Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus
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A workaholic who did not suffer fools gladly, Simpson’s autocratic manner, ruthless efficiency and Napoleon-like appearance led to him being dubbed ‘The Little Emperor of the Plains’. His ‘Character Book’, kept during the winter of 1831—2, is full of acerbic remarks about many of the eighty-eight clerks,whomhe clearly thought were a drain on the Company.He was particularly scathing about Colin Robertson, ‘a frothy trifling conceited man,whowould starve in any other Country and is perfectly useless here ’. Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of weaving in Perth, he was ‘too lazy to live by his Loom, read Novels, became Sentimental and fancied himself the hero of every tale of Romance that passed through his hands’. After a brief spell in New York, he had found himself in the service of the NorthWest Company, but despite being dismissed, he had reappeared on the books of the Hudson’s Bay Company at the unusually old age of fifty-five. Simpson clearly wished to bring his prolonged sojourn to an end:
To the Fur Trade he is quite a Burden, and a heavy burden too, being a compound of folly and extravagance, and disarranging and throwing into confusion whatsoever he puts his hand to in the shape of business. The concern would gain materially by allowing him to enjoy his situation a thousand Miles distant from the scene of operations instead of being taxed with his nominal Services in the Country. 39
Although George Simpson continued to recruit employees in northern Scotland, he preferred Lewismen to Orcadians, as he explained in his annual report to the board in 1832:
With regard to Servants, we beg to request that thirty Orkneymen … be sent out by the ship of next year. The Orkney servants we have lately had were weak, undersized, many of them Sickly and nearly the whole of them half starved in appearance so that for the two first years of their contracts many of them were ineffective. They are however generally speaking, quiet, orderly well behaved men. The Lewis islanders are preferable in many points of view, being strong hearty active and fit to be immediately employed on laborious service; but although steady well behaved and generally of a serious turn of mind, we find them exceedingly stubborn and difficult of management and so clannish that it is scarcely possible to deal with them singly. Under those circumstances we are not desirous of having any more of them in the country than at present, and highlanders are equally objectionable from the same cause. I therefore beg leave to recommend that instructions be sent to your Honors’ agent at Orkney, sufficiently early to enable him to make his selection before the Agents of the Davis Straits fisheries begin to engage these people. 40
Simpson’s reservations were not without effect, for whereas the Orkneys provided 88 per cent of the Northern Department’s servants in 1830, the figure had dropped below 50 per cent by 1855, and recruits from Lewis outstripped Orcadi-ans by the early 1870s.
Shortly before he died near Montreal in 1860, George Simpson corresponded with a countryman who was later to fill his shoes but who, unlike him, ultimately returned home. Donald Smith, who emigrated from Forres in 1838 with a letter of introduction to Simpson, is probably the best example of an enterprising sojourner who worked his way up through the ranks of the Company to its top office, progressing from a thirty-year isolation as a trader in the frozen wastes of Labrador to become not only governor of the Company from 1889 to 1914 but also one of the financial masterminds behind the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a member of the Dominion Parliament and, in 1896, Canadian High Commissioner to Great Britain. Created Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal in 1897, he purchased an estate in Glencoe and was also a major benefactor of the University of Aberdeen.
Simpson and Smith were high-profile figures who rose to the highest echelons of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Most servants, clerks and even the better-paid factors had a much more mundane and anonymous experience. The ideal employee, from the Company’s perspective, was a young single man aged at least twenty-one. Youths were not thought to have reached their full strength, and married men, it was thought, were unlikely to renew their contracts after the end of the mandatory five-year contract. If the Company records showed that employees had been healthy, financially prudent and of good character during their first Arctic sojourn, the benefits of re-engagement, even at slightly increased wages, were reckoned to outweigh the risks and costs of recruiting new men. Despite the preference for young bachelors, many recruits were in fact married men who were beyond the first flush of youth. Some, like Orcadian Alexander Kennedy, spent their entire working life in the Arctic but remained mindful of their responsibilities at home. After thirty-one years’ service, Kennedy retired in 1829 from his post as a chief factor, dying in London three years later. His will, drawn up in 1831, left £300 to each of his two sisters and the residue to his wife and nine children in South Ronaldshay, although his wife was only to be paid an annuity out of the interest on the capital.
While some recruits may have been attracted by romantic images of the frontier peddled by Edinburgh-born children’s author R. M. Ballantyne, who spent seven years as a clerk in Rupert’s Land, most enlisted because of economic necessity arising from overpopulation and estate reconstruction. In famine-stricken Lewis in the 1840s and 1850s, for example, service in the Hudson’s Bay Company was a recognized outlet for the surplus and rent-defaulting tenants of Sir James Matheson, whose cousin, Alexander Matheson, MP, was one of the Company’s governors. Information about conditions was transmitted in correspondence, as well as word-of-mouth reports from those who returned. Recruits and their relatives were painfully aware of the hazards of an Arctic sojourn, which, as in the whaling industry, included frostbite and drowning, particularly among inexperienced canoeists, as well as the obvious dangers of exploring uncharted territory. But poor communications meant that bad news sometimes took a long time to reach home, and it was not uncommon for families in Scotland to continue writing to their sojourning brothers and sons long after they had died.
A high mortality rate was not the only difficulty faced by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Arctic sojourners. Internal rivalries, power struggles and administrative breakdowns posed a variety of problems. Particularly perplexing were the circumstances surrounding the death of Thomas Simpson, the Dingwall-born cousin of Sir George Simpson, who in 1840, after surviving three polar expeditions, died in mysterious circumstances on the Dakotan prairie. It was no surprise that in 1829, on graduating from Aberdeen’s King’s College, Thomas followed in the footsteps of a brother and half-brother and joined the Hudson’s Bay Company. His appointment as Governor’s Secretary was on the invitation of his powerful cousin, who in 1836 sent Thomas on a polar expedition as second-in-command to Peter Warren Dease, the veteran explorer who had accompanied Sir John Franklin on his second overland Arctic journey in 1825. Thomas had already demonstrated qualities of leadership and scientific expertise, and these were reinforced during both the 1836 expedition and a follow-up trip in 1839. By then Dease was in poor health, and although both men submitted a joint recommendation to the Company for permission to resume their search for the Northwest Passage the following season, it was likely that command of any expedition would fall to Thomas Simpson.
At that juncture, however, George Simpson intervened to ensure that his ambitious young cousin would not forge the final decisive link in the chain of northern polar exploration. Instead of granting him permission to return to the Arctic in 1840, he ordered him back to Fort Garry and thence to Britain on leave, while at the same time promising that plans would be drawn up for a future expedition. Thomas, acutely disappointed that the directors in England had apparently failed to overrule the governor and sanction another expedition, set off for London on 6 June 1840, carrying with him the narrative and maps of his recent travels, as well as a determination to petition the directors personally. He was never to know that the directors had, on 3 June, mailed a letter containing the authorization he craved, for only nine days into the journey Thomas Simpson met a violent death just over the American border, in Dakota.
The official explanation of his death was t
hat he committed suicide while of unsound mind after murdering two of his four Métis companions. That interpretation rested primarily on the testimony of one of the two surviving Métis, James Bruce, who claimed that Thomas had, without warning, shot dead John Bird and Antoine Legros senior, believing that they had intended to murder him and steal his papers. When the two survivors returned the next day with reinforcements, Thomas allegedly shot himself through the head as they approached, whereupon the witnesses buried all three bodies in the same unmarked grave at the place where they had fallen and several weeks later reported the incident to the authorities. Thomas’s insanity was attributed to a growing obsession with finding the Northwest Passage, aggravated by a volatile temper and a depression brought on by too many ‘lonely Arctic winters’.
The fact that Thomas Simpson killed Bird and Legros was never disputed. But the allegation that he launched a frenzied, unprovoked attack on them and then killed himself was hotly denied by his brother Alexander. He argued that Thomas had acted in self-defence after being attacked by the Métis, who bore a long-standing grudge against him following a dispute over wages six years earlier, and who perhaps also intended to steal and sell the secret of the Northwest Passage, which they thought was contained in Thomas’s papers. Having been wounded in the first skirmish, Thomas was then murdered the next day by one of the other Métis who returned to the scene with Bruce. Alexander also refuted the insanity theory, claiming that Thomas had good reason to revile his despotic cousin, who had failed to honour a promise to promote him, withheld letters from London informing him that he had been awarded the Royal Society’s Gold Medal and a government pension for his discoveries in 1837, and blocked his efforts to persist in Arctic exploration. It is significant that the governor — described by Thomas in 1834 as ‘a severe and most repulsive master’41 — did not release his personal effects to Alexander Simpson for almost three years, by which time all George ’s letters to Thomas had been removed. Nor was the explorer’s diary ever recovered, although the Governor’s attempts to suppress publication of Thomas’s record of his expeditions, in favour of incorporating them in a book of his own, came to nothing. Alexander was convinced that the Governor had removed from Thomas’s papers all correspondence relating to his promised promotions and his repeated attempts to make the Company pay into his brother’s estate the share of profits due to him as a Chief Trader and then as a Chief Factor (up to £3,000) met with a blank refusal.
Alexander Simpson’s financial dispute was a matter of principle, but at a lower level any breakdown in the transmission of earnings could cause serious hardship to dependants at home. In 1857 Christina Anderson in Shetland made an unsuccessful appeal to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s London office after her husband, a labourer who had been in the Company’s service since 1848, accidentally defaulted on his remittances:
My husband Edward Anderson … wrote me Some time ago Stating that he had Sent me Five Pounds which has not yet come to hand and as I am very needful at present it would oblige me very much if you could advance me the Five Pounds on his account. I am led to believe that he has omitted to enclose the check and the more so from his regularity in Sending me Small Sums annually. If you comply with my request please to Send it on to Mr Peter Williamson Jr Merchant Lerwick Shetland as I have been receiving Some Supplies from him for my Family and had it not been for Mr. Williamson’s humanity Since my husband left here I and my children could not have been alive. 42
Arctic earnings were a vital part of the household economy of many sojourners’ wives and parents and also helped to stimulate trade in the Northern and Western Isles. More substantial fortunes made in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company were reflected in the tendency of some sojourners — like their countrymen in the Caribbean — to bequeath money for schools and poor relief in their home parishes. Sojourning could also pour oil on the troubled waters of family conflict, for ‘when a man and his wife cannot live in peace together, the parties and the parish are relieved from such disquiets, by the husband’s retreat to the Hudson’s Bay settlements’. But some commentators deplored the deleterious social and economic effects of overseas service in ‘this infernal settlement’ on the sojourners themselves and the local economy. ‘The money which they have earned,’ complained the minister of Kirkwall and St Ola in the Statistical Account, ‘instead of furnishing the means of industry, is almost always spent in idleness, and often in dissipation.’ Although there was no explicit criticism of the tendency to take native ‘country wives’while overseas, in the 1790s sojourners were criticized for abandoning their families, ignoring their patriotic duty to serve in the navy, and depleting the farming, fishing and kelping labour force. ‘Many…bring home with them all the vices, without any of the virtues of savages…and at the same time a broken constitution,’ complained the minister of Orphir, who was also not alone in accusing the returners of inflating rents by displacing small farmers fromtheir holdings until they too, having failed in agriculture through inexperience, were similarly displaced a few years later. 43
14. William Tomison’s School, Orkney. William Tomison (1739.1829) was a Scottish sojourner who spent 47 years in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He founded a school for poor children in his native island of South Ronaldshay and Burra and also bequeathed £200 to the poor of his native parish.
For three centuries Scots were predominant among all ranks of men employed in the Canadian fur trade. Life in these northern climes was no less hazardous than in their tropical counterparts, for although fortunes could be made, it was often at considerable cost, and there were many sojourners who never came home. For most recruits, making a modest living was more important than winning a vast fortune, but while they were generally unable to flaunt their wealth and left no architectural legacy of their sojourn, their accumulated earnings had a considerable and prolonged influence on the economy of the Northern and Western Isles in particular.
Transient tradesmen in North America
All parts of Scotland felt the impact of wages earned by temporary emigrants in more familiar locations. The United States in particular attracted large numbers of itinerant artisans who sought to capitalize on the demand for skilled labour in textiles, mining, construction and a host of other developing industries. John Ronaldson (twenty-nine), the flax heckler from Fife, arrived in 1852 with a list of contacts and the intention of securing work not only for himself but also for his new wife and other female relatives who had stayed in Scotland. Despite periods of unemployment during his two-year sojourn, he was able to save some money from wages earned at his trade in Schagticoke, New York and Braintree, Massachusetts. He could therefore go home with his head held high and avoid the ‘jeering of their relations and shopmates’ experienced by disappointed sojourners who returned with empty pockets. ‘I have not rued coming to this country,’ he assured his wife shortly before he went home, even though he admitted that he had enjoyed only moderate success, and ‘change of climate has been sore against me in health and money affairs’. His decision to return was based not only on wages and job prospects, especially the lack of opportunities for his wife, but also factors such as working conditions and lifestyle. Remuneration, he felt, was ‘not in proportion to the work performed’, and he disliked the pressure to become a rolling stone, covering huge distances in a constant search for better-paid employment. 44
After the American Civil War, the episodic emigration of artisans developed apace, thanks to a continuing demand for their labour, coupled with readily available transatlantic steamship passages. Many tradesmen made a conscious decision to play the international wage market as peripatetic or seasonal emigrants, and while some, such as the iron moulders who reapplied for membership in their Scottish trade union in the 1860s, were disappointed in their American expectations, most came and went in pursuit of the best wages. According to miners’ union leader, Alexander McDonald, in 1873:
One of the causes at the present moment reducing the price of coal in Scotland
… is that a large number of our young men have returned home. The high rate of wages at home has attracted quite a number. I should say that I know at the present moment at least 500 young men that have returned; but over all I estimate that at least 1,500 men have returned from the United States. Not to remain, however. We have hundreds of youths in Scotland that have got the habit of coming home in the winter season; they go out for the run in the summer season in the United States; it is only a matter of 16 days and 6l passage money; then they go by the emigrant cars, and 2l will take them to the coal field; the whole thing is done from 10l to 12l; they take the run, as they call it, and they can in some instances make 20l a month. They return in October, and they work here. In other cases they come back here and they do not work at all. But at the present time an immense number have returned, and are located here for a time. Many of them have their return passage tickets; and whenever the wages come to 4s. or 5s. or 6s. a day again they will not be found here, but will be off. 45