You will descend into a
temperate and delicious clime, differing only from your own by its
salubrity and mildness. Instead of encountering, with other
missionaries, all the difficulties of a barren, ungrateful soil, you go
to sojourn in a land where the grateful earth only waits the hand of the
husbandman to guide its luxuriant energies in the most pleasing or
advantageous direction. Instead of a savage population, suspicious of
your purposes, and hostile to your religion, you have thousands to
welcome you in your own language, and educated in all respects in habits
similar to your own.
THE REVEREND JAMES
SIMPSON, minister of the United Associate Synod, Potter-row,
Edinburgh, in his ordination charge to the Reverend Archibald
Macarthur, missionary, the first minister to Van Diemen’s Land, 22
January 1822.
THE flow of Scottish
emigration to Australia in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century
reflected the economic state of Scotland, the growing interest in, or
disillusion with, the Australian colonies at various times, and the force
of attraction of other emigration fields.
The slumps that affected
many districts in the post-war period, the great financial crash of 1826
and the bad times that followed it, the difficult depression years of the
late 1830s and the mid 1840s, were all marked by waves of emigration to
Australia and other lands. Similarly, the development of a strong public
interest in Australia in the early 1820s and later 1830s may be considered
as partly a cause, and partly an effect, of the movement. Disillusion with
the Cape, and the bursting of the bubble South American emigration schemes
in the 1820s, also inclined many to Australia, as did the financial
collapse in the United States and the political troubles in the Canadas in
the late 1830s.
In the earlier part of the
period, before 1832, the most remarkable feature of the Scottish
emigration was the rapidity with which it developed on a large scale in
1820. Before that date there were, proportionally, very few Scottish
settlers. In 1818 Australia was still regarded with prejudice in Scotland,
and Captain Patrick Wood of Fife, a retired East India officer petitioning
in 1820 to settle in Van Diemen’s Land, referred to a previous
application in 1818 and described how ‘the plan met with such decided
hostility from my relations as to force me for a time to relinquish it’.
Official thinking on emigration was still along the lines propounded by
Lord Sidmouth in 1816, when he stated that Upper Canada and the Cape were
the promising fields for those affected by the ‘bad times’.
By 1821 a completely
different attitude prevailed, and reports like that sent to Edinburgh by
the captain of the emigrant ship Westmorland were circulating
freely. ‘All the young men have got good situations of £100 or £130
per annum. Mr. --- got £200 for himself and wife to manage stock and a
dairy farm. I have such a high opinion of the country that I intend to
settle here. In the following two years, bad reports of crop failures and
distress among the Scottish settlers at the Cape made many intending
emigrants consider Australia instead.
The population of Scotland
at the census of 1811 was estimated at 1,800,000—between an eighth and a
ninth of the combined populations of England and Ireland, and between a
ninth and a tenth of the total population of the United Kingdom. Apart
from some officials and military officers, the proportion of Scots among
the free settlers prior to 1820 appears to have been negligible, and the
same applied to the Scottish element among the convicts. According to
Professor Manning Clark, only 70 Scots were transported between 1788 and
1800, and by 1823 the number of Scots to be transported since 1788 was
only 855 (764 men and 91 women), or about 3½ per cent, of the total to
that date.
The return of land grants
for the eight and a half years between August 1812 and March 1821,
rendered by Governor Macquarie in November 1821, shows only 34 grants made
to Scots out of a total of 380 grants of more than 100 acres—less than a
tenth—but
the Register of Land Orders for the period of Macquarie’s governorship
from 1810 to 1821 presents a rather different picture. It records that
Scots received fully one-sixth of the grants of 250 acres and over given
out in the mainland colony, a larger proportion than the return would
suggest. According to the register, about one-tenth of the smaller grants
were in favour of Scots, a figure that tallies with the evidence of the
return.
The Journals of the
Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land, giving an account of their
survey of lands in the colony in 1826—8, contain references to 23 Scots
settlers who had arrived prior to 27 November 1820 (the date of arrival of
the Skelton), and to 130 English and Irish settlers who had arrived
before that date. Assuming that the number of Scots who had arrived to
take up land prior to November 1820 and who had abandoned, sold, or
forfeited their grants by the time of the Commissioner’s survey was
roughly similar in proportion to that of English and Irish settlers who
did the same, it appears that about a sixth of the total number of free
settlers in Van Diemen’s Land prior to November 1820 were Scots. The
figures show that even before 1821 the number of Scots receiving large
grants in both settlements— many of them officials and army officers—was
relatively high, while the number among the lesser folk, receiving smaller
grants, was relatively low in proportion to the Scottish as against the
British population.
From 1820 there was a
remarkable increase in the number and in the proportion of Scottish
settlers, and this was particularly marked in Van Diemen’s Land. The
Land Commissioners’ Journals show that by 1828 there were 190
Scottish settlers holding land in the island, many of them with
considerable holdings. Of these, 167, or 88 per cent., had arrived since
November 1820. As many of these landholders brought out not only their
families, but domestic and farm servants as well, the figure indicates the
importance of this largest group among the Scottish settlers— the men
with sufficient ‘capital or property’ to qualify for land grants, and
who intended to become agriculturists.
As against the 190 Scots
referred to in the Journals as holding land in 1826—8, a total of
368 persons of English or Irish origin was recorded. The proportion of
Scots among landholders had therefore risen from less than a sixth to more
than a third. While English and Irish landholders had increased by between
two and three times in the first eight years of the decade, Scottish
landholders had increased almost sixfold.
In New South Wales there
was a similar increase, though it was less marked, owing to the fact that
the population was larger and the number of settlers, both those
established by 1821 and those who arrived later in the 1820s, much
greater. As against the 29 grants of land to Scots in the previous nine
years listed in Macquarie’s return of November 1821, no fewer than 26
grants of 250 acres or more were recorded in favour of Scots in the
Register of Land Orders for the thirteen months between 1 December 1821
and 31 December 1822. All of these were in New South Wales, and they
constituted 39 per cent. of the larger grants made in the period. In 1823,
28 such grants were made to Scots out of a total of 91, and in 1824, 51
grants were recorded in favour of Scots out of 164. In the great ‘granting
year’ of 1825, no fewer than 100 grants were made to Scots out of a
total of 340.
In the ten-year period
between 1821 and 1831, Scots obtained a consistent average of just under a
third of the grants of over 250 acres made annually. Out of a total of
1,439 grants recorded for the decade, Scots obtained 436 grants—or 30
per cent. of the total. The following table details the figures for each
year and the percentage of grants in favour of Scots. They do not
necessarily represent new arrivals, as settlers often received additional
grants at intervals during this period.
The evidence of the Land
Commissioners’ Journals and of the Registers of Land Orders
indicates that by 1830 slightly more than a third of the persons holding
sizeable grants of land in Van Diemen’s Land were Scots, as were about a
quarter of those holding such grants in New South Wales. This conclusion
must be qualified by the consideration that the Land Commissioners’ Journals
report actual tenure of the land, while the New South Wales Registers
record grants, which may not have been taken up by the grantees, as well
as additional grants made to those already holding land. Yet the salient
features of this first wave of
Scottish emigration are
traceable in the figures above—the great exodus of 1820-2, sustained in
1824 and 1825, but with a falling off in departures in the latter year
due, possibly, to the prosperity of 1824—5, and the optimism that went
with the speculative boom of the time; the much slighter flow of emigrants
occasioned by the financial collapse of 1826 and ‘the year of the short
corn’, and a gradual falling off again towards the end of the decade as
reports of depression in Australia were published in Scotland. These
trends can also be ascertained from the Colonial Office records and from
the passenger lists and shipping records.
In May 1828 the Sydney
Gazette stated that ‘emigration to Van Diemen’s Land is falling
off’,’ and the evidence of the island colony’s Land Commissioners’
Journal of 1826-8 certainly corroborates this. By far the greater
number of Scots landholders referred to in the Journal had arrived
by 1825. In New South Wales the number of Scots receiving larger land
grants in the period from 1826 to 1829 inclusive was considerable—no
fewer than 152 such grants being recorded. This suggests that Van Diemen’s
Land was particularly popular with the Scots settlers up to about 1826,
and thereafter fell heavily from favour. While New South Wales attracted
fewer settlers after 1826 than before, the proportionate fall in the
Scottish influx was not so great. Yet the New South Wales figures must be
considered with reservations, for they reflect the changing attitudes and
policies of the Governors Macquarie, Brisbane, and Darling with regard to
land grants, as well as the rate of the Scottish influx.
The figures based on the
petitions and applications sent into the Colonial Office by intending
settlers provide a surer indication of the trend of Scottish emigration to
Australia that set in suddenly in 1820. In the five years from 1815 to
1819 inclusive there were only 25 Scottish applicants, as against 323 from
England and Ireland. In 1820 the number of Scottish applicants increased
more than tenfold from 7 in 1819 to 79, as against a total of 237 from the
whole of the United Kingdom—a proportion of exactly one-third. This was
a phenomenal year, but until 1823 the proportion of Scottish applicants to
settle, and to have land grants, remained just under one-third of the
total. The table opposite gives the exact figures for the period, and
illustrates the surprising increase of 1820. It also shows that in 1824
Scots made up two-fifths of the total number, and that for the five years
from 1820 to 1824 inclusive the average number of Scots applying had risen
to seventy-three each year, about a third of the total.
In 1825 the Scottish
applications began to fall off, proportionally as well as numerically. For
the three years from 1826 to 1828 inclusive they made up about 20 per
cent. of the total for the British Isles, but in 1829, with only ten
applicants, they slumped back to about an eighth, or 12 per cent. of the
total of propertied persons applying for grants and settlers’
privileges. Miss Margaret Kiddle, in her Men of Yesterday,’ has
ascribed the change in the type of emigrants arriving in Van Diemen’s
Land after 1830 to the introduction of ‘assisted emigration’, which
enabled people of the working class to go out. This was undoubtedly one
reason for the change, but another, as far as the Scottish emigration flow
is concerned, was the severe depression of the late 1820s, which
discouraged many Scots of the middle class from venturing to settle in
Australia, especially in view of the unfavourable reports reaching them
from the colonies. The discontinuance of
the land-grants system also
contributed to the decline in middle-class emigration from Scotland to
Australia in the early 1830s.
By 1827 emigration had
become a controversial topic in Scotland. That influential Church leader,
Thomas Chalmers, was urging in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that
‘Home Colonisation’ —intensified agriculture on the Scottish
wastelands—would be more beneficial to the nation than assisted
emigration. With J. R. McCulloch taking the opposite view, in the Edinburgh
Review, that assisted emigration was preferable to large-scale poor
relief; there was much uncertainty among the potential emigrants of the
middle class, of the type who had embarked in such numbers and so
confidently for Australia in the earlier part of the 1820s. By 1829 even
the Edinburgh Courant was expressing doubts about emigration, and
reprinted statements from the London Globe on ‘the vice of the
present system of colonising... the facility with which large grants of
land are obtained, and the temptation which emigrants impregnated with the
notions of aristocratic importance attached to the possession of land in
old countries feel to obtain them’. By 1830 emigration had few
supporters.
Chalmers felt strongly that
‘emigration, absolutely and of itself; can do no permanent good’,
though he was prepared by 1831 to regard it as ‘worthy of all the
attention of government if regarded as subsidiary to other schemes’. It
is interesting to note that he even outlined a scheme by which the expense
would be ‘advanced by the Government on the security of land and repaid
after a period of years by the emigrants. . . or by the parishes’. This
was a suggestion that had been contained in the report of the Select
Committee on Emigration in 1826, but it had little chance of being
implemented in a country which had no poor law.
In the peak period of
Scottish emigration in the 1820s, the five years from 1820 to 1824, there
were over 360 applications. The total is not numerically impressive, but
it must be remembered that these were the substantial settlers who were
almost invariably accompanied by their families, and, very often, by
servants, agricultural labourers, and, occasionally, by craftsmen
employees as well. Allowing an average of five dependants and servants for
each applicant, the number of people affected was about 2,000.
In the following five-year
period, from 1825 to 1829 inclusive, the total number of Scottish
applicants was 160. The year 1825 saw a marked fall in the number to 32,
from 77 in 1824, and the fall continued until 1829 when only 10 persons
made application. The flourishing boom conditions, and the wave of
prosperity and business confidence in Scotland in 1825 and the early part
of 1826, may account for the drop in those years, and the reports of
depression in the colonies were certainly responsible for the continued
decline of the emigration, for the evidence of the Edinburgh newspapers
shows that the enthusiasm of 1822 had died out by 1828.
Estimating on the basis of
each applicant taking out five other persons, about 1,000 went out between
1825 and 1829, making the total for the ten years from 1820 to 1829
inclusive some 3,000 Scottish emigrants, and roughly 75 per cent. of these
went out in the peak period of 1820—4.
The figures indicate that
before 1821 the Scottish element in the Australian population, apart from
the official and military class, was numerically negligible, while by 1831
it was considerable, especially among the propertied class. Some of the
contemporary pressures on the Scottish upper and middle classes have
already been referred to in a general way. In ascertaining exactly which
sections of the Scottish population were induced to emigrate to Australia
in the 1820s, the correspondence of the applicants for the right to settle
in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land and for land grants there is
invaluable. From the series of Colonial Office letters, designated ‘Settlers’
and ‘Individuals’, it is possible to build up, in considerable detail,
a picture of this first important wave of emigration to a distant land
which had previously lacked appeal for the Scottish emigrant.
The Scottish settlers—background
and motivation
From the year 1814, when
the first applications began to reach the Colonial Office from Scotland in
what may be described as a ‘trickle’, until 1832, three types of
applicants predominated— farmers or landholders, merchants or
manufacturers, and military or naval officers, retired, ‘reduced’, or
on half pay.
Agricultural improvement
was well under way in most parts of the country by 1810. In the Lowlands
it took the form of ‘high’ or capitalist farming, on larger holdings,
and in the Highland areas it was marked by the introduction of sheep and
the replacement of the old crofting system in which tacksmen had been the
intermediaries between the landowners and the small crofters. This process
had begun as early as 1810 in the southernmost part of the west Highlands,
in Knapdale, and in the 1820s and 1830s it spread north to Skye and
beyond. In the Lowlands farm rents were increasing, and owing to the
increased size of farms there were fewer available for rent. It was
natural that to young men, of the tenant-farmer class in particular,
Australia should seem attractive with its prospect of free land. By 1814,
according to Halévy, quoting the Corn Laws Report, farm rents in the more
fertile districts of Scotland were higher than those in the best districts
in England, and the Scottish tenant farmer’s profits were equal to about
half the rent, while in England a farmer’s profits tended to be about
equal to the whole rent. A proportion of the soldiers who were being
discharged or ‘reduced’ after the wars were also looking for farms,
and, like so many farmers’ sons, looking in vain.
Among the Colonial Office
applications there are numerous illustrations of the problems facing
Highland tacksmen who were being displaced, Lowland tenant farmers who
were experiencing losses through the fall in prices, and owner-farmers who
lacked the means to improve their land or had overextended their
borrowings to do so. The son of Alexander McDonald, tacksman of Vallay, in
North Uist, stated in his petition in 1820 that ‘the termination of a
beneficial lease held by your petitioner’s father and his ancestors for
many generations compels him to remove’. Donald Campbell, another
tacksman, of Craig, by Dalmally in Argyll, applied in 1823 ‘in view of
the high rents and the low price of cattle in this country’. In the
Lowlands in the same year Joseph Butler, who owned a farm which he had
improved from a peat-moss, admitted that he had been compelled to sell it
to pay off his borrowings for improvements.
The petitions and
applications of Scottish farmers show that they were almost without
exception possessed of sufficient means to qualify under the ‘conditions’
required for official approval for their plans. Richard Downward, applying
in January 1819, had a capital of £2,000, and this was not unusual. Most
of the Highland tacksmen who applied were persons of considerable wealth,
judged by the standards of the time, though their capital was often
supplemented by their salaries, half pay, or savings as military officers
or officers of the East India Company. Donald Campbell of Glenstockadale
in Appin, who applied in August 1820, was a half-pay lieutenant and had
£3,000. Campbell had apparently been engaged in agriculture on the lands
he held on ‘tack’ or lease for some time, for he stated that he had a
good working knowledge of farming in all its branches.
There were few among the
Highland tacksmen, or half-pay officers who had taken up agriculture, to
admit that they were in difficult straits. Examples were Mungo Renton of
Inverness, a former captain of the Lochaber Fencibles who admitted in 1820
that he could not support his large family, and a tacksman, Donald
McDonald of Balure, Appin, a half-pay lieutenant, who complained that he
was unable to support his family ‘in a manner befitting his rank’.
More typical were those with pretensions to capital and plans to take out
small retinues of servants, like Alexander McNab of Degnish, near Oban,
with his claim to have between one and two thousand pounds available in
cash; and even young Donald McLeod of Talisker, a half-pay lieutenant,
while pleading ‘distressed circumstances’, stated that he could take
out several Highlanders, probably retainers who served his family.
The Highland element among
the Scottish settlers varied considerably in number from year to year,
unlike such groups as the Lothian and Fife farmers and the Edinburgh and
Leith merchants, who figured prominently and consistently. In the first
three years of the emigration surge, from 1820 to 1822, about a dozen
applications came in each year from Highland landowners, tacksmen, and
half-pay officers, the number then decreasing to four in 1823, and
recovering to ten in 1824, owing to applications by a group of seven
people in the district of Lochalsh. The fact that most of the Highland
applicants were comparatively well-to-do has already been referred to, yet
many doubtless suffered from the depression that was spreading over the
Highlands, although their reasons for emigrating were often given as the
lack of military employment and the falling in of tacksmen’s leases.
The decline of the
kelp-burning industry in the 1820s was removing a source of rents and
income, for it affected many of the small crofters in the western
Highlands and the islands, on whom the tacksmen depended for labour and
rents in money and kind. This was not the only failure. In 1800 the
British Society for Extending the Fisheries had established settlements at
three places in the west Highlands, but by 1820 the villages had grown
only very slightly. As early as 1805 David Macpherson wrote, ‘There
is reason to apprehend that the fisheries, restricted as they are, can
never afford any very flattering prospects to the people’, and the next
twenty-five years confirmed his fears. In 1822 H. Bains, a half-pay army
lieutenant, applying for a grant in Van Diemen’s Land, could write: ‘This
is the only thing I can think of, having already tried some speculations
in Fisheries in the north of Scotland, which unfortunately. . . has now
become a losing concern owing to the fisheries being overdone.’
The depopulation of the
area, from Sutherland in the north with its clearances and evictions to
Perthshire and the Lennox in the south, was well under way. The pattern of
applications in the 1820s from within the Highland area is surprisingly
even, with the exception of the small concentrations in Appin in 1820 and
in Lochalsh in 1824. Otherwise the Highland applicants were scattered
evenly throughout what were then the most populous districts of the area—northern
Argyll, Mull, Skye, and the Great Glen, with a few in the inner glens of
Perthshire and Inverness-shire. This evenness is symptomatic of the
general decline that was taking place all over the Highlands in the
traditional basic industry of cattle-grazing.
The Highland element was
prominent in the very earliest stage of the emigration, and this was
probably due to Governor Macquarie’s great range of acquaintance and
kinship among the tacksmen and gentry of the Western Isles. Young
Alexander McDonald, son of Major Alexander McDonald, tacksman, of Vallay
in North Uist, stated in his application for a grant in 1820 that he was
‘known to His Excellency, Governor McQuarie, and prefers going to New
South Wales to any other colony’. Of the fifty-seven Scots passengers
who sailed from Leith in the Shelton
in June of that year, thirty-six
were Highlanders (including eighteen children), all members of the family
or household, or in the service, of Major Donald McLeod of Talisker.
McLeod’s application had been backed by a letter to Bathurst from his
father-in-law, Alexander Maclean of Coil, a distant relation of Lachlan
Macquarie.
In 1827—30 there
were only two Highland applicants, and the fact that the distress in the
Lowlands at this time was matched by utter destitution in many Highland
areas may have been responsible. The great mass exodus, of both crofters
and the tacksmen, to Canada was resumed at this time, and one of the two
applicants for an Australian grant, Simon Fraser, a half-pay army
lieutenant, wrote from the island of Mull: ‘If His Majesty was aware of
the great distress among the lower tenantry in this country I am convinced
he would wish to relieve them. . . . He should send a corp [sic] of
Highlanders to that country’ (i.e. Australia).
Between 1815 and 1830 there
were fifty-nine applications from the Highlands, fifty of them before
1825. Since most of these settlers took out servants, shepherds, and other
workers from their home districts, this was an important element in the
Scottish emigration. Unfortunately, as with the craftsmen and artisans of
the Lowlands, the Highland ‘retinues’ sailed in the steerage, and it
is impossible to estimate the size of this largely Gaelic-speaking influx
into Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales in the 1820s.
The Highland Society,
formed in 1800 by Highland landowners with the discouragement of
emigration as one of its aims, was still in existence in the 1820s, but
its views had altered. Sheep-farming now offered attractions, and the
clearing off of tenantry was accepted by many landlords as necessary and
desirable. The cheapest way of removing the crofters was by encouraging
them with free transport to Canada, and the number of lesser Highland folk
who went out to Australia in the 1820s was insignificant compared with the
efflux to North America.
The Highlanders brought to
New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land considerable experience of the
sheep-farming which, since about 1800, had been becoming an increasingly
important feature of the Highland economy. In 1817 the woollen
manufacturers of Aberdeen and Yorkshire sponsored the Inverness Wool Fair,
which was to be an annual event. Many of the Highland half-pay officers
and agriculturists who applied to the Colonial Office between 1815 and
1830 claimed to have experience of sheep-farming, and though the number of
shepherds they took out with them is difficult to estimate because of the
dearth of reliable information about steerage passengers, shepherds and
their families probably made up a considerable proportion of the emigrants
from Scotland who went out in the employ of their wealthier fellow
countrymen.
The emigration of Lowland
farmers also reflects conditions in that area. Margaret Kiddie, describing
the social origins of the settlers in Australia before 1840, has
overstressed the importance of the tenant-farming element, the ‘poor
farmers’ sons’, among the Scots settlers prior to 1832. Her statement
that ‘Although less markedly than amongst the Scots, farmers seem also
predominant among the English emigrants’ is scarcely borne out by the
evidence of the Colonial Office records of applications, but her further
observation that ‘A few members of the gentry can be identified. They
were not Scots’ is disproved by the records, for the landed gentry, both
Highland and Lowland, figured to a very marked degree among the Scottish
applicants in the 1820s, and a good proportion of applicants of this
category did, in fact, proceed to the colonies.
Apart from military men of
old landed families who became settlers while in the colonies, like
Colonel George Molle and Colonel William Stewart, Lieutenant-Governor of
New South Wales under Governor Darling, there were numerous examples among
the free settlers from Scotland who went out from 1820 onwards. These
included George Ranken, a scion of the ancient house of the Rankens of
Whitehill in Ayrshire, who applied in March 1821 with the recommendation
of Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, intending to take with him his own
ploughman, shepherd, servant-maid, and livestock. The following also
applied in 1821: Roderick Forbes, son of Major Donald Forbes of Milness,
described by the three ministers of the Tongue district as ‘a descendant
of respectable and honourable ancestors’, and by John Dunlop of
Balnakeel, writing on his behalf, as ‘one whose family has very long
held a respectable place amongst the gentry of Sutherland and are
connected with the families of Reay and Bighouse’; Colin Urquhart of
Rosskeen, in Ross-shire, described in a testimonial as ‘a descendant of
the ancient family of Urquhart of Cromarty’; Donald Mackay, brother of
Lord Reay, and commissioner for that nobleman’s Sutherland estates; Hugh
McIntosh, of an influential Inverness family, with a capital of more than
£5,000 and a half-share in the ship Hope, with six years of a
general’s command in Persia behind him, intending to take out his fine
merino sheep and Yorkshire cattle and a selection of French vines; Allan
McKinnon of Struan, in Skye, less wealthy, but well connected to the
families of McLeod of McLeod and McLean of Coil; Alexander McDonald of
Vallay, with his estimated capital of £2,000, and Archibald Macleod of
Sky; with his capital of £3,000, and his intention to take out six
servants. Hugh Murray, who applied in the same year and went out with his
family and six other Scottish families, as well as artisans, ploughmen,
and shepherds in their employ, had chartered the brig Urania for
the voyage and was obviously a man of substance.
In 1822 there were more
applications from the gentry. David Brodie of Caithness had disposed of
his estate and intended to take out over £3,000. There were also:
Alexander Ferguson of Baledmund, Perthshire; Francis Irvine, son of the
influential Aberdeenshire laird, Irvine of Drum, with his capital of
£8,000 and his request (granted) for an unusually large grant of 2,000
acres; Alexander MacKenzie, kinsman of Alexander MacKenzie, an influential
Member of Parliament, with a capital estimated at £3,000; Alexander
Macrae of Glenshiel, descendant of a long line of influential tacksmen.
Among the Lowland applicants in that year was William Little of Cressfield,
near Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, who stated that his capital amounted
to between £7,600 and £8,000.’ The same amount of capital had been
declared in 1820 by John Campbell, ‘for the last twenty-three years a
practical farmer and grazier in the counties of Perth, Argyll and
Inverness, and a magistrate in all three counties... a Deputy Lieutenant
in Inverness and a Freeholder in Perth’. This applicant, who had managed
some of the largest landed estates in Scotland, intended to take out with
him, in addition to his eight sons and five daughters, no fewer than
fifteen men and five women servants, including shepherds, ploughmen,
gardeners, smiths, cabinet makers, and other tradesmen.
Even after the flow of
emigration from Scotland to Australia slackened in 1825, there were
several applications from landed proprietors. In 1831 George Mercer of
Rosslyn, near Edinburgh, outlined his plans for ‘forming an
establishment for some of the younger members of my family in Van Diemen’s
Land’, and made detailed inquiries about fishing rights in the rivers
passing through granted lands, which showed he envisaged a system of
landlordship in the colony that would be very similar to that existing in
the Scottish Lowlands. Applicants from among the old landed gentry in this
period included James Hay of Belton, a member of one of the oldest
families in East Lothian and a retired naval captain. Like others of his
class, though more particularly among the English applicants, Hay intended
to send out a young farmer from his own district to take possession of the
grant and work it. Another member of the same family, Peter Hay of
Melrose, who had apparently accumulated considerable wealth in the Indian
service, had applied in 1825 for a grant of 6,000 acres, and from the same
locality two younger sons of the family of Campbell of Treeshanks made
application in that year. Their capital amounted to £2,000.
Throughout the 1820s it is
the rank, the standing, and the wealth of the Scottish agriculturist
settlers that is impressive. In the following decade (perhaps as early as
1829, when Scotland saw its first marked efflux of poorer settlers) there
were ‘poor farmers’ sons among the Scottish emigrants, but it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that this class of Scot only made his
appearance on the colonial scene in strength in the 1830s.
Of the twenty-one
applicants in 1821 who may be described as agriculturists in Scotland at
the time of their applications, one was a considerable landowner, two were
the sons of landowners, three were farmers with considerable capital,
three were Highland tacksmen of means, one was a nobleman and factor, or
‘Commissioner’, for his brother’s estates, one was a farmer’s son
whose means were unspecified, two were ‘farm managers’, and another
commanded sufficient means to take out a farm servant and a capital of
£650. Four others, the Taylors, were a farming family, a father and his
sons, who had difficulty in finding rentable farms, but they possessed at
least enough capital to qualify them all for land grants. On the whole,
the impression given by the applications is that few poor farmers, and
fewer poor farmers’ sons, considered the serious step of going out to
settle in Australia in the 1820s. The property qualification alone would
have barred such applicants, and their only means of going out would have
been in the service of the men with some capital. A few did go out in this
capacity, and soon attained their independence— William Brown of
Haddington, about to go out to Van Diemen’s Land as a ‘land-steward’,
who wrote asking about the possibility of a land grant in two or three
years’ time, was an example, but it is an exaggeration to state that ‘amongst
the Scots, men of substantial capital were fewer than farmers’ sons who
set off armed only with "a light purse" and "brave
heart" ‘.
Among the Scots settlers,
particularly those who had been engaged in agriculture as tacksmen,
landowners, or tenant farmers in their own country, men of substance
predominated—men with capital and livestock to take out with them, and
sometimes with capitals that were considerable judged by the standards of
the time. It was not so much personal ruination and the general depression
in farming that made so many turn to Australia, but the changes in the
structure of Scottish agriculture—the decline of the tacksman system in
the Highlands and the higher rents and growing scarcity of rentable farms
in the Lowlands.
Evidence of this is found
in the inquiry cited below made in November 1823, on behalf of between
twenty and thirty Dumfriesshire farmers whose leases were due to expire,
and in other applications and inquiries of the early 1820s. The
Dumfriesshire group were apparently fairly prosperous, for they planned to
take out mechanics, clergymen, and schoolmasters. The difficulty of
finding farms for their Sons made some farmers send them out to the
colonies, and occasionally, as in the case of the Taylors in Fife
mentioned above, the father was also prepared to emigrate. In 1822, to
give another example of this, Hugh Robertson, a prosperous land steward
resident in Dunbar, in the most advanced and ‘improved’ district in
the country, stressed in his application that he had five sons under
twenty years of age, as well as the sizeable capital of £1,200. In the
same year John Sindair of Taynuilt in Argyil applied for grants for his
two younger brothers, both experienced in agriculture. The brothers had
‘been possessed of an extensive grazing and arable farm in this county
for some years, but in consequence of the great fall in the value of farm
produce they find they cannot continue’, but there was none among the
twenty-three Scottish farming applicants in that year who described
themselves, as the English applicant Thomas Godwin did in 1821, as ‘ruined
farmer’, and the Sinclairs’ complaint is one of the few references in
the applications to the depressed state of agriculture. References to
leases expiring and to the difficulty of finding rentable farms in the
applications of Lowland farmers and Highland tacksmen of substance and
their sons are much more numerous. They all indicate that the changes in
agricultural methods and organization, in both Lowlands and Highlands,
rather than the current fall in agricultural prices, were the motivating
factors for this group of emigrants.
The two Scots settlers
recorded in the Colonial Office records as having purchased their own
vessels in order to proceed to Australia in 1823 were both farmers—Robert
Ralston of Wigtownshire and David Brodie of Hopeville in Caithness. Brodie’s
brig was valued at £4,000, and he and Ralston took out farm servants,
stock, implements, and supplies. Obviously these were men of considerable
wealth, and though the general run of Lowland farmers who emigrated did
not command such means as Ralston or Brodie, their stated capitals were
still impressive, and often exceeded by far the requisite sum. William
Lang of Largs, a ‘feuar’ engaged in agriculture in Ayrshire, took out
£1,500 in 1823.’ In the same year John Sutherland of Forres took out
£1,000, and Alexander Tulloch, a farmer of Forres, had between £2,000
and £3,000. Of the eight Lowland farmers who applied four had over £800
of capital, including the two referred to above, and the same prevalence
of wealthy or substantial men among the Scottish farmer applicants is
found throughout the early years of the emigration. In writing to Wilmot
Horton on Ralston’s behalf, William Maxwell, the Member of Parliament
for the shire of Wigtown, made a point of stressing that ‘Mr. Ralston is
not leaving through necessity, but thinking it a good speculation to
improve his condition’. The same remark could have been applied to a
good proportion of the Lowland farmers who settled in New South Wales and
Van Diemen’s Land.
Even among the farmers’
sons who went out, a good number had considerable wealth. While a few
doubtless went out in the service of wealthier settlers, many more made
application for land grants, probably with the financial backing of their
families, like young William Gray, son of Charles Gray of Carse, who was
described in the testimonial drawn up by local clergymen as ‘the
greatest landed proprietor in the parish of Rescobie’, and Thomas Brock,
a young man with farming experience, who had the backing of his uncle, Sir
William Fettes, the Edinburgh banker.
Many of the young men of
farming stock and with capital who applied in the 1820s had experience of
the ‘high farming’ that was being practised in the Lothians. George
Galbraith, son of a landed proprietor in Stirlingshire, had been farming
‘in that part of the country where the best system of husbandry prevails’,
and Walter Black, a farmer’s son from Banff in the north-east, made
particular mention of his ‘Lothians experience’. It was from this
progressive, aspiring element among the Scottish farming class that a
considerable number of the settlers came, rather than from the less
progressive farmers of the more backward districts.
Miss M. Harris has written:
‘In 1829, farmers with capital had
not yet joined the stream of migrants yearly leaving Britain’, a
statement that is not bone out by the Colonial Office applications from
Scotland in the 1820s. Yet some conclusions she reached regarding the
emigration to Western Australia apply very forcefully to the first wave of
Scottish emigration to Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales between
1820 and 1830. ‘Nothing was done’, states Miss Harris, ‘to encourage
persons prepared to pay their own passages to the Swan River in 1829.. .
men who, risking all they possessed to gain independence, might well have
made reliable workers and staunch settlers.’
There were undoubtedly
applications in the 1820s from distressed farmers who lacked the property
qualification to go out to Australia, and they would in many cases have
been a useful accession to the colonial population. In 1819 a vote of
£50,000 had been secured by the Colonial Office to assist emigrants going
to the Cape, and in 1815—16 Scottish settlers had been given free
passages to Upper Canada, land, and rations while clearing it. If such
inducements had been offered in Australia in the 1820s, the less
prosperous Scottish farming class might well have figured much more
prominently among the settlers, but the considerations of strategy and
policy that affected these assisted emigrations were not applicable to
Australia. The numerous petitions sent to the Committee of Enquiry into
Emigration in 1827 from agricultural districts in Scotland—there were no
fewer than eleven ‘group’ petitions in addition to petitions from
individuals—indicate that the urge to emigrate was strong in the later
1820s. Yet a surprisingly small part of the emigrant flow from Scotland
between 1826 and 1831 was directed towards Australia, and it was the
comparatively prosperous rather than the distressed among the Scottish
emigrant farmers who made it their destination.
The professions and
occupations of the applicants of 1820, and the references by merchants and
manufacturers to the state of their fortunes, give a sure indication of
the sudden worsening of economic conditions in the country in 1819 and the
early months of 1820. In the latter year, merchants actually outnumbered
farmers among the Scottish applicants, and no fewer than six of the
thirteen merchants were in business in Edinburgh and Leith. Only one was
in business in Glasgow, and another in Greenock, and the relatively
flourishing state of trade on that side of the country is indicated by the
fact that the Greenock applicant’s inability to carry on his business
was due to losses in Buenos Aires and Trinidad during the war rather than
to depressed local conditions.
Merchants figured almost as
prominently as the group of tacksmen, farmers, land-stewards, and
gentlemen of the landed class among the applicants, and their petitions
and letters provide proof of the widespread trade depression in Scotland
in the period 1815-22. In March 1826 the Glasgow Chronicle, reviewing
the period since 1817, stated that ‘the number of bankruptcies. . . in
proportion to the trade of the respective countries, have been much
greater in Scotland than in England’, and according to figures quoted,
the rate in Scotland in 1819—20 was proportionally almost twice as high
as that in England. The application of Thomas Callam, a Leith merchant, in
March 1820 explains why so many of the earliest settlers of means in the
first great wave of emigration to Australia that began in 1820 were
merchants of Edinburgh and Leith, and why the first commercial ventures in
Australia originated among them. Callam referred to ‘the long and
continued stagnation of trade of this port, without even a distant
prospect of its improving, which has induced many of those who were once
its respectable merchants to emigrate to the British colonies or to
foreign countries’. Here he was referring to the failure of Leith to
re-establish its traditional Baltic and German trade after the war, for
reasons that will be considered in the following chapter. What
differentiated Callam’s approach, made not only on his own behalf, but
for a group of merchants in Leith, from the general run of Scottish and
English applications was the Leith group’s stated intention of becoming
merchants in the colony. ‘Uncertain about their prospects of success in
agriculture’, since they lacked experience, they wished to follow their
accustomed occupation of trade, and asked if there were any prohibitions
on taking out certain classes of goods as stock with which to start up
their businesses.
...continue
to Part 2
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