Large Scale Emigration to Australia after 1832

‘Australian Emigration—Fort William’

After some months of expectation and anxiety, Dr. Boyter, the Government emigration agent for Australia, arrived at Fort William on x 8th current. The news of his arrival, like the fiery cross of old, soon spread through every glen of the district, and at an early hour on Monday, thousands of enterprising Gaels might be seen ranked around the Caledonian Hotel, anxious to quit the land of their forefathers and to go and possess the unbounded pastures of Australia. . . . While we regret that so many active men should feel it necessary to leave their own country, the Highlands will be considerably relieved of its over-plus population.

Inverness Courier, 30 May 1838

By 1832 Scotland had entered the most important phase of its Industrial Revolution, and the whole economy was changing rapidly as a result of the wholesale adoption by the iron-masters of the ‘hot-blast’ technique of smelting. Perfected by James B. Neilson in 1828, it was widely applied in the early 1830s, and the process gave the country a new and decisive advantage in the production of pig-iron. By 1835 there were twenty-nine blast furnaces in Scotland, and in 1839 the number had increased to fifty-four. This new iron and coal development overshadowed all other economic projects in Scotland, for, apart from the large share of the British home market secured by cheap Scottish iron, priced about ten shillings a ton below its rivals for nearly forty years, there were extensive foreign markets. By the late 1840s the United States alone was taking no less than 14 per cent. of the Scottish pig-iron output—over 60 per cent. of the total amount of the Scottish export of this commodity—and over nine tenths of the total British pig-iron export was from Scotland.

Cheap iron made rapid industrialization possible, and between 1832 and 1846 a network of railways was constructed, linking the main centres of population, and serving coal-mines and iron works and connecting them with the ports. Linen and cotton mills continued to thrive and increase in size and number as machinery and coal-fuel became cheaper and more readily available. The experimental stages of shipbuilding in iron were reached, and new industries like boiler-making grew up in the iron-producing districts.

In the fourteen years between 1832 and 1846 Scotland was swept by a surge of commercial and industrial activity that made the bold company promotions of 1822 and 1824—5, and the founding of new factories in the previous decade, seem comparatively insignificant. This ‘coal and iron’ phase of development came much later in Scotland than in England, but when it did come it was accompanied by improved techniques that caused it to burst with all the greater impact on the still largely agricultural society in which it was set. Every aspect of Scottish life, and every district, however remote, was affected by the coming of this ‘second stage of the Industrial Revolution’, and it was also to have important repercussions on the Scottish attitude to, and connexion with, Australia. It was in the 1830s, for instance, that leading iron-works like the Carron Company and the Shotts Iron Company were to expand their business with the Australian colonies, their exports of both pig-iron and manufactured goods. It was in the mid 1830s, too, that the large-scale import of Australian wool began, to supply the rapidly expanding woollen mills of the Border districts.

Of even greater importance for Australia than the expansion of mutual trade were the rapid accumulation of capital in the hands of Scottish investors—profits, for reinvestment, drawn from the new industries and from ‘improved’ agriculture—and the movement of population within Scotland as a result of industrialization, agricultural improvements, Highland destitution, and the periodic slumps to which the new industrial economy was liable. The first of these features, the accumulation of capital and the propensity for overseas investment among Scottish ‘capitalists’, large and small, was to lead to the foundation of the second group of Scottish-based commercial ventures in Australia in Aberdeen in 1839—40. The effects of industrialization, destitution, and commercial depressions in promoting emigration to Australia were obvious from the early 1830s, and since, as in 1820-2, the commercial ventures tended to follow the line of an emigration flow, the motivation and quality of the Scottish emigration to Australia in this second phase must first be examined.

The most remarkable feature of the emigration was its widespread nature. No corner of Scotland was unaffected by it. In the 1820s, the south-east (Edinburgh, Leith, Fife, the Lothians, and the Borders) had supplied the bulk of the emigrants, who were chiefly drawn from the middle classes. In 1830s and 1840s the emigration was largely working-class in character, and was drawn from all over the country. Areas like the south-west (Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Wigtownshire, Renfrewshire), the north-east (Aberdeenshire, Kincardine, Banffshire, Moray, Nairn), the central and western Highlands (Inverness-shire, Ross, Sutherland, Perthshire, Argyll), and even Orkney and Shetland, which had all figured to only a slight extent in the emigration of 1815—33, were now well represented. The availability of free or assisted passages to Australia after 1832 was partly responsible, but the wholesale, widespread nature of the emigration can only be explained by the changes that were convulsing the country, breaking down the old pattern of town and rural life. This was a time when emigration generally, to North America as well as Australia, was increasing at a phenomenal rate.

The sheer growth of the population was a striking feature of the time. At no period, before or since, has the increase been more marked. In 1836 the population totalled 2,315,926. By 1847 it had grown to 3,718,316, a figure reached through large-scale Irish immigration as well as by natural increase. In the Highlands the increase was especially problematical, for the means of subsistence were actually decreasing, as a result of the ‘clearances’ of subsistence-farming crofts for sheep-runs, the decline of the kelp-burning industry, and the failure of the fisheries. After 1836, when economic conditions all over the country worsened, the Highlands were especially hard-hit, and it was partly due to this temporary economic set-back in the late 1830s and early 1840s that the flow of Scottish emigration to Australia from both the Highland and Lowland areas reached an unprecedented level.

In itself the depression would not have been sufficient to secure this result, which was realized only because the ‘Government’ and the later ‘Colonial’ bounty systems came into effect, for this was to be largely a working-class emigration, and the considerable proportion of the emigrants who came from the Highlands and islands included many who were near to complete destitution. While many influences and ideas led to the creation of the bounty systems, deriving their funds from the sale of Crown lands, it is interesting to note that in 1833 John Galt, the Scottish writer and colonizer, claimed to have proposed such a scheme in the 1820s as an alternative to Wilmot Horton’s scheme for the voluntary mortgage of their rates by parishes to raise funds for the purpose.

The British Government’s system for assisted female emigration to New South Wales was instituted in September 1831 by Lord Goderich, and was soon extended to mechanics. Between 1832 and 1836 sixteen entire shiploads of emigrants, most of them women, were dispatched from English and Irish ports, and in addition several hundreds of young women went out under the scheme in vessels other than those chartered by the London Emigration Committee. A few in this latter category sailed from Leith, but this early phase of the bounty emigration was not marked by any considerable efflux of assisted emigrants from Scotland. This was to come only in 1837, when the additional scheme devised in 1835 by the Government of New South Wales, to encourage the immigration of skilled agricultural workers as well as unmarried women and mechanics, came into operation. From 1837 this colonial bounty system was to supplement the reformed government system introduced in 1834 and operated by T. F. Eliot as Agent-General for Emigration.

Both assisted emigration and unassisted private emigration increased steadily from 1836 onwards, reaching a peak in 1839— 40, when Scotland as a whole, and the north-east in particular, experienced its second surge of enthusiasm for the Australian colonies as a field for emigration and investment. The increase in the rate of emigration was phenomenally swift, for in 1833 only 253 emigrants sailed for Australia from Scottish ports (as against 5,592 for the North American colonies, and 1,953 for the United States). It is interesting to note that in this year Scots comprised a fifth of the total British emigration to the Canadas and the Maritime Provinces—the traditional Scottish emigration field by this time. In the same year, they made up only between one-fifteenth and one-sixteenth of the total of British emigrants to Australia. This was the time, between 1832 and 1835, when John Broadfoot of Leith was slashing the rates of freight and passage money to Australia for the ships he handled, and sending off emigrant ships to Canada. By 1834 the number of persons leaving Scotland for Australia had fallen even lower, to 134 (as compared with 4,954 to the North American colonies, and 2,880 to the United States). In 1836 the numbers fell lower still. From all Scottish ports in that year, the total number of emigrants sailing for Australia was only 114.

The turning-point came in 1837, when 1,254 persons left Scottish ports for Australia, as against 2,391 for the American colonies, and 1,130 for the United States. Since these last figures show a decline of some 1,500 from the numbers leaving Scotland for North America in 1836, it seems safe to assume that the two bounty systems, in full operation by this time, were diverting at least a proportion of intending emigrants towards Australia, emigrants who would otherwise have swelled the exodus to Canada and the United States. The political disturbances in the Canadas, and the financial panic in the United States, were probably also responsible for this.

In 1838 the flow to Australia increased, and no fewer than nine ships with 2,161 government bounty emigrants cleared from Scottish ports. In addition, 1,054 ‘private’ bounty emigrants and unassisted emigrants took passage from Scotland, making a total of 3,215 for the year. In 1839, the total number embarking in Scotland was 2,238—a seventh of the total number embarking in Britain for all the Australian settlements, including Van Diemen’s Land, Port Philip, South Australia, and Western Australia. Until 1843, when bounty emigration was suspended owing to the economic crisis in the Australian colonies, the Scottish emigration continued on a considerable scale. In 1840 over 1,600 assisted emigrants went out, and in 1841, a record year, no fewer than 4,376 assisted emigrants sailed from Leith, Dundee, and Greenock and its outports. In that year began the massive influx of Irish bounty emigrants (13,704) that lowered the proportion of Scots among the emigrants. Between 1842 and 1847 there were only 907 assisted emigrants from Scotland to New South Wales, as against 4,197 English and 6,367 Irish. By 1846, partly as a result of the improvement in business conditions in Scotland and the fillip given to the economy by large-scale railway building, emigration to all ‘fields’ had slackened considerably, and only 3 emigrants to the Australian colonies are recorded for that year, as against 2,700 to the North American colonies, and 60 to the United States. In 1848 the Land Board reported that it had experienced great difficulty in selecting suitable emigrants for Australia in both England and Scotland because of the demand for labour for railway construction.

The beginning of bounty emigration through the
Scottish outports, 1832—1837

In the earlier part of the period, in the six years from 1832 to 1837 inclusive, Scots emigrants of all categories to Australia made up about a tenth of the British total (2,052 as against 20,664). The proportion of bounty emigrants among the Scots during this period is extremely difficult to assess, for while the Colonial Office records show that the government bounty system did not come fully into operation in Scotland on a large scale until 1837, involving the selection and dispatch of shiploads of people, some casual and small-scale bounty emigration was undoubtedly organized by shipowners and shipbrokers before that date. In February 1835 John Broadfoot, who obviously regarded himself as the doyen of the Scottish—Australian trade (‘for the last fifteen years particularly connected with the trade carried on between the Port of Leith and the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land’), petitioned Lord Aberdeen for restoration of the bounty to unmarried women proceeding direct from Scotland to the colonies, and stated that he had been ‘agent for several vessels employed in carrying out male and female emigrant settlers to these colonies from Leith—but more especially in the year 1832 and in the first three months of 1833 when the Government aid and bounty was extended to married mechanics accompanied by their wives and families and to respectable unmarried females’.

The bounty for the unmarried women had been withdrawn from persons sailing direct from Scotland early in 1834, according to Broadfoot, and restricted to those sailing from London and selected by the Emigration Committee there. Obviously Broadfoot had been acting as a bounty agent in 1832 and the first half of 1833, but no record survives of how many bounties he arranged. The London Emigration Committee was decidedly opposed to Broadfoot’s claims for a share in the Female Emigration Fund, and for extension of the new workers’ bounty system to Leith, but they were prepared by July 1835 to make some concessions. W. Mean, representing the Leith interests, described to Robert Hay at the Colonial Office his ‘long conversations’ with Marshall and Forster, the ruling members of the Committee, and the conclusions they had reached, that ‘our views will be allowed without the appointment of a committee at Leith’.

With the bounty system centralized in London and confined to that port, it was obvious to the Leith shipping interest that they would not secure what they considered their fair share of the bounty traffic, and when John Broadfoot took up the matter he brought out the point that the restriction was checking Scottish emigration. ‘So long as the Government bounty is restricted to the Port of London,’ he wrote, ‘very few Scotch females will venture so far from home to embark on so long a voyage amongst strangers, and, consequently, these colonies will continue to be deprived of their valuable services.’ Broadfoot wrote that he had received numerous applications from suitable women—’Scotch females. . . of unblemished moral character, experienced as dairy and household servants who would gladly avail themselves of the Government’s bounty to proceed there, could it be procured for them when embarking by a ship from the Port of Leith, when, in almost every case, they would be accompanied by relatives, friends or acquaintances’.

To the Scottish shipping interest, especially in the east coast ports, the bounty system certainly opened up pleasing prospects of employment for vessels, and, as James Ballingall of Kirkcaldy observed in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, ‘the mercantile community of this quarter are taking a deep interest in the subject’. Shipowners like James Thoms of Dundee were writing in to Robert Hay at the Colonial Office to ascertain the position regarding bounties, and attesting to the seaworthiness of the vessels which they intended to send out.

They included several shipping firms which had begun to participate in the Australian trade in the keenly competitive conditions of the late 1820s. Foremost among them were George Young and Co. and George Aitchison and Co., both of Leith. The firm of Buchanan and Davis also sent out ships from Leith, the three firms maintaining the primacy of the port in the Australian trade. A. Alexander and Co. of Grangemouth also used the port of Leith, as did William Henderson and Co., a Glasgow and Bo’ness concern. Glasgow and Greenock also participated, and the firms of Russell and Company, Campbell and Anderson, J. Carmichael and A. Balantine, and McAusland and Hamilton all sent out ships in the 1830s. By this time the Border woollen manufacturers required to import four-fifths of their wool, and most of this came from Australia, so that return freights no longer presented a problem.

The pressure of the shipping interest for extension of the bounty system to Leith and to Scotland generally was accompanied in 1835 by evidences of public interest from other east coast centres. From Aberdeen John Matheson, a bookseller and publisher who was establishing an ‘emigration information depot’, wrote to the Colonial Office asking for data concerning the Australian colonies for an Emigrant’s Guide he was preparing. From Invergordon, further north, A. Mackay, a ‘commercial agent’, wrote asking for information and circulars on emigration to Van Diemen’s Land for the large numbers of interested parties in his district. Influential men like Ludovick Stewart, a retired army field officer and a local magistrate in Banffshire, also wrote in 1835 urging the establishment of another emigration agency in the north, at Aberdeen or Cromarty.

In view of the tendency of the Emigration Commissioners to work through the London Emigration Committee and John Marshall’s London shipping clique in those years, and to restrict the activities of others by withdrawing the bounty privilege from outports, as stated by Broadfoot, it seems safe to assume that only a small proportion of the 2,052 persons who sailed from Scotland in the six years from 1832 to 1837 were bounty emigrants. Even a quarter of this number may be too high an estimate.

In his Sydney newspaper, the Colonist, in January and February 1835, John Dunmore Lang made a bitter attack on John Marshall and the London Emigration Committee, charging them with scouring the streets of London so as to fill their vessels, and implying that Scottish emigration was not being encouraged as it should. This provoked an angry response from Marshall in the form of a pamphlet, stating that ‘a greater proportionate disposition to emigrate does not exist in Scotland than in other parts of the United Kingdom’, and denying that the provision of vessels sailing direct from Scottish ports would encourage bounty emigration from that country.’ Marshall pointed out that the Committee had recently advertised a ship to sail from either Leith or the Clyde, provided that sufficient emigrants came forward, and that the response was so poor that the scheme was abandoned. Lang’s ‘assertions as to Scotland furnishing emigrants at all proportionate to the demand for labour in Australia, or in greater relative numbers than any other parts of the empire, or that equal facilities are not afforded to those who wish to go out from thence’ were sharply denied. In this controversy it appears that Lang, typically, overstated the case for direct sailings from Scotland, and went too far in his personal attack on Marshall. Yet Broadfoot’s petition shows that the grievance about direct sailings was a real one, and the statements in Marshall’s Refutation should probably be treated with as much reserve as Lang’s fulminations against Marshall and his exaggeration of the willingness of Scots working-class people to go out to Australia.

Broadfoot’s representation to the Colonial Office for the renewal of female bounty emigration at Leith was not, apparently, successful, for on 30 June 1835 a Colonial Office return from Leith for the quarter ending on that date stated that the Perthshire, Broadfoot’s ship, had sailed for Van Diemen’s Land, and that nineteen women had been sent on from Leith to London to join the Canton for Sydney. Similarly, in September 1835 twenty-seven women were ‘forwarded’ to London to join the Boadicea for Hobart. Yet some slight measure of extension was won at this time, for in July the Charles Kerr had sailed from Leith to Van Diemen’s Land with fifteen women bounty emigrants.

Until the beginning of large-scale bounty emigration to Australia in 1837, Leith remained the chief Scottish port of embarkation. In 1833, 213 persons sailed from Leith and 40 from Greenock. There were no Australian emigrant sailings from the other Scottish ports, from which the flow to North America went on steadily (5,592 in that year from all Scottish ports). In 1834 the number embarking at Leith was 109, with 13 from Greenock and 12 from Port Glasgow, and in 1836 78 emigrants took ship there, as against 24 from Greenock and 12 from Dundee. These were the lowest annual figures for the decade of the 1830s.

The bounty emigration from Scotland, 1837—1842

Between 1837 and 1846 assisted emigrants, largely working-class people, greatly outnumbered the unassisted emigrants. The Scottish emigration for the ten years numbered about 12,000 persons, of whom about 10,000 were brought out under either the government or colonial bounty systems, so that the proportion of Scots among the incomers rose to about a sixth, as against a tenth in the six years before 1838. For the first time, there was a considerable influx of working-class Scots.

In September 1832 T. F. Eliot, who had been secretary to the Emigration Commissioners during their tenure of office in 1831—2, was appointed to the Colonial Office to promote and extend bounty emigration. Eliot set about bringing Scotland fully within the bounty scheme by establishing agencies there, at Leith and Greenock. Yet until 1837, when Eliot was appointed Agent-General for Emigration, the Emigration Committee, as noted above, was dominated by London shipowners and shipbrokers, who were able to use the bounty system for their own benefit, and they obstructed the extension of large-scale emigration arrangements to the Scottish ports. On Eliot’s appointment as Agent-General the London Committee was wound up, and only then did large-scale operations commence in Scotland.

By this time the need for such operations in Scotland had become acute, and the political changes of 1832 had ensured that no such vested interest as that of John Marshall and his associates could for long monopolize a public fund. When John Broadfoot penned his petition of February 1835 for the extension of bounty privileges to the port of Leith, he had the support of the government emigration agent appointed thereby Eliot in 1834, Lieutenant James R. Forrest, who had agreed that the vessel Broadfoot proposed to send out with women emigrants should be ‘fitted up and provisioned under his superintendence’. At Leith Forrest played an important part in organizing the emigration service that Eliot created between 1834 and 1837, for until July 1834 Scots wishing to avail themselves of the bounty had usually to proceed to London, like the six women who sailed with bounty passages from Gravesend in the Strathfieldtaye in May 1834, with over 200 other women, English and Irish.

It was in April 1834 that Eliot had first appointed two government emigration agents in Scotland, at the two ports from which emigrants principally sailed. Samuel H. Hemmans was posted at Greenock, and James Forrest at Leith. Both were lieutenants in the Royal Navy, with considerable dockyard experience, since one of their principal duties was to survey vessels and certify them as suitable for carrying emigrants. In February 1836 the service in Scotland was strengthened by the appointment (by Governor Sir Richard Bourke of New South Wales) of the able and indefatigable naval surgeon Dr. Boyter as ‘Colonial Emigration Agent’ in Scotland, to operate a new, colonial, bounty scheme, approved by the authorities in New South Wales in October 1835. By June 1837 these three capable men had worked out a useful division of labour. Eliot’s agents saw to the chartering, surveying, and provisioning of the ships and helped with the embarkation of the emigrants, while Boyter concerned himself with their selection, travelling thousands of miles over the length and breadth of the country, and penetrating into districts where travelling conditions were primitive.

Borer showed remarkable enthusiasm and energy in his performance of these duties, and the success of the large-scale Scottish bounty emigration of 1837-4 owed much to his keenness. In March 1838 Eliot wrote to James Stephen at the Colonial Office concerning Borer’s work: ‘He is charged with almost the whole detail of the emigration from Scotland. He has to visit the candidates in their several districts, to suggest the apportionment of the vessels among the different parts of the country that may require them, to superintend the embarkation of each party, and see that there is no apparent defect in the ship or her supplies.

It was Boyter who planned the ambitious programme of 1838-9 - the selection of the ports, located so as to serve the districts concerned, and the allocation of ships to districts. He also set the objectives to be aimed at in his selections—’shepherds, farm labourers, country mechanics, cartwrights etc. from Glenmoriston, Glengarry, Dingwall and the districts of Glenurquhart, the towns of Fort George, Campbelltown and Inverness’. Obviously, within two years of his appointment, he had acquired a considerable knowledge of the Highlands and their people. Because of his special appointment with a ‘roving commission’ by the colonial authorities, and through his tireless activity and travelling, there was no need for Eliot to establish British Government agencies in the northern ports of Dundee, Aberdeen, or Inverness.

In 1837 the bounty system began to operate effectively in Scotland, and there was a dramatic increase in the number of emigrants leaving for Australia. When the system became fully operative in Scotland, in 1837, Leith, with 97 embarking, was overshadowed by Greenock with 830 and Dundee with 327. This was caused by the dispatch of shiploads of bounty emigrants from the latter ports, and the same trend continued throughout the peak years of the bounty emigration, from 1838 to 1841.

Despite these figures, swollen by the sailings of bounty emigrant ships from Greenock and Dundee, the evidence of the shipping lists suggests that for intending settlers paying their own passages Leith remained the chief port of embarkation, just as it remained the principal trading port for the Australian colonies.’ It was to lieutenant Forrest at Leith that ‘numerous enquiries’ came in 1834 regarding land grants to officers and the prospects of settlers in the new colony of South Australia.2

It was fortunate that improved facilities for the selection of emigrants were available by 1837, for Highland destitution created a strong urge to emigrate. By this year, too, the Colonial Office had decided to extend the benefit of bounty to agricultural labourers and married couples, and the new policy fitted in well with the desire to emigrate from the Highlands and from certain Lowland areas where little interest had been shown before in emigration to Australia.

John Dunmore Lang was subsequently to claim that it was through his ‘intervention’ while in Britain in the winter of 1836—7 that the London deputation of the Highland relief committees had successfully put forward the idea of directing a large-scale Highland emigration to Australia to Glenelg, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. It is probable that here again, as with the Stirling Castle experiment of 1832, Lang’s energy and determination helped to secure the Highland emigration on the scale on which it was carried on in 1837-9. He certainly took direct action as well, for he chartered the barque Portland in Greenock and returned to the colony with 310 emigrants, a mixture of Highlanders and Lowland craftsmen and skilled agricultural workers. The information he gave to the London deputation about conditions in the colony and about the availability of funds for emigration no doubt prepared it for the interviews with Glenelg, for the deputation had originally contemplated Canada as the destination for the destitute Highlanders, and there is no reason to doubt Lang’s claim that he diverted their attention to Australia instead. Yet with Eliot's appointment as Agent-General, with greatly increased powers and with the problem of Highland destitution becoming more acute, direct emigration from Scotland to Australia on a large scale would probably have eventuated in any case, without Lang’s intervention. Eliot’s policy was to conduct emigration ‘without discrimination against any part of the kingdom’, and, where bounty emigration to Australia was concerned, to provide government ships in proportion to population.

Lang was not the only colonist to urge that Scottish immigrants should be encouraged. James Macarthur, one of the most prominent and influential men in New South Wales, regarded the Scots detachment among the first bounty emigrants to be selected in 1837 as a valuable accession to the colony, and commended their ‘religious disposition, good sense and orderly habits’. Macarthur held that too many Irish labourers were being sent out to Australia, and that Scottish Highlanders would be more likely to ‘furnish the description of families most urgently required in New South Wales’.

In March 1837 the first ship sailed with a full complement of emigrants from Scotland under the government-organized bounty system, as distinct from the shipping out of bounty emigrants by private individuals under licence. This was the John Barry, which sailed from Dundee with 323 emigrants selected by Dr. Boyter, mostly from the Lowlands, and including in their number many craftsmen, especially masons and joiners, and several engineers, farmers, and shepherds. In the next three years twenty shiploads were to be dispatched from Scotland under this system, with more than 5,000 emigrants. The strong Highland element in this emigration is indicated by the fact that, of the twenty vessels, twelve sailed from ports in the Highlands and five more from Greenock on the Clyde—a convenient port of embarkation for people from the Highlands.

It can be assumed that the bulk of the passengers in the ships from the Highlands were crofters, with a few shepherds and very few craftsmen among them. Some were elderly people who were allowed ‘ship-room’ on payment of their passages by their friends or their landlords. In the absence of detailed lists, with ages and occupations, it is difficult to assess the exact composition of the Highland element. Fortunately, one detailed list does exist in the Port Phillip Immigration Registers for a vessel which sailed from Greenock, and this, if typical, does give an impression of the system, in that farm labourers, craftsmen, and women domestic servants made up the main categories. The total of ninety-four was made up as follows:

types of emigrants who went out under the government system. The ship was the David Clarke, which left Greenock in June 1839 with 125 people from the Highland counties of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness, and 94 from the Lowlands. The Highland contingent included 50 children, 16 married women, 10 shepherds, 4 ‘farmers’ (possibly crofters), 11 farm labourers (probably some of them had been crofters), 17 craftsmen, who mainly came from the Highland ‘fringe’ area of Perthshire, with its country towns, a ‘farm overseer’ from Argyll, and a ploughman. The Lowlanders in this shipload were probably typical of those sent out under the government system, in that farm labourers, craftsmen, and women domestic servants made up the main categories. The total of ninety-four was made up as follows:-

17 maidservants, 22 married women, 13 farm labourers, 19 children, 4 dairymaids, 2 storekeepers, 1 carpenter, 3 menservants, 2 blacksmiths, 2 tailors, 1 joiner, 2 needlewomen, 2 shepherds, 1 farm overseers and 3 cartwrights.

The David Clarke list is, in fact, very similar to the lists of many of the vessels sent out by private operators under the colonial system in the next few years. There are the same features marking the Scottish emigration under both systems—the presence of a considerable Highland element, of a large number of shepherds and craftsmen and artisans.

In 1838 no fewer than nine vessels sailed, eight of them from Greenock or from far northern ports, with a total of 2,461 emigrants in government ships, making this the peak year of assisted emigration from Scotland. Eliot, in his Agent-General’s report of April 1838, envisaged the dispatch of twelve government ships from Britain in 1839—four from each of the three kingdoms—but five ships were, in fact, obtained for Scotland, and that year saw the departure of 1,178 assisted emigrants in government ships.

In 1840 the system of government ships was abolished, together with the British Government system of bounty emigration (as opposed to the colonial bounty system). Eliot’s office as Agent-General for Emigration was also abolished, and its functions transferred to the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, but the flow from Scotland continued under the new system, by which the selection of the emigrants was made by private operators.

By 1840-1 an increasing number of Scottish shipowners and merchants were availing themselves of the licences to bring in bounty emigrants granted by the Governments of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. By 31 December 1841 no fewer than 71,315 bounty ‘permissions’ were outstanding for New South Wales, and the government emigration agents were simply supervising the bounty operations of shipowners, shipbrokers and merchants, both British and colonial. These private bounty emigration operations will be considered later, but the problems arising from the predominantly Highland character of the ‘official’ bounty emigration organized by Eliot and Boyter first deserve to be examined in some detail for the light they throw on the nature of this, by far the largest Scottish influx into Australia up to this time, and on the attitudes of the emigrants, of their landlords, and of other sections of their countrymen to Australia.

From 1835 the problems of destitution and over-population in the western Highlands and islands were becoming increasingly acute. The general depression of 1836—8 throughout Scotland aggravated the situation, and the outbreak of disturbances in Canada dimmed, for many Highlanders, the prospect of settlement in their traditional emigration field. By 1837 much of the redundant crofting population had become so impoverished that, for them, even the comparatively cheap passages to North America were out of reach. In May 1837 Dr. Robert Graham, Professor of Botany in the University of Glasgow and an early expert on public health and social problems, sent a report to the Honourable Fox Maule, the active and progressive Member of Parliament for Aberdeen, on the ‘unexampled destitution’ in the western Highlands—’worse than any ever known there before’. Graham cited the reasons for this state of affairs—the poor potato crops since 1835, the reductions in the army, which had closed the door to employment for many, the primitive subsistence nature of the crofting system, and the failure of the fisheries. The only solution, he declared, was large-scale emigration, involving the removal of a great number of the people, of all ages. The newly formed Highland relief committees in Glasgow and Edinburgh were strong in support of Graham’s ‘large-scale emigration’ proposal, and here, it seemed to Eliot and to Boyter, was an opportunity for them to be of some service to both Britain and the Australian colonies.

By 1837 poverty and destitution seemed to be breaking down the traditional aversion of the Highlanders towards Australia. Roderick Millar, surgeon at Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, wrote to Sir John Hill in Edinburgh in June 1837 reporting that he had been ‘a good deal among the peasantry enquiring of their inclination to emigrate to New South Wales... . I found among them a good deal of timidity about going to Australia, but, on the other hand, a great desire to emigrate to America.' Still, he reported, no fewer than three or four hundred had said they were willing to go out to Australia. This prompted Eliot and Boyter to push on with the selection of emigrants and the arranging of the first vessels to sail from the Hebrides in July and August 1837.

It was in the question of selection that they were to come into conflict with important Scottish interests, for George Grey, at the Colonial Office, had asked Boyter in April 1837 to co-operate with the Edinburgh and Glasgow relief committees in selecting and sending out emigrants, and had suggested that mechanics and skilled agriculturists be selected. The suggestion showed a lack of knowledge of Highland conditions, for craftsmen of any kind were few in the Highlands, and agriculture was primitive. Grey was probably intent on doing his best to meet the needs of the colony for workers of this description, and Boyter and Eliot, while unable to follow his suggestion very closely, were determined to ensure that the emigrants were at least able-bodied, and not likely to be a burden on the colony.

Here the Agent-General and the ‘Agent for Emigration to New South Wales in Scotland’ came into conflict with the relief committees, which included many influential Scots. The committees objected to the cream of the Highland population being shipped abroad, leaving only poverty-stricken, aged, and destitute people in the area. James Stephen apparently asked Eliot for a report on the subject of an ‘extensive’ (i.e. non-selective) emigration, for as early as July 1837, before the first ship had sailed from the Hebrides, Eliot wrote to him ‘on the suggestion that recourse be had to an extensive emigration’. Eliot agreed that ‘to make a deep impression on the case, where seventy thousand people are destitute. . . not only the active and the enterprising, but the weak, the aged and the sickly, must accompany the general emigration’, but he held that the bulk of such an emigration must be to North America.

In April 1837 Boyter had been given special authority by the Colonial Office to select emigrants from the Highlands, and his lists for the two ships that sailed in July and August were regarded by the destitution committees as too selective. The committees believed that Boyter had been more or less given carte blanche to send out persons of all ages and states of health (though Grey had obviously envisaged the dispatch of only those emigrants who would be useful to the colony). In the view of the Committees, Boyter’s selection policy was discouraging emigration to Australia, and against the Inverness Courier’s account of the enthusiastic reception given to Boyter and to the idea of emigration (at the head of this chapter) must be set the statements of John Bowie of the Edinburgh Relief Committee, who had been in the Highlands in the autumn of 1837 to promote emigration to Australia. In November, he wrote to Glenelg: ‘I found not only great ignorance with respect to the colony, but also prejudices of the worst description. . . many who are willing to go to Australia cannot comply with the regulations because they are too old, or wish to take aged relatives.’

In May 1838 the Edinburgh Destitution Committee passed resolutions criticizing Boyter’s selections, charging that many persons of good character in the Highlands had been disappointed in their hope of emigration, and going so far as to suggest that Boyter and the government agents at Leith and Greenock had held out false hopes of free passages to the people. Defending his service (and Boyter), Eliot pointed out to Stephen that the committee’s aim—a ‘wholesale emigration’ regardless of age and condition—was contrary to the whole object of the bounty scheme, which was to provide suitable settlers for the colony, and not relief measures for the whole Highland area. He also made the telling point that the desperate situation in the Highlands was being aggravated by the landlords themselves, who were associated with the relief committees, for they were destroying the houses of the people in order to clear away the crofting system. Another serious accusation brought against Eliot and Boyter by the relief committees was that they were denuding the Highlands of ‘the superior class of emigrants’—such as ‘intelligent shepherds’. As Campbell of Jura, chairman of the Edinburgh committee, affirmed, this would ‘deplete’ the area, and he urged that labourers and other unskilled persons be given the advantage of bounty.

The colonial public and the authorities there, too, were made aware of this strong feeling about emigration among the educated middle class in the north, for in May 1839 Lesslie Duguid, the Aberdeen merchant who had been responsible for founding the commercial Banking Company of Sydney, sent in to the Sydney Herald a letter he had received from C. Munro in Dingwall. Munro, ‘an opulent banker and extensive sheep-farmer in Ross-Shire’, wrote that it ‘sickened his heart’ to see so many of his countrymen emigrate to Australia—’If Boyter were ridding the country of its scum, we should be obliged to him, but he is depriving us of the very flower of the land. I don’t know one bad man he has taken from this country.'

Throughout this controversy Eliot firmly refused to deviate from what he considered to be his duty to the colony. Like Boyter, Eliot co-operated with the relief committees, as the large-scale operations of 1837—9 in the Highlands bear witness, but he never yielded to pressure for an ‘indiscriminate emigration’. If the Scottish Highland element among the bounty emigrants was smaller because of his determination than it would have been otherwise, its quality, and its usefulness to the colony, were all the greater. The Agent-General had to resist continual pressures from Scotland, and some of them were exerted in such a way as to offer tempting solutions to the Highland problem to the Government. In January 1838, Bowie, for the relief committees, offered theft entire funds—about £20,000—to assist the emigration, but Eliot advised Stephen to resist the offer, since it involved ‘discrimination in favour of one part of the kingdom’, and kept to his view that the Australian emigration must be selective, must not become simply ‘the discharge of extensive and over-peopled districts in this country from their surplus population’. He contended that Australian emigration funds were insufficient for a large-scale ‘indiscriminate’ operation, and that the colony would only be embarrassed by such an influx.

Despite the criticisms of the relief committees that Eliot and Boyter were creaming off the useful part of the Highland population for New South Wales and leaving the useless, the emigration scheme was actually administered with considerable flexibility, and concessions were made to the natural family feelings of the Highlanders. As Eliot put it, Boyter ‘has power within moderate limits, not to object to the reception of aged relatives, provided the cost of their passages.. . be paid for by their friends or landlords’. Since the emigration was being carried on in ships chartered by the Government, and under government superintendence, this meant a considerable relaxation of former procedure.

The urgency of the destitution problem, and the new enthusiasm about the prospects of Australia, resulted in the submission of some remarkable schemes to the Colonial Office at this time. Charles Baird, secretary to the Glasgow Highland Destitution Committee, conveyed to Sir George Grey in January 1838 the proposal of a member of the Committee, ‘himself a Highlander’, who asked that they should be permitted to purchase three or four thousand acres of land at Port Philip or some other suitable locality, on which families from the western islands would be given allotments. The assistance of both the committee and the Government would be necessary, and Baird stressed that the aim was to make emigration by whole families possible. At the same time, and in collusion with the Glasgow Committee, John Bowie of the Edinburgh Committee addressed Grey, stressing the need for family emigration and urging that the whole operation ‘be opened up more extensively’. The two committees had come to the same conclusion—that the emigration was not large enough in scale, and that the Government alone could achieve the great movement of population necessary to solve the problem. Yet another scheme was that of Alexander Jopp, a lawyer and company promoter of Aberdeen, on the fringe of the Highland area, who had a plan for depositing money in Britain for the purchase of land in New South Wales, in order to be entitled to send out labourers. Again Eliot’s reaction was unco-operative— ‘incompatible with the present system’.

James Loch, factor for the extensive estates of the Duchess of Sutherland, had already suggested that ‘Her Grace would be desirous to join with the Government’ in an emigration scheme, and Hugh McLean of CoIl had written several times proposing the establishment of an entirely new settlement in Australia, with a population (‘free of convict contamination’) of 3,000 destitute Highlanders, 300 to be sent out yearly for ten years. CoIl himself would undertake the management of the colony, and suggested that the Government should give him ‘a very large tract’ of land, and advance him £42,000 in passages for the Highlanders. He described himself as ‘a Highland proprietor, who, having lost one-third of his income by the annihilation of the kelp manufacture, has consequently a large surplus population which must starve or emigrate’, and stated that he ‘felt most keenly the responsibility of recommending them going into the almost certain destruction of a convict contact and example. They are themselves aware of this great danger and importune me for location apart.’ If a separate settlement could be formed, Coll believed that Australia would soon match Canada in popularity as a Highland emigration field.

It was to the North American colonies that Eliot suggested the proposers of all these schemes should send their people, and no encouragement was given to them, not even any ‘abatement’ in the passage money to be asked of labourers, who did not come under the bounty scheme provisions. The attitude of the landowners had changed completely since the early years of the century, when the Highland Society, fearful of a draining off in the population, had caused such restrictions to be imposed on emigrant vessels that the traffic, even to North America, because doubtfully profitable. Now the landowners were desperate to clear their lands, and the provisioning regulations were relaxed, but the sheer pressure of demand for shipping space from all over the Highlands created its own problem—because funds for the operations were limited, and, unlike private operators earlier in the century who could make their own bargains with the people, Eliot and Boyter were circumscribed by the selection regulations, and the bulk of the people they had to consider had lost their savings, had little or no ready money, and were often utterly destitute.

By May 1838 the Highlanders’ prejudices against going to Australia, reported by Roderick Millar and by Bowie to Glenelg in November 1837, had largely disappeared, probably because of Eliot’s and Borer’s relaxation of the regulations to permit elderly relatives to go out in the government ships. This was the key to their success in 1837—40 in securing an ample supply of good quality emigrants, and the same enlightened attitude, permitting the emigration of family groups, was to be successful again when the Highland and Island Emigration Society conducted the next large-scale emigration from the north to Australia in the 1850s. The growing popularity of Australian emigration in the north was shown at the meeting held at Fort William on 8 May 1838 with the object of promoting emigration, specifically to Australia, where it was stated that 1,200 persons had pledged themselves to go out ‘under the Colonial Act’ of 1835, and Hew Ainslie, a local merchant, moved that ‘there is no district in Scotland in which the spirit of emigration and enterprise prevails to a greater extent than in Lochaber’. This change in the attitude of the Highlanders was also revealed in the approaches made by William Mackenzie of Muirton, chairman of the Edinburgh Destitution Committee, urging Glenelg to send more ships to the west Highlands, where numerous emigrants for Australia were waiting—this within a few days of the Committee’s attacks on Borer for distributing misleading circulars in Shetland and raising false hopes ‘so as to prejudicially affect the favourable feeling for emigration’.

Eliot’s last concern with Scottish emigration as a member of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission was with Renfrewshire, that particularly distressed area in the Lowlands, from which the ‘working men of Paisley’ petitioned Stanley in May 1841 asking for free passages to Australia ‘rather than remain at home, dependent on charity for subsistence’. A local emigration committee had been formed in the town to further assisted emigration to Australia, and Paisley had sent in petitions, but Eliot’s final reaction was to refuse assistance, since no public funds existed for the purpose of sending out weavers. Eliot refused to relax the regulations in this case, but under the private bounty system considerable numbers (211 people) went out from Renfrewshire in 1838—41, and 74 of these were from Paisley.

Despite the criticisms of the destitution committees for their refusal to countenance a general exodus, Eliot and Boyter’s government operations provided the largest and most concentrated Scottish influx into Australia before 1852. Conditions on the ships they operated were remarkably good, judging by the low rate of deaths and sickness on the voyages. David Waugh, a Scottish settler, writing in 1837, gave Boyter the highest praise for the care and attention he gave to provisioning the vessels. Supplies of wine were carried for invalids, and large supplies of fresh beef and vegetables were laid in whenever possible at the ports of departure, even in the western Highlands. Nothing came of a proposal by Principal McFarlan and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to have clergymen and teachers appointed to the ships, Eliot approving the scheme in principle but pointing out to Stephen that no funds were available to pay such people, and stressing that the complete authority of the superintendent surgeons of the ships might be impaired if this were allowed. Yet a concession to the national diet was made in the provision of supplies of oatmeal in the ships.

The unwillingness of the Highlanders among government bounty emigrants to separate from their kinsfolk and friends was a problem for the colonial authorities, just as it had been for Borer and Eliot when they were being selected. The case of the Midlothian, the third government ship to sail from Scotland, illustrates this very well, for on arriving in Sydney in December 1837 the Highlanders claimed that they had received an undertaking before they sailed that they would be settled as a group in the colony. Their petitions for employment as a group seeming to be of no avail, they were reported to have threatened that ‘no more settlers would ever come from the Western Islands of Scotland’. The problem was solved when Andrew Lang, a Scots settler on the Hunter River, undertook to settle the whole shipload on his estate. The close ties of relationship among many of these people can be guessed from the emigrant list of the British King, which sailed from Tobermory in October 1838. Of 332 people, 146 bore the surname Macdonald.

The Midlothian case was apparently unique in the determined resistance made by the Highlanders to dispersion on arrival, and the fact that the ship was one of the first to sail from the Hebrides was probably in large part responsible for its occurrence. When contingents of Highlanders were already settled, they provided reassurance and a welcome for newcomers, and a surprising number of them soon prospered, though impoverished on arrival. A typical instance, cited by Lang, was John McMillan of Skipness, a destitute Highlander who had been forced by the economic pressures of the 1830s to become ‘a common porter’ for six years in the streets of Greenock. Within seven years of his arrival in Port Phillip in 1840 he had become a farmer, with his own land and 400 head of cattle.

Even before they arrived in Australia the first shiploads of Scottish bounty emigrants made a favourable impression on James Macarthur, a prominent colonial landowner. In his survey of ‘The Present State and Future Prospects’ of New South Wales, Macarthur made several approving references to their quality and conduct, and printed the ‘strict code’ of rules and regulations which the emigrants sailing from Dundee in March 1837 in the John Bar!y had drawn up entirely voluntarily for their conduct on the voyage. These rules made provision for the election of a superintending committee, for the trial of offenders by a jury chosen by ballot, and for the appointment of constables or watchmen in rotation. Swearing, quarrels about religion, and gambling were prohibited, and there was to be ‘public reading’ of ‘strictly moral books’.

The searching investigation before the British Select Committee on Scottish Emigration in 1841 brought out the view of many witnesses that Australia would be a particularly suitable emigration field for both Highlanders and Lowlanders. John Bowie of the Edinburgh Relief Committee described how he had found in Skye in 1837 that two-thirds of the people were unwilling to go there, and that many did not even know of the existence of New South Wales, and how his distribution of a pamphlet with notes on the colony had led to ‘great emigrations’. Bowie stated that the movement had been an unqualified success: ‘Parties who went out without a sixpence write me that they dare not tell me what they have gained, for they think I could not believe them’, and he instanced the Highland settlement in the district of Skye on the Hunter River founded by emigrants from that island as an example of success.

The Reverend Norman McLeod, who had been on the relief committees’ London deputation of 1837 with Bowie and Charles Baird of Glasgow, still differed in 1847 from his erstwhile colleagues in preferring Canada to Australia because of the better shipping facilities in the Clyde for North America, but his namesake and colleague, the Reverend N. McLeod of Morven, believed strongly that ‘the people of the remote glens, a pastoral people, are very well adapted for Australia, or America, but particularly for Australia’, and Charles Baird of Glasgow supported him in the view that ‘no class of persons are more capable for labour in Australia than the distressed persons in the Highlands’. The evidence given before the Committee was so unanimously in favour of emigration that it is interesting to speculate on the effects of a continued large-scale movement from the Highlands. The machinery for sending people out was changing. There were, after 1841, no more government ships, but the newly appointed Land and Emigration Commissioners still had agencies in Scottish ports, and could no doubt have laid on vessels for the Highlanders if all bounty emigration had not been stopped in 1841. Emigration on an appreciable scale under government schemes had been slow to start up in Scotland, and it was halted just when a certain momentum had been acquired.

Private operators under the colonial bounty system, and
Scottish emigration to Australia 1832—46