Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A comprehensive account of the 19th-century exodus of almost two million men, women and children from Scotland to a new life overseas. When the clearances started, many people saw America as a land of opportunity, where they could obtain land, and landlords were trying to stop them emigrating. But after the potato blight in the 1840s the landowners just wanted to get rid of people, and they began shipping them across the Atlantic.
There’s a huge Scottish diaspora as a result of the clearances. You’ve recommended Marjory Harper’s book Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus.
To begin with, when the clearances started, many people did want to leave. They saw America as a land of liberty and an opportunity to obtain land, and, as their Gaelic songs emphasized endlessly, there were no landlords. America was a place that people wanted to get to. But up until about 1820, the landlords wanted to keep the people in the area; to remove them from the inland places being made over to the sheep farmers, but establish them on smallholdings on the coast. That was the beginnings of the crofting system. Crofts were deliberately made small so that a family couldn’t make a living from agriculture alone and would have to do other things. I mentioned fishing, but much more important on the West Coast and in the Hebrides was the kelp industry.
The kelp industry depended on the manufacture of a kind of crude industrial alkali from seaweed, much in demand for the manufacturing industry then developing in the south. But the industry collapsed in the period 1815-1820, and after that crofting was seen by the landlords who’d created it as having outlived its usefulness. People were turfed back on to their tiny bits of land and the only crop that could grow on the crofts in sufficient quantities to feed a family was potatoes. Then came the potato blight in the 1840s and the famine. By that point the landowners were just wanting to get rid of people, and they began shipping them overseas.
At the time there was a lot of timber being imported into the UK from Canada. The timber ships were always pretty rundown, and when they emptied out the hold they would put a couple of crude decks inside, and people were crossing the ocean in the holds of these ships. These voyages could last two or even three months. When the weather was bad the hatches were battened down and it was the perfect breeding ground for cholera and typhoid and all the rest. So it's not a happy story of everybody sailing off to America and living happily ever after; an awful lot of them never made it to America in the first place.
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Professor James Hunter is director of the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. He is the author of 12 books about the Highlands including A Dance Called America, The Making of the Crofting Community and On the Other Side of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands. He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union. He also chaired Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland’s development agency.
