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This island, at one time,
had a large population, all of whom were weeded out in the usual way.
The Rev. Donald Maclean, Minister of the Parish of Small Isles, informs
us in The New Statistical Account, that "in 1826 all the inhabitants of
the Island of Rum, amounting at least to 400 souls, found it necessary
to leave their native land, and to seek for new abodes in the distant
winds of our colonies in America. Of all the old residenters, only one
family remained upon the Island. The old and the young, the feeble and
the strong, were all united in this general emigration—the former to
find tombs in a foreign land—the latter to encounter toils, privations,
and dangers, to become familiar with customs, and to acquire that to
which they had been entire strangers. A similar emigration took place in
1828, from the Island of Muck, so that the parish has now become much
depopulated."
In 1831 the population of
the whole parish was 1015, while before that date it was much larger. In
1851 it was 916. In 1881 it was reduced to 550. The total population of
Rum in 1881 was 89 souls.
HughMiller, who visited
the Island, describes it and the evictions thus:--
"The evening was clear,
calm, golden-tinted; even wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush
of transient beauty; and the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides,
barred by the plough lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had
borrowed an aspect of soft and velvety richness, from the mellowed light
and the broadening shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the
deserted fields the grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the
ground; but the valley, more desolate than that which we had left, had
not even its single inhabited dwelling; it seemed as if man had done
with it for ever. The island, eighteen years before, had been divested
of its inhabitants, amounting at the time to rather more than four
hundred souls, to make way for one sheep farmer and eight thousand
sheep. All the aborigines of Rum crossed the Atlantic; and, at the close
of 1828, the entire population consisted of but the sheep farmer, and a
few shepherds, his servants: the Island of Rum reckoned up scarce a
single family at this period for every five square miles of area which
it contained. But depopulation on so extreme a scale was found
inconvenient; the place had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for
the comfort of the occupant ; and on the occasion of a clearing which
took place shortly after in Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of
the ejected families with sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few
cows, on the bit of morass beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen
their humble dwellings. But the whole of the once-peopled interior
remains a wilderness, without inhabitants,—all the more lonely in its
aspect from the circumstance that the solitary valleys, with their
plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open upon
shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden
sea stretches drearily around.
"The armies of the insect
world were sporting in the light this evening by the million; a brown
stream that runs through the valley yielded an incessant poppling sound,
from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly leaping in the pools,
beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and gold that fluttered
over them ; along a distant hillside there ran what seemed the ruins of
a grey-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a remote age to
facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on which the heath
and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast encroaching, that had
borne many a successive harvest ; and prostrate cottages, that had been
the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and blythe new-year's
days;---all seemed to bespeak the place of fitting habitation for man,
in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of the luxuries of
life, might be procured ; but in the entire prospect not a man nor a
man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one without
figures.
"I do not much like
extermination carried out so thoroughly and on system;—it seems bad
policy; and I have not succeeded in thinking any the better of it though
assured by the economists that there are more than enough people in
Scotland still. There are, I believe, more than enough in our
workhouses—more than enough on our pauper rolls—more than enough muddled
up, disreputable, useless, and unhappy, in their miasmatic valleys and
typhoid courts of our large towns; but I have yet to learn how arguments
for local depopulation are to be drawn from facts such as these. A brave
and hardy people, favourably placed for the development of all that is
excellent in human nature, form the glory and strength of a country;—a
people sunk into an abyss of degradation and misery, and in which it is
the whole tendency of external circumstances to sink them yet deeper,
constitute its weakness and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what
principle the ominous increase which is taking place among us in the
worse class, is to form our solace or apology for the wholesale
expatriation of the better.
"It did not seem as if
the depopulation of Rum had tended much to anyone's advantage. The
single sheep farmer who had occupied the holdings of so many had been
unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island ; the
proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate as the
tenant, for the island itself was in the market, and a report went
current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer forest.
"How strange a cycle!
Uninhabited originally, save by wild animals, it became at an early
period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hillside testified,
derived in part at least, their sustenance from the chase. They broke in
from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of the valleys, they
reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep,—their number increased to
nearly five hundred souls,—they enjoyed the average happiness of human
creatures in the present imperfect state of being,—they contributed
their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood to the armies of the
country, and a few of their more adventurous spirits, impatient of the
narrow bounds which confined them, and a course of life little varied by
incident, emigrated to America. Then came the change of system so
general in the Highlands; and the island lost all its original
inhabitants, on a wool and mutton speculation,---inhabitants, the
descendants of men who had chased the deer on its hills five hundred
years before, and who, though they recognized some wild island lord as
their superior, and did him service, had regarded the. place as
indisputably their own. And now yet another change was on the eve of
ensuing, and the island was to return to its original state, as a home
of wild animals, where a few hunters from the mainland might enjoy the
chase for a month or two every twelvemonth, but which could form no
permanent place of human abode. Once more a strange, and surely most
melancholy cycle! "
In another place the same
writer asks,
"Where was the one tenant
of the island, for whose sake so many others had been removed?" and he
answers, "We found his house occupied by a humble shepherd, who had in
charge the wreck of his property,---property no longer his, but held for
the benefit of his creditors. The great sheep farmer had gone down under
circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development,
when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to
calculate."
HARRIS and the other
Western Islands suffered in a similar manner. Mull, Tiree, and others in
Argyllshire are noticed in dealing with that county. |
