Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
just his name. He also took experience and skills: the skill of the Highlander to survive on near barren land in a wild climate, and the Lowlander took his industrial skills and business acumen. In addition, they took pride in their homeland and their personal contacts with Scotland, people they could do business with and people they could trust as their agents. The Scottish business network was, and to a certain extent still is, a club whose membership depended simply on provenance. Membership was a bond that ensured trust and fair play. No other nation of people achieved this bond, not the expatriate English who invariably merged into the background of their overseas destination, not the Norwegians or the Irish, who for the most part were unskilled, nor any other European emigrant expatriate.
Scottish emigration took place in two phases. The notorious Land Clearances preparatory to the introduction of the four-legged Highlander, the sheep, produced a massive outgoing of crofters and farmers seeking a new start in North America and Australia. The exodus was accelerated with the decline of the hand loom and the decimation of herring stocks, which conspired to bring abject poverty to both Lowlander and Highlander. The stories of hardship on the long voyages with families cramped in poor accommodation with inadequate nourishment and poor sanitation are legion. Indeed, that so many families survived the journey is remarkable and the statistic that on many voyages new arrivals could equal the number of deaths was surprising.
One example of the conditions is reported in Papers relative to emigration to the North American Colonies. Accounts and Papers, 1852, vol XXXIII, p71 (sessional no. 1474):
The return includes information in the form of letters on the emigration of 1,681 destitute Highlanders from South Uist, and a further 986 from Lewis. The emigration agent in Quebec reported that immigrants had arrived from South Uist in a very poor condition. They had been existing on the island by eating shellfish and seaweed collected from the rocks at low water before being sent to Canada; their passage had been paid by the proprietor, Colonel Gordon. Upon arriving at Quebec it was found that they had insufficient funds or food for travelling across Canada to their final destination. On the voyage from Scotland, the wife of the captain had spent her time organising the making of clothes for the emigrants. One man leaving the ship was found to have no other clothes than a woman’s petticoat. The Quebec Emigration Agent was very scathing concerning some of the proprietors for sending out tenants unable to fend for themselves, and at a time of the year when no employment existed for them.
The emigrants were packed in the ’tween decks, and life aboard the sailing ships could be tedious and uncomfortable. Deaths aboard ship were interspersed with new births, and life went on much as it could, despite the cramped conditions on board. More often than not a teacher was on hand to attend to the children’s education, and a surgeon attended to the passengers’ ills. A contemporary report by Captain J H Taylor of the Albion Line clipper Timaru described the emigrant’s lot:
The surgeon got £1 per head for every soul he landed. Many people in those days came to sea for their health, thinking that a long sea voyage would be beneficial. They generally gained strength in the tropics but after we got into the high southern latitudes the weather there was generally very cold and the sudden fall in temperature was often too much for weakened bodies having only gained temporary strength in the tropics and they soon passed away …
The first funeral aboard was always a very sad and serious event for the passengers, and generally tears were shed and everyone was present. As the time passed a similar event happened and fewer people were present, and when the third, fourth and fifth funerals took place it was noticed that many did not come and some did not even stop their games on deck to be present.
On the outward passage of the Timaru in 1877, south of Tasmania, there having been five deaths and four births, the surgeon naturally anxious to have his list of passengers back to the original number and he had evidence that a birth might take place before reaching our destination and, sure enough, three days before we arrived, at 1am the doctor called me up with great glee and said ‘No. 5 has arrived’ and the £1 per head was now secure.
The Albion Line’s Timaru (1874) was an iron-hulled full-rigged ship built by J E Scott at Greenock. (Oil painting by K A Griffin)
The Clearances peaked in the 1840s and early 1850s. Knox (see reference section) wrote:
The landlord’s course of action was based on the fact that the Highland economy had collapsed, while at the same time the population was still rising. As income from kelp production and black cattle dried up, the landlord saw sheep as a more profitable alternative. The introduction of sheep meant the removal of people. The crofting population was already relying on a potato diet and when the crop failed in the late 1830s and again in the late 1840s, emigration seemed the only alternative to mass starvation. The policy of the landlord was to clear the poorest Highlanders from the land and maintain those crofters who were capable of paying rent.
The Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland and other large landowners financed emigration schemes. Offers of funding were linked to eviction which left little choice to the crofter. However, the Emigration Act of 1851 made emigration more freely available to the poorest. The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society was set up to oversee the process of resettlement. Under the scheme a landlord could secure a passage to Australia for a nominee at the cost of £1. Between 1846 and 1857 around 16,533 people of the poorest types, comprising of mainly young men, were assisted to emigrate. The greatest loss occurred in the Islands, particularly Skye, Mull, the Long Island and the mainland parishes of the Inner Sound.
Subsequent to 1855 mass evictions ceased and emigration became a choice rather than a necessity. For the next forty years decline in the Highland population was less than in the rural Lowlands. The Highlands experienced a 9 per cent fall in population between 1851 and 1891 (Ireland in the same period faced a 28 per cent reduction). In addition the Crofters’ Holding Act of 1886 provided security of tenure and in due course new crofts were developed so that by 1950 over 2,700 new tenant crofts had been created.
But people still chose to leave the Highlands with the promise of a better, perhaps even an affluent life, in a new country. By the 1930s the population of the Highlands was little over half that of a hundred years before. Many moved south into the Lowlands of Scotland and England but a substantial proportion, preferring to stay in contact with the land, left for permanent migration to Canada where the attractions of Ontario and Nova Scotia were compelling; the majority of nineteenth century settlers in Nova Scotia were of Scottish extraction. In Nova Scotia in the first half of the nineteenth century, 59 per cent of UK settlers were Scots-born.
As for the emigrant from Lowland Scotland, Knox wrote:
Keeping in touch with the land was not a consideration for the urban emigrant from the Scottish Lowlands. The decision to emigrate in this part of Scotland was purely voluntary. Indeed, emigration was seen by trade unions and other voluntary groups as a practical solution to unemployment and economic depression. Lowlanders were moved to leave their birthplace by a combination of low wages, poor housing conditions and unemployment. The high points in emigration statistics corresponded with years of severe economic depression. These occurred in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the mid-1880s, and the period 1906–13 … In fact in the economic depression of the 1920s emigration exceeded the natural increase in population. This was brought to a halt in the 1930s as the world trade depression saw emigrants return home. Indeed, the numbers leaving Scotland in the 1930s were at their lowest for a century.
The rise in emigration from urban areas saw a shift in the pattern of overseas settlement and the social status of emigrants. In the early 19th century it was the poorer members of society who chose to migrate. From the Highlands it was the landless peasants; from the Lowlands it was the unemployed craftsmen and labourers and small farmers. The country of settlement tended to be Canada. In fact, in the period 1825–1835 over 70% of emigrants from Scotland settled there.
The picture changed considerably in the twentieth century when skilled workers became the mainstay of the emigrant population. In 1912 and 1913, 47 per cent of adult male emigrants from Scotland were described as skilled, compared with just 36 per cent of the migrants leaving England and