Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  They are not keeping the Sabbath here at all. They are shooting and cutting firewood the same as on other days. I saw a man one Sabbath-day cutting a tree with an axe. He was a shoemaker. When I was speaking to him about the Sabbath-day, he said he was so busy through the week he could not cut fire-wood. I went into his house, and one of his boys came in and said, Father, you must mend my shoes to-morrow. The old man said, you can mend them yourself. Yes, said the son, but I have no time, as I must be early to my work. You can mend them today, said the old man. I’ll not mend them on Sunday, said the son; on which the father took a stick and made the poor boy break the holy day of rest by mending them on the Sunday. 79

  Further south, the tropical climate of the Caribbean seems to have undermined the morals, as well as the health, of Scottish emigrants. In British Guiana, they won striking material success but lost both their inhibitions and their integrity, as self-indulgence replaced sobriety, and their clannishness became the subject of local derision:

  there is perhaps no class of European emigrants that has undergone such changes in their natural habits. The reserve, the temperance, the zeal for religion which characterised them in their own country, became gradually obliterated in their translation to this colony. They still associated together, and sustained each other in the true spirit of nationality, carrying this principle of cohesion indeed so far that the shrewd negroes applied the term of Scotchmen to the large shrimps which they were in the habit of hawking about for sale, because of the habits of these creatures in clinging one to the other. But, separated from the austere influence of domestic examples at home, and cast into a community very differently organised, they plunged as readily as others into the vortex of dissipation. In reference to a great many, it may be observed, that much of this change was owing to the fact of their being introduced on their arrival to a footing in society, and to a mode of living to which they had been previously strangers in ‘Auld Reekie ’. Mingling in more pretending and extravagant circles, and living in a style superior to that in which they had been brought up, they soon came to lose that simplicity and sobriety of character which, as a nation, they have so meritoriously maintained. They have been more successful in business notwithstanding than most of the other settlers from England and Ireland, but they have also encountered greater reverses, and although forming a majority of the white population, they have failed to impart their nationality to the colony. 80

  Elsewhere in the Caribbean too, the legendary frugality, industry and business acumen of the Scots were coupled with debauchery, boorishness and the complete absence of the cerebral symbols of Scottishness so lauded in other emigrant destinations. Lady Maria Nugent, whose husband served as Lieutenant- General of Jamaica for four years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, recalled an encounter with an unsavoury but successful Scottish plantation overseer:

  The overseer’s chere amie, and no man here is without one, is a tall black woman, well made, with a very flat nose, thick lips, and a skin of ebony, highly polished and shining. She shewed me her three yellow children, and said, with some ostentation, she should soon have another. The marked attention of the other women, plainly proved her to be the favourite Sultana of this vulgar, ugly, Scotch Sultan, who is about fifty, clumsy, ill made, and dirty. He had a dingy, sallow-brown complexion, and only two yellow discoloured tusks, by way of teeth. However, they say he is a good overseer; so at least his brother Scotchmen told me, and there is no one here to contradict him, as almost all agents, attornies, merchants and shopkeepers, are of that country, and really do deserve to thrive in this, they are so industrious. 81

  Particularly reprehensible — but unpunished — was the conduct of one of his fellow countrymen recounted by the Scot John Anderson, Special Magistrate in St Vincent:

  A Scotsman — (I blush to write it) who resided to Leeward was on another occasion being rowed to Kingstown in his canoe, on board of which was a runaway slave, whose neck for greater security he had encircled with an iron collar, attached to a heavy weight — which the unfortunate wretch supported in his hands, or on his head, when in motion. As they coasted along, he seized as he conceived, a favourable moment for escape, and leapt into the waves. ‘Hout away mon’ said Sawney, ‘are ye gaen that gait? Then tak it a wi you’; — & suiting the action to the word, he threw over the ponderous ball — and as the poor slave was sucked into the vortex the momentary bubble of water announced that an immortal spirit was struggling to be free. The reins of authority were too loosely held, to bring retributive Justice on the tyrant. The deed — and the perpetrator became known, but the murderer was never called to account. 82

  But even if Scots retained their religious and cultural identity, it could still be a source of discord or a stumbling block rather than an asset. Distinctiveness was certainly interpreted negatively in a stinging diatribe against the Scots of Pictou in 1859 which disparaged them as ‘a canting, covenanting, oat-eating, money-griping tribe of second-hand Scotch Presbyterians; a transplanted, degenerate, barren patch of high cheek-bones and red hair, with nothing cleaving to them of the original stock, except covetousness and that peculiar cuta-neous eruption for which the mother country is celebrated’. 83 Further west, in Killarney, the sabbatarianism of the Hebridean emigrants in the 1880s irritated their less legalistic Protestant neighbours, who could not understand why men did not shave on Sunday, or why the potatoes remained unpeeled, the cream unseparated and the lakes unfished on the Sabbath. 84 The Gaelic language too isolated these emigrants unhelpfully from their more experienced neighbours. ‘Gaelic may be a very nice and expressive dialect but you cannot raise wheat from it, and these people had nothing else,’ commented T. J. Lawlor, the Killar-ney merchant who supplied the new arrivals with seed corn and seven years later reflected on the reasons for the colonists’ limited success. 85 His views echoed those expressed a generation earlier by the Dundas Warden, in respect of the 1,100 emigrants sent from Barra to Ontario in 1851. While the inability of all but a handful of the emigrants to speak English may have reinforced their ethnic identity, the newspaper was of the opinion that their monolingualism seriously impeded their ability to capitalize on any of the benefits emigration might offer them, concluding as a result that, for these impecunious Hebrideans, ‘emigration is more cruel than banishment’. 86

  Contemporary opinion was divided over whether specially created ethnic colonies were a blessing or a curse. Some, like William Brown, were utterly convinced of their value, especially as a social cement, but others were concerned that they encouraged an isolating introspectiveness that prevented the settlers interacting with their more experienced neighbours and rendered them vulnerable to economic failure. By remaining socially distinct, the Killarney settlers missed the opportunity to learn crucial new skills from earlier settlers, and their poor agricultural techniques were heavily criticized by the Imperial Colonisation Board. Ethnically autonomous settlements could also be disputatious settlements, another charge levelled at the Killarney emigrants, whose assimilation was made more difficult by their history of collaborative political agitation in the crofters’ war, and their tendency to look to Scotland for redress of the grievances that they identified and discussed in their new Canadian environment. In the opinion of A. M. Burgess of the Canadian Department of the Interior:

  The Crofters and the Highland people generally are excellent settlers when they emigrate of their own accord, and are placed alongside of people of other nationalities, but when settled in compact body they are like the Indians in that they spend a great deal of time in talking over their grievances, real or fancied … they are content to make very little progress when left to themselves. 87

  Finally, we have to address the issue of spurious identity. Did Scots overseas, deliberately or subconsciously, filter out memories of home that did not fit the prevailing orthodoxy of either brutal expulsion or the sentimentalized ‘kail-yard’ image of rural domesticity? Inevitably, emigrants’ memories of their homeland — frozen in their mind
s at the time of departure — became increasingly divorced from reality as the years passed, but in some cases the image and the reality had never coincided. Perhaps the preservation or refashioning of their ethnic identity overseas was only sustainable if the emigrants exaggerated either the evils that had driven them away or the attributes of Scotland that made its memory worth celebrating. As a result, the Scotland they remembered in exile was generally larger than life, or even a complete figment of their imagination. While for some the construction of such an ersatz identity was the means of giving a corporate rationale to a dislocating experience, for others it was simply a piece of occasional fun. As E. J. Cowan has suggested, ‘Whether attending balls or Burns suppers, there was an element of the carnivalesque involved; one or two annual wallowings in Scottish culture, bathos and nostalgia enabled people to act like normal human beings … throughout the rest of the year.’ 88

  But there was also a commercial dimension to the fashioning of a Scottish identity overseas. Scotland’s growing tourist industry in the nineteenth century owed much to the romantic lure of an invented Highland landscape promoted in word and picture by Sir Walter Scott and Sir Edwin Landseer respectively. Although — or because — such images distorted the reality of a country where, by the end of the century, four-fifths of the population lived in the urban-industrial central Lowlands, they were immensely popular overseas, where they further exacerbated the ‘tartanization’ of the Scottish emigrant culture. Nowhere was this more evident than in Nova Scotia, which in the late nineteenth century began to recognize the commercial value of its Scottish connections. Later, during the 1930s depression, it ‘began parading its Scottishness … as a calculated and self-conscious promotion for the tourist industry’. 89 Premier Angus L. Macdonald coupled his personal enthusiasm for Scotland with a drive to promote the Gaelic heritage of economically vulnerable areas, even if that meant ignoring the existence of other ethnic groups. The result was the simultaneous creation of the Cabot Trail and the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, to which was later added the Lone Sheiling, a completely spurious replica of a Highland settler’s home, built of stone and thatch (rather than the wood that the emigrants actually used) along the most northerly stretch of the Cabot Trail. Elsewhere too Caledonian games and Scottish societies were used as tourist bait, particularly in the wake of the burgeoning interest in genealogy in the second half of the twentieth century. Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in North Carolina is currently the biggest — and most Disneyfied — gathering on the international circuit of such events.

  In the headlong rush to claim and capitalize on Scottish origins, accurate analysis has sometimes been sacrificed to a fuzzy stereotype in which all Scots were portrayed as brothers, marching forth in honourable poverty from the land of the but and ben to win fame, fortune and universal respect as explorers, fur traders, soldiers, farmers, businessmen, clerics, educators and politicians from the Arctic to the Antipodes. The uncomfortable truth that evicted Highlanders in turn displaced Native Americans and Australian Aborigines is conveniently forgotten, as is the fact that Scots did not always bury their differences when they emigrated. No doubt it is true that in the melting pot of the emigrant experience, different motives for remembering home, different mechanisms of remembrance, and different memories — real and artificial — converged to some extent into a single stream of Scottishness. Robert Louis Stevenson certainly claimed that when Scot met Scot overseas, differences of origin, language and religion were forgotten, and ‘Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scottish.’ 90 But not always, for Scots exported their prejudices and their quarrels as well as their brotherly affections, as is evident from even a cursory glance at the colonial manifestations of Scottish theological disputes and Highland—Lowland rivalries. Lowland Scots such as John Galt and William Gilkison actively discouraged Gaels from settling in Guelph and Elora, the towns they respectively founded in Upper Canada, and although refugees from the Highland famine were initially given relief in Fergus, by the early 1850s they had become an embarrassment and were being pushed south to townships around Lake Erie. 91

  Conclusion : a Scottish diaspora?

  The predominance of Canadian examples in this book is not accidental. It is attributable partly to the longer history of Scottish settlement in Canada, at least in comparison with Australia and New Zealand, where the influence of Wake-field’s principles of systematic colonization, the different socio-economic structure and the emphasis on creating a new national identity may have made it more difficult to establish distinctive Scottish communities. But that does not fully explain why Scottish identity was far more visible in Canada than in the United States, since North America as a whole had a strong eighteenth-century tradition of Scottish settlement. One clue, as we have suggested, lies in the ease with which a skilled Scottish workforce, the product of an advanced economy and a literate society, could respond to the requirements of American industry. But also important was the fundamental difference in the immigration philosophies developed by the two countries. Whereas the preference of the United States for the concept of a melting pot perhaps tended to obscure the visibility of individual immigrant groups — particularly those who, like the Scots, were not consistently oppressed or victimized — the mosaic approach favoured by Canada allowed the Scots, like other immigrant groups, to retain and promote their ethnicity with confidence. Perhaps we can therefore claim that in Canada, to a greater extent than in other areas of Scottish settlement, issues of identity, isolation and integration were easily recognizable, hotly debated and even definable in terms of a diaspora.

  On closer examination, however, the definition of Scottish emigration as a diaspora may be more widely applicable. While it clearly cannot be defined in the Jewish sense of the complete scattering of a nation under persecution, many emigrants not only brought cultural, social and economic ideas from the homeland but also nurtured and replicated them with such tenacity that key features of the Scottish psyche became deeply embedded in the culture of the host societies. Dr Johnson’s assertion that communities of emigrant Scots in the 1770s ‘change nothing but the place of their abode ’ was equally true of the nineteenth century, as many emigrants, consciously or otherwise, created enduring ethnic colonies on the North American prairie, the South African veld and the Antipodean or Falkland Islands sheep station. Yet this was not true of all who left Scotland. Johnson’s observation was confined to those who emigrated in neighbourhood parties, whose ‘departure from their native country is no longer exile’ and who ‘carry with them their language, their opinions, their popular songs, and hereditary merriment’. Solitary emigrants, on the other hand, he believed, lacked any ability to imprint their identity on the new land, since ‘their power consisted in their concentration: when they are dispersed, they have no effect’. 92 This trend too was evident in the nineteenth century, among those whose main objective was to put the past behind them and capitalize on the opportunities of a new land by integrating into the host society as quickly and as imperceptibly as possible.

  The extent to which emigrants wished to remember seems to have depended not on factors such as gender, occupation or location per se, but on whether they regarded themselves as passive exiles or active adventurers. Exiles remembered in song and story in order to commemorate and justify a traumatic experience, while adventurers remembered in practical collaboration if it was in their individual interest to do so. On the basis of this definition, it might be argued that the cultivation of memory — including spurious memory — was primarily the preserve of Highlanders. Their culture and experiences combined to create in them a greater psychological need to remember, and therefore a particularly potent image of a diaspora, which predated their settlement overseas, and was couched in terms of enforced removal rather than positive choice. Their predilection for group settlement in isolated locations facilitated the transfer of their corporate identity, since they were not compelled to adjust to other cultures, but could reconstruct the world th
ey had lost, with all its memories, real and invented.

  Lowlanders’ attitudes, on the other hand, tended to be pragmatic rather than romantic. Caribbean planters who cultivated business and social links with fellow countrymen, timber merchants who monopolized the Maritime and St Lawrence trade in the early nineteenth century, tradesmen who competed for skilled jobs on the USA’s industrial frontier and wealthy pastoralists who endowed educational and religious institutions across Australia generally played the ethnic card in pursuit of individual economic betterment rather than cultural solidarity. Most Lowlanders were not burdened with a sense of guilt about abandoning the land of their fathers and therefore felt little need to justify their decision to emigrate by attributing it exclusively to negative factors beyond their control. Their more individualistic, ambitious approach made them less inclined overtly to cultivate memories of home, and that in turn inhibited the development of a clear concept of diaspora or even shared experience. The consequence of this has been the misleading — but persistent — application of the powerful Highland memories and definition of diaspora to the overall Scottish exodus.

  But Scottish emigrants did not fall into watertight compartments. While Highlanders may have been more inclined to kin-based concentrated settlement and the cultivation of memory, and Lowlanders to individualistic dispersal, the experience of uprooting often engendered, even in individualists, an unexpected desire to proclaim their identity and erase regional and cultural differences. If they differed in the way they remembered home, in practice there was often little difference in the ways that they demonstrated and capitalized on their identity overseas. Highland emigrants might be set apart by language, and might have regarded the cultivation of Celtic contacts primarily as a means of preserving their culture, but that did not prevent them from using those contacts in pursuit of their economic and social betterment. Remembering and forgetting were moulded to fit their changing circumstances and ambitions and, as we have seen, there was no common memory or single mythology of emigration, even among cleared Highlanders. Conversely, Lowlanders who might have been more inclined to highlight the practical economic applications of the emblems of diaspora often came to value the cultural functions of those emblems, particularly if the experience of emigrating had provoked in them a feeling of rootlessness. And the emblems themselves were often identical, for both Highlanders and Lowlanders made equal use of the formal mechanisms of church, school and Scottish society, and the informal mechanisms of place names, correspondence, family and community networks and chain migration to preserve, articulate and even invent their memories and identity. The Aber-donians who settled in Nichol Township in the 1830s christened their settlement Bon Accord, after the motto of their native city, while their neighbours in Fergus constructed dormer-windowed stone houses in the style of the homeland and put a high priority on the early establishment of church and school. Further east, Scots in Montreal’s mercantile community not only did business with each other but also paraded their origins through the thistle and saltire iconography engraved into their commercial buildings, while the 900-strong Scotch Colony in the forested depths of New Brunswick displayed many of the features more commonly associated with the isolated group settlements favoured by Highland emigrants.