The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  In the last week of February, the food riots broke out again, the most savage and desperate of them in Caithness and Ross.

  On the 20th of that month the Sheriff of Caithness asked for soldiers at once, saying that the mob was plotting to scuttle a grain-ship at Wick. Two companies of the 76th Regiment, under Captain Evans Gordon, came promptly by steamer, landing at Ackergill and marching into Wick with drums beating and bayonets fixed. They were in action immediately, for the streets were full of rioting men and women. Gordon put a lieutenant and twenty men on the wharf to guard the ship, and then marched the rest of his command to the meal-store where the carts were being loaded. From the moment the soldiers were placed on the wharf they were under bitter and sustained assault from the crowd, and several of them, including the lieutenant, were injured by stones. Fishermen tried to drag them into the sea by running at them with an extended rope, but the soldiers leaped over it and drove the sailors away with the bayonet.

  When Gordon brought the carts down to the harbour he was halted by a barricade that kept him from the ship and the twenty men on the wharf. For an hour his men, most of them young recruits, stood in the open by the carts and under volleys of stones. Women hung from the windows on either side, urging on their men and shouting for bread. At last the Sheriff read the Riot Act and Gordon sent his men forward. They broke into sections and advanced with barking hurrahs, their bayonets down. The struggle was short and ugly. Women beat at the muskets with sticks, and one who attacked an officer was knocked to the cobbles by ‘a pretty severe sword cut’. Many of the crowd were wounded on the arms and legs by the bayonets before they broke and left the harbour to the soldiers.

  The ship was loaded and drawn out to the safety of the bay.

  The 76th formed ranks and marched back towards their quarters with several prisoners they had taken, and now the mob swarmed down a hill upon them, hurling stones which, said the Courier, ‘rattled on the soldiers' accoutrements like hail’. Gordon brought his men into line with their muskets at the present, and shouted a warning to the crowd. He was answered with more stones, and he gave the order to fire. The volley was aimed high, but two hundred yards from the redcoat line the falling shots broke a man's wrist and tore a hole in the breast of a young girl.

  That night Wick was bloody and bruised, and the grain-ship it had hoped to scuttle lay off Pulteneytown waiting for a fair wind that would take it to the south.

  A week later (when Captain Gordon and the 76th were marching northward still to quell another food-riot in Thurso) the officer commanding at Fort George received a hysterical call for help from John Jardine, the aged advocate who had succeeded Macleod of Geanies as Sheriff of Ross. He said that the people of Invergordon and the hills about were rioting against the export of grain. They had broken into stores and mixed the sacks to make them unmarketable and unfit for sale as seed, and they were now threatening to intercept and overturn all wagons sent to the harbour. His constables were unable to control the mob, and he wanted soldiers to escort farmers' shipments to the wharves at Invergordon. On Tuesday, 2 March, one hundred men of the 27th Enniskillen Foot, who had just arrived at Fort George in the Birkenhead, were sent to the Cromarty Firth in the same ship and under the command of their Colonel.

  Mr Jardine, other sheriffs of the county, the Procurator-Fiscal, a retired lieutenant-general, a retired major, two baronets, and a dozen other gentry were waiting with relief on the quayside at Invergordon to welcome the Irish soldiers, in whose own homeland at this moment skeleton women were shrieking for food and maddened animals were gnawing at human corpses. The 27th formed up on the quay in scarlet and pipe-clay, tapped their muskets on the stones, and marched off with the gentry for Rosskeen two miles away. There a farmer called Baxter had several wagons of grain he wanted to ship to the south.

  A mile from Rosskeen soldiers and gentlemen were halted by the mob. The people had already stopped Mr Baxter's convoy, driven off the few constables guarding it, unloaded the wagons and sent them back to the farm. The 27th formed in line across the road and the fields on either side, and Mr Jardine came forward to read the Riot Act. Not much of the Act was heard above the shouts of ‘Starvation!’ but when he had finished the Irish advanced and drove the people away with the bayonet. The carts were brought back, reloaded, and taken into Invergordon. A half dozen prisoners were locked in the inn.

  The loading of Mr Baxter's grain began by torchlight that night, and was completed successfully under the protection of the soldiers. But the mob poured down on the empty carts as they were returning to Rosskeen, tore them to pieces and chased the drivers into the heather. The people then assaulted the inn where the retired lieutenant-general and the rest of the gentry were guarding the prisoners. They broke down the door with one of the gentlemen's own carriage-poles, rescued two of the prisoners, and were then driven out of the inn by clubbed pistols and riding-crops. The gentry made frequent sallies on the mob, shouting defiance, until a picquet of the 27th came up at the double and cleared the streets until dawn.

  The little war continued the next day, when the Sheriff-Substitute and seventy-five soldiers went again to Rosskeen to escort some empty carts needed for carrying grain from the store to the harbour. But all they found was a great fire of burning wood. They faced about and marched to Ballintraid, where thirty loaded carts should have been waiting for them. Once more the people had forestalled them, and were already cutting open the sacks when the soldiers came running in with the bayonet. The carts were re-loaded, but all the way to Invergordon the 27th had to fight off a great crowd of men and women* who threw stones and cried, ‘Starvation! Starvation!’ Women who took the bridles of the horses in an attempt to turn them were beaten back with musket butts.

  The convoy was a mile long, and the soldiers had difficulty in guarding all of it. The teamsters were often left alone, swinging their whips against the crowd. In Invergordon the difficulty increased. ‘In the course of the march through the village to the harbour,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘three successive bayonet charges were made, in the course of which several people received slight wounds.’ Waiting on the quay was a company of the 76th, brought that morning by the Birkenhead, and at the sight of them the people lost heart. They went home in listless and hungry despair.

  Picquets of the 27th and the 76th patrolled the empty streets of Invergordon for the rest of the day, and throughout the night while the ships were loaded with grain. On Friday the town was still deserted, and Mr Jardine decided that the worst was over. But in the afternoon he heard that a band of men, in what appeared to be disciplined order, was coming down the road from Tain with a piper at its head. The General Assembly was beaten on the drums of the 27th, and the Irish formed up across the quay. The gentry came out of the inn with their pistols and crops, and Mr Jardine stood ready with the Riot Act once more in his hand. It was not needed. The threatened mob turned out to be ‘sixty fine-looking young men from the Duke of Sutherland's estates, with knapsacks on their backs and sticks in their hands’, who had left the land of Improvement to find work on the railways in the south. They knew nothing of the riot, and showed no desire to join it. The gentry were so relieved at this that they put their hands in their pockets and gave the Sutherlanders money ‘to buy beer and bread to refresh them’. Though where they might buy bread in the hungry streets of Invergordon was not explained to them.

  Rioting increased with the second failure of the potato crop that year. Three-quarters or more of the population of most parishes were existing, or trying to exist, on the relief given them by the Destitution Boards. It was never sufficient. Sixty-nine ‘poor inhabitants’ of Evanton in Ross declared that for weeks they had lived on a few turnips, and now that these were gone they had nothing. Queen Victoria ordered her household to eat no more than one pound of bread per person daily, and seventeen ‘distinguished persons’, headed by the Dukes of Bedford, Norfolk, Rutland and Grafton, published an advertisement in the Inverness Courier pledging themselves ‘to reduce in
our families as far as practicable the consumption of bread and flour’. Lord John Russell decided that a banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London was a suitable occasion on which to advise other people to do the same. In Arisaig, seven hundred people were saved from death by starvation by the gift of 10½ bolls of meal which lasted them two days, and the Marquess of Abercorn rented a shooting-lodge on Loch Laggan for £2,000 a year.

  The people were a burden – to themselves, to the proprietors, and to the Government. In the west a meeting of landlords put

  into words and on to paper what men had been thinking for some time. The people should go. The meeting resolved to ask the Government to assist emigration from the Highland counties of Scotland. ‘I see the hills, the valleys and the slopes,’ cried the bard Kenneth Mackenzie,

  But they do not lighten my sorrow.

  I see the bands departing

  on the white-sailed ships.

  I see the Gael rising from his door.

  I see the people going,

  and there is no love for them in the north.

  ‘Cha till mi tuille, we shall return no more!’

  EMIGRATION had begun long before the coming of the Great Cheviot. According to John Knox, the London bookseller who toured the Highlands in the seventeen-eighties, twenty thousand people left for the Colonies between 1763 and 1775. In one year alone fifty-four emigrant ships sailed from the western sea-lochs. Though some of the emigrants were the families of soldiers who had fought in the Americas, and who had chosen to settle there on grants of land, most were led and organized by small tacksmen who wished to escape the rack-renting of their chiefs. In 1769 all tenants and sub-tenants left the Skye estates of Macdonald of Sleat, forcing him to import others from the mainland. A growing population, a decaying economy, recurrent famines and bitter poverty made exile inevitable for increasing numbers. Others left to be free from the religious intolerance of their lairds, of men like Colin Macdonald of Boisdale who beat his tenants into the Presbyterian Church with his cane, and thus earned for it the enduring name of Creideamh a' bhata buidhe, the Religion of the Yellow Stick.

  From the beginning the emigrants were the victims of speculators and ship-masters, of typhus, cholera and dysentery. They were deceived in most of the promises made to them. In July 1773, two hundred people of Ross, thirty-three families and twenty-five single men, boarded the Hector at Ullapool on Loch Broom. The ship was so rotten that the emigrants were able to pick away its timbers with their finger-nails. It was owned by two Englishmen, Pagan and Witherspoon, who had bought unbroken land in Nova Scotia which they proposed to settle with Highlanders, rightly concluding that these were gullible or desperate enough to believe that they would receive a farm for every family and a year's free provisions for all. The people left in good spirits, and when their piper was ordered ashore because he had no money to pay for his passage ‘they pleaded to have him allowed to accompany them, and offered to share their own rations with him in exchange for his music’.

  The voyage was long and hard. Off the Newfoundland coast gales drove the Hector back into the Atlantic, adding two more weeks to its bitter passage. Eighteen children died of smallpox or dysentery. Water in the barrels was green and almost undrinkable, and in the end it was so scarce that the emigrants were unable to eat the little salt meat that was left. They searched the ship's hold for scraps of mouldy oatcake they had previously thrown away. In Nova Scotia they went ashore behind their piper, wearing the tartan that was still under proscription in Scotland, and some of the young men carried broadswords at their hips. But nothing they had been promised was awaiting them. Many were sent into the timberland without food or the tools to build houses. It was October, too late to break the land or plant it. That winter men and women walked eighty miles through the snow to exchange their clothing for potatoes. Some tried to live on the bark of trees or by hacking clams and oysters from the ice. Others bound themselves away as indentured servants to earlier settlers. Then they rose in protest, mobbed the owners' stores, bound the agent who had brought them from Ross and since deserted them, took what they needed in food and clothing, and left notes against their willingness to pay when they could. A company of militia ordered out against them refused to march. ‘I know the Highlanders,’ said its captain, ‘and if they are fairly treated there will be no trouble with them.’

  In the spring only seventy-eight of the original two hundred emigrants were left on the settlement.

  The American Revolution checked the flow of emigration for seven years. In 1783 it began again, stimulated by a famine during which, said the Sheriff of Caithness and Sutherland, ‘many people are dying in great numbers for want of food’. And now sheep had come to the Highlands. ‘It need be no matter for surprise,’ said Knox, ‘if a gentleman should embrace the tempting offers from sheep-farmers. One man will occupy the land that starved fifty or more families; he gives a double or treble rent and is punctual to the day of payment.’ The fifty or more starving families walked to Greenock, to Fort William or Ullapool, to Thurso or Wick, or any port at which emigration agents advertised their sailings. During the first three years of the nineteenth century ten thousand people left for Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, driven from the Highlands by poverty, by eviction and by sheep. In 1801, said Thomas Telford, eleven ships sailed from Fort William with 3,300 emigrants. In the verse of the people there was now a hopeless melancholy, an acceptance of despair. A Dhomhnaill, a ghràidh mo chridhe…

  Oh Donald, love of my heart,

  I am sorrowful, heavy and weary

  in solitude, as I think

  of all the misery that pursues me,

  and of all my kinsmen lost to me.

  It is not offended pride, not rage,

  not a fierce and savage gloom,

  not War even (that would be little),

  but that Islay now has so few

  of the youth that once were here.

  They have been driven away

  to America across the sea,

  and there is no one left

  with kindly feelings, or peace in him.

  The Inverness Journal certainly had no kindly feelings when it reported the departure of one hundred and thirty emigrants who left Thurso in October 1807, aboard the brig Rambler. ‘Most criminal infatuation!’ it declared, ‘that can thus lead men to emigrate from their native homes into a state of voluntary banishment, peril and toil the most laborious, to a country where they have not only to till but make the field, half of which exertion and labour would have made the country they thus abandon pregnant with every blessing.’ When it later announced the wreck of the Rambler, with the loss of all but three of the emigrants, the Journal did not say that this was probably Divine Judgement, but it did choose the occasion to lament the fact that so many people were leaving Scotland ‘when recruits for our standing army and militia are hard to find’.

  In its sustained disapproval of those who ‘wantonly left the Highlands and safely arrived in the western hemisphere’, the Journal had the support of all good men in the country, particularly those who took turns at governing it. So long as Highlanders were needed to fill the uniforms emptied by French musketry or West Indian fevers, emigration was regarded as an evil, though few men suggested that the economic causes of it might be greater evils still. The Government's attitude was also part of the paradox of Britain's imperial growth, that whilst the country acquired large areas of the earth's surface it was disinclined to people them with anything more than convicted felons. In this it may have been mindful of the fact that thirteen colonies of largely respectable emigrants had recently decided to govern themselves. But until the Napoleonic Wars ended, and until a sheep economy made destitution too great a problem to be solved by anything other than emigration, the Government did its best to keep the people at home (and in employment) by encouraging the construction of the Crinan and Caledonian Canals, the building of 875 miles of roads and bridges in the Highlands. The cost of these works, to the State, county authoritie
s and proprietors, was more than £1,500,000, of which nearly half went in the eighteenpence or half a crown a day paid to the labourers. Though hundreds of evicted men were able to find work on the roads and the canals, the rate of removals and the growth of the population outstripped the work available. Emigration increased in the second decade of the century.

  There is probably a definable rule governing the exploitation of the many by the few in times of suffering, if it has not already been stated as The Law of Demand and Supply. Before the end of the eighteenth century there were men like Pagan and Witherspoon who saw an opportunity for quick profits in Highland emigration. Many were merchants who formed partnerships for the chartering of emigrant vessels. Others went further, again like Pagan and Witherspoon, and bought land in Canada which they never saw but to which they committed hundreds of Highland families. Some were retired or half-pay officers, buying shares in a single emigrant ship, or in a fleet. According to Sheriff-Substitute Brown of Western Inverness, writing in 1800, a Major Simon Fraser at Fort William ‘has made a trade of the business since 1790’.

  One of the most successful contractors was George Dunoon of Fort William who, with his partners, made a comfortable fortune shipping Glengarry and Strathglass people across the Atlantic to Pictou in Nova Scotia. On one of Dunoon's ships, said Sheriff Brown, fifty people died of cholera. ‘I saw the ships when at Fort William. They were much crowded. When the passengers landed in America they were shut up in a point of land, and all communication betwixt them and the rest of the country people cut off, to prevent the contagion of disease.’

  Emigrant sailings were advertised in an encouraging and deceptive prose:

  NOTICE TO PASSENGERS

  for

  NOVA SCOTIA AND CANADA

  A SUBSTANTIAL COPPERED Fast Sailing Ship will be ready to receive passengers at Fort William on the 10th of June and sail for Pictou and Canada on the 20th.