Highland and Island Emigration Society

The Highland and Island Emigration Society was a charitable society formed to promote and assist emigration as a solution to the Highland Potato Famine. Between 1852 and 1857 it assisted the passage of around 5,000 emigrants from Scotland to Australia.

Crisis - Relief vs Emigration

In 1846 the Highland Potato Famine elevated the existing difficult circumstances in a region ^[1] already struggling with overpopulation ^{[2] [3]} and the upheavals of the Highland Clearances to the level of a full blown crisis demanding immediate practical relief.

So numerous were the deaths from starvation in 1848 and 1849 that the Government dispatched a number of frigates loaded with oatmeal to act as mobile relief depots at various places on the western seaboard. ^[4]

At the appointed time and place the poor creatures troop down in hundreds, wretched and thin. Some have clothing, some have none, and some are a mass of rags. Old and young, feeble and infirm, they take their stations and await their turn. Not a murmur, not a clamour, not a word - but they wept out loud as they told of their miseries. ^[5]

Relief measures were supervised by Sir John McNeill, himself a highlander. In 1846, in his role as chairman of the Board of Supervision for the New Poor Law in Scotland, he toured 27 of the most distressed parishes. ^[4] As the famine continued many, like McNeill, began to doubt that relief was a sustainable solution to the problem.

For example, in Skye, one of the hardest hit areas, the local clan chief Norman McLeod bankrupted himself between 1846 and 1849 providing relief to his people. In 1849 he was obliged to leave Skye and move to London, working as a clerk earning three pounds a week. He became convinced that emigration was the only solution and eventually joined the London Committee of the Highland and Island Emigration Society. ^[6]

As another example, Thomas Fraser, Sheriff Substitute of Skye, had worked there since 1846 organizing relief but...

by 1851 he had lost hope in the efficacy of such measures, and saw emigration as the only hope for the Highlander. ^[7]

In 1851 McNeill published a report ^[8] to the Board of Supervision which...

finally discredited charitable relief as a solution to the Highland problem and presented a powerful case for the large-scale emigration of the 'surplus' population as the only way forward. ^[9]

This view was strongly shared by Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty's Treasury in London. He saw emergency food supplies as a "useless palliative" ^[10] and wrote to Thomas Fraser on Skye concerning...

the necessity of adopting a final measure of relief for the Western Highlands and Islands by transferring the surplus of the population to Australia. This community is tortured and preyed upon ... and the 'patient' and 'loyal' Highlander being tamed by the mistaken kindness of his friends into a Professional Mendicant. ^[11]

By January 1852, Trevelyan had founded the Highland and Island Emigration Society with McNeill. They had a strong and useful ally in Sir Thomas Murdoch, chairman of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. ^[12][13] MacMillan attributes the success of the Society primarily to this powerful trio: Trevelyan and Murdoch for Treasury and Emigration and McNeill as the chief administrator of Poor Relief in Scotland. ^[14]

Skye was the area selected for the Society's first operations, with Australia as the ultimate destination.

Trevelyan's choice of Australia as the destination for his emigrants was determined by his belief that the Highlanders, with their experience as shepherds and cattle drovers, were exactly the settlers that the Australian colonies needed. ^[15]

The Rules

In its first pamphlet published in May 1852 the Society set out its rules:^{[16] [17]}

1. The Emigration will be conducted, as much as possible, by entire families, and in accordance with the rules of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners.
2. Passages to Australia are provided by the Commissioners, from Colonial funds, for able-bodied men and women of good character.... on production of a stated quantity and description of clothing, and on payment of a deposit ...
3. The Society will advance the sum necessary to make good whatsoever may be deficient for these purposes.... The emigrants will he required to repay to the Society the whole of the sums advanced to them, which will again be applied in the same manner as the original fund.
4. The owners or trustees of the properties from which the emigrants depart will be expected to pay one-third of the sum disbursed on account of the emigrants by the Society.

The last rule which required landlords to partially fund the emigration of their tenants was a controversial one.

Quoting Richards:

the operations of the ... Society were clouded by its allegiance with landlords wanting to divest themselves of small tenantry who were no longer economic. ^[18]

Quoting Prebble:

Helped by the Highland Emigration Society and by the Commissioners for emigration - the one finding the money and the other the ships - the lairds of the Isles were now clearing their estates with sickening haste. ^[19]

Popular Support

The Society did not receive any financial assistance from the British Government. ^[20] It was funded by the landlords, Australian institutions wishing to encourage immigration and also charitable donations.

In 1852 popular support for emigration was widespread. The Society's pamphlet of May 1852 announced that its patron was Prince Albert and asked the public for donations. ^[21]

The list of benefactors showed:

The Queen gave £300, Prince Albert £105, three Scottish Dukes £100 each, and numerous English clergy and nobles gave similar amounts. Also heading the list were Members of Parliament, the Australian Agricultural Company, Mr Rothschild and other prominent persons. ^[22]

The London Committee, which in addition to Trevelyan himself included other influential individuals such as Baring, W. G. Prescott, Governor of the Bank of England and Baron Rothschild, wrote personal letters to prominent Scots in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras ^[23] asking for funds to help...

this final effort to put an end to the misery that is breaking the spirit and degrading the character of our Highlanders, now that an absolute necessity of removing them has coincided with such an opportunity of providing for them elsewhere as never has, and perhaps never will, occur again. ^[24]

Support also came from the governments in the various Australian colonies, including £3,000 from South Australia in 1853 ^[22] and £3,000 from Tasmania in 1854 ^[25] on condition that a certain number of emigrants were sent there.

Criticism

The Society's emigration scheme was sometimes exploited by landlords leading to some of the notorious forced evictions that figure in the sad history of the Highland Clearances.

The Society's work came to be identified in many minds with the horror of the more brutal evictions - but for these it was not directly responsible. ^[26]

For example, in 1854, Donald Ross published a pamphlet entitled "Real Scottish Grievances" in which he describes some of the results of the activities of what he refers to as "a body calling itself the Highland and Island Emigration Society". ^[27]

Trevelyan must have been aware of these incidents because many were widely reported. However...

...there is little mention of such protests in Trevelyan's correspondence. When a correspondent raised the doubt, then gaining ground among the Society's supporters, that "the emigration is to facilitate the landlord's clearances", the Chairman replied: "They will no doubt gain by the removal of the unemployed population, but the people will gain far more. This is essentially a popular movement." ^[28]

Trevelyan's correspondence reveals a low opinion of the "Celtic race" (despite his own Cornish, and therefore Celtic, ancestry) ^[29] that was not uncommon for the times. See, for example, Highland Clearances#Pseudoscientific racism. These views influenced the operation of the Society. Quoting Kent:

The active principles on which the Highland and Island Emigration Society was founded, and which it consistently espoused, were a mixture of liberal political economy, ill-disguised racism and a grudging form of charity. ^[30]

The sometimes conflicted nature of the Society and its operations is reflected in MacMillan's comments on the nature of Trevelyan:

Trevelyan's own personality is enigmatic, with its undertones of racial prejudice and authoritarianism. He could defend his emigrants against the criticisms of Robert Lowe and the critics of his schemes in New South Wales, but he could also contemplate with satisfaction "the prospect of flights of Germans settling here in increasing numbers - an orderly, moral, industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us that the Irish or Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with our body politic". He certainly believed that he was benefiting both Britain and the Highlanders, for he wrote on another occasion, "The Irish and Scotch, especially the latter, do much better when they have a fresh start in other countries, and become mixed up with other people, than when they stay at home". ^[31]

Operation

Apart from being unusual in the way it funded emigrants, the Society was also unusual in the application of its first Rule - emigration by family.

The sheer size of family groups, the joint migration of extended kin and even of some three-generational family groups contrasted sharply with the usual immigration pattern of single men, of childless couples, or of young married couples with only a few children. ^[32]

Families were selected by a Land and Emigration Commissioner's agent in Scotland acting on behalf of the Society. Families that satisfied the Society's criteria ^[17] were selected and assigned a family number.

Between 1852 and 1857, 29 ships carried 963 families sponsored by the Society comprising around 5,000 emigrants. ^[33][34]

The voyages could be dangerous. Fatal diseases included typhus, scarlet fever and smallpox. For example, out of 615 immigrants (not all sponsored by the Society) on the 1852 voyage of the Ticonderoga, 168 died including 82 children under 7. ^[35]

However, other voyages went smoothly. A well documented one is that of the Sir Alan McNab which sailed from Liverpool in 1854 where:

Only trifling sickness occurred, chiefly diseases of the throat and glands, which the Surgeon thought might have been caused by the ship's being lined with salt to preserve its timbers. ^[36]

In 1852, its first year of operation, 17 ships carried Society emigrants to Australia. There were only 4 ships in 1854 - "Economic conditions in the Highlands had improved slightly, and the people were reluctant to emigrate." ^[37] In 1854 the number of ships rose to 5 but then operations were disrupted by the Crimean war. In 1855 only two ships left with Society emigrants, none in 1856 and only one, the last, in 1857. ^[38]

End of the Society

Quoting Prentis on the end of the Society:

The Highland and Island Emigration Society was a short-lived but impressive attempt to alleviate poverty in the Highlands by taking advantage of the expressed need of the Australian colonies for labour ... The slackening demand for labour in Australia and the renewed attractiveness of Canada, combined with improved conditions and prospects at home and the disruption caused by the Crimean War, brought the Society's programme to a virtual halt after 1854. (A mere 544 highlanders were sent out in 1855 and 1857). ^[39]

Hellier on the success of the Society:

The HIES succeeded in dispensing thousands of impoverished Highlanders abroad by knitting together colonial needs, landlord eviction, public charity and Highland kinship. ^[40]

Trevelyan had a long view on the Society's legacy. Writing to McNeill in 1852:

Five hundred years hence, a few of the most aristocratic families of the great Australian Republic will boast of being able to trace their ancestors in the Highland Emigration Book of 1852-53. ^[41]

In 1855, as the Society was clearly coming to an end, he wrote to McNeill:

The records will be deposited at the Register House in Edinburgh. They may have some social and statistical interest hereafter. ^[42]

MacMillan comments:

It is to Trevelyan's sense of history and his concern for the safety of documentation, characteristics of a great civil servant, that we owe the remarkable survival of the central records of the Society. ^[43]

As well as providing valuable insight into this turbulent period of Scottish history, the Society's documentary legacy has allowed researchers to track the fate of many of the Society's emigrants ^{[44] [45] [46] [47] [48]} - most of whom would count among those that history tends to forget.

References

Bibliography

External links

• The Life of Emigration - Marketing the Dream