The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  All those who wish to emigrate to these parts in Summer will find this an excellent opportunity, as every attention will be paid to the comfort of Passengers, and they may depend on the utmost punctuality as to the date of sailing.

  For particulars application may be made to Mr John Grant, Merchant in Fort William.

  In none of the advertisements was there any suggestion that death from fever, or from dysentery, was inevitable for some of the emigrants on every ship. Nor was there a warning that if the ship did not make the landfall it confidently promised, starvation would be added to the normal hell of the passage. The cost of the voyage was high, and many small tenants placed themselves and their families under indentures in Canada in order to meet it.

  FOR PICTOU DIRECT

  The Fine Brigantine

  GOOD INTENT

  220 Tons Burden

  E. HIBBARD, Supercargo,

  will be ready to sail from Aberdeen in March, and intends calling at Cromarty about the end of that month, if a sufficient number of passengers offer.

  This Vessel has most excellent accommodation for Passengers, and Mr Hibbard, the Supercargo, will pay every attention.

  The Fares are as follows, and payable at going on board:

  Cabin passengers

  10 guineas each

  Steerage ditto

  7 guineas each

  Ditto, from 7 to 14 years old

  5 guineas each

  Ditto, from 2 to 7 years old

  3 guineas each

  Infants go free

  An early application from those who intend going by the Good Intent is requested, that the owners may determine whether the vessel shall call at Cromarty.

  The sailing of an emigrant vessel was a deeply emotional experience, for those leaving and for those who remained. The Highlanders were like children, uninhibited in their feelings and wildly demonstrative in their grief. Men and women wept without restraint. They flung themselves on the earth they were leaving, clinging to it so fiercely that sailors had to prise them free and carry them bodily to the boats. A correspondent of the Inverness Courier watched the departure of some Kildonan people from Helmsdale: ‘Hands were wrung and wrung again, bumpers of whisky tossed wildly off amidst cheers and shouts; the women were forced almost fainting into the boats; and the crowd upon the shore burst into a long, loud cheer. Again and again that cheer was raised and responded to from the boat, while bonnets were thrown into the air, handkerchiefs were waved, and last words of adieu shouted to the receding shore, while, high above all, the wild notes of the pipes were heard pouring forth that by far the finest of pibroch tunes, Cha till mi tuille, We shall Return No More!’

  Conditions aboard the emigrant ships were seldom better than abominable, and for fifty years selfless humanitarian societies fought for Acts of Parliament that would bring a slight improvement in them. The ships that sailed from Dublin or Belfast were the worst of all, but because steerage passage on them cost thirty shillings only, a quarter of what it cost from Greenock, many Highlanders crossed the Irish Sea to sail from there. In the beginning, before Parliament attempted to control the contractors, emigrants were loaded into the ships like bales of merchandise. In 1773, for example, a ship of three hundred tons left for the Carolinas with four hundred and fifty passengers. All were crammed into a hold measuring sixty feet by eighteen by six, each emigrant having a little over two square feet of deck on which to spend ten or eleven weeks at sea. The pure water with which the shipmaster was supposed to supply his passengers was in fact sour, and was stored in casks that had previously contained indigo. Dysentery killed twenty-three of the emigrants before they reached America.

  In the summer of 1801, George Dunoon advertised the sailing of the Sarah and the Dove from Fort William for Pictou. Had the laws then governing slave-ships applied to these emigrant vessels, they would not have been allowed to carry more than 489 passengers. Dunoon filled the tiny holds with 700, emigrants from Lord Reay's country, from the clan-lands of Seaforth, Fraser and Cameron. If they believed his promise that in Nova Scotia they would find a tree that supplied fuel, soap and sugar (he probably meant the maple) they may have found the nightmare voyage endurable, but it is unlikely. Forty-nine people died on the Sarah alone, and the suffering of all was so terrible that it was remembered in Nova Scotia for more than a century.

  Two years after the departure of the Sarah and the Dove Thomas Telford, then surveying the coasts and Central Highlands for the Treasury, was asked to give his views on emigration. His report was placed before a select committee, and he urged that something be done to prevent over-crowding, to guarantee adequate provisions for all emigrants. The Passenger Act of 1803, which followed, produced some odd responses. Two ministers protested against it on behalf of ‘one hundred illiterate crofters in Inverness and Ross’, saying that the new regulations were making it impossible for their poor parishioners to escape hunger and destitution. Less disinterested was William Allen, a ship-owner of Leith, who petitioned the Treasury and the Commissioners of Customs, ridiculing a clause in the Act which obliged him to ship the following provisions for every child he carried: 52 gallons of water, 84 lb. of beef, 84 lb. of biscuits, 84 lb. of flour, 36 lb. of oatmeal, and 6 lb. of butter.

  Neither ministers nor ship-masters worried for long. The new regulations made little impression on the self-interest of contractors or the indifference of authority. Overcrowding continued and disease increased. When the little brig James reached Halifax in 1826 every person on board, crew or passenger, was ill with typhus. Reporting this to William Huskisson, the Colonial Secretary, a Governor-General of British North America added: ‘I really do believe that there are not many instances of slave-traders from Africa to America exhibiting so disgusting a picture… The most favourable account that reached me of one vessel admitted no sort of comparison between her and a French slaver brig captured by me four years ago when in command of a frigate on the Leeward Isles.’

  Another Act, in 1828, tried to establish the amount of space which should be given to each emigrant, and the amount of provisions that should be supplied, but both were the pitiful minimum only, and both were largely ignored. Thirty thousand people were now leaving Britain for Canada every year, and the profits were too tempting for shipowners to limit them by obeying regulations which nobody seemed inclined to enforce.

  From the moment they agreed to sail on a vessel the emigrants were bound to the contractor or his agents. They pledged themselves by depositing half the passage-money, and those who had no money sold their property to the agent at his valuation. Only when this was done, when a passenger-list was filled, was a ship chartered. Weeks, sometimes months would pass before she sailed down the Clyde, Loch Linnhe or Loch Broom (where the road to Ullapool was now known as ‘Destitution Road’). During the long wait the emigrants were fleeced by the managers of boarding-houses owned by the contractors. Told by the agent that his company's ‘fine coppered vessel’ would be no more than six weeks at sea, the emigrant bought provisions for this period only, and usually exhausted them before Canada was reached. He was then obliged to buy more from the master, who would charge him two shillings for a stone of potatoes that had cost the owner threepence only.

  For every emigrant who was fortunate enough to have the 30s. or £6 needed to buy himself three square feet on the lower deck of an emigrant brig, there were two or more with no money at all. They earned it by what work they could find in Glasgow, Greenock or Fort William. They were plucked by touts and brokers who sold them tickets for ships that could not sail for weeks, if indeed they existed at all. And where the ships did exist they were something that imagination could not have created. In 1836 the Colonial Office was told (and this after the passing of a third Emigration Act) that when the Ceres and the Kingston arrived at Nova Scotia the former was without water, and the latter had enough for half a day only. The Kingston, with 340 passengers, was carrying far more than the legal number, and aboard the Ceres* the rotten wood of temporary be
rths had collapsed, killing two children. Despite certain suffering, and possible death, many people without the passage money stowed away aboard the emigrant ships. This happened so frequently that Customs officers took constables and coastguards aboard when they checked the sailing-lists, and they searched each ship before it sailed.

  By the eighteen-thirties the Government, having no major war but too many people on its hands, was raising no objection to emigration from the Highlands. Where James Loch had once declared that the idle alone thought of leaving their country, sheep-farming proprietors were now saying that Canada and Australia needed those virtues which only the commonality of the Highlands possessed. These were the years of ‘The Great Emigrations’. In 1831, 58,000 people left Britain for Canada, and in the following year the figure was above 66,000. Emigration to New South Wales was also growing, and in twenty years would be greater than that to Canada. Prompted and probably paid by the shipping-contractors, hack writers produced pamphlets of advice in which fact and fiction were engagingly mixed: ‘The average length of a voyage to Quebec is from four to five weeks in spring, the proper time for an agricultural emigrant to go out…. Provisions must be taken for the longest period, as it would be very miserable to one blessed with a good stomach to have nothing to put into it during the latter weeks of a voyage lengthened by accidental circumstances.’ The Highlander, who received special attention from these writers, was told that a man with his digestion and appetite would need four stones of oatmeal, four of cutlings for gruel, four stones of biscuits and a half of sugar, half a pound of tea, four stones of butter, twenty stones of potatoes, ‘and a few dozen eggs which should be well-greased to exclude the air, and consequently preserve them fresh.’

  Gentlemen who took cabin passage on the emigrant ships published accounts of their voyage for the entertainment of their friends and the education of their descendants. John Hood, of Stonebridge in Berwickshire, sailed for New South Wales on the Lady Kennaway in 1841. He paid £50 for his passage, and found the food (‘Roast mutton, boiled mutton, mutton-pies, sheep's-head; pork roasted, fried, boiled and broiled’) tolerable, and even enjoyable after a while. The claret was good too, and after tea every afternoon the cabin passengers sat on deck to await the coming of ‘brilliant stars and splendid moonlight’. It was unfortunate that he found it difficult to sleep at nights for the noise which the steerage passengers made, and the lack of proper segregation for their women was deplorable. ‘I am told that in some emigrant ships even partitions are dispensed with, that decency is entirely disregarded, and that a sentry and lights are the only protection.’

  As late as 1854, after four Acts of Parliament to control and improve conditions aboard emigrant ships, The Times published this account of one:

  The emigrant is shewn a berth, a shelf of coarse pinewood in a noisome dungeon, airless and lightless, in which several hundred persons of both sexes and all ages are stowed away, on shelves two feet one inch above each other, three feet wide and six feet long, still reeking from the ineradicable stench left by the emigrants on the last voyage… Still he believes that the plank is his own, and only finds when the anchor is up that he must share his six feet three with a bedfellow. He finds that cleanliness is impossible, that no attempt is made to purify the reeking den into which he has been thrust, and that the thirty days voyage he has been promised will not, from the rottenness of the rigging and the unsoundness of the hull, be completed in less than sixty. He is lucky if the provisions correspond to a sample, if the water can be served out according to contract, or if he can prevail upon the cooks, selected from among the emigrants, to dress his meals in such shape that he can eat them without mortal loathing…. After a few days have been spent in the pestilential atmosphere created by the festering mass of squalid humanity imprisoined between the damp and steaming decks, the scourge bursts out, and to the miseries of filth, foul air and darkness is added the Cholera. Amid hundreds of men, women and children, dressing and undressing, washing, quarrelling, fighting, cooking and drinking, one hears the groans and screams of a patient in the last agonies of this plague.

  Twenty-nine emigrant ships had left for America in November of the previous year. Of the 13,762 passengers who sailed in them, more than a third had been attacked by cholera, and over a thousand had died.

  Yet all this was worth enduring if survival of the voyage meant relief from the hardships at home and an escape from the Great Mountain Sheep. ‘Oh, young men of Ness,’ wrote Donald Campbell from Upper Canada, ‘I want you to come here and be not afraid. Leave the poor fishing of the Ness. Oh, my brothers and sisters, and all of you, be sure and come here, and don't live starving where you are!’

  ‘That you should feel pain in leaving, is natural’

  THERE was a reluctance to believe that conditions aboard the emigrant ships were as bad as reports indicated. The slight inconvenience of the voyage, it was thought, was a small price to pay for the good life at the end of it. ‘Highlanders, it is well known,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘can exist on very little when necessity requires them to do so. If each grown person, therefore, lays in one boll of oatmeal, and another of potatoes, there is no fear of him starving, and thus, for somewhat less than four pounds he will reach the promised land.’ The Courier was reporting the plans of ‘two respectable agents who, partly as a trading speculation and partly as an act of philanthropy’ were offering to transport Skyemen to Cape Breton Island for two pounds a head. It left its readers to decide between this murderous optimism and a letter it published from a young Sutherlander who had left Cromarty in a small brig crowded with 220 emigrants: ‘Nearly the whole of the passengers were attacked by a severe fever owing to bad water. The water had been put into palm-oil casks, or some other obnoxious stuff was in them formerly, and we could neither use it for tea, coffee, or anything else, and of which we got a very small allowance. We lost nine passengers in all.’

  And of course there was the Asia. Three hundred Ross-shire emigrants sailed in her, but she got no further than Plymouth. There her rotten hold filled with water and she was declared unfit. Her passengers, who had been close to starvation since she left Cromarty, were put ashore and all record of what happened to them is lost.

  The landlords' demands for ‘an extensive system of emigration to relieve the destitute poor of the Highlands’ reached Parliament in February 1841, when Henry Baillie, the Member for Inverness and a cousin of James Baillie the sheep-farmer, moved for a Committee of Inquiry. He said that there were forty thousand Highlanders in need of assistance, and since a passage to Canada cost £3 a grant of £120,000 should settle the whole business. No such grant was made by the Government, of course, and the landlords were later rebuked by the Assistant-Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who told them that it was their fault the land was over-populated and destitute, and that they would receive the real benefits of emigration by way of increased rents and a diminished liability to support paupers under the Poor Laws. Not that Trevelyan was moved by any great compassion for the destitute. During the Irish Famine later he was to say ‘Dependence on charity is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.’

  Baillie got his Committee, and when it issued its second and final report in June it said what everybody knew, that there were too many people in the Highlands. ‘This excess of population,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘who are for the most part, for a period every year, in a state of great destitution, is variously calculated at from 45,000 to 80,000 souls.’ The Committee said that an efficient system of emigration was urgently needed, and on so vast a scale that it would be impossible without State assistance.

  No assistance was offered. The Government, which had moved from one side of the House to the other that month, probably felt that its predecessor had adequately covered the problem the previous year by the establishment of a Colonial Land and Emigration Department, though this was never much more than a filing-cabinet for statistics and reports. The potato blight came, and with it a second great wave
of evictions in Ross, Glengarry and the Isles. Toward the end of the decade destitution and over-population were worse than they had ever been. Landlords were now hysterical in their descriptions of the good life awaiting emigrants in Canada or Australia. Thomas MacLaughlan, in a series of letters he wrote for The Witness, accused them of hypocrisy and deceit, and that ‘while the law is banishing its tens for terms of seven or fourteen years as the penalty for deep-dyed crimes, irresponsible and infatuated power is banishing thousands for life for no crime whatever’. And as for the ‘promised land’ which proprietors and Press said was awaiting the emigrants:

  We would bring them to the emigrant sheds at Quebec or Montreal, and we could tell them that during the last great emigration hundreds, we might say thousands, died in these sheds of a fearful pestilence. We would bring them to Cape Breton or the district around Pictou in Nova Scotia, and we suspect we could point out an amount of destitution among old settlers not to be outdone by that of the Hebrides…. We could bring them to the Lewis Highlanders on the Salmon River who, after ten years of settlement, have hardly been able to pay the small sum due as the price of their lands; and lest they should suppose that this state of things merely existed among the lazy Highlanders, we could tell them of an English settlement in the same neighbourhood of several years standing where a friend of ours was told within the last year or two, on unquestionable authority, that there were forty families who had not twenty-four hours' food in their houses at a time, nor the means of purchasing it.

  In 1851 something like planned emigration was evolved. It was by compromise, of course, with the Government acting like a parent, giving advice and some financial assistance to private emigration societies which were expected to find the bulk of their funds in the pockets of the public. The Board of Supervision, the central administrative control for the Poor Laws, had been in favour of emigration for some time, and was in a constant state of irritation over the people's reluctance to leave their homes. It was of the light-headed opinion that the best way to convince them of the necessity of emigration would be to put the burden of immediate poor relief on the shoulders of local authorities. This would soon starve the Highlanders into submission. At the beginning of the year the situation in the Highlands was as bad as, if not worse than it had ever been. The funds of the two Destitution Boards were exhausted, and the potato harvest of the previous year had been a failure. In Portree, the minister of Snizort wrote to the Home Secretary, ‘Death from starvation must be the inevitable result if we are denied extraneous aid, as we have no local resources of any kind.’ In February 1851, Sir John MacNeill, chairman of the Board of Supervision, went north for a gloomy tour of the Highlands. He went at the request of the Home Secretary.