For it was now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that the demand for meat, followed by the demand for wool, would transform the Highlands, draining the land of its ancient people forever. It was called ‘the Clearances’, and it would spell the death of Highland culture. The weapon deployed in this long and deliberate campaign of human catastrophe was the humble sheep.
There had, of course, always been sheep in the Highlands: small things kept in modest flocks, producing milk, small amounts of fine wool and, occasionally, tough mutton. They were thin and delicate creatures, unable to survive the harsh Highland winters, at the beginning of which they were brought down from their grazing places on the slopes to the lower, more protected climates. Often, they would over-winter with the tenant farmers themselves, man and beast under the same roof, in a way that later revolted outsiders.
Then, in the last years of the 1700s, came the time of the Cheviot, the Great Sheep. Named after the bitter hills running along the border of England and Scotland among which it was bred, the Cheviot was a man-made super sheep, producing one-third more wool and meat than the common blackface or Linton. It was also relatively disease free and could survive the harsh Highland winters that, insisted the locals initially, not even the strongest stag could bear.
Suddenly, land that had quietly supported a few hundred Highland families in a manner that remained unchanged for centuries was worth a fortune. Attention was directed towards the Highlands and its inhabitants as never before. The fear and loathing felt by a previous generation now gave way to pity and contempt for their squalid way of life, their dismal huts of sod and stone, their wooden ploughs, their paltry crops of oats and potato, their rough stills and bitter beer, their refusal to modernise, their stubborn beliefs in witches, faeries and other superstitions.
On their chestnut geldings, English and southern gentlemen—the industrious as well as the curious—made forays into the Highlands, notebook in hand, cursing the lack of roads and the absence of a decent inn. They rode up the river banks and into the villages, marking down every fertile valley and verdant hillside they could find along the way, tut-tutting as to how these people could be so immune to the wondrous progress of modern Britain. For their own sake, it was decided, they must—by force if necessary—be brought into the modern world, if only to liberate them from their own backwardness. Improvement became the moral imperative, and it was a subject not open for debate.
Driven from the south in massive flocks before southern Scots and English shepherds, the Cheviot came up the old cattle roads and crags to feed on the cotton grass and the alpine plants. They poured into glens and towns and villages like a bleating white river. To the landowners, armies of agents now offered previously unheard of rents. The only thing standing in the way of this tide of modernisation was the people.
The Napoleonic Wars, coinciding with the advent of the factory system and the new English industries of the early nineteenth century, brought the demand for wool to a crescendo. Public land was enclosed, fences appearing where none had existed before.
Unlike in some European countries, such as Switzerland, the rights of peasant tenants in the Highlands were not guaranteed. Even in England, the agricultural labouring classes had some hold on their tenure. Not so in Scotland. Families that had lived and died on the same plots were now handed eviction notices and ordered to leave. Many still spoke only the Gaelic and as they gathered as a village to listen to what these strangers from the south—the agents, the factors and the sheriffs—read to them, they could not understand a word of it. When they finally did, they could not believe what they were hearing.
Peacefully at first, the bewildered Highlanders accepted their lot with resignation. They were given the chance to dismantle their ancient wooden homes piece by piece and transport them to one of the new plots promised to them in a different part of their lord’s estate. These were usually on the wild coast or in the Western Isles, where they would now be forced to learn new ways of life as herring fishers or kelp harvesters—trades about which they knew absolutely nothing. Better still, they were told, a berth was always ready for them on one of the emigrant ships waiting in Greenock to take them to far-away America, Canada or, later, Australia. Many of the landowners were so keen to be rid of their people that they paid their fares, up front, no questions asked.
As surely as the native inhabitants of Australia and America were dispossessed in the name of progress and industry, so too were the Highlanders of Scotland, forced out by the sheep farmer colonists, and their so-called four-footed clansman of the Highlands: the Cheviot.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as landowners began to taste the riches that ridding their lands of people and converting them to sheep pastures could bring, the Clearances accelerated both in scope and bitterness. Land that had been worth pennies per acre to the gentry now yielded shillings and pounds. Yet the people were not leaving fast enough.
Perhaps the most brutal episodes of the Clearances took place across the vast shire of Sutherland, owned almost in its entirety by the phenomenally wealthy George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford and later first Duke of Sutherland. Said to be one of the richest men of nineteenth-century Britain—exceeding in wealth the fortune of even Baron Rothschild—he dubbed himself the ‘Great Improver’, although almost all he owned came through his wife, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, nineteenth Countess of Sutherland. Not that his thousands of tenants would have recognised him. It was said that in twenty years, he had visited his vast northern estates just once. His agents, sheriffs and factors, on the other hand, would soon become extremely familiar.
In the valleys of Strathnaver, entire towns and villages were cleared away like worn-out furniture. Any delay, any resistance to the evictions—even verbal protest—was taken as defiance and dealt with ruthlessly by Stafford’s men, particularly the infamous Factor for the Sutherland Estates, Patrick Sellar. His name, even today, induces a shudder of loathing to people in Scotland’s north.
Sellar employed teams of men to move people on with increasing brutality. Those slow to respond to the writs of removal had their houses torn down, with teams of horses being used to rip out beams and walls. Gone were the days when they were at least permitted to take their timbers with them—wood being a rare commodity in the Highlands. Then fire became the preferred tool. Entire villages of Strathnaver were set ablaze, houses lit at both ends at once, often with their inhabitants still inside. No pity was shown for age. Old women and children were ordered out or pushed into the elements, their furniture—often their only worldly possessions—smashed to pieces or going up in flames with the houses. In one such eviction, an old woman perished inside a house Sellar had set alight. It took two years for him to come to trial, only to be acquitted in minutes by a jury of fellow landowners and agents, along with a grovelling apology from the presiding magistrate.
Local ministers of God, not even remaining silent throughout their ordeal, sided almost exclusively with the landowning gentry, who promised them new manses and carriage roads leading up to their front doors. Thus bought, they turned on their own flock, threatening the more stubborn evictees with hellfire and eternal damnation for the slightest disobedience. Bleating waves of Cheviot sheep broke over the hills even before some tenants had had time to obey the eviction orders.
The evicted Highlanders were given no real compensation, offered no halfway houses, and no emergency or interim accommodation, no transport and no assistance to reconstruct their lives in whatever place it was they had been sent to. They were simply ordered to pack up, leave their crops to rot in the ground, take their few cattle and go.
The alternative coastal allotments generously provided by the Duke and Duchess to their ejected and homeless tenants were so miserable and so inadequate that, in many instances, it was all but impossible to eke out an existence. Rocky stretches of worthless moor and bog, whipped endlessly by the winds and waves rolling in from the Arctic. Unused to seas and tides, many were dr
owned or swept out to sea attempting to learn such alien activities as salt-making. The soil was, for the most part, thin and unproductive. Crops were attempted, but seeds that were not blown away on the wind sprouted weak green shoots that were killed by salt and mildew. People who had, over generations, established sustainable patterns of harvest on their modest plots now simply had to rely on what was provided by the merciless sea. In a sense, it did not matter where they had been sent:
Once expelled from the glen they had occupied for generations, it was of small consequence to them whether they travelled ten miles or four thousand. The loss was the same, the pain as great.2
One Highlander remembering his home before the time of the Clearances described being able to see the next village not more than three-quarters of a mile away from his own, with the next one the same distance beyond that. Now, four shepherds, their dogs and 3000 sheep occupied land that had once supported five townships.3
There were indeed improvements in the Highlands, but as one local observer, and one of the few local and articulate critics of the Clearances, Donald MacLeod, observed in a series of letters written to Edinburgh newspapers:
Roads, bridges, inns and manses to be sure, for the accommodation of the new gentlemen, tenantry and clergy, but those who spoke the Gaelic tongue were a proscribed race, and everything was done to get rid of them, by driving them into the forlorn hope of deriving subsistence from the sea while squatting on their miserable allotments where, in their wretched hovels, they lingered out an almost hopeless existence.4
There was some mobbing and deforcing of sheriff officers, and riots occasionally erupted at places like Strath Oykel and Gruids, but such resistance was quickly and ruthlessly put down in the courts. Soon, it petered out into resignation and despair:
The old weaknesses of the Highlanders had ended it—their lack of leadership, their childish faith in the laird, who must surely now change his mind, and, most insidious of all, their melancholy belief that they had been a doomed race since Culloden. Their comfort came in the stirring sadness of their own destruction.5
In the midst of the various waves of cruelty, there were one or two who resisted the tide. The Chisholm Clan, who had held the green and dark valleys of the Upper Valley of the River Beauly near Loch Ness for generations, were well used to standing by their beliefs before the fury of authority. Remaining defiantly Roman Catholic since the Scottish Reformation of 1560, they continued to hide Catholic priests on their estate, even allowing them to preach the old faith to their wary congregations in secret locations.
In the face of pressure to turn his rich lands over to sheep at the expense of his people, Alexander Chisholm, the ageing twenty-third chief, resisted. Folklore has it that his only daughter, Mary, burst into the room where an all-night meeting was taking place between her father and a delegation of pleading sheep farmers, hurling abuse at them. She was ordered out of the room, but instead tipped off the servants who alerted the surrounding villagers. When morning came, it is said that a thousand people had gathered outside Alexander’s door, begging him to protect them, telling him that these sheep men were worse than any enemy who had ever come to Strathglass with a broadsword in their hand. The southerners read the wind and made their escape up the glen. Looking back, they reported the old man being carried on the shoulders of his people as their saviour.
When Alexander died, his widow Elizabeth and daughter Mary continued their resistance to the Clearances, fiercely holding onto their tenants until William, the twenty-fourth Chisholm, and half-brother of Alexander, began the total dispersal of the clan. Now a married woman in London, Mary could do nothing and, brokenhearted, turned her back on the cause forever.
As if compensating in cruelty for his half-brother’s mercy, William Chisholm began one of the most thorough Clearances of all. In the case of Strathglass, not even an alternative plot on the coast was offered to the exiled tenants, who were burned out of their homes. Their only alternative was an emigrant ship to Canada. By 1812, 10,000 Chisholm clansmen and women had been exiled to the New World, with but a single solitary tenant, an ageing farmer, remaining on the once populous estate.
Although it is impossible to be exact, it is estimated that between half and two-thirds of the population of the Scottish Highlands was dispersed by the Clearances in the first 30 years of the nineteenth century. Now half a million sheep grazed the otherwise empty glens, wandering across the ruins of myriad houses, nibbling at the occasional potato shoot that still managed to appear in what had been a garden patch that had once sustained several families, wandering through the ruins of kitchens, climbing over the broken stone walls and hearths of former homes.
With awful irony, the Highlands now became something of a tourist playground. English visitors began to arrive, invigorated by the area’s magnificent walks and clean country air, now accessible with excellent new roads, bridges and inns. Deer and grouse shooting parties—which hunted for amusement the same game upon which others had relied for sustenance—began to pour into the area, happy to fork out the handsome fees the estate owners charged for the privilege. Highland culture even underwent something of a revival. The tartan and the Tam O’Shanter began to be sported by the young and fashionable of Edinburgh and London. The works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns began a romanticisation of the Highlander that persists to this day. Of the Highlanders themselves, however, there was no sign whatsoever—save for a few wandering vagrants—and only piles of scorched stones to indicate they had ever been there at all.
Clinging to their thin allotments along the coast and the islands, many dispersed Highlanders scratched out a bleak existence, but the herring fishers found that the fish were unreliable—sometimes disappearing for a year or so before inexplicably returning—and storms along the wild west coast smashed boats and split apart nets. Many worked in the kelp industry, but when the Napoleonic Wars brought an end to tariffs on cheaper Spanish kelp, the Highland market collapsed.
Then, to pile further woe on misery, in the summer of 1846, clouds of white spores began to be carried across the Highlands by wind, man and beast after a tumultuous year of severe drought followed by savage storms and floods. This fine white powder settled on everything that grew. Almost overnight, the potato plants began to blacken, their leaves turning to slime. When opened, the tubers in the earth were found to be black and rotten, and smelt of death. The blight had arrived.
Although never as severe or as prolonged as the Great Famine that had broken the previous year and continued to rage across Ireland, the Highland famine put 200,000 people at risk of starvation. The potato had only been introduced to the Highlands and islands a century before, but, particularly after the Clearances, it was found to be one of the few crops that could be relied upon in the doubtful soils along the coast. By the 1840s, one half of the entire Scottish population lived on the potato for nine months of the year, while in the Highlands, it was estimated to be two-thirds.
The blight wreaked its havoc with astonishing speed. Entire fields which were healthy on a Friday were black and rotten by Sunday. By the summer, it was evident that the entire Highland potato crop had failed.
While the death rate across the Highlands increased threefold—primarily from malnutrition and associated illnesses—the massive level of mortality seen in Ireland was avoided. As had happened there, however, the sanctity of commerce remained inviolable, and even in the face of starvation, ships departed Scottish ports weighed down to the waterline with Scottish foodstuffs such as oatmeal to honour contracts signed in England and further abroad. Soon, vessels in harbours required naval protection from rioters on the docks.
A government relief fund of sorts was established whereby recipients were required to work hard on government projects—such as road building—in order to receive any support at all. The terms were harsh. If only one member of a family of any size was deemed to be working, the rest were ineligible for any relief whatever. By 1850, however, the relief had all but run out, while
the blight in some areas persisted. It was the final straw for the Highlanders. For thousands, there was now no alternative but to emigrate.
With the blight eradicating any hope that the Scottish islands might become self-sufficient, the Skye Emigration Society was formed in 1851 to deal with the humanitarian crisis unfolding there. It soon evolved to include the entire Highlands as the Highland and Island Emigration Society, with its aims being
to procure help for those who wish to emigrate but have not the means of doing so, to afford information, encouragement and assistance to all whom emigration would be a relief from want and misery.6
And so began the mass exodus of the Highland Scots to all parts of the world, particularly Canada and Australia, answering the calls from the labour-starved colonies. There, they were assured, they were both wanted and needed. For many Scots travelling to Australia, the irony was not lost on them: sheep had forced them out of their old homes, and it was sheep that were now luring them to the new. Since 1845, in Ross and in the Isles, the Great Cheviot Sheep had been making sure that its cousins in Australia would not want for drovers.7
Over the next decade, an estimated 16,000 Highlanders finally decided that, after exile and famine, their best and only hope lay on the far side of the world.
11
Life at sea
The humid conditions on board the Ticonderoga continued during the first few days of sailing, during which the passengers had their first experience of weather at sea—and it was not pleasant. Soon after departing, a sudden squall had burst overhead in a thick summer downpour. Torrents of rain lashed the ship and the sea stirred in white-capped fury. Confined below for the first time, the passengers heard the main hatches leading up to the open deck being noisily battened down and the ventilation mechanism that had managed to supply at least some fresh air was disengaged. The sea erupted further as the Ticonderoga reached the open water, beyond the protective lee of the southern tip of Ireland. Huddling in the lower decks, many passengers could scarcely believe that a ship of this size could be tossed so violently, like a toy boat on a river being tumbled in an eddy. Suddenly, the great ship’s more than 1000 tons—which had felt solid and comforting—counted for nothing.
Hell Ship Page 8