by John Prebble
This was not his decision, but one made by the Government's Emigration Commissioners, who handled the affair in the usual bloodless manner of civil servants. Since Australia had too many bachelors, and too few spinsters, all the young men of Sollas over the age of eighteen were told that they would be given no passage without a wife. Those who hoped to marry girls from their own townships discovered that these had been ordered to remain unwed. For weeks a hundred young men of Sollas wandered through Benbecula and South Uist, looking for wives. ‘In such trying circumstances,’ said the Glasgow Herald, reporting the matter with some astonishment, ‘it was hard work to find suitable brides, but the task was accomplished to the great mortification of the young damsels who saw their sweethearts debarred from binding the matrimonial ties with their first loves. But we hope that the young girls will be happily mated at the diggings.’
Just before Christmas 1852, after three years of demoralizing delay, the people of Sollas sailed for Campbeltown in the steamer Celt. The old, the sick and the unwanted were left on the island, listening to a piper's lament until the ship could no longer be seen. At Campbeltown the people joined other emigrants from Harris and Skye aboard the frigate Hercules. She sailed on 26 December. When she stopped at Queenstown for water and mails, there was already smallpox below decks.
‘Prompted by motives of piety and humanity’
HELPED by the Highland Emigration Society and by the Commissioners for Emigration – the one finding the money and the other supplying ships – the lairds of the Isles were now clearing their estates with sickening haste. In one season Colonel Gordon of Cluny removed two thousand people from Mingulay and Barra, Benbecula and South Uist. ‘Hear the sobbing, sighing and throbbing,’ wrote Donald Macleod of Strathnaver; ‘see the confusion, hear the noise, the bitter weeping and bustle. Hear mothers and children asking fathers and husbands, where are we going? hear the reply Chan eil fios againn – we know not.’ In August 1851, for greater dispatch and the saving of time, Gordon asked the Commissioners to send the transport Admiral to Loch Boisdale on South Uist. With maniacal fury his factor, Fleming, drove the people to the shore for a public meeting, and fined each absentee forty shillings. ‘At this meeting,’ Macleod was told by one of the people, ‘some of the natives were seized, and in spite of their entreaties sent on board the transport. One stout Highlander, Angus Johnstone, resisted with such pith that they had to handcuff him before he could be mastered. One morning during the transporting season we were suddenly awakened by the screams of a young female who had been recaptured in an adjoining house, she having escaped after her first capture. We all rushed to the door, and saw the broken-hearted creature, with dishevelled hair and swollen face, dragged away by two constables and a ground-officer.’
The Admiral lay close to land, and some of those put aboard her swam ashore again. Fleming led the police and officers in pursuit of them, combing the curling hills to the north of the loch, beating the fugitives down with truncheons and bringing them in irons to the quay. Carts loaded with bound men came over the sand from Benbecula at low tide. Cottages were raided in the early mist of day, but even then some of the people managed to escape. ‘Were you to see the racing and chasing of policemen,’ Macleod was told, ‘pursuing the outlawed natives, you would think that you had been transported to the banks of the Gambia on the slave coast of Africa.’
‘Many a thing have I seen in my own day and generation,’ remembered Catherine Macphee of Iochdar in the north of the island. ‘Many a thing, O Mary Mother of the black sorrow! I have seen the townships swept, and the big holdings made of hem, the people being driven out of the island to the streets of Glasgow and the wilds of Canada, such of them as did not die of hunger and plague and smallpox while going across the sea. I have seen the women putting their children in the carts which were sent from Benbecula and the Iochdar to Loch Boisdale while their husbands lay bound in the pen, and were weeping, without power to give them a helping hand, though the women themselves were crying aloud, and the little children wailing like to break their hearts. I have seen the big strong men, the champions of the country, the stalwarts of the world, being bound on Loch Boisdale quay and cast into the ship as would be done to horses and cattle. The God of Life, and He only, knows all the loathsome work of men on that day.’
On Catholic Barra, and on the little isle of Mingulay to the south of it, the evictions were organized by a Protestant minister called Beatson. ‘He made himself very officious as he always does,’ Macleod was told, ‘when he has an opportunity of oppressing the poor Barra men. He is the most vigilant and assiduous officer Colonel Gordon has. He may be seen in Castle Bay, the principal anchorage in Barra, whenever a sail is hoisted, directing his men like a gamekeeper with his hounds, in case any of the doomed Barra men should escape.’ One man took shelter on an Arran boat which Beatson boarded in a fury, demanding his surrender. The master lifted a hand-spike and threatened to split the minister's skull, man of God or no, if he did not get ashore with his dogs.
‘I have lost my memory since I lost my means,’ said Roderick MacNeil, long after he was evicted from the three hills of Mingulay, ‘and since my people were scattered, some of them in Australia, some in Canada, and some mouldering in the dust. Oh, the turns of the hard world! Many a trick does it play, and so it was with me. My new house was burned over my head, and I burned my hands in rescuing my dear little children. Oh, the suffering of the poor folk, the terrible time that was! The land was taken from us though we were not a penny in debt, and all the lands of the township were given to a Lowland farmer. He had always wished to have them, and he was not content until he got them.’
Fifteen hundred people from Gordon's estates went to Canada. Six hundred were accepted as paupers and were supported by the colony. Many more begged for bread. They buried their dead in Quebec. ‘They were in rags,’ said a newspaper, ‘their mourning weeds were the shapeless fragments of what had once been clothes.’ They went to Upper Canada, where the Dundas Warder reported their arrival with indignation. ‘We have been pained beyond measure for some time past to witness in our streets so many unfortunate Highland emigrants, many of them sick from want and other attendant causes…. There will be many to sound the fulsome noise of flattery in the ear of a generous landlord who had spent so much to assist the emigration of his poor tenants. They will give him the misnomer of benefactor, and for what? Because he has rid his estates of the encumbrance of a pauper population.’ Donald Macleod said that when Gordon bought the Isle of Barra his first intention had been to sell it quickly to the Government, for use as a penal colony.
All over the Hebrides the Cheviot tide rose. On Rum, one family only remained of the hundred who had once paid their portion of Clanranald's debts with black cattle and sea-weed. ‘All was solitary there,’ wrote Hugh Miller. ‘We could see among the deserted fields the grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground. It seemed as if man had done with it for ever.’ Ulva was turned into a single sheep-walk. The blue isles of Tiree and Coll lost half of their people. St Columba's Iona, ‘broad, fertile and fruitful of corn’, became the deserted necropolis of fifty Scottish kings and countless forgotten chiefs.* On a dozen islands from Berneray to the Sound of Sleat there was no echo of voices in the hills, and the milkwort flowers grew unpicked by children on the machair by the sea.
In the summer of 1851 Alexander Macalister, who styled himself of Torrisdale Castle in Argyll, decided to put sheep on the Strathaird district of Skye which he had lately bought. He was generally regarded as an amiable and inoffensive fellow. That is, said Thomas Mulock darkly, he was ‘a man who does all his harsh deeds by deputy’. His new land was a green opening on the west of Loch Slapin, below the black frown of Blaven and the Cuillins. He said that the people's rent had been in arrears for twenty years (‘Pretty factorship this!’ thought Mulock), although they said that all they owed was one half-year which they would endeavour to pay, if Macalister would allow them to remain. The debt, he said, was £450, b
ut he would waive it and advance them £1,200 on condition that they went to Canada or New South Wales, whichever took their fancy. Mulock, whose political ideas could occasionally leap-frog into the next century, said that if tenants were given this kind of money to improve their land it would profit both them and their landlord, and there would be no need to replace them with sheep. ‘Ah, Mr Macalister of some Argyll ilk, how would you like to be transported against your Scottish will from Torrisdale to Toronto?’ The thought of this intrigued the old Irishman. ‘Stars and Garters! Just imagine the Duke of Sutherland under orders for some backwoods location!’ It is still an interesting thought.
To evict the five hundred people of Strathaird Macalister's factor, a banker in Portree, needed the cooperation of Sheriff Colquhoun, two officers of the Destitution Board and, said Mulock, the threat of using two companies of the 13th, Prince Albert's Own. Donald MacInnes, a native of the isle and one of the Board's officers, first brought the writs to Strathaird, though it was scarcely his business. The people were less inclined to accept his authority than they were to acknowledge the decreets. They drove MacIines out. He hurried back to Portree, interrupted the Sheriff and the banker at their dinner, and reported that ‘The people will do all in their power to resist any number or force that may be brought against them, and they say that they will abide by the consequences’. This, said Mulock, was a lie. But Colquhoun, with unpleasant memories of the screaming women on North Uist, wrote to the mainland and asked for police and soldiers. All this, jeered Mulock, because of ‘rebellion in Skye, an armed peasantry, and policemen deforced by two old women and a lame boy!’
Captain Smith of the Destitution Board then went to Strathaird. He read the people a lecture, which they did not understand, and pinned a notice in Gaelic on their church door which left them in no doubt. It told them that they would receive no more relief from the Board, for by Law they should not be there after next term. Since the relief promised them in February had not been paid, this may not have surprised them, but the threat of police and soldiers soon broke any will they may have had to resist. Mulock said that if the Strathaird affair were not an example of what was happening all over the isles, it would be comic.
Maclnnes concocts a wicked fable for Captain Smith, and the latter (though fully apprised of its falsity, as we are informed) transmits it to the Highland Destitution Board. The Sheriff on his side is not supine. He sends it to the Lord-Advocate, who straightway orders the Sheriff of Inverness, his Procurator-Fiscal, and a body of police (to be paid for extra by the county) to be ready for immediate action in Skye! Sheriff Colquhoun diligently prepares some extempore haran on the patriotic duty of emigrating to prevent the pulling down of houses; and the Procurator-Fiscal is quite on the qui vive to dictate precognitions of what witnesses never uttered, but for which fiscals must be honestly paid. To crown the whole, the Home Office must get an alarm… two companies of the 13th, Prince Albert's Own, absolutely required if Strathaird is expected to form part of the British empire.
While the eight townships of Macalister's estate were being cleared, two miles to the east across the mouth of the loch the Trustees of Lord Macdonald were evicting the people of Suishnish and Boreraig. The first was high on a point of land where the sea-lochs of Slapin and Eishort are joined, the second was two miles to the east by an idling path. The people, most of them surnamed Macrae and MacInnes, were the descendants of men who had once formed part of the armed rent-roll of the Macdonalds of Sleat. They raised barley and potatoes, had boats for inshore fishing, and grazed some stock on the braes of Beinn Bhuidhe. Their life had been hard since the Great Famine. The Trustees of Lord Macdonald argued that he had been overindulgent to this community, that he had allowed the people to waste good land, and that it would be better for them and it if they were removed. Patrick Cooper, who was skilled at special pleading, let it be known that in evicting the people his Lordship had been ‘prompted by motives of benevolence, piety and humanity, because they were too far from the church’.
Most of the people were removed without trouble in 1852 and sent to Campbeltown, where Emigration Commissioners put them aboard the Hercules with the demoralized tenants of Sollas. And for some of them, too, there was death from smallpox in Queenstown harbour. Thirty-two families were left in Boreraig and Suishnish, and when they heard what had happened to their kin on the transport they asked Macdonald to let them remain in Skye, for no one could now claim that the townships were overpopulated. On 4 April 1853, they were warned that writs of removal would be executed against them in the autumn.
Macdonald, the factor of this district, was also a Sheriff-Officer and the local Inspector of the Poor, and he used the authority of two of these offices to rid himself of the responsibilities of the third. On a golden day in September, with the Sheriff-Substitute and a body of police, he came down the Portree road, crossed Loch Slapin from Strathaird, and began the removals. Most of the men of the townships were away, working in Glasgow or on the railways that were crawling like vines across the Lowlands, but some were in the hills with their cattle. They heard the crying of women, the barking of dogs, and a hammering as the officers nailed up the doors of the cottages. They came down in haste, and there was a short, brutal struggle on the shore by Boreraig. When it was over, Alexander MacInnes, John and Duncan Macrae were in irons. They were dragged thirty miles to Portree and their families followed them, weeping.
The evictions continued. ‘The scene was truly heartrending,’ Donald Ross, the lawyer, wrote to the Northern Ensign. ‘The women and the children went about tearing their hair, and rending the heaven with their cries. Mothers with tender infants at the breast looked helplessly on, while their effects and their aged and infirm relatives were cast out, and the doors of their houses locked in their faces. No mercy was shown to age or sex, all were indiscriminately thrust out and left to perish.’ There was no word spoken of emigration, or of other land on Skye which, in an unguarded moment, Lord Macdonald had said might be theirs. The doors were nailed up and the people were told to go. When the officers left at dusk the women and children crawled into byres and sheep-cots. And waited.
At Portree, the two Macraes and MacInnes gave their word to appear before the Court of Justiciary in Inverness. Without food and without money, they walked a hundred miles, and arrived two days before their trial, surrendering themselves with dignity at the Tolbooth. Factor and Sheriff-Officers, who were to appear against them, had already arrived ‘in their conveyances,’ said Donald Ross, ‘at the public expense, and lived right loyally, never dreaming but that they would obtain a victory and get the three men sent to the Penitentiary to wear hoddy, break stones, or pick oakum for at least twelve months.’
At their trial the men were defended by a persuasive and passionate advocate called Rennie. ‘It really becomes a matter for serious reflection,’ he said, ‘how far the pound of flesh allowed by the law is to be permitted to be extracted from the bodies of Highlanders. Here are thirty-two families driven out, and for what? For a tenant, who, I believe, has not yet been found. But it is the will of Lord Macdonald and Messrs Brown and Ballingall that they should be ejected; and the civil law having failed them, the criminal law with all its terrors is called in to overwhelm these unhappy people. But, thank God, it has come before a jury!’ And the jury, with great enthusiasm, returned a verdict of Not Guilty.
The Macraes and MacInnes went back to Loch Eishort, where their families and others' were living in the shelter of walls and huts. The men opened the houses, put back the roof timbers and lit peat on the hearths again. The little victory was brief. Notwithstanding the verdict at Inverness, the writs of removal were still valid in law. Five days after Christmas, in a bitter wind and drifting snow, the factor Macdonald came again with his men. In Suishnish they turned out all the MacInnes family, the old man Neil who was its head, and his sons Alexander and Donald. Bedding, furniture and crockery were thrown through the doors. Donald MacInnes was away looking for sheep in the snow when he he
ard the cries and shouts from Suishnish, and he came back at the run. His sick wife was cowering against a wall in a bed-gown and with a child at her breast. He tore down the bars from his cottage and carried her inside again, and when the factor threatened him with prosecution he ‘armed himself with a formidable oak cudgel which he promised to bring with all his strength over the head of the first who would meddle with his wife or with himself’.
In Boreraig the factor's men were floundering in the snow, dragging out the belongings of the Macraes. The mother of John and Duncan was eighty-one, and Macdonald yelled at her to take up her bed and walk. When she said nothing, but stared at him with dark eyes, he ordered her to be pulled out on her blanket. A Macrae child of seven stood before the factor crying, ‘O nam bitheadh m'athair an so an diugh, co aig an robh a' chridhe so dheanamh oirnn!’ (If my father was here today, who would dare to do this to us!) But it was done, and once more the houses were nailed up, and the snow fell on the little heaps of clothing, on the women and the children huddled against the walls.
Many of them were still there in February, living like animals in the open, when Donald Ross came from Glasgow with food and clothing. He found Flora Robertson, a widow of ninety-six, existing on half a crown a month from the Parochial Board. She had been living in a sheep-cot since the September eviction, and was starving. ‘Anything more wretched than the appearance of this old woman I never yet witnessed. Her bed, a pallet of straw and some pieces of old blanket was on the bare floor. Her face and arms were the colour of lead. I asked her what was it she complained of most. She tried to raise herself up, and she replied, “I complain of nothing, but weakness and the want of food.”’