Once past the mouth of the Mersey, the Ticonderoga shortened sail briefly to allow a pilot vessel to come alongside. The pilot wished the captain the best for the long journey and handed the big oak wheel over to the helmsman. A call went around for any last messages to be taken ashore and a few notes were hastily scribbled. Some passengers watched in silence as he descended the ship’s ladder, taking with him their last connection to the old world. Now they were finally and entirely on their own. If all went to plan, nothing would be heard of the Ticonderoga or the souls on board until they reached the shores of Australia.
Suddenly, they were out into Liverpool Bay heading due west along the coast of Wales. Had they kept going, they would have sailed across the Irish Sea almost directly into Dublin Bay; instead, many hours later, they rounded the island of Holyhead, passed the famous South Stack Lighthouse then proceeded through St George’s Channel, running between Ireland and Wales, before turning onto the heading that would barely alter for two months: due south. Way over on the port side, some took a last glimpse at the home they knew they would never see again, and the last sight of land ebbed quietly over the horizon.
10
Clearances and famine: The tragedy of the Highlands
When the Scots emigrants walked up the gangway from the Birkenhead depot onto the Ticonderoga’s deck for the first time, more than a century had passed since the day in 1746 when, on a bleak moor near Inverness, the old dream of a Scottish king returning to the British throne was buried once and for all in blasts of musket and grapeshot. Yet, 106 years later, the Duke of Cumberland’s guns still reverberated in echoes of despair throughout the Highlands.
Even in their forefathers’ time, only a fraction of the clans[1] had supported the delusions of the so-called Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart. His wild-eyed followers hurled flowers into his path, dubbed him their ‘Bonnie Prince’, their dark-eyed Roman Catholic darling, their saviour—all this despite him having placed not so much as a foot on Scottish soil until the age of 25, and the fact that his title ‘Prince’ existed in name only. Most other Highlanders watched in dread and foreboding as this Great Jacobite Rebellion, this fancy of the Catholics and those mad, unpredictable Episcopalians, gathered its brief head of steam before shattering in disaster as a rag-tag army of half-starved clansmen withered in front of the Duke of Cumberland’s Regiments of Foot, two of which happened to be Scottish themselves. But despite many not supporting the uprising, all would be made to suffer its defeat.
In the end, the grandson of a deposed and long-dead king would prove no match for the warrior son of a reigning monarch. Earning his sobriquet ‘the Butcher’, Cumberland carried out the orders given by his father, King George III, and saw to it that no clansman was left alive on the battlefield of Culloden. Dead and wounded were thrown together into pits and buried, dead or alive.
Thus began the pacification of the Highlands. In an indication of the depth of the shock felt by the Hanoverians at the Jacobin uprising, Cumberland embarked on a sustained and cold-blooded campaign, hunting down clansmen like dogs and eradicating Highland culture root and branch. The tartan was outlawed; the pipes forbidden. Roads were now policed and those caught speaking Gaelic were punished by imprisonment or death. With the passing of the Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act, the Highland chiefs were stripped of their powers, and eventually the entire clan system, which had evolved over a thousand years and formed the bedrock of Highland society, was smashed forever.
Worse even than this treatment at the hands of the old enemy, the English, however, was the betrayal by their own. Warlords no longer, the estate-owning lairds of southern Scotland—upon whose largesse and sufferance tens of thousands of tenant farmers had relied for centuries to eke out some kind of living on their tiny plots of fertile land, decided to cash in their centuries-old traditions and become rich.
Since as long as anyone could remember, in a system that had evolved little since feudal times, the land-owning gentry had sub-let their vast estates to tacksmen, who in turn leased ‘tacks’ or strips of fertile land collectively to the farming families of a village or town. The system, known as run rig, had served Highlanders for generations. The rent gathered from those at the bottom of the pyramid was, however, small, sometimes pitifully so. And while in previous times, the landowners had been happy to count their assets in numbers of loyal clansmen willing to wield a broadsword in their name, their desires from the mid-1700s became decidedly more worldly.
The landowning Scots quickly began to dissociate from the rough ways of the Highlanders. They married pretty English wives who preferred a townhouse in Belgravia to an estate in the glens, and who chose to venture no further north than a ball at a wealthy home on the outskirts of Edinburgh. They affected English manners, courted English friends and agreed with them that the Gaelic, after all, had always been a barbarous tongue for a barbarous people.
For it was now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that the demand for meat, followed by the demand for wool, would transform the Highlands, draining the land of its ancient people forever. It was called ‘the Clearances’, and it would spell the death of Highland culture. The weapon deployed in this long and deliberate campaign of human catastrophe was the humble sheep.
There had, of course, always been sheep in the Highlands: small things kept in modest flocks, producing milk, small amounts of fine wool and, occasionally, tough mutton. They were thin and delicate creatures, unable to survive the harsh Highland winters, at the beginning of which they were brought down from their grazing places on the slopes to the lower, more protected climates. Often, they would over-winter with the tenant farmers themselves, man and beast under the same roof, in a way that later revolted outsiders.
Then, in the last years of the 1700s, came the time of the Cheviot, the Great Sheep. Named after the bitter hills running along the border of England and Scotland among which it was bred, the Cheviot was a man-made super sheep, producing one-third more wool and meat than the common blackface or Linton. It was also relatively disease free and could survive the harsh Highland winters that, insisted the locals initially, not even the strongest stag could bear.
Suddenly, land that had quietly supported a few hundred Highland families in a manner that remained unchanged for centuries was worth a fortune. Attention was directed towards the Highlands and its inhabitants as never before. The fear and loathing felt by a previous generation now gave way to pity and contempt for their squalid way of life, their dismal huts of sod and stone, their wooden ploughs, their paltry crops of oats and potato, their rough stills and bitter beer, their refusal to modernise, their stubborn beliefs in witches, faeries and other superstitions.
On their chestnut geldings, English and southern gentlemen—the industrious as well as the curious—made forays into the Highlands, notebook in hand, cursing the lack of roads and the absence of a decent inn. They rode up the river banks and into the villages, marking down every fertile valley and verdant hillside they could find along the way, tut-tutting as to how these people could be so immune to the wondrous progress of modern Britain. For their own sake, it was decided, they must—by force if necessary—be brought into the modern world, if only to liberate them from their own backwardness. Improvement became the moral imperative, and it was a subject not open for debate.