After some months of expectation and anxiety, Dr Boyter, the Government emigration agent for Australia, arrived at Fort William. The news of his arrival, like the fiery cross of old, soon spread through every glen in the district, and at an early hour on the Monday, thousands of enterprising Gaels might be seen ranked around the Caledonian Hotel, anxious to quit the land of their forefathers and to go and possess the unbounded pastures of Australia. While we regret that so many active men should feel it necessary to leave their own Country, the Highlands will be considerably relieved of its overplus population. 42
Australia again became the focus of emigrant attention in the wake of the Great Highland Famine. Between 1852 and 1858 the Highland and Island Emigration Society expedited the removal to the Antipodes of almost 5,000 ‘surplus’ Highlanders from ten impoverished western estates. The Society was initially conceived by Sheriff Substitute Thomas Fraser of Skye as a small-scale charitable venture to enable more islanders to emigrate under the auspices of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission after the cessation of the ineffective government-funded famine relief and improvement schemes. It quickly evolved, however, into what T. M. Devine has aptly described as ‘a government project in all but name’. 43 At the helm were two implacable opponents of charitable relief, Sir John McNeill and, more significantly, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury and until 1850 the civil servant primarily responsible for Irish famine relief. Their aim was to develop a tripartite scheme involving landlords, the Emigration Commission and the Society, by means of which entire families would be sent to Australia in the confident expectation that they would readily adapt to pastoral occupations and replace the labour which had deserted to the gold fields. Responsibilities were clearly demarcated, with landlords paying a third of the cost of removal (approximately £1 per head), the Emigration Commission waiving some of its regulations on eligibility, and the Society defraying the cost of outfit, conveyance to the embarkation port and the passage of eligible emigrants. Emigrants were expected to repay the Society’s expenses in due course, while landlords could reduce their expenditure by taking advantage of the government’s only legislative concession to the famine, the Emigration Advances Act of 1851, which allowed them to borrow money at favourable interest rates to assist the emigration of tenants.
Highland emigration to the Antipodes was sporadic rather than steady, the product of specific, short-lived schemes. Much larger numbers went to Canada, increasingly financed by landlords who were becoming convinced both that it was the only alternative to tenant starvation and proprietorial bankruptcy, and that the government was unlikely to relieve them of their responsibility through systematic or long-term state aid. The Scotsman of 25 August 1849 estimated that the previous decade had seen 20,000 Highlanders emigrate to Canada, while in that season alone almost 4,000 had left Glenelg and South Uist. The tally increased in the early 1850s, as Outer Hebridean proprietors in particular responded to persistent famine and the facilities of the Emigration Advances Act with intensified emigration programmes. Of 14,000 emigrants estimated to have been assisted by Highland landlords between 1815 and 1856, almost 11,000 left in the decade 1846—56, with Sir James Matheson of Lewis, John Gordon of Cluny, proprietor of South Uist and Barra, and the Duke of Argyll among the most active participants in that era. Gordon dispatched 3,200 tenants to Canada, 2,337 were sent out from Lewis and one-third of the entire population left the Duke of Argyll’s island of Tiree. 44
2. A Coronach in the Backwoods, oil painting by George W. Simson, 1859. The emigrant is playing a lament (coronach) beside his weeping wife after receiving news from home. He is shown with the axe he has used to clear the forest. In the background stands the log cabin he has built.
But did the tenants really wish to emigrate? Were they encouraged or coerced? The Inverness Courier, as we have seen, was in no doubt in 1838 that the surplus population of the Highlands was happy to emigrate to Australia under the auspices of the Colonial Land Fund. Official agencies reinforced their pro-emigration rhetoric by emphasizing the Highlanders’ ‘great disposition’ to go overseas, attracted by prospects of ‘a comfortable independence after the lapse of a year or two’. 45 ‘Their prejudices against emigration are entirely gone,’ declared Norman McLeod to the Poor Law Commissioners in 1844, while Lord MacDonald’s Skye and North Uist tenants had displayed, according to John Bowie’s evidence to the same inquiry, ‘an anxious desire to emigrate ’. 46 Sir John McNeill noted that James Ewan Baillie, the Bristol merchant and banker who was proprietor of Glenelg and Lochalsh, and John Gordon had received petitions from tenants wishing to emigrate. On Gordon’s Hebridean estates ‘men of all classes and denominations’ agreed that the people ’s plight ‘would have been more wretched than it is had not the proprietor enabled a considerable number to emigrate ’, while Hector McRae, a crofter at Inverinite in Kintail, told McNeill, ‘There are many persons who would desire to emigrate if they could find the means of carrying themselves and their families to one of the colonies.’ 47
But such apparent enthusiasm should be taken with a pinch of salt. Even in the 1820s the ‘desire ’ to emigrate was generated by poverty, and the reluctance of some of the Rum emigrants did not go unnoticed at the time. Although bounty emigration in the late 1830s was partly a response to agency propaganda and should not be equated with landlord-instigated clearances, the catalysts for most emigrants were famine and high rents. In the 1840s and 1850s the correlation of clearance and emigration became much more distinct, and in both Canada and Australia they came to be seen as ‘two sides of the same coin’. 48 It was in this period that the negative concept of enforced exile became firmly embedded in the psyche of emigrants and commentators alike, and even the reports of those who promoted emigration contain clues that many Highlanders did not share their views. Thomas Knox, chamberlain of Lewis, and a supporter of the replacement of people by sheep, told the 1841 Select Committee that seventy emigrants, whose passage three years earlier had been paid by the landlord, Stewart Mackenzie of Seaforth, ‘did not wish to go, but farms were cleared to make sheep walks’. And Duncan Shaw, factor for Harris and North Uist, described to the same inquiry the way in which troops had been used in an abortive attempt to orchestrate eviction and emigration from the farm of Borve in Harris in order to lease it to a single sheepmaster:
Three years were allowed them to prepare. At Martinmas 1838, they were told they must remove at Whitsuntide 1839. Such of them as from age or other infirmities were unfit subjects for emigration, were offered better lands elsewhere in Harris; those able to emigrate were informed their whole arrears would be passed from, that they and their families would be landed free of expense, with the proceeds of their crop and stock of cattle in their pockets, either at Cape Breton, where their friends and countrymen were already settled, or in Canada, at their choice; these offers were then considered generous, and no objection was made to them. In the meantime, however, occurrences of an unpleasant nature had taken place in the neighbouring island of Skye. Some people on the estate of Macleod fearing a removal, wrote threatening letters to MacLeod, of Macleod, and his factor. Inflammatory proclamations of the same description were posted on the church doors, and some sheep belonging to a sheep grazier were houghed and killed … Exaggerated accounts of these occurrences soon reached Harris, and joined with bad advices from those who ought to have known better, wrought an immediate change on the tempers of the people … they defied and severely maltreated the officers of the law. 49
The evidence of three clerics to the Poor Law Commissioners painted a picture of reluctance rather than of enthusiasm. John McKinnon of Strath in Skye reported that the islanders were ‘not disposed to emigrate if they can live comfortably at home’, while Colin McDonald of Portree believed that unenthusiastic reports from earlier emigrants had made people ‘not so much inclined’ to follow their example. More emphatic was the statement of the minister of the Small Isles, who was ‘persuaded that nothing but absolute distress in
the parish’ would induce his parishioners to emigrate, since ‘they are so much attached to their native parish.’ 50 Similar evidence was presented to Sir John McNeill. The people of Kilfinichen in Mull, especially the poorest, were generally ‘not inclined to emigrate ’, while witnesses in Kishorn and Torridon had ‘no reason to believe ’ that crofters had any desire to go overseas. McNeill also referred to opposition to emigration in Lewis and Harris, where proprietorial offers to cancel arrears, supply provisions and fund passages had been cold shouldered by the population. It was clearly a sensitive subject. Not only did McNeill observe that ‘several persons’ who acknowledged their support for emigration in conversation were unwilling to confirm their views in written evidence, ‘fearing that such an assertion of their opinion might give umbrage to persons whom they desired not to offend’. In Glenelg, James Ewan Baillie’s fear of being accused of enforced clearance led him to make his offer of cancelled arrears and free passages conditional on the emigrants pulling down their houses before departure and funding their way to the Clyde ports. Not surprisingly, his offer attracted only one applicant, although twenty-five years earlier the tenants of Glenelg had petitioned the government for assistance ‘to emigrate to a country [Upper Canada] where their nearest and dearest relatives are already settled and form no inconsiderable colony’. 51
Even the landlord-supporting, pro-emigration Scotsman was concerned about the ethics of large-scale evictions from Lord MacDonald’s Skye estates. After removal notices had been served on 600 families in summer 1849, it anticipated with some trepidation the eviction of 3,000 people from the island:
Means of emigration to Canada, we believe, will be provided, but the case is an extremely painful one, and it will probably lead to an inquiry, suggested by the Scotsman, whether the ordinary law of landlord and tenant is suited to districts like those in parts of Ireland and the Hebrides! The extraordinary power possessed by one individual in such circumstances is certainly anomalous, and ought to be exercised with great moderation and humanity. The condition of these remote Highland properties is a subject surrounded with unusual difficulties and responsibility … When the lands are heavily mortgaged, the obvious, though harsh resource, is dispossessing the smaller tenants, to make room for a better class able to pay rent, and this task generally devolves on south-country managers or trustees, who look only to money returns, and cannot sympathise with the peculiar situation and feelings of the Highland population. 52
If emigration to Canada presented a painful case, so too did the exodus to Australia, according to a correspondent of the Inverness Advertiser, who witnessed the traumatic embarkation of a group of Locheil and Ardgour emigrants in September 1849:
He states that it was heart piercing to hear them wailing — the Highland wailing — and when the bagpipes struck up ‘Lochaber no more’, the passionate outburst of their grief broke through all restraints. It was at midnight this scene took place, and by the aid of the steamer’s lights alone they were able to take their last look at the hills of Lochaber, from the great bosom of which they were thus wrenched … The distress of many of the emigrants was greatly aggravated, owing to their being compelled to leave members of their families behind, from inability to pay the passage money. 53
Advocates of Highland emigration — particularly landlord-sponsored movement — had good grounds for caution. They were attacked on a range of fronts at home and abroad. Canada’s chief immigration agent, Alexander Buchanan, was scathing in his condemnation of the deliberately inadequate provision made by some proprietors, who, having chosen Canada for its proximity and cheap access, exported their problem by shipping maximum numbers of emigrants at minimum cost, expecting his department to foot the bill for onward travel from the port of landing. In 1848 Lachlan Chisholm sent out 134 emigrants from South Uist, most of whom could not speak English. All were ‘in very poor circumstances, and required assistance from the department for their removal from Quebec to their places of destination’. 54 A year later Buchanan reported the arrival of 1,625 Highlanders in the month of August alone, all from the Hebrides, and sent out by the Duke of Argyll, Lachlan Chisholm and John Gordon:
They are respectable orderly people, but many of them very poor. The passengers by the ‘Charlotte and Barlow,’ were all forwarded to Montreal by the ship, those by the remaining vessels landed here, under the impression (from the information they received, and the promises made to them before leaving home) that they were to be forwarded to their destination by this department. But few of them could speak English; and, after investigating their cases as strictly as circumstances would permit, I was under the necessity of forwarding upwards of two-thirds of their number at the Government expense. 55
By the autumn Buchanan was still reporting grimly on an influx of destitute Highlanders. October saw the arrival of a shipload from North Uist, sent out by Lord MacDonald as far as Montreal. ‘They were all extremely poor, and at that port became chargeable on this department for their food and transport to Hamilton, their destination being the London and Huron Districts. On arrival at Hamilton, they were sent into the interior at the expense of the Hamilton and Toronto St. Andrew Societies.’ 56 The year 1850 saw little improvement, with the arrival in Montreal in August of a shipload of eighty-two emigrants from Oban, bound for Glengarry. ‘Owing to the number of women and children,’ noted Buchanan, ‘it was found necessary to provide them, at the expense of this department, with a free passage to Lancaster.’ 57
Particular opprobrium was reserved for John Gordon of Cluny, who in 1851 shipped out 1,681 emigrants from Barra, South Uist and Benbecula to the port of Quebec but failed to pay for their onward transport to Upper Canada. In September Buchanan wrote to the Provincial Secretary, asking that Gordon should reimburse his department ‘for the expenses incurred … on account of his people’. Writing to Gordon’s factor two months later, Buchanan was unequivocal in his condemnation of the estate ’s policy, which he compared with the ‘wholly different circumstances’ under which Sir James Matheson had financed the transfer of 986 tenants from Lewis all the way to their final destination in the Eastern Townships:
Quebec is practically the only seaport of Canada; and being situated in a country already fully supplied with a population speaking a different language, this city and neighbourhood afford no opening of any extent for the employment of the destitute emigrants who arrive in large numbers and at a particular season of the year … The mere transfer to this port of an indigent tenantry, without an alteration in any respect in their condition, gives no reasonable ground for expecting their subsequent successful progress. The numerous inconveniences which attend emigration are sufficiently trying to every class, and, with the addition of distress and privation, must always induce unfavourable representations by the emigrants to their friends who remain at home. 58
John Gordon, one of the most infamous evictors, was further vilified in the Canadian press for the brutal recruitment techniques allegedly used in rounding up emigrants, as well as the lack of concern for their subsequent fate. An account in the Quebec Times casts doubt on Sir John McNeill’s assertion that Gordon’s tenants had petitioned him for assistance to emigrate:
Many of our readers may not be aware that there lives such a personage as Colonel Gordon, proprietor of large estates, South Uist and Barra, in the Highlands of Scotland; we are sorry to be obliged to introduce him to their notice, under circumstances which will not give them a very favourable opinion of his character and heart.
It appears that tenants on the above mentioned estates were on the verge of starvation, and had probably become an eyesore to the gallant Colonel! He decided on shipping them to America. What they were to do there, was a question he never put to his conscience. Once landed in Canada, he had no further concern about them. Up to last week, 1,100 souls from his estates had landed in Quebec, and begged their way to Upper Canada; when in the summer season, having only a morsel of food to procure, they probably escaped the extreme misery which seems to
be the lot of those who followed them.
On their arrival here, they voluntarily made and signed the following state-ment:-‘We the undersigned passengers per Admiral from Stornaway [sic], in the Highlands of Scotland, do solemnly depose to the following facts:- That Colonel Gordon is the proprietor of the estates of South Uist and Barra; that among many hundreds of tenants and cotters whom he has sent this season from his estates to Canada, he gave directions to his factor, Mr. Fleming of Cluny Castle, Aberdeenshire, to ship on board of the above named vessel a number of nearly 450 of said tenants and cotters from the estate in Barra — that accordingly, a great majority of these people, among whom were the undersigned, proceeded voluntarily to embark on board the Admiral, at Loch Boysdale, on or about the 11th August 1851; but that several of the people who were intended to be shipped for this port, Quebec, refused to proceed on board, and in fact, absconded from their homes to avoid the embarkation. Whereupon Mr. Fleming gave orders to a policeman, who was accompanied by the ground officer of the estate of Barra, and some constables, to pursue the people who had ran [sic] away among the mountains; which they did, and succeeded in capturing about twenty from the mountains and islands in the neighbourhood; but only came with the officers on an attempt being made to handcuff them; and that some who ran away were not brought back, in consequence of which four families, at least, have been divided, some having come in the ships to Quebec, while other members of the same families were left in the Highlands.
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 8