lowland counterparts felt less need to cultivate. That image of a community forged in adversity was then perpetuated and given retrospective coherence through the mythologizing of Highland emigration in a powerful oral and literary tradition that was absent from the more comfortable Lowland narrative. Lowlanders, particularly from urban areas, lacking the Highlanders’ vision of a kin-based racial solidarity, and pulled rather than pushed into emigrating, often integrated more easily and imperceptibly into their new environment. The effect of these different priorities was that the interpretation of Scottish emigration as an unwilling and self-conscious diaspora — which belonged primarily to a traumatic era in west Highland emigration — came to be misleadingly applied to the entire Scottish exodus. Meanwhile, in the host societies, opinion was divided over whether communal settlement was a blessing or a curse, and from time to time there were allegations that Scots were characterized by exclusive clannishness, pride, tight-fist-edness and debauchery, rather than the positive stereotypes of hospitality and sobriety. Literary as well as historical sources are relevant in the quest to disentangle real and ersatz identities, as we try to understand what ‘Scottishness’ meant to both emigrants and host societies across the world.
Highland colonies and coteries
The prospect of a reconstituted Scotland, with evils expunged but treasured institutions preserved and old relationships restored, was emphasized by those who promoted specifically Scottish colonies. The most visible examples were probably the frontier settlements of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders created in two different parts of Canada in the 1830s and 1880s. The thickly wooded landscape encountered by the Hebrideans who flocked out to the British American Land Company’s territories in Quebec’s Eastern Townships between the 1830s and the 1880s was strikingly di
fferent to the treeless, sea-girt homes they had left, but they carried with them many of the place names of their native island — Stornoway, Tolsta, Galson and Ballallan, among others — and collaborated with their French neighbours in building their new, but distinct, communities. They also compensated for the physical dislocation by emigrating in extended family groups and settling in close proximity to each other in an agricultural environment where mutual aid was a prerequisite for survival. Centenarian Maryann Morrison, who emigrated from Harris as a child in 1888, reminisced in 1976 about her family’s emigration to Marsboro:
We sailed from Tarbert on a little boat … a little steamer from Tarbert to Glasgow, and from Glasgow on a one called the Siberia. There was lots of immigrants coming over with us. In our family there was my mother, father, sister, and myself, and my grandfather, and my auntie, and she had three children. Her husband was dead, but she come with us. And my grandfather came with my father because his wife died when the children was young and he stayed with my father and mother. So he followed them over to Canada. 3
Despite joining an uncle who had emigrated some years earlier, homesickness almost overwhelmed the family, and she recalled that in the early days her father would happily have returned home if he could have afforded the passage.
Homesickness and the difficulties of making a start were overcome by the proximity of fellow Scots, as well as the settlers’ willingness to work together in logging bees, barn raisings, harvesting and many other homesteading activities.
‘I am very comfortable in the midst of the old settlers,’ wrote Angus Young of Lingwick to his father in Lewis in 1851. Thirteen years later eleven heads of families settled in the same area declared that on arriving at Lingwick they had been treated with ‘the greatest kindness’ by their fellow countrymen, ‘who invited us to their houses, where we enjoyed their hospitality till we took up land for ourselves and had houses of our own to live in’. And in 1866 John Macdonald, mayor of Whitton, wrote to Sir James Matheson, thanking him for sending him and his fellow islanders to a country ‘wholly governed by Scotchmen or of Scotch descent’. 4
While they had to sacrifice some of the staples of their native diet — notably mutton and fresh fish — the Eastern Township Highlanders bought in large quantities of salt herring and continued to follow traditional Hebridean recipes, notably scone making, although the end product was thinner than the Scottish scone. Other imported practices included the spinning and weaving of cloth, using spinning wheels and looms brought with them from Scotland, and participating in waulking bees, when the wet cloth would be beaten to the rhythm of Gaelic waulking songs. Folk remedies for conditions ranging from toothache to tuberculosis were also part of the imported culture, as was the tradition of the taigh céilidh, when settlers would gather in each other’s homes to exchange accounts of emigration and adventure, as well as historical events, anecdotes, ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, including many narratives from the homeland:
Night after night, during the long winter evenings, people would gather, first at one place, then at the other. Around a crackling brush fire they would congregate … and would swap stories, joke and sing the folk songs of their old homeland. In the meantime the women would prepare vast quantities of food … [Some evenings] the women quilted … [other times] all the moveable pieces of furniture would be thrust out of the way, and, as the fiddlers ground out their gay Scotch melodies, all hands would temporarily abandon their cares to join in joyful dances. 5
One of the most frequently told stories in later years concerned Donald Morri-son, the Megantic Outlaw, and reflects the ethnic tensions between British Protestants and French Catholics in Quebec. Morrison, a native of Lewis, returned from the prairies in 1888 to find that, although he had been sending back regular remittances, his father’s homestead had been lost to a creditor and was occupied by French-speaking owners. After shooting dead the American law officer deputized to arrest him for harassing the new owners, he was sheltered for ten months by fellow Highlanders in a gesture of community solidarity and opposition to what they felt was the takeover of the Megantic area by French speakers. Morrison was eventually arrested during Easter weekend 1889, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, where he died of tuberculosis in 1894.
Donald Morrison’s seven-year Western sojourn reflected the prairie fever that drew many Hebrideans to Manitoba and the NorthWest Territories in the 1870s and 1880s, directly from Scotland as well as from the Eastern Townships. ‘I am very glad for my change from the old Benbecula to the new Benbecula,’ 6 wrote Angus MacCormic fromWapella in the NorthWest Territories, although the Benbecula colony of ten Long Island families created by Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart in 1883 was in fact the product of proprietorial duress more than the participants’ desire. Five years later continuing Highland poverty and land congestion were reflected in the settlement of seventy-nine Hebridean families at Killarney and Saltcoats, after the Napier Commission had recommended that state-subsidized emigration should constitute part of the economic rescue programme for the Highlands. To the Highlanders the barren prairie presented a topography as hostile as that of the wooded Eastern Townships had done earlier, but the distance between homesteads made it more difficult for them to seek solace and support from their fellow colonists. The Countess of Aberdeen, on an official visit to Killarney in 1890, was so struck by the settlers’ lonely isolation and the ‘inexpressible dreariness of these everlasting prairies’7 that she subsequently spearheaded the formation of a society that aimed to bridge the gulf between their old and new worlds. During a stopover inWinnipeg a month later, she addressed a 1,400-strong women’s meeting at Knox Church. After recalling her distress at the homesteaders’ plight, she urged her audience to organize local collections of magazines, books and newspapers and at regular intervals to dispatch parcels of this reading material, along with flower seeds and small ornaments, to isolated prairie homesteads. So was born the Aberdeen Association for the Distribution of Literature to Settlers in the West. Its members — initially only in Winnipeg but before long in other cities across Canada and Britain — corresponded regularly with hundreds of prairie settlers right up until the First World War, assisted by the subsidies Lady Aberdeen secured from a number of transatlantic shipping companies, as well as the Canadian Pacific Railway, which transported the literature parcels free of charge.
It was not only in formal colonies that Highlanders tried — or were assisted — to re-create their lost homeland. As we have seen, their eighteenth-century predilection for emigrating in extended family or community groups was continued into the nineteenth century, when whole districts were sometimes depopulated at one fell swoop under the auspices of government agencies, specialist societies or individual landlords. Highland identity was most visible in Atlantic Canada. For much of the nineteenth century Gaelic remained the working language of large parts of Nova Scotia and in 1871 Scottish origin was claimed by over 79 per cent of the population of the four eastern counties of the province. 8 Numerous cemetery inscriptions bear testimony to the fact that Highlanders continued to flock to Cape Breton Island in particular, not just for reasons of eighteenth-century precedent but also because its topography reminded many of them of their Hebridean origins. Prince Edward Island too attracted a significant influx from the north of Skye, following in the footsteps of Lord Selkirk’s colonists of 1803. The eighty-four families who arrived in 1829 commemorated their area of origin by founding the settlement of Uigg adjacent to Selkirk’s Belfast settlement. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s they were joined by many others from Lord MacDonald’s estates in Kilmuir, Snizort and Portree, though Skye emigrants were also drawn to established Scottish communities in other parts of the island. For these emigrants, the prospect of preserving their identity overrode the better land, climate and employment opportunities available in Upper Canada, a priority that did not go unnoticed by John Bowie. In 1841 he explained to the select committee on Highland emigration why 1,250 of
the 1,850 emigrants whose removal from Skye he had organized since 1837 had gone to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton:
The parties preferred those districts in consequence of many of their countrymen having previously settled there; and in consequence of the representations sent home to them, last year there were 700 or 800 went from Skye; and the parties had not been long in their new country before they wrote home such favourable accounts to their friends, that parties are now anxious and many are now actually arranging to go out as soon as they can procure the means. 9
Wherever they went, from Canada’s Atlantic seaboard to Antipodean locations like the Hunter Valley in New South Wales and Waipu in New Zealand, Highlanders were enabled to retain their distinctiveness partly by the concentrated and often isolated nature of much of their settlement, but more explicitly by the Gaelic language, which some commentators regarded as the major hallmark of their identity. In Glengarry, Ontario, ‘they retain many of the habits of their native country; they generally converse in the Gaelic language, some of them use no other,’ declared a Canadian witness to the select committee on Highland emigration in 1841. 10 As we have seen, Gaels were encouraged to emigrate to Canada by the publication of promotional literature in their own language, notably Robert MacDougall’s guidebook, Ceann-Iuil an Fhir-Imrich do dh’America Mu-Thuath (The Emigrant’s Guide to North America) (1841) and Dr Norman McLeod’s periodical, Cuairtear nan Gleann. Readers were reminded of more than the material benefits of emigration. Cuairtear assured them that they could continue or reinstate their old way of life among welcoming compatriots, with the harshness of the Canadian winter mitigated by the opportunity to socialize, ‘visiting and ceilidhing between homes, plenty to be had and to be spared, and the friendliest entertainment and hospitality to be had’. 11 MacDougall, who relied heavily on familiar Scottish analogies to describe Canada and the Canadians, was lost for words when it came to the cold of winter: ‘My ears have felt it, but though they have, I have no words to describe its harshness, as in truth, the Gaelic language is not capable of describing it.’ 12 MacDougall also instructed emigrants on how to preserve their culture and their morals, as well as their fingers and toes, in the new land:
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 44
