Since I am now about to bid farewell to everyone and everything on this side of the Ocean, and to take one leap forward without reservation, in order to smooth out everything which might cause the emigrant to stumble when he arrives, I would pray of the Gaels, before we part, that they leave in groups, as I have directed them; for, in so doing, the youth will not be in danger of falling into bad company, which is much too commonly seen in America. 13
He urged emigrants to look out for each other’s moral welfare, for ‘the decent man will protect the man who seeks good companions’ in a country where ‘in the everyday speech of some persons there are curses as repulsive as any ear has ever heard’.
It was not the mere survival of the Gaelic language that allowed Highlanders to retain and reinforce their identity in areas like Cape Breton even after they had ceased to be numerically dominant. Their cultural vitality was achieved and sustained in no small part by the way in which memories of home were celebrated, manipulated and at times invented in Gaelic sung poetry, which was the main vehicle of Gaelic literary expression and public articulation of the emigration experience. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, the traumatic context of much Highland emigration meant that it was frequently portrayed as involuntary exile, the unhappy consequence of the erosion of the Highlanders’ traditional economy and way of life through landlord-instigated modernization policies. Deliberately or unwittingly, emigrants and commentators conflated arbitrary nineteenth-century evictions with the very different estate policies of the eighteenth century, portraying the whole history of Highland emigration as an uninterrupted tragedy of brutal eviction and wholesale clearance. While this was historically inaccurate, it was a powerful weapon in the construction of an enduring sense of identity and solidarity in the emigrant community. That community, it was perceived, had been forged in the fires of adversity and persecution, and it was incumbent on the emigrants to restore traditional clan loyalties, put people before profits and help each other adjust to the new environment that had been imposed on them.
Yet there was no common interpretation of emigration, even Highland emigration. The emigrants’ varied backgrounds and experiences ensured that Gaelic song celebrated as well as lamented their experiences. Two cousins from Lochaber, John MacDonald (Iain Sealgair) and Allan MacDonald (Ailean an Rids), both settled in Mabou Ridge in Cape Breton, but saw their emigration through different ends of a telescope. John, consumed with the bitterness of exile when he arrived in 1835, wrote a Gaelic lament, in which he looked back longingly:
I left my country, I left my heritage;
my mirth remained over there.
I left the friendly, hospitable place,
and my beloved relatives there.
I left the beauty and the place where it was seen,
land of the hollow and the cairn.
It is the cause of my reflection that
I could not stay there forever. 14
Allan MacDonald disagreed vehemently with that interpretation. ‘You have put down lies and boasts about many subjects in your song,’ he accused his cousin, claiming that ‘the land that you left is the land without kindness, without humanity for the tenantry’. 15 To Allan, who had emigrated twenty years earlier, Cape Breton offered hope for the future, a sentiment even more prominent among those Highlanders who, having discovered that the commercialization that had forced them from home could work to their advantage in the new world, integrated into the colonial élite and celebrated their identity primarily in terms of the martial tradition and loyalty of generations of Highland settlers. 16
Michael Kennedy is adamant that the public perception of Highland emigrants as being ‘in a constant state of nostalgic mourning for a lost Highland homeland’ is attributable to a misleadingly selective and distorted reading of the folklore by non-Gaelic authors. As a result, ‘only those songs which confirmed the romantic interpretation of the Highland emigrants as victims were selected, translated and incorporated into the dominant English language tradition’. 17 He singles out for particular criticism the (in)famous ‘Canadian Boat Song’, which first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1829, purporting to have originated among Highland boatmen on the St Lawrence. It includes the following emotive lines:
When the bold kindred, in the time long-vanish’d,
Conquer’d the soil and fortified the keep -
No seer foretold the children would be banish’d,
That a degenerate Lord might boast his sheep:
Fair these broad meads — these hoary woods are grand;
But we are exiles from our fathers’ land. 18
Pointing to the lack of any evidence of a Gaelic version, and the technical disparities between the poem and other contemporary Gaelic literature, the anonymous ‘Canadian Boat Song’ was, says Kennedy, ‘a work of the imagination and of English, and not Gaelic, literature ’ 19 which reinforces the myth that Highland emigrants invariably lamented, and never celebrated, their translation to the new world.
The negative identity criticized by Kennedy is certainly evident in the declamations of the two best-known contemporary Scottish polemicists, reinforcing the overall image of an ill-starred, hapless company of unwilling exiles. Both Donald McLeod and Alexander MacKenzie castigated Lord Selkirk’s treatment of his Red River colonists and highlighted the plight of the large contingent of Barra emigrants sent to Canada in 1851. According to MacKenzie, Selkirk’s colonists had been ‘deceived and deserted … and left to their fate in an inclement wilderness’, where, said McLeod, they had undergone ‘unparalleled sufferings’, with their descendants in the 1850s still allegedly ‘subject to the grasping insatiable avarice of the Hudson Bay Company’. 20 Almost forty years later, the newly arrived Barra emigrants were identified with destitution and potential starvation, both at Quebec and after they reached their final destination in Ontario. MacKenzie drew on an editorial in the Dundas Warden to demonstrate how at one and the same time they were set apart and drawn together in shared misery:
We have been pained beyond measure for some time past, to witness in our streets so many unfortunate Highland emigrants, apparently destitute of any means of subsistence, and many of them sick from want and other attendant causes. It was pitiful the other day, to view a funeral of one of these wretched people. It was, indeed, a sad procession. The coffin was constructed of the rudest material; a few rough boards nailed together, was all that could be afforded to convey to its last resting-place the body of the homeless emigrant. Children followed in the mournful train; perchance they followed a brother’s bier, one with whom they had sported and played for many a healthful day among their native glens. Theirs were looks of indescribable sorrow. They were in rags; their mourning weeds were the shapeless fragments of what had once been clothes. There was a mother, too, among the mourners, one who had tended the departed with anxious care in infancy, and had doubtless looked forward to a happier future in this land of plenty. The anguish of her countenance told too plainly these hopes were blasted, and she was about to bury them in the grave of her child. 21
In other cases documented by MacKenzie or reconstructed from oral tradition, Highland emigrants had fallen victim to shipwreck, disease or misrepresentation by agents. The 178 passengers aboard the Hector, which left Loch Broom in July 1773 for Pictou, allegedly endured squalid accommodation, storms and disease during the voyage. Eighteen children died, ‘and were committed to the deep amidst such anguish and heart-rending agony as only a Highlander can understand’. Having been promised ‘splendid farms’, these emigrants from the treeless west coast of Scotland were aghast to be put ashore into a dense, unbroken and uninhabited forest, where they would clearly have to learn skills of axemanship before they could even begin to cultivate their lands. Yet after enduring ‘unspeakable suffering’, the remnant of the Hector’s passengers who remained at Pictou ultimately — and surprisingly — emerged ‘prosperous and happy’. 22 A party of 229 emigrants from Lewis to the Eastern Townships of Lower
Canada in 1841 experienced a similar reversal of fortune when, after being saved from starvation and a ‘horrid death’ only by timely financial assistance from the St Andrew’s Society of Montreal, they settled down in ‘easy circumstances’, and founded what by the 1880s was a ‘happy and prosperous community’ at Lingwick and Winslow. 23
It is therefore misleading to claim that English-language sources depicted the identity of Highland emigrants in unequivocally negative, defeatist terms. Ultimate success in the new world was a common theme even in the most nostalgic literature. Indeed, the achievement of prosperity in the face of adversity satisfied the demands of poetic — and sometimes retributive — justice, as in Alexander MacKenzie ’s juxtaposition of the wealth and comfort of the descendants of cleared Highlanders in Glengarry with the fate of the ‘grasping sheep farmer who was the original cause of their eviction … [who had] died ruined and penniless’. 24 These images of an identity forged by exile and entrepreneurship also became part of colonial folklore, with Canadian novelists such as Ralph Connor and Hugh MacLennan taking up and reinforcing the stereotype. Connor’s ‘Glengarry’ novels, published at the turn of the nineteenth century, depict a tenacious people, ‘bound together by ties of blood’, but also by the isolated, inhospitable nature of the land they had to tame. ‘Driven from homes in the land of their fathers, they had set themselves with indomitable faith and courage to hew from the solid forest, homes for themselves and their children that none might take from them’, and in their ultimately successful struggle with nature, ‘their brittle Highland courage [was] toughened to endurance’. 25 MacLennan, writing in the 1950s about a Highland mining community in Cape Breton Island, used similar imagery to explain the Highlanders’ emigration:
Then across the ocean in the Highlands of Scotland a desperate and poetic people heard of her [Cape Breton Island]. They were a race of hunters, shepherds and warriors who had discovered too late that their own courage and pride had led them to catastrophe, since it had enabled them to resist the Saxon civilization so long they had come to the end of the eighteenth century knowing nothing of the foreman, the boss, the politician, the policeman, the merchant or the buyer-and-seller of other men’s work. When the English set out to destroy the clans of Scotland, the most independent of the Highlanders left their homes with the pipes playing laments on the decks of their ships. They crossed the ocean and the pipes played again when they waded ashore on the rocky coast of Cape Breton Island. 26
The bagpipe, another familiar icon of Highland identity in emigrant fiction, also appeared in Margaret Laurence’s flashback novel of the legacy of joint Highland and Indian ancestry in Canada, The Diviners. In a more upbeat interpretation of the Sutherland clearances than that presented by Donald McLeod and Alexander MacKenzie, Laurence used the figure of Piper Gunn to represent the proud spirit in which Lord Selkirk’s pioneers came to Red River in 1813:
Then Piper Gunn spoke to the people. Dolts and draggards and daft loons and gutless as gutted herring you are, he calls out in his voice like the voice of the wind from the north isles. Why do you sit on these rocks, weeping? says he. For there is a ship coming, says he, on the wings of the morning, and I have heard tell of it, and we must gather our pots and kettles and our shawls and our young ones, and go with it into a new world across the waters … Then Piper Gunn changed his music, and he played the battle music there on the rocks … Then what happened? What happened then, to all of them people there homeless on the rocks? They rose and followed! Yes, they rose, then, and they followed, for Piper Gunn’s music could put the heart into them and they would have followed him all the way to hell or to heaven with the sound of the pipes in their ears. 27
Faith communities
While the sound of the pipes might rally exiled Highlanders, whose cultural vitality was also nurtured by Gaelic song and story and whose confidence was enhanced by the communal nature of much Highland emigration, there were many formal institutions through which emigrants from all parts of Scotland could demonstrate and reinforce their identity in unfamiliar environments. Probably the most vital — certainly the most familiar — was the Church. For innumerable Scots the cultivation of religious roots was the crucial way to maintain memories of the old country, and until the end of the nineteenth century founding or joining a Scottish church was probably the major mechanism through which Scots throughout the world acknowledged their origins and anchored themselves in a new community. There was no common religious identity, for Scots exported their sectarianism, while some changed their religion as well as their domicile when they emigrated. Irrespective of denomination, however, many emigrants, clergy and observers recognized that the Church provided a strong social cement, offering both spiritual and practical support to its adherents.
Clergymen were often seen as the keystones of emigrant communities. One of the Canadian witnesses to the select committee inquiry into emigration in 1841, when asked whether Highland emigrants to Canada should be accompanied by a clergyman, replied emphatically:
Most unquestionably; I deem this of the utmost importance … nothing tends so much to keep a community of persons going to a strange land together, as having some one person of superior intelligence, prudence, and benevolence among them, who being possessed of their confidence and respect, they can look up to as their adviser and friend, and who by his counsel and example will encourage them to persevere in overcoming difficulties which without such advice and encouragement they might regard as insurmountable. A clergyman is evidently the person most likely to answer these purposes, and the performance by him of the religious services to which the emigrants had been accustomed would, more than anything else, probably diminish the natural feeling of regret at leaving their native country. 28
By 1841 there was some precedent for clergymen organizing and accompanying emigrant parties, particularly from the Highlands to British North America. In the late eighteenth century several Roman Catholic clergy had been actively involved in west Highland and Hebridean emigration, though not always with the explicit backing of the Church hierarchy. In 1772, for instance, Father James MacDonald accompanied 210 emigrants from South Uist, Arisaig and Moidart to Prince Edward Island, after the Uist tenants had been ordered to renounce their faith for Presbyterianism on pain of expulsion from their lands. The exodus was devised and financed clandestinely by two Scottish bishops, who hoped to stem the spread of Protestantism among Highland landlords by threatening to depopulate their estates, at a time when landlords still fiercely opposed emigration. The bishops also hoped that the isolated location of the settlement would help to preserve the Catholicism of the settlers, Bishop George Hay suggesting in 1770 that ‘being all together on an Island, they would be the easier kept together & Religion the more flourish among them’. 29 Fourteen years later there was another priest-led exodus from the Highlands, when 520 tenants who had been evicted from their lands in Knoydart emigrated to Glengarry County under Father Alexander McDonell. There they re-joined their countrymen and co-religionists, 600 of whom had emigrated in 1773, initially to the Mohawk Valley in New York. In 1804 there was a further substantial addition to the Glengarry community, when 1,000 Highlanders, members of the disbanded First Glengarry Fencibles and their families, settled there under the auspices of their chaplain, also Alexander McDonell. 30
It was not only Catholic clergymen who accompanied Highland emigrants overseas. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of exodus is the departure of a boatload of Presbyterian emigrants from Assynt to Nova Scotia in 1817, under the leadership of Norman McLeod, a rusticated theological student and separatist preacher who had been thwarted in his attempt to become parish schoolmaster in Ullapool. Talented but autocratic, McLeod had spoken out against the Established Church’s lack of zeal and discipline. When the litigious minister of Lochbroom blocked his appointment as schoolmaster and had his salary stopped for unlicensed preaching to separatist congregations which he had established at Assynt and Ullapool, he was prompted to emigrate, along wi
th 400 supporters from those districts, in a self-built boat. At Pictou he upset both the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia and the local secessionist clergy by fomenting dissent among Highland settlers, large numbers of whom were attracted to his unlicensed preaching. ‘So great was the fame of Norman as a preacher,’ wrote the Reverend G. Patterson, ‘that people went so much further to hear him than any other minister … by thoughts so wildly fanatical he was a man of great power and gained influence over a large portion of the Highlanders such as no other man in the country possessed.’ 31 The Presbyterian establishment was no doubt relieved when, three years later, McLeod persuaded 200 followers to build another boat and set sail on the first stage of a journey to a Highland colony which he had been invited to found in Ohio. That invitation provided McLeod with a timely excuse to move on, since by 1820 he was in bad odour with the civil authorities, having been charged with libel and defamation after levelling an accusation of bigamy at the Reverend Donald Fraser, the Church of Scotland minister at East River. When McLeod and his followers were stormbound off Cape Breton Island, the party abandoned plans to go to Ohio and instead applied for government land grants in the isolated location of St Ann’s. Here the ‘Normanites’, as they were known, established the first Presbyterian church on Cape Breton Island, and in 1826 McLeod was ordained by Genessee Presbytery in New York State. As magistrate, schoolmaster and minister, McLeod had unassailable authority, and he ruled his colony with an iron rod akin to that exercised by many Hebridean churchmen back in Scotland.
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 45