Scots in Canada E-Book

Jenni Calder

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In Canada there are nearly as many descendants of Scots as there are people living in Scotland; almost 5 million Canadians ticked the "Scottish origin" box in the most recent Canadian Census. Many Scottish families have friends or relatives in Canada. Who left Scotland? Why did they leave? What did they do when they got there? What was their impact on the developing nation? Thousands of Scots were forced from their homeland, while others chose to leave, seeking a better life. As individuals, families and communities, they braved the wild Atlantic Ocean, many crossing in cramped under-rationed ships, unprepared for the fierce Canadian winter. And yet Scots went on to lay railroads, found banks and exploit the fur trade, and helped form the political infrastructure of modern day Canada. This book follows the pioneers west from Nova Scotia to the prairie frontier and on to the Pacific coast. It examines the reasons why so many Scots left their land and families. The legacy of centuries of trade and communication still binds the two countries, and Scottish Canadians keep alive the traditions that crossed the Atlantic with their ancestors. REVIEW: ...meticulously researched and fluently written… it neatly charts the rise of a country without succumbing to sentimental myths. SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

Leseprobe

JENNI CALDER was born in Chicago, educated in the United States and England, and has lived in or near Edinburgh since 1971. After several years of part-time teaching and freelance writing, including three years in Kenya, she worked at the National Museums of Scotland from 1978 to 2001 successively as education officer, Head of Publications, script editor for the Museum of Scotland, and latterly as Head of Museum of Scotland International. In the latter capacity her main interest was in emigration and the Scottish diaspora. She has written and lectured widely on Scottish, English and American literary and historical subjects, and writes fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. She has two daughters, a son and a dog.

By the same author:

Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, Secker and Warburg, 1968

Scott(with Angus Calder), Evans, 1969

There Must be a Lone Ranger: The Myth and Reality of the American West, Hamish Hamilton, 1974

Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Thames and Hudson, 1976

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Edward Arnold, 1976

Heroes, from Byron to Guevara, Hamish Hamilton, 1977

The Victorian Home, Batsford, 1977

The Victorian and Edwardian Home in Old Photographs, Batsford, 1979

RLS: A Life Study, Hamish Hamilton, 1980

The Enterprising Scot(ed, with contributions), National Museums of Scotland, 1986

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four,Open University Press, 1987

The Wealth of a Nation(ed, with contributions), NMS Publishing, 1989

Scotland in Trust, Richard Drew, 1990

St Ivesby RL Stevenson (new ending), Richard Drew, 1990

No Ordinary Journey: John Rae, Arctic Explorer(with Ian Bunyan, Dale Idiens and Bryce Wilson), NMS Publishing, 1993

Mediterranean(poems, as Jenni Daiches), Scottish Cultural Press, 1995

The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, Virago, 1997

Museum of Scotland(guidebook), NMS Publishing, 1998

Present Poets1(ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1998

Translated Kingdoms(ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1999

Robert Louis Stevenson, (poetry, ed), Everyman, 1999

Present Poets2(ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 2000

Not Nebuchadnezzar: In Search of Identities,Luath Press, 2005

Scots in the USA, Luath Press, 2006

Letters From the Great Wall, Luath Press, 2006

Frontier Scots: The Scots who won the West, Luath Press, 2009

Scots in Canada

JENNI CALDER

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2003

Reprinted 2008

Reprinted 2009

Revised Edition 2013

eBook 2013

ISBN (print): 978-1-908373038

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Maps by Jim Lewis

© Jenni Calder

Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Ship Under Sail

CHAPTER TWO Land and Habitation

CHAPTER THREE Men Fare Well Enough

CHAPTER FOUR A Kind of Kingdom by Itself

CHAPTER FIVE A Wanderer in this New Land

CHAPTER SIX The Right Sort for Canada

CHAPTER SEVEN True Canadians

Picture Section

Map 1: Scotland

Maps 2-7: Canada

Chronology

Places to Visit

Biblography

Acknowledgements

The many ships that left our country

with white wings for Canada.

They are like handkerchiefs in our memories

and the brine like tears.

CHAPTER ONE

The Ship Under Sail

The ship is now under sail that is to ferry me over the waves.

JOHN SINCLAIR

FROMTHEWESTcoast of Harris, one of Scotland’s Hebridean islands, you look out to the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear day you might see St Kilda, the most westerly piece of the British Isles. With infinite vision and the ability to bend to the curve of the earth’s surface you would see the coast of Newfoundland, less than two thousand miles away. Many Scots for many hundreds of years were accustomed to the Atlantic and the notion that there was another land on its western shore. From the seventeenth century that other land became an important part of Scotland’s historyand Scotland contributed indelibly to the way that other land developed.

Stand by the Clyde above Port Glasgow and you can see the remnants of wooden stakes in the river. This was where rafts of Canadian timber awaited their final destination after being unloaded. The ships that made the transatlantic crossing did not sail empty to Canada but carried a lucrative cargo: people. Thousandsof them departed from Greenock and small ports scattered alongthe west coast. They are all evidence of the Canada connection. But it is not only Scotland’s west coast that looked to Canada. The east coast also saw the emigrant ships depart, particularly from Aberdeen. The east coast whaling ports, Leith, Kirkcaldy,Dundee and Peterhead, are built into the historyof Arctic whaling and exploration which took Scots to the most northerly reaches of the vast territory that became Canada. Further north, Orkney’sinvolvement with the Hudson’s Bay Company is a deeply embedded facet of the islands’ history. The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, once the headquarters of the Company which recruited hundreds of Orcadians to play a part in the fur trade, and displays in the Stromness Museum are tangible reminders.

Over the centuries Scots knew of the northern expanse of the New World, or parts of it, as Nova Scotia, Upper and Lower Canada and Rupert’s Land, until in 1867 the process began of combining these colonial tracts into the Dominion of Canada. Before the United States of America was born ‘America’ could mean anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle. After Britain lost the Thirteen Colonies, British North America was the generaldesignation of what became Canada. There can be few Scots families that don’t have some kind of connection. At some point in the last four hundred years there is likely to have been a forebear who went to Canada or who contributed in some way to maintaining the Scottish-Canadian link. There will be someone who helped tobuild a ship or make a sail or unload timber or prepare a passenger list. Someone will have received a letter from Canada or woven a shawl or forged an axe that voyaged across the Atlantic.

The map of Canada is peppered with Scottish names. They have been given to rivers and mountains, towns and counties, bays and inlets. Canada’s telephone directories are filled with them. Wander along the street of almost any community in Cape Breton and check the names on the mailboxes: you may find yourself thinking that it hardly seems possible that there can be Macleods or Macdonalds still in Scotland. Formative aspects of Canada’s history were dominated by Scots, in particular the Hudson’s Bay Company which determined so much of the character of British North America, and the Canadian Pacific Railway which made the vital coast-to-coast connection. Scottish names are prominent in the government of Canada. There are nearly five million people of Scottish descent in Canada, while Scotland’s population is not a great deal more than that.

Why did so many Scots go to Canada, and having got there, what made them so prominent, in the decades of colonial settlement and in the growth of the young nation after Confederation in 1867? What was the experience of leaving Scotland and making a new life in what was for Scots a new world? To what extent didthey maintain links with the old country and keep alive the cultural traditions they brought with them? The answers highlight a story of migration that has echoes all over Europe, where particularly in the nineteenth century huge numbers of people were displaced, and all over North America, where so many of them began their lives again.

Evidence of departure can be found all over Scotland. For centuries before the first significant movement of Scots to North America began Scots had been leaving to live and work elsewhere, in England of course, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, in France, Germany and Russia. At one time it was reckoned that there were as many as 30,000 Scots settled in Poland. These European connections stamped the history of the east coast ports in particular. Leith, Culross and Crail, for example, all owed their vibrant success in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the activities of Scots overseas. Scottish merchants, soldiers and scholars, and later engineers, architects and industrialists, did not hesitate to move in response to opportunities overseas. So there was a tradition of leaving Scotland long before attention was turned to the other side of the Atlantic.

It was a tradition fostered by aspiration and a sense of adventure as much as by hardship and the pressures of penury, all of which would play a part in sending Scots to Canada. Although many left because they had no choice, it is probably fair to say that most believed that they were making a journey towards a better life. Some intended that that better life should be back in Scotland, and it often happened that after a period of months or years migrating Scots returned. But not all those who intended a temporary sojourn in fact made their way back to Scotland. For a variety of reasons, the New World retained them. And some of those who did return had anticipated living out their lives in their new country, but were disillusioned or frustrated by the reality they met.

The first significant Scottish migration to Canada began in the seventeenth century with the efforts to settle Nova Scotia. Although this was a tentative start, later Nova Scotia would become a very Scottish province. Emigration to America generally gathered pace in the eighteenth century, particularly in the second half, spurred by the enforced exile of defeated Jacobites and by the need for British soldiers to fight colonial wars in North America. After the defeat of Charles Edward Stewart’s Jacobite army at Culloden in 1746 the displacement of Highlanders overseas became official policy, as punishment in the first instance, and then as recruitment. The Jacobites went mainly to the Thirteen Colonies, where there were already numbers of Scots, including communities of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. Among them were Jacobites who had been transported to South Carolina after the Rising of 1715 as well as groups of Highlanders who had left voluntarily. However, the potential of Highlanders as a fighting force was acknowledged, as was the usefulness of recruiting disaffected young men into the army and removing them from their native territory, where they might cause trouble. Highland regiments were raised and sent to fight overseas. The French were the enemy from 1756, and with the end in 1763 of the French and Indian Wars (the American end of the Seven Years War), North America was secured for Britain. Many Scottish soldiers took advantage of the offer of land grants along the St Lawrence River.

The abundant fishing grounds off Newfoundland had early attracted the attention of Europeans, including Scots, who joined those crossing the Atlantic to fish. Some efforts were made to encourage Scots to settle there. An advertisement of 1771 in theGlasgow Journalpainted an enticing picture:

Any person inclining to make their fortune and live happily in the island of St John’s Newfoundland where the soil is excellent and a good healthy climate, great plenty of stone and timber and lime within a few leagues of water carriage, the sea and rivers full of fish.

But although some Scots did settle in Newfoundland, notably in the mid-nineteenth century when a number moved on from Nova Scotia, it never became a prime destination for emigrant Scots.

When in 1775 the Thirteen Colonies signalled rebellion against George III and British rule, the majority of Highland settlers in the Colonies, along with those Scots who had a vested interest in the status quo, supported the king. With British defeat, the Loyalists became refugees and most made their way to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. There were about 40,000 of them. Some joined existing communities, others went to new areas of settlement. They received considerable government support, in the form of land grants in good locations, clothing, household goods and tools. The Loyalists were a special case; many had not chosen to leave Scotland in the first place, and none had chosen Canada as their destination. Those from the southern colonies found the north very different in climate and terrain, and the work involved in starting all over again could be discouragingly hard.

But many of Canada’s eighteenth-century settlers left Scotland willingly to go to their chosen destination. The factors that influenced their choice were mixed. Dissatisfaction with circumstances at home and hope for a better life combined in varying proportions. Fluctuating economic conditions played a part. In the 1770s, for example, a crisis in the Lowland textile industry, which had been employing increasing numbers, encouraged textile workersto look to North America for new opportunities. In the same decade poor harvests and rising rents meant that those dependenton the land, especially in the Highlands, were struggling. Emigration was tempting. It was also expensive, particularly for those who played no part in the cash economy. Most Highland tenants had little opportunity to handle money, and if they wanted to leave were reliant on what they could raise by selling their stock and any possessions they could not take with them. Nevertheless, many of those who departed Scotland were able both to pay their fares and to take with them sufficient cash and goods to get them started. One of the main arguments against emigration was that it not only took the most energetic and enterprising individuals out of Scotland, it also removed capital. Scotland was being drained of human and financial resources.

The totally destitute, who were seen as an encumbrance rather than a resource, were not in a position to leave and anyway rarely had the will to start a new life. It was a decision not readily taken by those who had resigned themselves to a life of deprivation, who no longer had much hope that circumstances could change. Although illusions persisted of the New World promising an easy life, there was an increasing flow of information coming back to Scotland about conditions and requirements. Those who had gone before wrote letters, and literature offering advice began to be published. Travellers returned with accounts of their experiences, and Scots generally expressed considerable interest in the other side of the Atlantic. An increasing number had good reason to, as commercial as well as personal connections grew.

What fuelled the hope for a better life? A key factor was the prospect of owning land. The pace of agricultural modernisation was accelerating in the eighteenth century, driven by commercialpressures and a zeal for improvement. The impact on farm labourersand tenant farmers was profound. In both Highlands and Lowlands farms were being enlarged and rationalised. With the fragmentation of the clan system, which had begun before the Jacobite Rising of 1745 but became irreversible thereafter, the old Highland small-scale subsistence farming no longer had a framework and support system. Traditional tenure of the land was eroded. The possibility of owning land on which to raise crops and stock, of never again paying rent or being subject to the demands of a landlord was an enticing prospect. AsChambers Edinburgh Journalput it in March 1834, Canada offered the prospect of ‘the poorest becoming a possessor of the soil, earning competence for himself, and comfortably settling his children’. Only emigration could make this real. Only in a territory with unclaimed acres could a family of modest means hope to take the future into their own hands.

There were other enticements. Settler society was seen as more open, less bound by class and status, more welcoming to those with enterprise and determination. For those who were not tempted by the republican United States (and many were) British North America offered an attractive alternative. It had all the vigour and potential of a pioneer country, but was still British. For Highland communities overtaken by the new commercialism, which threatened traditional culture as well as traditional work patterns, it offered the opportunity of sustaining the old ways. A substantial amount of Highland emigration involved the transplanting of whole communities, with their kinship connections and collective memory intact. Throughout Scotland it was common for emigrants to leaveand settle as families, often extended families of several generations,and for new settlers to encourage other family members to join them.

Practical factors were also important. As emigration increased in the nineteenth century the level of support, from government, from landowners desperate to rid themselves of what they saw as the burden of unproductive tenants, from the colonial government, from agents and land speculators, could make all the difference to the potential emigrant. Often the support was somewhat illusory, or so short-term as to be of limited use, but generally by the time that was discovered it was too late to turn back. Many people had vested interests in encouraging emigration: landowners on both sides of the Atlantic, ship owners, agents who pocketed a commission with every passage sold, settler communities in need of particular skills. Some were unscrupulous, but all tried very hard to ensure that British North America received a good press.

In the early 1770s there was public concern at what theGlasgow Journalcalled the ‘ruinous practice’ of emigration. There were calls for action to prevent it, and worries that the large numbers leaving would lead to the colonies separating themselves from Britain. There was not, however, a unified or consistent policy on emigration. Although the first organised clearances of tenants from Highland and Island estates were under way before the end of the eighteenth century, the realisation of the economic value of kelp meant that many Highland lairds were doing their best to hang on to their labour force. Kelp is a seaweed found in abundance on Scotland’s west coast. Its ash is a source of alkali that was important in bleaching linen and in soap and glass making. When the import of Spanish barilla, also derived from seaweed, was first subjected to duty and then interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, the price of Scottish kelp shot up. Gathering and burning the kelp was labour intensive, andHebridean landowners seeking to maximise their profits were anxious to deter their people from leaving. But the kelp bonanza – about 7,000 tons were produced in 1810 – was short-lived, and when the duty was dropped in 1825 the price plummeted and the kelp workers became redundant.

MacNeil of Barra did well out of kelp. The profits allowed him to build a fine new house and maintain a sophisticated lifestyle.The minister of Barra was able to report in theOld Statistical Accountof 1794 that ‘the spirit for emigration is now happily andtotally suppressed’. But that was optimistic, as in1817, with Napoleon defeated and worsening economic conditions, emigration was on the agenda again. Colonel MacNeil commented, ‘the loss of so many very decent people, is much to be regretted: at the same time, those that remain, will in time, be much better.’ Colonel MacNeil seems to have had a genuine concern for his tenants. His son, who inherited the estate at his father’s death, had a very different attitude. He demanded that his tenants did what they were told – ‘I must have fishers and helpers who will cheerfully do my bidding,’ he wrote in 1825 to Father Angus MacDonald, the priest on Barra – and stated his intention of kicking out those who didn’t. John MacCodrum, who went to Cape Breton, made his views clear in poetry written in his native Gaelic: ‘Since they won’t put up with you living within your familiar bounds, it’s better for you to leave of your own accord, than to be oppressed like serfs.’

The landowners’ interests were represented by the Highland Society based in London which lobbied effectively on their behalf. The result was the Passenger Act of 1803. On the face of it, this was an effort to improve shipboard conditions. It restricted the number of passengers a ship could carry and included regulations on provisioning and medical care. The result, inevitably, was a steep rise in the cost of passage to North America, which deterred people from leaving. The price of a ticket from the West Highlands to Nova Scotia rose from £4 to £10. Subsequent Passenger Acts reflected the policy on emigration at the time.

Emigration to North America faltered during the American revolutionary war (which confirmed the worst fears of those who warned of the link between emigration and a spirit of independence) and again in 1812 when the youthful United States invaded Canada. Britain successfully repelled the invading Americans and secured a British future for its surviving colonies, although there was more argument to come about the delineation of the border. Disbanded soldiers were again rewarded with land grants. With the collapse of the kelp industry and the intensification of clearance of large tracts of the Highlands to make way for sheep runs, the numbers of displaced and dispossessed increased dramatically. Landowners who in the early years of the nineteenth century were anxious to retain a working population were now encouraging and often forcing departure. Families already struggling to make a living from pitifully unproductive land faced increased rents and diminishing support from clan leaders who had traditionally been the guardians of their people. Many tenants submitted reluctantly to these pressures by choosing to emigrate. Many others had no choice. They were evicted from their homes, in some but not all cases with their passage paid to the other side of the Atlantic, but often with little regard for what happened to them when they got there.

The emigration of Highland communities had begun in the first half of the eighteenth century, largely as a response to rising rents and organised by clan tacksmen, the tenants of larger areas of land who sublet to others. The economic depression of the 1770s spurred departures, commented on by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson when they made their famous 1773 tour to the Highlands and Islands, and by Thomas Pennant who was there in 1769. Johnson noted that ‘whole neighbourhoods formed parties for removal; so that departure from their native country is no longer exile… they change nothing but the place of their abode; and ofthat change they perceive the benefit’. Pennant is much less sanguine. He had sharp words for Highland landlords whom hecharacterised as both rapacious and neglectful. In hisTour of Scotland and a Voyage to the Hebrides(1773) he cautioned them to support their tenants, and not to ‘force them into a distant land, and necessitate them to seek tranquillity by a measure which was once deemed the punishment of the most atrocious criminals’.

It already seemed that emigration was spreading like an epidemic but it was another few decades before wholesale clearances emptied Highland straths and glens, destroyed communitiesand sent hundreds of families at a time to Canada. One of themost notorious of these systematic evictions was instigated by the Countess of Sutherland in the early1800s. In 1846 another swathe of devastation struck with the failure of the potato crop. In spite ofefforts to provide organised relief for those who were literally starving the belief of many was that the land simply could not sustain its population and that the only solution was that it should leave. ‘I see no prospect of relief for the population, without emigration,’ said Charles McQuarrie, a merchant in Mull. The cost of passage overseas was raised by landlords and public subscription,though even in these extreme circumstances there was often profound resistance to leaving.

Further south, Scotland’s growing industrial areas were also producing economic casualties. The mechanisation of industry was perhaps even more relentless than the commercialising of agriculture, and was just as callous towards the labour force. In the early decades of the nineteenth century a key contributor to Scotland’s economic success was the textile industry, but mechanised weaving, for all the large numbers employed in the factories, was putting hundreds of handloom weavers out of work. It was among the weavers that some of the first emigration societies were formed in the 1820s. In that decade around eighty societies came into being, which were responsible for getting around two thousand people to Canada. The societies were set up mainly by weavers in or near Glasgow. All saw the benefits of acting collectively and providing mutual support. The government was petitioned for assistance, and charitable organisations also helped. In 1820 the government responded by providing a loan of £11,000 to enable 1,100 individuals to go to Upper Canada. Included in the deal was free transport for their onward journey from Quebec, a 100-acre land grant for each family, with seed corn and tools provided.

As more Scots made the journey west, more information flowed back. Throughout the century, the tone of letters to family and friends at home ranged from the demoralised to the highly satisfied. They often included useful practical information about whatto bring and what to leave behind. Increasing numbers of pamphlets and books were published, offering a picture of what emigrants could expect and freighted with advice. William Bell’sHints to Emigrants(1824) warns against the ‘flattering accounts’ of Canada people may have seen, but nevertheless encourages emigration. ‘Your surplus population, who have not employment at home, could not do better than come to Canada, provided they are possessed of health, industry, perseverance, and as much cash as to settle them decently upon their land’. He made it clear that emigration is not for the faint-hearted or for the impecunious. John Galt, instrumental in founding the town of Guelph in Upper Canada in 1827, delivered his emigrant’s guide in the form of a novel,Bogle Corbet, or The Emigrants(1831). He makes his intentions clear:‘it contains instruction that may help to lighten the anxieties ofthose whom taste or fortune prompts to quit their native land, and to seek in the wilderness new objects of industry, enterprise, and care’.

Reports on British North America often stressed the rigours of the climate. Robert MacDougall published his GaelicEmigrant’s Guide to North Americain 1841, and was literally at a lost for words to describe his experience of the cold:

… any man who has never been away from Scotland may talk, read, imagine, and dream of cold until he goes grey, but as long as he lives, he will not comprehend the extent of the cold in Canada until he himself feels it or another cold equal to it. My ears have felt it, but though they have, I have no words to describe its harshness, as in truth, the Gaelic language is not capable of describing it.

Alexander Buchanan, the government chief immigration agent whose task it was to assist intending settlers when they arrived, produced detailed practical advice on maintaining good health while adjusting to the new environment:

Dress yourself in light clean clothing… Cut your hair short, and wash daily and thoroughly. Avoid drinking ardent spirits of any kind, and when heated do not drink cold water. Eat moderately of light food. Avoid night dews.

Catherine Parr Traill in herFemale Emigrant’s Guide and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping(1854) takes up the theme of perseverance and hard work, which she reiterates throughout. ‘In Canada persevering energy and industry, with sobriety, will overcome allobstacles, and in time will place the very poorest family in a position of substantial comfort that no personal exertions alone could have procured for them elsewhere.’ Her message was that even the destitute could succeed if they tried hard enough.

One of the most remarkable migration stories is that of the group who were led by the Reverend Norman McLeod, a breakaway Presbyterian who had a following in Sutherland and Wester Ross. Prevented from preaching and taking up a post as parish schoolmaster in Ullapool, in 1817 he and 400 followers built their own boat and set off across the Atlantic. They arrived at Pictou, but McLeod soon had the Presbyterian church there in a state of agitation – he was an immensely popular preacher and severely critical of any apparent laxness – and after three years he and his followers were building another boat. The plan was to go to Ohio but off Cape Breton Island storms intervened. McLeodand the200 who had stuck with him changed their plans and established a settlement in St Ann’s Bay in the northeast of the island. McLeod was an exacting and authoritarian leader, who not only held his people together but fired them to migrate yet again,this time to Australia and eventually to New Zealand, wherethey founded a community at Waipuon North Island.

Not everyone who left Scotland went to Canada, ofcourse, but it remained throughout the century the favoureddestination.The United States was also attractive, especially to the independently-minded, and by the mid-century Australia was becoming an increasingly popular destination. But crossing the Atlantic was not so daunting a prospect as voyaging half way round the world, and Scots generally knew a great deal more about Canada than about Australia or New Zealand. In 1849The Scotsmanreckoned that 20,000 Highlanders had emigrated to Canada in the previous decade, and the more who went the more attractive the propositionbecame. If kith and kin were already established it was easier tomake the decision to uproot and join them, or to accept the inevitable when emigration was enforced.

The growing perception of the Highlands and Islands as over-populated became even stronger with the potato famine of the 1840s. In spite of the efforts made on the part of the government and the church to provide relief, in many areas it seemed that the only solution was to decrease the numbers on the land. There was another wave of organised emigration. Landlords evicted those seen as surplus to requirements or who hindered their vision of prosperity. Some paid passage to Canada, but that was only a small part of what was required to enable settlement. The Duke of Argyll made it clear that it was worth his while to finance the departure of those whom he would otherwise feel obliged to support. Among the most notorious evictions were those instituted by John Gordon of Cluny, who got rid of tenants in Barra (where he had bought the MacNeil estate), South Uist and Benbecula. In 1851 he sent over sixteen hundred to Quebec, but made no provision for them to get to Upper Canada. They had no resources themselves with which to continue their journey or begin their new lives, and many of them spoke only Gaelic. Alexander Buchanan, the government chief immigration agent, had to pick up the pieces and vigorously condemned the irresponsibility of landlords who so cynically sent their people into the unknown. As it was impossible to allow thousands of destitute and bewildered Gaels to remain in Quebec, thegovernment had no choice but to provide the means of sending them on to their ultimate destination and supporting their settlement.

The 1850s saw a new threat to crofting survival, the turning of vast areas of the Highlands into sporting estates. This brought more clearances; by 1884 there were nearly two million acres of deer forest. ‘Why should we emigrate?’ asked Donald Macdonald of Back of Keppoch. ‘There is plenty of waste land around us; for what is an extensive deer-forest in the heart of the most fertile partof our land but waste land?’ The grievances of Highland and Island crofters intensified and the early 1880s erupted into rent strikes and land raids. Protest was focused through the Highland Land League, formed in 1883. The Crofting Act of 1886 brought a measure of reform, securing fairer rents and security of tenure, but crofters remained without sufficient land to subsist, and the act did nothing to help landless labourers. The tide of emigration continued.

It continued also in the Lowlands, where changing land use and increasingly industrialised agriculture displaced tenants andlabourers. Many left Scotland altogether, choosing a life that offered some hope of advancement over an existence of low wages and poor conditions. ‘These men,’ commented theAberdeen Herald