Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus
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Although Sam made his way to Calcutta in 1858, his health was broken and he died on 14 August 1858, just as his brother was promoted to an assistant commissionership in the Punjab, at an enhanced salary which John had earmarked to help finance Sam’s medical studies.
John Chalmers, like Sam, made the acquaintance of several fellow Scots during his five years in India. When he arrived in Calcutta in December 1855 the Reverend John Milne, at the request of his friend Alexander Wallace Chalmers, took the newly arrived recruit under his wing and recommended him to his commanding officer before he was posted to the 39th Native Infantry at Jehlum in the Punjab. Acutely aware that India was ‘a dangerous country for soul as well as for body’, Milne — who returned to Perth in 1858 — felt that ‘parents at home do not know what they are sending their children to, when they rejoice at getting them into the Civil or Military Services’, and he reminded Alexander Chalmers of the continuing importance of patronage if John was to succeed. ‘You must,’ he urged, ‘try to interest any influential friends at home in his behalf.’ 28 During his time at Jehlum, where his house-mate and almost all the officers were also Scots, John studied hard for the language qualification which would open up the adjutancy of his regiment. Like Sam, he also enlisted the help of his fellow Aberdonian Dr Walker, whose powerful connections could smooth the way to such an appointment, and he was more consistently optimistic than Sam that India was still a rewarding outlet for Scottish sojourners. ‘In two or three short years,’ he wrote encouragingly to William in 1856, ‘we three shall stretch our legs under the same mahogany table in some part of the Gorgeous East.’ He frequently encouraged William to persist in his studies, not least because of the promise of a Company salary of at least £60 a month, coupled with the prospect of being able to retire on a pension of £500 after seventeen years’ service. Subsequently, however, he advised William to enlist in a royal regiment which, while it did not offer such a good retiring allowance, would not exile him for so long to a country which he might not like. 29
By 1858 John’s optimism had been shattered, first of all by the severe arm wound he sustained during the Mutiny and then by Sam’s death, which plunged him into depression and sharpened his desire to return to the bosom of his family. ‘Everything in this country seems changed to me, and I hope only for the day when I may rejoin you all at home,’ he wrote to his sister in November 1858. 30 The passage of time did not alleviate his homesickness. A year later, attributing his tardiness in writing home to ongoing grief at his brother’s death, he explained, ‘Home is a subject of contemplation I generally avoid. It brings up painful memories, & excites vain wishes of return.’ 31 Correspondence with an acquaintance who, ‘like everyone else here regrets the hour he came to India’ reinforced his disillusionment with the ‘Gorgeous East’32 and, like Sam, he was acutely aware of the way in which an Indian sojourn accelerated the ageing process. Although John was not due a furlough until 1865, he was invalided home in 1860 after an unsuccessful attempt to recuperate in Kashmir, aiming to return to his post — passage paid — after fifteen months. It was not to be, for he died in Wales in August 1861, in straitened circumstances and still struggling to obtain the arrears of pay from his Indian sojourn.
William had the shortest Indian career of all three Chalmers brothers. After completing his studies, he followed John’s advice and became an army surgeon, on the grounds that the reorganized East India Company was no longer such an attractive proposition:
I rather think that the days of having any chance of civil employ in India are gone, as I see by the papers that the Power has been taken from the East India Coy, and conferred upon one of the Secretarys of State … Therefore, the pay of a Medical Officer in John Co’s Service unless much increased will never counterbalance the disadvantages of the £300 out of pocket for outfit and passage, and such a number of years of exile. Compare with that the 10/- of a day now given in the Queen’s Service, the small outlay for outfit, for the passage money to India alone wd fit a man out for the Queen’s, besides his drawing pay within a few days after passing, instead of a few months, as in John Coy’s. Such being the case, you can hardly wonder at my having changed my mind in regard to which Service I am to honour with my talents. And besides all the above, Jack is a Company’s Officer, Alick is a Queen’s Naval one, and I think I cant do better than become a Queen’s Army man; and thus the family will be pretty well divided among the different Arms of War, as they are called. 33
After working briefly in England, William was posted to India in 1861. But just as Sam’s death had taken the gilt off the attractions of the Orient, so John’s death made William disillusioned and anxious to come home almost as soon as he had arrived. ‘What a shock I got yesterday evening on reading at the Mess the English Telegraphic News and finding that Poor Johnny had died,’ he wrote to his father on 11 September. ‘How I hated these niggers before and now it will be a deeper hatred. I can’t settle to anything since and shall write by next mail.’ 34 Although his father thought it ‘not likely that you will be allowed to return after so short a sojourn’, 35 William was to get his wish sooner than he expected, like his brother, on the grounds of ill-health. By December 1862 he was back in London, from where he wrote a last letter to his aunt, asking her to find cheap lodgings for him in Aberdeen. ‘Don’t be alarmed, it is only I wish to be amongst you,’ he reassured her, less than a month before he died. 36
William’s death brought to a close the Chalmers’s futile efforts to ‘come back rich nabobs’. For all three brothers, sickness had been a constant concomitant of life in India, and their experiences provided a solemn reminder of the risks, as well as the opportunities, of sojourning in a hostile environment. Equally notable is the way in which both Sam and John, who went overseas under very different circumstances, not only maintained strong links with home but also identified and exploited Aberdeenshire connections in India in their efforts to secure promotion, or, in Sam’s case, a complete change of career. Like many other temporary emigrants, they demonstrate that the creation of ethnic networks was not the preserve of permanent settlers but extended to sojourners, who, it could be argued, found them an even more vital lifeline if they had only a limited period in which to make their mark, or, more ambitiously, their fortune.
Arctic adventures
Many Indian sojourners returned home after a single prolonged spell overseas. By contrast, those who pursued their careers in the equally inhospitable Arctic, either as whalers or in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, were more commonly episodic emigrants, the former coming and going annually and the latter usually undertaking a series of five-year sojourns in the north. In the eighteenth century over thirty ports, mainly in England, had sent vessels to the Greenland Sea and the Davis Strait in pursuit of the Greenland Right Whale. By the 1830s, however, falling prices, combined with a series of disastrous seasons, had caused many of them to drop out of the business and by 1849 Hull was the only English port still involved in whaling. The more tenacious and adaptable Scots, meanwhile, continued to send vessels to the Arctic, but alternated whale fishing and seal hunting as conditions dictated. These industries were centred on north-east Scotland, particularly on Peterhead, which soon became Britain’s leading whaling port, in 1857 sending out over half the entire British whaling fleet. One native of the town, born in 1853, later recalled that in his childhood as many as thirty-three whaling and sealing ships had left Peter-head each spring, providing work not only at sea but also in the shore-based activities of shipbuilding and sailmaking and in the rendering yards.
This picture of Peterhead in the 1850s and 1860s was recalled sixty years later by David Cardno, no casual observer but a lifelong diarist and by the 1920s a veteran of numerous journeys to the Arctic. He was only thirteen when he made his first trip in 1866, after stowing away on the Lord Saltoun. To stow away successfully on Arctic whaling vessels was, he recalled, the ambition of almost every small boy in Peterhead in the 1850s, and some straight talking from his mo
ther after he had failed in two previous attempts did nothing to alter his resolve. His grandfather and father were both second mates of whaling ships, and his father, who had sailed with the Lord Saltoun in 1865, had remained in the Arctic at the end of the season to manage one of the whaling stations in Cumberland Sound. David’s desire to be reunited with his father made him all the more determined to succeed, and so on 14 June 1866, instead of going to school, he directed his steps towards the harbour, dropped his redundant schoolbooks into the revolving bucket of a dredger and concealed himself in a barrel aboard the Lord Saltoun. There he remained, undetected, during the customary search for stowaways, and only when the ship was well out to sea did he make himself known, as hunger got the better of him. The captain’s first reaction was to put him ashore at Orkney and have him sent straight home, but the ship’s owner, who was on board, interceded on David’s behalf when he heard that the boy had stowed away in order to join his father. As a result David Cardno was given his first job on a whaling vessel, that of ship’s boy, launching an Arctic career that was to continue for more than half a century.
It was not long before the new recruit was exposed to the dangers and discomforts of the Arctic. On its way up the Davis Strait the ship became trapped in ice for ten days, during which time it only just escaped destruction by an iceberg. When disaster seemed imminent the captain ordered all the whaleboats to be unlashed and hauled on to the ice, clear of the imprisoned ship. Provisions and men were allocated to each boat and the crew watched as the iceberg bulldozed along the port side of the Lord Saltoun, tearing away part of the stern, davits, bulwarks and about twelve feet of sail. But the damage was not irretrievable and the carpenters immediately set to work to make repairs before the ice broke. Having spent a fruitless few weeks hunting, the ship was then forced to winter in Niantilik harbour in Cumberland Sound after the ice barrier closed early. There David had his first encounter with the Inuit, who gathered at the whaling stations and worked for the visiting Scottish and American ships. As well as joining in baseball games on the ice with the crews of six other Scottish and American whaling vessels, he made friends with an Inuit family who lived on Niantilik Island and spent much of his free time in their company, tobogganing with their children and sharing their food:
We got a skin from their Mother and we had some great fun going up to the top of the hill, and laid the skin down on the snow and sat down on the skin, and we did come down that hill with some speed — our faces used to be covered with loose snow, the rate we came down. I may say I was nearly as much in their house as I was in the ship. When the father came home at night there was always a pan of boiled seal ready for him, so I came in for my share just the same as their own two, and I was picking up a word or two of their lingo, and when I felt very hungry I used to go to other Igloos on Niantilik Island, as all the natives nearby lived there that was engaged to the ships. After we had dinner if there was any soup left, I got [it] from the cook into a beef tin and took it ashore and gave it to the children, and they did think a lot of that, as they are very fond of all our meats. 37
But an Arctic winter was by no means all fun and games. Since the Lord Saltoun had been provisioned only for the autumn fishing, the captain put all crew members on to half-rations as soon as it became clear that the ship would be detained, but by January supplies had become so depleted that six crew members and four Inuit had to be sent on a dangerous fifty-mile trek across the ice to Kekerten Island Station to replenish stocks. The outward trip was made without incident, but on the way back one of the Peterhead men went missing from the sledge. When he was found by the others several hours later he was in a state of collapse, badly frostbitten and unable to speak. He was taken back to the supply station, where the cooper used his seal knife to saw off both feet, without the luxury of an anaesthetic. A worse fate was to befall James Kynoch and James Reid, two other crewmen from the Lord Saltoun, who were sent on a second expedition to Kekerten before the first party had returned. Accompanied by an Inuit couple and their young son, the men set off by sledge, but when they were just over halfway to their destination, the weather deteriorated and the Scots soon became exhausted. The native couple constructed an igloo, where they left Kynoch and Reid, along with their own son, while they struggled on and reached Kekerten. But the weather then worsened still further, and during the next ten days, when it was impossible to mount a rescue mission, it became clear that once the trio’s small supply of stove oil ran out, it was only a matter of time before they froze to death. In fact, the bodies were not discovered until the following summer, lying huddled together, several feet down, in clear ice.
The Lord Saltoun returned empty-handed to Peterhead in August 1867. David Cardno had not been deterred by the hardships of his fourteen-month inaugural voyage, and in 1868 he again signed on as a ship’s boy on the same vessel. During that trip he had his first experience of helping to capture one of the four whales killed during the voyage, and during the next few years he served regularly on whaling and sealing vessels. The constant hazards of the whaler’s life meant that much of his journal was taken up with gruesome descriptions of accidents, many of which occurred as the whalers, in twenty five-feet rowing boats, pursued a quarry that could be sixty feet long and weigh 100 tons. For most of the nineteenth century, however, the profits of whaling outweighed the risks, as oil from the blubber continued to be used as an illuminant, lubricant and ingredient in soap, while whalebone was in demand for corsets, umbrellas and a variety of other goods.
David Cardno’s last voyage as an active member of a whaling crew was in 1898. He then spent four years at herring fishing and trawling, followed by a spell as a barge skipper engaged in harbour construction at Peterhead. But the lure of the Arctic was too strong, and in 1910 he accepted an offer to manage Kekerten Island Station, supervising the seal-hunting activities of the Inuit and the storage of the skins until the return of the storeship. His first tour was uneventful, but in 1914 he returned to Kekerten for a second tour, with a year’s provisions and the promise of a store ship in the spring. No such ship arrived, and for the next three years he was forced to exist on a diet of seal meat and venison, the only European among 300 Inuit, completely unaware of the outbreak of the First World War. By the time he retired in 1923, the whaling industry had become little more than a memory. Profits had dropped steadily in the face of competition from alternative products, and in 1893 the last whaling vessel had sailed out of Peterhead. For a while the industry survived in Dundee, where whale oil was still used to heat hemp in the jute mills, and most of Cardno’s later voyages were made out of that port. But by 1913 only two whaling ships sailed from Dundee to the Arctic, and the First World War drove the final nail into the industry’s coffin.
While whaling played a part in the life of ports such as Peterhead and Dundee, it was never the crucial hinge of the local economy. Further north, in the Orkney islands, it was a more significant source of employment and income, recruiting an average of about 500 men a year in the 1840s. But it was the Arctic fur trade that provided perhaps the most vital and enduring lifeline to many communities in the Northern and Western Isles, as Scots came to dominate the ranks of both the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company in the eighteenth century. Chartered in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company soon became one of the largest and most consistent employers of Scottish sojourners, whom it regarded as ‘submissive and industrious’. Orkney was initially a fertile recruiting ground, not least because until 1891 Stromness was the last port of call for outgoing Company ships and the base of an agent who received a commission on each employee engaged. As the minister of St Andrews and Deer-ness explained in the Statistical Account, the Hudson’s Bay Company began to recruit in Orkney in the 1740s, and by the end of the century it engaged up to 100 islanders a year. Around three-quarters of its 400—500 men in the field were Orcadians, ‘as they find them more sober and tractable than the Irish, and they engage for lower wages than either the English or Irish’. 38
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br /> From 1783 until 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company was challenged by the Montreal-based North West Company, which was described by one English pedlar as being ‘overrun with Scotchmen’. Operating initially as a loose federation of traders who swarmed across the Canadian wilderness and solicited furs from the Indians, its approach necessitated a similar response from its rival, which until then had adopted the more passive policy of establishing bases on Hudson’s Bay, to which the Indian trappers brought their furs. Increasing rivalry culminated in a bloody battle in 1816, five years after Lord Selkirk, backed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, had purchased the huge Red River tract, intruding into the North West Company’s territories and threatening its pemmican supplies. In 1821 the rivals amalgamated in what was effectively a defeat for the North West Company, although it did bring valuable wilderness survival skills to the enlarged Hudson’s Bay Company, which now controlled vast territories stretching from the shores of Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific coast.
Scots continued to dominate the new company throughout the nineteenth century. The most notable — indeed notorious — character was George Simpson. Born on the wrong side of the blanket in Lochbroom, Wester Ross, he joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1820 and was immediately sent out to Athabasca, where he was pitched into the heat of the war between his employer and the North West Company. So skilfully did he conduct himself during the conflict that when hostilities ended he was appointed to govern the important Northern Department of the remodelled Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1826 he added the Southern Department to his jurisdiction, presiding over the reorganization of the fur trade following the merger until his death in 1860, and being knighted for his services in 1841. No armchair governor, Simpson travelled extensively on regular trips of inspection, making epic canoe journeys to remote parts of the Company’s domain, in order to assess conditions and requirements. These were not simply administrative reconnaissance trips. He also aimed to open up new regions of fur trading, in order to allow conservation in the older areas, and by the 1830s the Company had extended its activities much further north, along the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay itself, to Labrador, and to the west in the region of Great Bear Lake. As well as opening up new fur trading posts in the outback, Simpson was also gripped by the polar exploration mania, in particular the challenge of being the first to discover the much sought-after Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific.