Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  No humane person would today advocate child emigration as a remedy for problems of homelessness and poverty, but we should beware of demonizing the Victorian philanthropists for failing to adopt modern child-care practices, at a time when the welfare structure to support such policies simply did not exist. William Quarrier and his contemporaries did what they thought was best in an age when neither society nor the state accepted adequate responsibility for the poor, and when, for many children, the only alternative to utter destitution seemed to be emigration, even if that meant separation from home and parents. In the context of their time, the emigrationists were confident that the policy was both philosophically sound and practically feasible; and if they were naïve in their early expectations, many of them soon proved themselves willing to amend their practices in the light of experience, for the better protection of their charges.

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  LEAVING AND ARRIVING

  ‘Keep your mind easy on the voyage,

  and be always eating something.’ 1

  ‘There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, in a striking juxtaposition of image and reality in transatlantic travel. His sentiment could have been echoed by many emigrants throughout the nineteenth century. It was in 1879 that Stevenson crossed the Atlantic from Greenock to New York, and trekked on across the continent to California, in pursuit of his mistress, and future wife, Fanny Osborne. Stevenson’s contrasting images also encompassed the attitude of the passengers, who were, by his account, ‘a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal’. Yet, incongruously, he continued, ‘it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety.’ 2 By the time that Stevenson went to America, steamships had totally eclipsed sailing vessels as emigrant carriers, and transatlantic travelling time had been slashed from between one and three months to less than a fortnight. Yet even so, a voyage in an emigrant ship was still no luxury cruise, as the ailing, eczema-ravaged Stevenson discovered to his cost. It was rather a test of endurance that did nothing to build up the passengers’ strength for the challenges of the new life that lay ahead. Anaesthetized by the jet engine, which has for generations now shrunk the globe and made long-haul travel an everyday experience for millions of ordinary people, we find it difficult to appreciate the discomforts and dangers encountered by our nineteenth-century predecessors who chose to travel — or particularly to emigrate — overseas. But if steamship and rail travel were arduous, how much more hazardous, as well as incomprehensible to modern travellers, was the interminable voyage by sailing ship, often followed by a long overland journey, which was the lot of all emigrants until mid-century?

  Our lack of comprehension is certainly not attributable to lack of evidence, for the actual process of emigration was always a subject of great human interest, lending itself particularly readily to eyewitness accounts. The travelling experiences of emigrants are therefore well documented, not only by themselves, but also by those who sought to advise them in advance, and by official inquiries which exposed fraudulent practices or picked over the pieces of shipping disasters in an attempt to learn lessons for the future. Commentary on the transatlantic passage and onward journey — much of it negative — is readily available in a Scottish context from the mid-eighteenth century, and increases in volume and variety after 1815, with accounts of the Antipodean experience beginning to appear, particularly from mid-century. From this plethora of material we learn how emigrants arranged their passages, how they coped on the journey to the embarkation port, as well as on the voyage itself, how they were received on disembarkation and how they made their way to their final destination. We also learn about the few pleasures and the many hazards of travel, as well as the spirit-crushing tedium of being cooped up in a floating village for weeks and often months on end. We learn about the differences between cabin and steerage passage, between transatlantic and Antipodean travel, between fraudulent and honest agents and captains, and between officious and helpful immigration officials. By the 1850s we can begin to detect the effects of technological development on both sea and land travel, and can compare the experiences of emigrating under sail and steam, or by bullock cart and railway carriage. And throughout the century we can set the travel diaries and autobiographical accounts alongside the protective mechanisms which were meant to safeguard the interests of emigrants. From this wealth of information we may also be able to assess the truth of Robert Louis Stevenson’s emphasis on the contrast between image and reality as unrealistically optimistic shiploads of emigrants made the physical transition from the old world to the new.

  Eighteenth-century emigrant travel: the Hector and the Bachelor

  Accounts of the travelling experiences of emigrant Scots predated the nineteenth century. The major

  tourist attraction in Pictou, Nova Scotia, is a commemoration of the Hector, sometimes known as Canada’s Mayflower, which in 1773 brought almost 200 Highlanders from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia and initiated large-scale Scottish settlement of the Canadian Maritimes. The waterfront complex, incorporating a museum and gift shop, and with a replica of the vessel itself as its centrepiece, focuses in particular on vibrant oral traditions concerning the trials and tribulations of the ten-week voyage from Lochbroom, during which there was an outbreak of smallpox and dysentery and eighteen children died. To make matters worse, provisions rotted and ran low, the drinking water grew a green mould and severe storms off Newfoundland added an extra fortnight to the voyage. The ship itself was old, slow and wet, and from the start the passengers allegedly occupied themselves by picking wood out of the rotting hull with their fingernails.

  Others fared worse. In the same year the Nancy, sailing from Sutherland with 250 emigrants, lost eighty-one passengers, fifty of them children, before the ship docked in New York. Also in summer 1773, 280 would-be emigrants from Caithness and Sutherland who boarded the Bachelor in the expectation of settling in North Carolina got no further than the Northern Isles in an enterprise that quickly degenerated into farce. To begin with, the passengers gathered in Thurso in early July, on the instruction of their agent-organizer, tacksman James Hogg. The ship, however, did not arrive to pick them up until the end of August, having been delayed on its trip from America with a cargo of rice. The emigrants’ food supplies, already depleted during this unexpected delay, decreased still further during the eighteen days it took to load the ship at Thurso. When the Bachelor eventually set sail, far too late in the season, it was caught by equinoctial gales in the notorious Pentland Firth and driven first into Stromness in Orkney and then into Walls in Shetland. Repairs were made, but when the ship was about to sail again, it was dashed against the rocks, suffering worse damage than before. By this time eleven passengers had died and most of the rest were destitute. Still denied access to the ship’s supplies, they had used up their own provisions and were dependent on the limited charity of the Shet-landers. When the Leith-based shipowner James Inglis then ordered the captain to drop off the passengers at Thurso before bringing the partially repaired ship back to Leith for refitting, most of them refused, knowing that they were unlikely ever to see the Bachelor again or to have their passage money refunded. The result was that the ship limped back to Leith in April 1774 with all but twenty-eight of the surviving passengers on board. Protracted legal wrangles ensued, during which it became clear that the Bachelor was never going to be fit for an Atlantic crossing. But by the time Inglis was found liable for the transportation costs of all the emigrants who had come down to Leith, most of them had either booked passages on other ships, returned to the Highlands or settled in the Lowlands, and there is no record of the shipowner ever discharging his debt.

  Advising the traveller

  The fiasco of the Bachelor, the images of hardship associated with the voyage of the Hec
tor and ongoing evidence of inadequately provisioned, fever-ridden or wrecked ships made emigrants very aware that crossing the threshold from the old world to the new was no easy step, but a major leap of faith that required careful planning, stamina and a strong stomach. Even in the eighteenth century supporters of emigration began to offer advice on how to prepare for the voyage, while those in the opposite camp sought to deter emigrants by warning of the grave — perhaps mortal — dangers involved in crossing the Atlantic. During the nineteenth century, as we have already seen, the giving of advice developed into a sophisticated industry. It soon became virtually de rigueur that wealthy travellers should publish their journals for the benefit of their contemporaries and posterity, while several emigrants also recorded and disseminated their impressions and experiences. Booksellers’ shelves groaned under the weight of guidebooks offering hints on how to emigrate to an expanding range of destinations, emigrants’ letters contained detailed instructions to friends and relatives who were following in their footsteps, and advertisements for passages took up many column inches in national and provincial newspapers.

  The voyage produced a reasonable — if implicit — consensus of opinion among commentators that it was an ordeal to be endured, rather than a pleasure to be enjoyed. Advice was frequently offered on when to leave, what sort of passage to book, how to avoid being defrauded, what to take, how to avoid seasickness and other shipboard ailments, and how to proceed on disembarkation. In 1803, offering advice to an unknown correspondent, John MacDonald of Glenaladale recalled his experience of successfully escorting 210 Highlanders to Prince Edward Island over thirty years earlier. Abundant water and preliminary health care were of prime importance:

  If you go in Summer, that is in advance of May, you may reasonably lay your Account with a very long passage from the westerly winds, and the vessel being constantly put out of trim by the people: the full allowance of water is rather more necessary than of the Provisions, and the distribution of the Water should be immediately put under regulation from the moment of going on board … The health and cleanliness of the passengers should be looked after for as long a time as possible before embarking. It is a serious thing to bring any putrid disease on board, it being enough that they will be but too subject to the same at any rate from being crowded in too narrow a space, upon salt victuals, bad water and too rare ventilation … The ship should not be overcrowded with numbers, and in all good weather they should be much on deck to ventilate below: if you do not look well to this the Highlanders will keep below until they rot. 3

  Until 1835 the official advice given to transatlantic passengers was to prepare for a twelve-week journey. Most commentators were therefore agreed that emigrants should leave early in the season, in order to be settled before the onset of winter. Those going to Canada were often advised, if they could afford it, to enter the country via New York and the Great Lakes, thus avoiding the hazardous St Lawrence Seaway, which was also ice-bound between October and May. The Aberdeen Journal on 6 December 1848 recommended emigrants going to New York City to embark as soon after mid-January as possible, so that they would be located and accustomed to their new homes before winter ended, as that marked the start of the business season and was therefore the best time for finding work. If they were going to the Midwest, however, frozen lakes and canals dictated a shorter travelling season, between April and September, as on the St Lawrence. For emigrants to the Antipodes, however, an August or September departure was recommended, at least by Jessie Campbell, a cabin passenger in the Blenheim, which left Greenock for New Zealand in August 1840. 4 And another New Zealand emigrant, steerage passenger Isabella Henderson, advised those of her friends who could afford it to take a cabin passage and ‘to bring plenty of food suitable for children, sago, arrow-root, cornflour, rusks, etc.’ 5

  Securing a passage was a notoriously hazardous business. A huge variety of vessels participated in the emigrant trade. Until the middle of the nineteenth century many of them were timber ships, which had built up a thriving business with the Canadian Maritimes and the St Lawrence ever since an embargo had been placed on the importation of Baltic timber during the Napoleonic Wars. The timber ships deposited their bulky but low-value freight at ports right round the British Isles and their agents and captains used the provincial press to advertise regularly for emigrants to make up a paying ballast on the return voyage, usually to Quebec or Montreal. Fares averaged £3—£4 in the steerage and £10—£12 in the cabin, and ships generally sailed in April and August. Some advertisers were at pains to reassure wavering passengers by emphasizing the particular facilities of their vessel or the good order that prevailed on board. The Albion, a long-serving timber ship based in Aberdeen, aimed to attract higher-paying cabin passengers to both Canada and the USA when it advertised in the local press in January 1835:

  The Cabin and Half Deck of this Vessel are commodiously fitted up for the accommodation of Passengers, to whose comfort every attention will be paid by Captain Leslie … The ALBION will afford a favourable opportunity to Passengers desirous of proceeding to the United States: there being regular conveyance thither from Halifax, and the distance only about two days sailing. 6

  In slightly different vein, the agents for the Wacousta, which sailed from Glasgow to Melbourne in 1852, gave assurances about the careful vetting of pas-sengers:

  With a view to obviate, as far as possible, the many evils which experience has shown to arise from the indiscriminate association of all grades of character on ship board, and to give a comfortable assurance to Heads of Families and others purposing to emigrate, and generally to promote the well-being of all on board, it will be required that parties going by the above ship shall either be known or certified to be of good moral character, and this rule will be strictly adhered to. 7

  Some agents appended testimonials or letters from satisfied passengers to their advertisements. In 1855 a passenger on the Aberdeen-based Aurora advised emigrants who wished to sail to New York or Quebec to make their arrangements with John Muir of Aberdeen or one Mr Percival, who ‘puts out the very fastest Passenger Ships that sail from Liverpool’, while the following year the captain of another Aberdeen timber ship, the Berbice, was presented by his grateful passengers with ‘a valuable Cameo Ring, set in Gold, and a set of Cameo Masonic Studs to match’. 8

  Obtaining reliable advice about ships and agents was particularly important for emigrants who had to make their travelling arrangements at a distance. Even when transatlantic emigrant shipping was fairly decentralized — organized more around the interests of merchants than the needs of emigrants — some passengers still travelled some distance to embark. Those bound for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa usually had little option but to take their passage from Liverpool, Glasgow, London, Plymouth or Southampton, and when steamships eclipsed sailing vessels embarkations to all destinations became even more firmly centred on the Clyde and the Mersey in particular. Britain was the first European country to introduce transatlantic steamships, when the Cunard Line was launched in 1840, although the facility was available for almost twenty years on the New York route before it was extended to the St Lawrence. It was the late 1870s before steamships became commonplace on the Australian run, replacing the legendary clippers and slower types of sailing ship. Steamship passages cost about a third more than those in sailing ships, but it was money well spent, for the ships were not dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather. Regular sailings became the rule instead of the exception, and the time spent at sea was slashed. Emigrant transportation came to be dominated by famous names like the White Star, Dominion, P&O, Allan and Anchor Lines, whose agents, scattered across the length and breadth of the British Isles, recruited the emigrants and sent them to distant ports by means of the ever-expanding railway network. When blacksmith William Shennan emigrated from Kirkcudbrightshire to Melbourne in 1870, he travelled by train to Plymouth and spent a week in lodgings and then in the emigration depot before embarking on the Crusader.9


  Liverpool stood head and shoulders above all other ports as the main embarkation point for emigrants from the British Isles, but it could be a very frightening and dangerous place for the unprotected emigrant. It had an unenviable reputation as a place where naïve emigrants were highly likely to be defrauded and assaulted, particularly by the hundreds of ‘runners’ who frequented the railway stations and docks. These men received a commission for bringing emigrants to ship brokers, provision merchants and lodging-house keepers, and were not averse to seizing baggage, manhandling emigrants and changing their money into dubious dollars. If adverse weather conditions — or just sharp practice — prevented a sailing ship from leaving port at the appointed time, emigrants who had travelled from a distance were at the mercy of greedy hostel keepers, most of whom demanded exorbitant payments for their squalid, vermin-infested accommodation. But even if emigrants managed to avoid the runners and lodging-house keepers, they might find themselves left behind in the stampede of a last-minute embarkation. Since passengers were not usually allowed on board until the hold was loaded, there was often a frantic scramble to embark with their luggage before the wind and tide changed and the gangplank was lowered, with those who missed their chance making a last, dangerous attempt to leap on board as the ship began to move.When that happened, wrote a reporter for the Illustrated London News, ‘their only chance is to wait until the ship reaches the dock-gate, when boxes, bales, barrels, and bundles are actually pitched into the ship, and men, women and children have to scramble up the rigging amid a screaming, a swearing and a shouting perfectly alarming to listen to’. 10 As soon as the voyage was under way, all passengers were summoned on deckwhile the crew searched the vessel for stowaways. The passengers were then subjected to a roll call, to ensure that all had paid their fares, and that parents had not tried to pass off adult or adolescent children as infants. Physically or mentally defective passengers were also pinpointed and returned to the shore by tug boat.