Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Conclusion

  Although the uniqueness of each individual’s experience defies generalization, there are undoubtedly recurring themes that link emigrants of various backgrounds and occupations who came from different parts of Scotland and settled throughout the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The huge influence of family, friends and community in choosing and consolidating a settlement was clearly and consistently evident, and emigrant letters were frequently characterized by references to the exploits of known fellow countrymen who were located in the area and sometimes extended a helping hand to the new arrivals. The need for resilience and perseverance was also repeatedly stressed, whether the emigrant was clearing a bush or prairie farm, shepherding in the outback, labouring in industry or cooking, cleaning and homemaking on the frontier. At the same time, there were obvious differences of emphasis in the way that experiences were evaluated. Farmers tended to invest for the future and measured success through a longer telescope than many artisans, who preferred to make and save money quickly and were more prepared to move on if their immediate expectations were not fulfilled. These different priorities were also reflected in the tendency of artisans to send money home, perhaps to support families who had remained behind, whereas farmers, who were more likely to have emigrated with their families, sometimes sought remittances from relatives at home to shore up or enhance their investments. While all emigrants ran the risk of being defrauded, and farmers had to be wary of the wiles of land speculators, particularly in undeveloped areas, the self-employed, independent emigrant was generally less vulnerable than the wage worker, particularly the contract labourer.

  Most emigrants probably played a long-term game of snakes and ladders, as setbacks alternated with achievements. In some cases, however, the emigrant experience was unexpectedly and tragically cut short. Victims of accident, disease or foul play rarely left a personal record, but their fate was sometimes mentioned in the letters of their fellow countrymen or in the press. In 1872 granite mason Peter Adam was about to return from a two-year sojourn in Maine to be married in Aberdeen. He got no further than Boston. According to the newspaper in his home town:

  He changed his bank bills for gold, then buying a ticket for New York, he started on the night express train, intending to take a steamer at New York. This was the last seen of Peter Adam till his dead body was found in the Quaboag river, seven days later, eighty miles west of Boston, in the town of Palmer, Mass. There were two stabs in the neck, one of which had severed the jugular vein. It is supposed that he was followed by the murderers to the broker’s office, and from there to the train; that he had put his gold in his boots, and, as he was passing from one car to another, he was seized and murdered, his boots cut open, the gold secured, and his body thrown into the river while passing over one of the numerous open bridges between Brookfield and Palmer. 78

  Fourteen years later, in the cemetery at Burnet, Texas, the Aberdeen granite cutters who had gone to cut stone for the new State Capitol erected a headstone in memory of three of their workmates who died during the job. Suicide was not an uncommon response to the trauma of homesickness, disappointed expectations or failed endeavours of emigrants from all walks of life, although it was not always mentioned publicly. Christina McMillan, Argyll-born widow of the Gippsland sheep farmer Angus McMillan, who himself died in penury in 1865, drowned herself in the La Trobe River in 1884. Two years earlier William Wallace had reported the suicide of a Scottish settler in his neighbourhood in western Canada:

  A young man, a licentiate of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, came out to Manitoba with his young wife and family to get more scope but he did not succeed in getting an opening … Some influential persons knowing his circumstances secured for him the mastership of a small school, but he seems to have felt his inferior condition acutely. He one day astonished the children by asking those of them who wanted a new teacher to hold up their hands, and immediately after took poison, and before he could stagger to the door he was dead. Subscriptions are being asked to enable his family to go back to the old country. 79

  The repatriation of the surgeon’s family was precipitated by tragedy, but by no means all return migration was the result of death or disappointment. Temporary sojourning overseas, as opposed to permanent settlement, was an important dimension of the emigrant experience, particularly among artisans, contract workers and those who sought their fortunes in climatically inhospitable regions. Its causes, characteristics and consequences are examined in the following chapter.

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  THE TEMPORARY EMIGRANT

  ‘The Scot … never loses his attachment to his native land … Whenever fortune smiles on him he returns to his native village and the drama of his life closes where it commenced.’ 1

  Although more than a third of Scotland’s emigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century came back to their homeland, the phenomenon of the returning exile has long been the Cinderella of Scottish diaspora studies. Emigrants returned home for a variety of reasons. Probably only a minority came back with their tails between their legs, since those who were bankrupt, ailing or disillusioned often lacked the financial, physical and psychological resources to retrace their steps. Much more commonly the decision to return was a carefully planned part of the whole emigration strategy from the start, and demonstrated success rather than failure. A significant number of Scots went overseas with no intention of settling permanently in the new land, but with the objective of repatriating the profits they hoped to make in a range of enterprises, from managing plantations in the tropics to fur trading in the Arctic. Others, such as soldiers and missionaries, sojourned overseas out of duty or vocation, while a professional élite of doctors, teachers, clerics and administrators capitalized on an international demand for their expertise as they pursued their careers round the globe. Even more adept at exploiting the internationalization of the labour market were tramping artisans, particularly in the United States, who emigrated in pursuit of higher wages and moved on — or back across the Atlantic — when opportunities dried up or they had saved enough money to return home without loss of face. While temporary and seasonal emigration was undoubtedly given a huge boost by the technological revolution in sea and land transport after 1850, as well as better telegraph and postal communications, it was by no means unknown in the age of sail, and the sojourning Scot had been a familiar figure in many overseas locations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  How did the motives and characteristics of the sojourner conform to or diverge from those of the settler? Both utilized the same communications media and transportation facilities, both developed overseas networks that influenced the timing and location of their emigration, and both struggled to reconcile harsh realities with overblown images. But there were also significant differences. Temporary emigrants — at least, those who emigrated for economic reasons — were probably characterized by a more speculative and detached approach than their counterparts who put down permanent roots overseas. Many of them were young men, either bachelors or married men whose dependants had stayed at home. Their focus remained very much on Scotland, and wages were either remitted home or saved against their ultimate return. Their expectations were higher, and they were often more impatient for quick and substantial returns than permanent settlers, who judged success and failure by longer-term, and perhaps more modest, criteria. Since they did not anticipate putting down roots, sojourners were also more likely to be found in climatically inhospitable or socially undeveloped regions, provided the economic prospects were favourable for exploitation, than those who had invested their entire future in relocation overseas. But it was probably in the long-term consequences of sojourning, particularly the repatriation of capital, labour and ideas, that the difference was most marked. However long they stayed, or however many times they returned to the same location, sojourners were transient visitors, not committed home-makers and nation-builders, and while they undoubtedly stamped their presence on th
eir host societies in a variety of ways, the most lasting legacy of their overseas experience was generally the application of its fruits to their places of origin in Scotland.

  Plantation life

  Sojourning did not suddenly become a feature of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century. We have already seen that long-standing European connections were overtaken after 1700 by a growing focus on the American continent, as middle-class career emigrants, frustrated by limited horizons at home, flocked to the southern mainland colonies and the Caribbean. Most did not intend to stay for good, but hoped to exploit lucrative openings in the Chesapeake tobacco industry or the sugar plantations of the West Indies, generating income for profitable investment back in Scotland. To buy a colonial estate yielding a steady return was regarded as a legitimate stepping stone to the ultimate, and more prestigious, acquisition of land in Scotland, and up to 10,000 ambitious Scots may have sojourned in these plantation colonies in the second half of the eighteenth century. While those who went to the Chesapeake were generally involved in tobacco factoring and storekeeping for merchant houses in Glasgow, the Caribbean provided more varied openings in conjunction with possibly greater physical and ethical challenges. Doctors, lawyers, merchant-planters and estate managers in Jamaica, Antigua and the Windward Islands of Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent and Tobago sometimes struggled to reconcile their image of professional integrity not only with the temptations of the flesh and the bottle but also with their ambition to bring home a fortune as quickly as possible before their health gave way. In both locations the Scots cultivated complex transatlantic patronage networks which fostered a sense of ethnic solidarity and — by maintaining clear links with the homeland — reduced the likelihood of assimilation.

  Caribbean capital had a more diffused impact on agriculture and industry across Scotland than the profits of the tobacco trade, which were invested primarily in and around Glasgow. By the end of the eighteenth century ‘the great influx of money from the East andWest Indies’ had contributed markedly to the ‘increasing prosperity’ of Inverness, while at Logie Pert in the county of Forfar ‘there is an increase both of splendour and luxury in many places of the neighbourhood, occasioned chiefly by the influx of wealth from the East and West Indies’. At least two landowners in the Kincardineshire parish of Fetteresso had, on returning from theWest Indies, invested in substantial new dwelling houses, as well as agricultural improvements, while ‘several young men of spirit’ who had gone to the Caribbean from Kells in Kirkcudbright had reappeared after sixteen or seventeen years, ‘with genteel fortunes’. 2 In the early nineteenth century the Gordons of Buthlaw applied Jamaican revenue to land purchases which made them one of Aberdeenshire’s largest landowning families, while the Baillies of Inverness achieved a similar status in the west Highlands by the 1830s, investing their Caribbean money in the improvement and extension of their estates, as well as diversifying into the business and political sectors. In Argyll-shire the Malcolms of Poltalloch used profits from their Jamaican enterprises to improve their properties between the 1780s and the late 1840s, while in the vicinity of Glasgow merchants with Caribbean interests frequently invested in the processing of cotton and sugar, the products on which many of their fortunes were based. West Indian money was also channelled into Scottish educational and philanthropic ventures, further reflecting the attitude of the donors that the Caribbean was a place of short-term sojourn rather than a new home in which to put down roots. 3

  But by no means all who went to the plantations succeeded in making and repatriating fortunes. In the mainland American colonies growing resentment of foreign moneylenders culminated in the wholesale expulsion of Scottish loyalists in 1776. Many returned to Scotland empty-handed, and after the American Revolution they received minimal compensation for their loyalism. The obituary columns of the Scottish press testify to the rapidity and frequency with which sojourners in the Caribbean succumbed to tropical diseases, while those who did earn enough money to purchase large estates and numerous slaves discovered that these assets could not always be translated into the acquisition of land in Scotland, where the economy was expanding rapidly and land values were rising beyond their calculations. Paradoxically, the more successful the sojourners became, the greater the difficulty they experienced in extricating their fortunes, and some became permanent settlers by default, repeatedly postponing their return in pursuit of ever-expanding but elusive ambitions.

  The abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean between 1834 and 1840 and the accompanying economic dislocation rendered the islands a less attractive prospect for Scottish investors. Some sought to replace the slaves with wage labourers recruited at home, either as permanent settlers or under indentures reminiscent of the recruitment of artisans in the eighteenth century, while advertisements for plantation overseers, governesses and tutors also appeared occasionally in the Scottish press. In 1836 John Anderson, an Edinburgh lawyer, called on the patronage of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg, to secure the position of Special Magistrate in St Vincent, with responsibility for adjudicating disputes between former slaves and their masters during the transitional ‘apprenticeship’ period. When he was killed in a riding accident three years later, the Colonial Office defrayed the return fare of his wife and family to Scotland, where they took up residence in Inverness. During his brief sojourn in St Vincent Anderson kept a journal which reflects the difficulties of implementing meaningful manumission in a context where even liberal abolitionists like himself continued to assume the servility of the former slave. It also declaims against the vulgarity and depravity of West Indian society which made the Caribbean a place to sojourn rather than settle, lamenting — among other evils — the general absence of civilized society:

  He who treads these Western shores, will soon be reminded he has parted with them, to be a denizen of a land, where discomfort & luxury; where desolation & hospitality, oddly assort. The badly paved, or metaled dirty streets, where broken bottles, — hoops of iron, & other rubbish lie huddled before the doors; the mean appearance of the low roofed stores, and huckster shops; — the defaced, & mouldering houses; the naked appearance of the planked, uncovered floors & walls of even the best and inhabited tenements; — whether in town or country, the scanty & illkept furniture; — the rarely seen objects of books or musical instruments; — the barefooted, shirted menials; — bring in painful contrast to the recollection, all the harmonised comforts of home! word, sacred even here; where the Planters would fain have no abiding spot, — but still yearn at some distant day for that ‘home ’ they recognize only over the blue Atlantick.

  While genteel emigrants would find that ‘the life of a planter at the best, is but an apology for life ’, for the ‘sensitive European female’ the sense of desolation and imprisonment was even greater, so that it was little wonder, declared Anderson, that she ‘lolls on a settee all day long … [and] vegetates a death of life ’. 4

  Some of those who sojourned in the Caribbean moved on to other overseas pastures before returning to Scotland. As we saw earlier, Robert Boyd Tytler, who was initially sent from Aberdeenshire to Jamaica in 1834 to serve an apprenticeship on a family friend’s sugar plantation, removed three years later to Ceylon,where his name became a householdword in both commercial and political circles. Having established a family dynasty among the island’s planters, he retired to Aberdeen to enjoy the fruits of a labour which had made him preeminent among the island’s pioneer planters. He was not unique in cashing in his return ticket. Many of the handsome granite mansions that sprang up in the city’s west end testified to fortunes made on eastern plantations, and in 1875 a dinner of planters and ex-planters held in Aberdeen in Tytler’s honour attracted over 100 men, half of whom had current or past commercial connections with Ceylon. All were well-to-do, according to one of thosewho attended, and ‘thoroughly enjoying a well-earned furlough. The Lord Provost congratulated us, and drank continued prosperity to coffee, whilst some of us waxed eloquent in declaring our i
mplicit faith that, so long as heather grew on Benachie, coffee and Scotsmen too would thrive on the hills of Ceylon.’ 5 Although, even as those words were being uttered, Ceylon’s coffee industry was being brought to its knees by the double blow of a destructive fungus and the increasing popularity of the healthier Brazilian product, many planters simply switched their attention to tea, which in turn provided a comfortable income for these Scottish career-emigrants well into the twentieth century.

  The corn chest for Scotland?

  Scottish sojourners’ connections with the Indian subcontinent were not confined to plantation investments.Two of RobertTytler’s brothers were in the service of the East India Company well before he went to Ceylon, and many Company officers bought plantations on the island during the first coffee mania in the 1830s and 1840s. In the eighteenth century the expanding East India Company had become a rich source of patronage for soldiers and administrators, well before 1784,when Henry Dundas, Scottish Solicitor-General and first Senior Commissioner of the Company’s Board of Control, dispensed Indian appointments liberally to those who were prepared to pay the political price for such favours. Even in the era of Warren Hastings, India had become, in SirWalter Scott’s memorable words of a later date, ‘the corn chest for Scotland’, a place where the younger sons of the Scottish gentry and merchant classes sought their fortunes, as well as a field of service for recently created Highland regiments. Successful soldiers sometimes moved on to political, administrative or commercial careers, but whatever their employment, and however long they stayed in India, most Scots kept their eyes firmly fixed on the homeland, to which they intended to return. Like their counterparts in the Caribbean, many of them anticipated that their eastern fortunes would purchase not only landed estates but also the accompanying social prestige which would have eluded them if they had stayed at home. Many achieved their goal, and the Scottish landscape is dotted with reminders of the Indian connection. Looming 1,500 feet above the village of Evanton in EasterRoss is the Fyrish monument. Commissioned by Sir Hector Munro of Novar in 1792 to relieve local unemployment, it was intended to be a replica of the temple gate at Negapatnam, the scene of one of Munro’s greatest victories during his military service in India. Onthe other side of the Moray Firth, over £90,000 of Indian capital was invested in the town of Elgin between 1815 and 1924, when Dr Gray’s Hospital and the Anderson Institute were founded on the bequests of localmenwho had made fortunes in India. Meanwhile, in Aberdeenshire the Bombay free merchant John Forbes (1743—1821) bought back his ancestral estates in Strathdon, where he poured large sums of money into the development of agriculture and forestry, as well as leaving £10,000 to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. 6