by John Prebble
The report made by this conscientious, fatherly old man was depressing. It strengthened the Board's argument that emigration was the only solution to destitution, and it accused the Highlanders of laziness, and of expecting relief as a right. ‘The fact is unquestionable that a people who some years ago carefully concealed their poverty, have learned to parade, and of course exaggerate it.’ Money expended by the proprietors, as well as that given by the local authorities for the relief of destitution had resulted in nothing that ‘would justify the conclusion that any practicable amount of additional expenditure for the same purposes would place the present inhabitants in a condition to maintain themselves where they now reside’.
The people must emigrate. There should be no increase in poor relief.
The Highland and Islands Emigration Society was the direct result of MacNeil's report. It began, in September 1851, as the Skye Emigration Society under the chairmanship of Thomas Fraser, Sheriff-Substitute of the island, declaring that it had been formed 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.’ It issued a public statement, telling the people that immigrants who were peaceable, orderly, moral and hardworking would be welcome in Australia and Canada, and it told them that the Highlands could no longer offer them either employment or subsistence.
That you should feel pain in leaving your own country is natural, and proceeds from a praiseworthy sentiment; but is the sacrifice of this feeling which emigration demands peculiar to you? Remember the families that were most respected in this country twenty years ago. How many of them have gone abroad? Is it harder for you to leave your native land than it was for them. They have subdued the feeling of pain, and so ought you, for you have stronger reasons for emigrating than they had.
We will do what we can to assist you, and we will endeavour to procure assistance for you from others… and remember that you should convert into cash every article of property you possess to procure the means of carrying you to the Colonies.
The Society was to work with Government assistance supplied by the Colonial Land and Emigration Department, which after ten years of pigeon-holing was now called upon for action. Its Commissioners, said Fraser, would provide passages for suitable emigrants.
... but the emigrants require, first to make a deposit in money of £1 per head in certain cases, £5 in others, and £11 in others. Second, to provide a suitable outfit or clothes etc. Third, to find their way at their own expense from their homes to the port of embarkation.
Those emigrants who could find no money for the deposit, for clothes, or for transport to the ports, would be assisted from the funds collected by the Society. ‘Let each consider well,’ said Fraser chidingly, ‘and answer the question for himself. Is it not his duty to endeavour to remove to a country where his services would be valued and would readily procure for him not only plenty of food and clothing, but the means of rising to a comfortable and respectable independence?’
This little Skye organization quickly grew into a national and imperial body – The Society for Assisting Emigration from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It had its headquarters in St Martin's Lane, London, and a committee of management that included the Lord Mayor, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Baron de Rothschild M.P., Macleod of Macleod, Macpherson of Cluny, and, of course, its humble founder the Sheriff-Substitute of Skye. Mr Fraser, surrounded now by his wealth and position, resigned his chair to the Assistant-Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyan.
Queen Victoria's husband (his affection for Scotland made manifest by the wearing of the kilt and the designing of a tartan) graciously agreed to become Patron of the Society, and this was not without dramatic irony. ‘Much as we rejoice in our beloved Sovereign's visits to our country,’ Thomas MacLauchlan had grumbled two years earlier, ‘we fear that they may hasten the consummation of making our Highlands a great deer-forest by inducing a larger number of our English aristocracy to flock to them for the purpose of sport.’
The Society became the machinery by which thousands of the Highland poor left for Australia and Canada. Each one of them was first examined by Commissioners from the Colonial Land and Emigration Department to determine ‘condition, circumstances and character’, and presumably to satisfy the Government that the applicant came within the Society's own definition of a deserving case: ‘A burden to the British community in the Mother Country… a support to it when transferred to the Colonies.’
Highland proprietors welcomed the Society with enthusiasm and relief (three of them sat on its committee). To judge from an interim report, they gladly paid for the opportunity to be rid of a people whom they wished to replace with sheep. ‘The owners of the properties from which the emigrants depart will be expected, and, so far as they have been applied to they have not declined, to pay one-third of the sum disbursed by the Society towards the expenses of the emigration.’ The remaining two-thirds were begged from the public which, as usual, responded with the generosity that should put Governments to shame, but never does. Quartermaster Sergeant Hoban of the 13th Light Infantry, for example, sent 4s. 2d., and there was ‘A Widow's Mite of Twenty Shillings’. Highland soldiers abroad donated a day's pay, and Scots settlers already in Canada or Australia sent messages of encouragement with their collections. The Queen gave £300, and the Prince Consort £100. The Dukes of Sutherland, Argyll and Buccleuch each gave £100, and the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles sent ten shillings (but he did preach a sermon on the subject of emigration at St Matthew's, Spring Garden, and collected £36 is. 11d. from his congregation).
In May 1853, five ships were placed at the disposal of the Society by the Emigration Commissioners. The first to sail, two months later, was the Georgiana from Greenock for Melbourne. She carried 312 emigrants, most of them from Skye – 60 married men and women, 115 single men and women, 125 boys and girls, and 12 infants. Mr Chant, agent for the Commissioners, travelled with them to the Clyde from Skye (where, he said, ‘it is not too much to say that many of the swine in England are better ed and better housed than are the poor of this island’). He assured the Commissioners that the Georgiana was
… one of the best emigrant ships I have seen. Her great height between decks, breadth of beam, and her excellent ventilation, render her the most desirable vessel of the service. Captain Temperly has put on board half a ton of oatmeal, in addition to the usual supply, to enable the people to have porridge for breakfast, for which they are very thankful. This is an arrangement of the greatest importance to Highland emigrants, and will, I have no doubt, prove very beneficial to the health of the passengers by this vessel.
Standish Haly, Secretary of the Society, went to Glasgow for the sailing of the ship. He told Trevelyan that the emigrants were ‘exceedingly well-looking, even robust in appearance’, and he was afraid that Chant, in selecting the people, had not realized that the Society wanted to relieve destitution by emigration. What Mr Haly did not realize was that Mr Chant, as an agent of the Government, was under obligation to send the able-bodied, not the sick, to the Colonies. Meeting the emigrants was a startling experience for Haly, and he was quite affected by their unrestrained emotions. He was also slightly shocked.
I should much have desired to have found a Gaelic clergyman who would have devoted himself to instruction on board, and also a more efficient matron for the girls. The person who is appointed to this post speaks not one word of Gaelic and wrung her hands at the girls' want of knowledge of the broadest Scots which she possesses in abundance. And as the young ladies, too, had generally never seen a plate, and have not as yet the refinements necessary to the more Lowland accomplishments of a knife, fork and spoon, her tribulations seem much increased at having such a charge.
I found, too, that there was a total want of books, and very few Bibles on board; also a very general absence of hair-brushes and c
ombs. These, to the best of my ability, I made provision for. I ordered Bethune and Macdonald to send down a plentiful supply of the latter articles immediately, and also a barber from this place to put the people's hair in order, and initiate them into the mysteries of combs and brushes.
Though the emigrants' ignorance of knives, forks, spoons and plates is hard to accept, the lack of Bibles was real enough. Before the Georgiana went down the Clyde, the Reverend Doctor Norman Macleod came aboard with a large supply of them, and also a hundred Psalm Books and three thousand religious tracts, all in the Gaelic. The emigrants sang Psalm 23 as they sailed. ‘Cold indeed,’ said the Glasgow Constitutional, ‘must be the heart from which an earnest prayer ascends not to heaven, that God may be pleased to bring them in safety to the place of their destination, and prosper them in their undertakings.’
Australia was happy to welcome the emigrants, and those whom the Society sent later in the Militiades, the John Gray, the Chance and the Flora. They were offered immediate employment. On sheep-stations. These had been virtually deserted since the opening of the gold-diggings, and it was not only Australian flockmasters who were anxious for the Society to send more Highlanders. Yorkshire woollen manufacturers were alarmed by the thought of a failure in the supply of Australian wool. Few of them, however, thought it was their business to support the Society with money, even though Mr Bonamy Price, a member of the Committee and lately mathematics master at Rugby, wrote to them in a language they should have understood: ‘I am making no appeal to your charity. I address you as a Yorkshire manufacturer deeply interested in procuring an adequate supply of wool from Australia. I venture to hope on [the Society's] behalf for the vigorous support of you and your brother capitalists, as an instrument pre-eminently adapted to accomplish your object.’
Since 1845, however, in Ross and in the Isles, the Great Cheviot Sheep had been making sure that its cousins in Australia would not want for drovers.
5
THE MASSACRE OF THE ROSSES
‘I would have no place to take bread and cheese!’
THE MEN OF Strathcarron in Easter Ross had been out in the Year of the Sheep, and their women had taken a stand across the road at Culrain in 1820, when Sheriff Macleod came from Dingwall to serve writs of removal in Strath Oykel to the north. Though the years since had emptied the glens of Ross-shire one by one, and filled the ships for Pictou and Geelong, Strathcarron in the parish of Kincardine had been left untouched by its laird. It was a shallow green valley, an arm reaching westward from the Kyle of Sutherland for nine miles and then clawing at the escarpment of Bodach Mor with three fingers – the narrow ravines of Strath Cuileannach, Strath Alladale and Glencalvie. Down these ran three streams to make the black roll of the River Carron. The land was divided into two estates, Greenyards which formed most of the valley from its elbow to the Kyle, and Glencalvie where the waters of the ravines met on an urlar, a green grass floor by the township of Amat.
Four to five hundred people lived in the strath, and their little holdings were pinned to the shawl of the hills by brooches of birch and oak. Most of them were Rosses or Munros by name, though their sennachie, their bard and historian, was John Chisholm, a blind old man who lived at the mouth of the valley. Sitting at the door of his cottage in a blue coat with yellow buttons, a Glengarry on his head, he told the people stories of their ancient feuds with the Mackays. He said that there had been Rosses in Strathcarron for five hundred years, and that they were the true descendants of the Earls of Ross (though in any glen, anywhere in Ross, an old man could be found to make the same claim). Sixty men of Strathcarron, he said, soldiers with Lord Macleod's Highlanders, had died in the great siege of Gibraltar when he was a boy. And he remembered those who had gone to Calabria and Egypt with Patrick Macleod of Geanies.
The people supported a poor teacher for the education of their children, and their minister was Gustavus Aird. His church was at Croick, a mile up Strath Cuileannach from the urlar of Glencalvie, and on a bend of the Black Water where an angle of hills breaks into the valley like the stem of a ship. It was, and is, little more than a grey stone cabin sheltered by wind-crippled trees, one of forty-two which Thomas Telford built in the Highlands for Parliament and eternity. A fierce and independent pride made the people of Strathcarron seem sullen to outsiders, and in Tain and Dingwall they were called ‘The Philistines’. But they greeted each other in the old way, crying ‘Failte duibh! Sith gun robh so!’ Welcome to you! Peace be here! Though they had as yet received no writs of removal, they had lived in dread of them for forty years. To the north, the south and the west, the Great Cheviot flocks were a sea surrounding them. Their rights by tradition had been taken from them. They were forbidden to graze their stock beyond their own pasturage. They could no longer take salmon from the Carron, hunt deer, shoot grouse or blackcock on the braes of Cam Mor. The right to slaughter these at their leisure had been purchased by a gentleman from Warwick and another from Lanark (who did not think they had a bargain, however, complaining to the laird's factor that the lodge was uninhabitable and that they were forced to stay at the inn of Ardgay). For centuries Highlanders had been free to take timber from the woods when it was needed to build a bridge or repair a house. In 1821 the people of Strathcarron lost that privilege too, when the laird imposed a fine of £20 upon them for stealing (as he called it) his trees. Since there was not that money in the strath, the minister paid the fine.
John Robertson, a southern journalist who reported the removals in Glencalvie for the Glasgow National, found the way of life in this little enclave both admirable and distasteful. ‘Wonderful is the power of the affections which link human love to dark, dirty turf-huts with earthen floors and heather roofs, half kraals and half cow-sheds. All the cabins, with the exception of the stone cottages, filled me with disgust.’ And he could not fit the people into a pattern of Victorian behaviour that might have given their savage virtues some value.
The Highlander's soul lives in the clan and family traditions of the past, the legends of the ingle, the songs of the bards. The master-idea of the English mind – the idea of Business – has not dawned on his soul, has not developed its peculiar virtues in his character. He is loyal but not punctual, honest but not systematic. The iron genius of economical improvements he knows not and heeds not.
The lairds of Strathcarron were the descendants of William Robertson, a seventeenth-century merchant from Inverness, a property dealer who bought himself the lands of Kindeace on Cromarty Firth. After Culloden the fifth laird acquired Strathcarron from a bankrupt Munro of Culrain. These Robertsons took commissions in the Sepoy regiments of the East India Company, in the Black Watch and the Ross-shire Buffs. They married into great Highland families, and were proud that their wives brought them the blood of Bruce, Plantagenet and Stuart. Their coat-of-arms was a red shield emblazoned with three silver wolves' heads, their crest was a right arm holding an imperial crown, and their motto claimed that glory was the reward of courage, in Latin of course. In 1842 another William Robertson, aged seventy-seven, was the sixth laird of Kindeace. A Justice of the Peace, he had ridden with the gentry in 1792, and in 1820 he had put his name to the bond by which all Ross-shire proprietors declared their loyalty to a mad old king and a profligate Regent. Not inappropriately, his wife had been a sister of The Chisholm who began the great clearing of Strathglass.
Old Kindeace came rarely to his land in Strathcarron, preferring a house in London to anything north of Highgate, but on one of the rare occasions when he did visit it he stopped at a cottage for food. The woman of the house spoke to him boldly as he sat at her door, and asked him if it were true that he intended to remove all the people in the glen. He said ‘Far be it from me, you go on improving.’ And he laughed. ‘If I cleared Strathcarron I would have no place like this to take bread and cheese.’ Toward the end of 1841 he instructed his factor to issue writs of removal on all the tenants of Glencalvie.
This factor was James Falconer Gillanders of Highfield, who had
recently evicted twenty families from an estate he had bought for himself at Rosskeen. He was a hard and ambitious man, managing other property besides that of Kindeace (whose granddaughter he was later to marry). In Strathconon he drove out four hundred people, and when they took shelter in the Black Isle he drove them from there too. On 9 February 1842, obeying Robertson's instructions, he published an advertisement in the Inverness Courier:
FARMS TO BE LET ON THE ESTATES OF GREENYARDS & GLENCALVIE
In the Parish of GLENCALVIE
The Sheep Walk of Greenyards presently possessed by Mr Alex. Munro.
The Sheep Walk of Glencalvie presently possessed by Mr Malcolm Mackay, etc.
The above farms will be let on Leases of such duration as may be agreed upon, with entry at the term of Whitsunday, 1842.