Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  The settlement at St Ann’s did not see an end to the colonists’ wanderings, however. Between 1851 and 1860 McLeod persuaded about 900 of his followers to leave Cape Breton for South Australia, Victoria, and ultimately for New Zealand, in six vessels which they again built themselves. Following encouraging letters from McLeod’s son in Adelaide, the first two ships sailed for that port in 1851 and 1852. Unimpressed with prospects there, and McLeod junior having disappeared to Victoria, the pioneers, led by their minister, halted briefly at Melbourne, where McLeod was distinctly unimpressed with the moral tone of a society convulsed by gold fever. After making a reconnaissance trip to New Zealand, the Normanites finally settled on a 30,000-acre tract at Waipu, north of Auckland, where they were subsequently joined by other shiploads direct from St Ann’s. By 1860 there was a 1,000-strong Highland community at Waipu, and McLeod had successfully reconstituted the unique, cooperative, Gaelic-speaking community which he had first created and presided over at Pictou fifty years earlier.

  Fourteen years before McLeod set foot in Australia, an equally magnetic and controversial Scottish cleric had organized the removal of nearly 4,000 impoverished Highlanders to New South Wales. John Dunmore Lang had originally emigrated in 1823 on his brother’s advice that Sydney’s settlers needed a Presbyterian minister, and from 1826 until his death in 1878 he pastored the Scots Church which he founded there. He was also an assiduous writer, traveller and emigration agent, establishing three newspapers and publishing almost 300 books and pamphlets. His first major work, An Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, was completed during the third of nine trips back to Britain, undertaken to recruit ministers and Christian settlers and to seek government and public support for religious, educational and colonization projects. Lang advocated selective Protestant emigration in order to relieve poverty in Britain and effect the moral regeneration of Australian society, dominated by convicts and Catholics. The success of his first recruits, fifty-four ‘Scotch Mechanics’ and their families who accompanied him to Sydney in 1831 to build a Presbyterian college, led him to organize several further emigrant parties, including the Highland contingent of 1837, many of whom were given land grants on his brother’s extensive estate in the Hunter Valley. Although Lang’s outspokenness in ecclesiastical and political affairs provoked hostility and four times landed him in prison, he was for fifty years Australia’s best-known Scot, a firm advocate of the transfer of Presbyterian identity, and his funeral in 1878 brought the city of Sydney to a complete standstill.

  Some clergymen were initially reluctant to accompany emigrant parties, as Donald Meek has demonstrated in the case of a number of Congregational and Baptist pastors who left the Highlands for Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of these men, Dugald Sinclair of Lochgilphead, refused regular requests from former members of his congregation to join them in Upper Canada, until in 1831, ‘finding … that a great part of the church had determined to follow their friends and brethren this year, he saw it his duty to accompany them, along with his family’. 32 Dissenting pastors may have actually found it easier than Established Church ministers to emigrate with their flocks, suggests Meek, partly because their removal did not have to be sanctioned by any central body and partly because their meagre stipends and lack of manses and glebes forced them to take secular employment alongside their people, which further cemented their identification with them. The decision to throw in their lot with their congregations was also influenced by the concept of spiritual kinship that was particularly highly developed within evangelicalism — both dissenting and Presbyterian — which encouraged a particular affinity between ministers and members of churches, as well as within the membership. For these brothers and sisters in faith, the emigrant experience was a spiritual, as well as a physical, journey to a land where members of the pilgrim family were covenanted to support each other in re-establishing their corporate identity.

  It is neither coincidental nor surprising that the foregoing examples all relate to Highland emigration. Most recorded instances of clergymen accompanying Scottish emigrants come from the Highlands, where the communal nature of much emigration made it likely that the clergyman, a pivotal figure in the local community, would play an integral part in the planning and implementation of an exodus. Catholic priests, Presbyterian ministers and dissenting pastors alike stood with their people in deploring the economic and social dislocation that had necessitated emigration, but at the same time they often sanctioned the decision to leave as a means of both escaping from deteriorating conditions at home and reconstituting the old way of life overseas. Their crucial role was further enhanced by the way in which Highland emigration was sometimes equated with Old Testament accounts of the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt and their subsequent exodus under Moses into the Promised Land. This analogy was not made because the Highlanders’ departure stemmed from religious persecution; even the South Uist emigrants of 1772 were provoked more by economic and social pressures than by attempts to convert them to Protestantism. Yet, as we saw in the context of Gaelic poetry, the portrayal of emigration as an enforced exile, and its endowment with a religious symbolism, enabled a deeply conservative people to legitimize what for them was a very radical reaction to the secular challenges of modernization, a reaction which would otherwise constitute the betrayal of traditional loyalties. The trauma of leaving home also made the emigrants particularly responsive to eve-of-departure sermons which assured them of God’s protection during the coming trials of voyage and settlement. ‘Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you’ (1 Peter 5:7) was the theme of the parting sermon preached by the Congregational minister of Sannox, Arran, to a Canada-bound contingent of cleared islanders in 1829. And when a shipload of Skye emigrants embarked at Greenock for Melbourne in July 1852, they were addressed by the Reverend Dr Norman McLeod, whose Gaelic exhortations were witnessed and reported on by the Glasgow Constitutional:

  At great length … the 23rd Psalm was sung, amidst much sobbing, and under very deep impressions … Not one bitter word was spoken against landlord or factor. They declared, in very touching language, that they went forth trusting in God, as did Abraham of old, not doubting that he was sent of God for purposes of good. 33

  Highland emigrants did not have a monopoly on either clerical leadership or specially created Christian colonies. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, the province of Otago in New Zealand, founded by the Reverend Thomas Burns and Captain William Cargill, was the brainchild of the Free Church of Scotland, and was unambiguously promoted as a Christian colony for Lowland Presbyterians. In the event, however, religious enthusiasm was more apparent among the promoters than the settlers, and Otago did not become a church settlement in the manner its founders had envisaged. Once in the colony, the settlers refused to follow Cargill’s advice to keep Presbyterianism as ‘the religion of the place ’ and in 1854 the Provincial Council insisted that colonists should be invited from the whole of the British Isles, with an emigration agent being appointed in England. 34

  Settlements such as Otago and individuals such as Thomas Burns, Norman McLeod and John Dunmore Lang were the exception rather than the rule. Most clergymen went overseas as a result of pleas from Scottish settlers in scattered locations, rather than on their own initiative or at the head of a Christian colony. In new emigrant communities high priority was often given to the establishment of a church, and would-be settlers kept an eye open for evidence of this pivotal symbol of Scottish identity. When George Elmslie was sent to Nichol Township to purchase land on behalf of his friends in 1834, he was instructed to ensure that church and school were both within ‘reasonable distance ’. In 1866 Charles Farquharson was persuaded to join his Deeside relatives in Tilbury East partly because of the proximity of church and school, as well as the induction a year earlier of the Reverend William Troop from the Deeside village of Bal-later. 35 Emigrants often looked to their home communities to supply them with pastors. In 1831 Donald Hendry left Sannox in Arra
n to minister to a group of emigrants from his home church who had settled in Megantic County, Quebec, while the second pastor of Breadalbane Baptist Church in Glengarry County, Ontario, Duncan Cameron, came, like his flock, from Lawers in Perthshire. When Peter MacLean went to Whycocomagh in Cape Breton in 1837 at the request of his fellow islanders from Lewis, he presided over a notable revival in the district before returning to Lewis four years later. And Alexander MacFadyen of Tiree, a Baptist minister who emigrated to Canada in 1867, initially struggled as a missionary among the Roman Catholics of Quebec, but eventually (in 1884) found his spiritual home among a substantial community of fellow islanders at Tiverton Baptist Church, Bruce County, Ontario. 36

  16. Scottish Church, Collins Street, Melbourne, 1874, from MelbourneViews , 1880

  From time to time emigrants grumbled about the lack of church provision. An unsigned appeal for a Presbyterian minister made by a group of early settlers in Cape Breton between 1780 and 1809 asked for ‘a pastor to tak care of our souls we have non of our Way heir only of the church of ingland and We was never Brought up in that Way’. 37 And Aberdeenshire emigrant George Forbes complained to his father in 1846 that demand vastly exceeded supply, at least in his township just north of Toronto, where ‘we have preaching every 2 sabbaths in the free church’. Both the Established and Free Churches were vacant, and only occasionally did they hear a visiting minister from Scotland. ‘There are,’ he lamented, ‘so many congregations and few ministers.’ 38

  The Scottish churches were acutely aware of the needs and were sometimes more anxious to supply clergymen than the settlers were to receive them, recognizing that not all emigrants gave priority to the preservation of their religion. As early as 1785 Catholic clergy in both Quebec and Nova Scotia expressed concern that inadequate provision of Gaelic-speaking priests was encouraging apathy, drift and loss of religious identity among the Scottish settlers. In Quebec, reported Father Roderick MacDonell of Culachie, ‘All the Highlanders and others from Scotland are doing very well in all respects except in that of religion.’ 39 In Nova Scotia, alleged Captain John MacDonald, up to 4,000 Catholics — Irish, Acadian, Indian and Scot — were ‘exceedingly ill off from the want of a Missionary’. He discouraged further emigration until a clergyman had been settled in Halifax, adding perceptively, ‘I fear Religion is at any rate too apt to become an inferior concern with the most that leave their own Country to try their fortunes any other where; certain I am they will not put themselves to great inconvenience for it.’ 40 Things had not improved greatly a generation later. Angus Bernard MacEacharn, who emigrated from the Small Isles to Prince Edward Island in 1790 and thirty-nine years later became Bishop of Charlottetown, tried to address the Highlanders’ spiritual needs in their own tongue, but complained for over thirty years of the persistent difficulties under which he laboured. The death of a colleague in December 1807 left him with sole responsibility for the island’s scattered Catholic population of almost 2,000, and he was aware of similar problems in Cape Breton and Lower Canada:

  It is a dreadful thing to see so many thousands, so scattered, I may say over these kingdoms, depend and look for all spiritual assistance from two hands now much the worse of the wear. Old men are not fit for these wild countries. It requires youth, and activity to move in all weathers by sea and by land in N America … I beg and beseech of you by all that is sacred to endeavour under God to send us two or three such men as you best know would suit these mixed Missions, where every person enjoys all the advantages of the British Constitution, but where at the same time, that equality, which is not so well understood anywhere, as in America, entitles every man to censure even an imaginary fault in his neighbour. 41

  By 1819 he was still ploughing a solitary furrow, aided only by a Canadian priest ‘who knows no Gaelic, and very little English’, and in 1820 he appealed again for assistance for his expanded sphere of duty:

  I have no less than 9 chapels, besides the French ones, very distant the one from the other, to attend. Fillin himself with all his speed and agility, would find himself hard put to in three or four feet of snow. The French Gentleman who is stationed on the Island, speaks little English, and not a word of the language of Morven [sic]. They have thought proper also to attach New Brunswick to my charge. St Johns, Frederickton, and Maramichie [sic] in the said extensive Province are without a Priest. I wish for the sake of Our Maker you could spare me one who can speak French, and if possible Gaelic. 42

  More than sixty years later the Reverend George Corbett of St Andrews, Ontario, was motivated more by cultural than religious priorities when he canvassed the Bishop of Oban to send out Gaelic-speaking Highlanders to replace those who had been lured from Eastern Canada to the prairies:

  I perceive, by the papers, that some of the tenants in Scotland are likely to emigrate this year. No doubt many of them are Catholics. I therefore take the liberty of stating that Ontario is as good a section of the Dominion as I know of. Labourers of every class are scarce and the children of those who speak little but gaelic will run great danger of loosing [sic] the faith unless they settle where their language is spoken. There have always been a few gaelic speaking priests in Stormont and Glengarry, Ont. Within the last twenty years numbers have been going away to the province of Manitoba and to the Western States … Many of them are returning, convinced that no place can compare with Ontario. Still there is room for more and I should prefer some of the Highland Class to fill up the vacancies and help to keep up the old gaelic language among us. 43

  Perhaps Corbett’s comments about the exodus to Manitoba led Bishop MacDonald to enquire about provision for Scottish Catholics on the prairies. At any rate, in May 1884 he received a letter from the Archbishop of St Boniface, informing him that there was ‘no priest talking Gaelic’ within his archdiocese and petitioning him ‘to send one of his good priests to reside amongst these poor people. They are in the midst of Protestants and they cannot safely be left a long time, without a pastor speaking their own language.’ 44 Two years later, the Reverend David Gillies, writing to MacDonald from the North West Territories, where he had recently taken up a charge among Gaelic-speaking crofter emigrants, reiterated the fear that his flock would be proselytized by neighbouring Protestants:

  The people are very good, full of faith, yet they are greatly exposed to loose [sic] it here unless they are looked after, as they are surrounded by protestant ministers on all sides, and who have funds to enable them to build churches and schools, while we must strive very hard, with empty hands, to get up small buildings wherein to assemble on Sundays. 45

  Unlike the Catholic Church, the less centralized Presbyterian denominations depended heavily on freewill offerings from Scottish congregations to meet overseas commitments. Until 1825 the Church of Scotland had no auxiliary body to support members in the colonies, but in that year a group of evangelical clergy and laity in the Synod of Glasgow formed the Society for Promoting the Religious Interests of Scottish Settlers in British North America, more commonly known as the Glasgow Colonial Society. Its President was the Tory MP and former Lord Provost of Glasgow Kirkman Finlay, who, as we saw earlier, helped to orchestrate the emigration of destitute weavers to Upper Canada in the 1820s. Through its branches all over Scotland, the society aimed to publicize the spiritual needs of Scottish emigrants, and raised funds to supply them with ministers, catechists and schoolmasters, who, it was hoped, would strengthen the commitment of the emigrants to their mother church. Like their Catholic counterparts, the Presbyterians were frustrated by lack of personnel and funds, and also seem to have had difficulty in persuading Scottish churchgoers to identify with their colonial brethren. In 1835, two years after he had been sent to minister to the Gaelic-speaking congregation at St James, New Brunswick, the Reverend P. McIntyre wrote to the society in some frustration:

  I trust that your most useful and benevolent Society will continue to prosper, and extend its sphere of usefulness. Your labours of love are so duly appreciated on this side of the
Atlantic, that it is a matter of wonder to us that you are not better patronized by the Scottish public. Why not write circular letters to every minister in Scotland, and earnestly urge them to bestir themselves, and procure for you — men and money? Surely the religious wants of America need only be told in order to excite the sympathy of every true-hearted Scotchman. Could the people of Scotland only cast an eye over the dense and unmeasured forests of America, and behold their expatriated countrymen, and their youthful offspring, immersed in the bosom of the trackless wilderness, and, like trees and plants that surround them, left to the care of nature, without the labour of a single vine-dresser to prepare them for the vineyard above; could they behold many of them growing up in heathen ignorance and utter unconcern about their immortal spirits; and hear others, with tears in their eyes, lamenting the loss of those religious privileges which they once enjoyed, but from the enjoyment of which poverty and iron-hearted oppression expelled them; could the people of Scotland, I say, witness such scenes, a tide of sympathy would roll from Johnny Groat’s to Galloway, and thousands instead of hundreds would flow into the coffers of the Colonial Society. But alas! Scotland knows neither our wants nor her own privileges.46