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Whose glory it is to have thrown up his place rather than proceed in
command of the steamer "Lochiel," which was to convey the police
expedition against the Skye crofters in the winter of 1884.
No traveller can have failed to be struck by the solitude and
desolation which now constitute the prevalent character of the
Scottish Highlands. "Mile after mile," says Macaulay, speaking of
Glencoe, "the traveller looks in vain for the smoke of one hut, or for
one human form wrapped in a plaid, and listens in vain for the bark of
a shepherd's dog, or the bleat of a lamb. Mile after mile, the only
sound that indicates life is the faint cry of a bird of prey from some
storm-beaten pinnacle of rock." His words might appropriately stand
for a description of a great part of the north of Scotland. But it was
not always so. The moors and valleys, whose blank silence is only
broken by the rush of tumbling streams or the cry of some solitary
bird, were once enlivened by the manifold sounds of some human
industry and made musical with children's voices. The crumbling walls
and decaying roof-trees of ruined villages still bear witness to the
former populousness of many a deserted glen. Perhaps these humble
remains touch our feelings more deeply than the imposing fragments of
Greek temples and Roman amphitheatres. For it was but yesterday that
they were inhabited by a brave, moral, and industrious peasantry, full
of poetic instincts and ardent patriotism, ruthlessly expelled their
native land to make way for sporting grounds rented by merchant
princes and American millionaires.
During a visit I paid to the Isle of Arran in the summer of 1884, I
stood on the site of such a ruined village. All that remained of the
once flourishing community was a solitary old Scotchwoman, who well
remembered her banished countrymen. Her simple story had a thrilling
pathos, told as it was on the melancholy slopes of the North Glen
Sannox, looking across to the wild broken mountain ridges called "The
Old Wife's Steps." Here, she said, and as far as one could see, had
dwelt the Glen Sannox people, the largest population then collected in
any one spot of the island, and evicted by the Duke of Hamilton in the
year 1832. The lives of these crofters became an idyll in her mouth.
She dwelt proudly on their patient labour, their simple joys, and the
kind, helpful ways of them; and her brown eyes filled with tears as
she recalled the day of their expulsion, when the people gathered from
all parts of the island to see the last of the Glen Sannox folk ere
they went on board the brig that was bound for New Brunswick, in
Canada. "Ah, it was a sore day that," she sighed, "when the old people
cast themselves down on the seashore and wept."
They were gone, these Crofters, and their dwellings laid low with
the hill-side, and their fertile plots of corn overrun with ling and
heather; but the stream went rushing on as of old, and as of old the
cloven mountain peaks cast their shadow on the valley below whence the
once happy people were all gone—gone, too, their dwelling-places,
and, to use the touching words of a Highland minister, "There was not
a smoke there now." For the progress of civilisation, which has
redeemed many a wilderness, and gladdened the solitary places of the
world, has come with a curse to these Highland glens, and turned green
pastures and golden harvest-fields once more into a desert.
- DUAN SECOND, STANZA XVII., PAGE
37."OR quelle est la situation du Crofter de l'époque
actuelle? Ce n'est plus qu'un fermier sans bail, dont la redevance est
susceptible d'augmentations arbitraires, et qui peut etre renvoyé
d'un pour à l'autre. D'année en année, les limites du sol in
grat et épuisé que les grands propriétaires abandonment á la petite
culture deviennent de plus en plus restreintes. L''eviction' frappe
sans pitié les humbles tenanciers dont les rangs se sont toujours
éclaircis depuis un siécle dans les immenses domaines de la haute
Ecosse. . . .
"La population des Crofters, des Highlands et des Iles, si peu
importante qu'elle soit, est une pépinière de bons travailleurs et de
bons citoyens pour tout l'empire. Par sa vigoureuse constitution
physique, son intelligence native et sa bonne éducation morale, elle
est particulièrement propre au recrutement du peuple dans les grands
centres industriels, qui, s'il n'était alimenté de la sorte par les
sources saines des districts ruraux, ne manquerait pas de dégénérer,
sans l'influence des mauvais logements, d'occupations malsaines et
d'habitudes énervantes. . . .
"Mais ce c'est pas seulement au point de vue de ces avantages
particulieres qui la population des Crofters a une utilité
indiscutable. Elle constitue une base naturelle pour la défense navale
du pays, défense qui ne peut être improvisée et dont l'importance,
dans certaines circonstances, ne saurait être es timée trop haut. La
population maritime des Highlands et des Iles fournit, en ce moment,
4431 hommes à la réserve de la marine royale, nombre équivalent aux
équipages de sept navires de guerre cuirassé de Ire classe, et qui
pourrait être encore beaucoup accru au moyeu d'avantages proportionés.
"Il en est de même du recrutement de l'armée de terre. Les
enrôlements deviennent de plus en plus rares dans les Highlands,
l'émigration moissonant la partie la plus robuste et la plus
determinée de la population rurale."
—"Les Highlands et la Question des Crofters," par Le Cte
Louis Lafond.
-
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA XXVI., PAGE
55."The tenants of Knoydart, like all other Highlanders, had
suffered severely during and after the potato famine in 1846 and 1847,
and some of them got into arrear with a year's and some with two
years' rent, but they were fast clearing it off. Mrs. Macdonell and
her factor determined to evict every crofter on her property, to make
room for sheep. In the spring of 1853 they were all served with
summonses of removal, accompanied by a message that Sir John Macneil,
Chairman of the Board of Supervision, had agreed to convey them
Australia. Their feelings were not considered worthy of the slightest
consideration. They were not even asked whether they would prefer to
follow their countrymen to America and Canada. They were to be
treated as if they were nothing better than Africans, and the laws of
their country on a level with those which regulated South American
slavery. The people, however, had no alternative but to accept any
offer made to them. They could not get an inch of land on any of the
neighbouring estates, and any one who would give them a night's
shelter was threatened with eviction themselves. It was afterwards
found not convenient to transport them to Australia, and it was then
intimated to the poor creatures, as if they were nothing but common
slaves, to be disposed of at will, that they would be taken to North
America, and that a ship would be at Isle Orsay, in the Island of Skye,
in a few days to receive them, and that they must go on board.
The Sillery soon arrived, and Mrs. Macdonell and her factor came all
the way from Edinburgh to see the people hounded across in boats, and
put on board this ship, whether they would or not. An eye-witness who
described the proceeding at the time, in a now rare pamphlet, and whom
I met last year at Nova Scotia, characterises the scene as
indescribable and heart-rending. The wail of the poor women and
children as they were torn away from their homes would have melted a
heart of stone! Some few families, principally cottars, refused to go,
in spite of every influence brought to bear upon them, and the
treatment they afterwards received was cruel beyond belief. The
houses, not only of those who went, but of those who remained, were
burnt and levelled to the ground. The Strath was dotted all over with
black spots, showing where yesterday stood the habitations of men.
The scarred, half-burnt wood—couples, rafters, and bars—were strewn
about in every direction. Stooks of corn and plots of unlifted
potatoes could be seen on all sides, but man was gone. No voice could
be heard. Those who refused to go aboard the Sillery were in hiding
among the rocks and the caves, while their friends were packed off
like so many African slaves to the Cuban market."
—"The Highland Clearances," by Alexander Mackenzie
(pp. 267, 268).
- DUAN SECOND, STANZA XXVI., PAGE 55."The clearing of Sutherland was
a process of ruin so thoroughly disastrous that it might be deemed
scarcely possible to render it more complete. Between the years 1811
and 1820, 15,000 inhabitants of this northern district were ejected
from their snug inland farms by means for which we would seek in vain
a precedent, except, perhaps, in the history of the Irish massacre. A
singularly well-conditioned and wholesome district of country has been
converted into one wide ulcer of wretchedness and woe."
—Hugh Miller.
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA XXVII., PAGE
55.
-
"Yearly the Highlands have sent forth their thousands from
their glens to follow the battle-flag of Britain wherever it flew. It
was a Highland rearlorn hope that followed the broken wreck of
Cumberland's army after the disastrous day at Fontenoy, when more
British soldiers lay dead upon the field than fell at Waterloo. It
was another Highland regiment that scaled the rock-face over the St.
Lawrence, and first formed a line in the September dawn on the level
sward of Abraham. It was a Highland line that broke the power of the
Mahratta hordes and gave Wellington his maiden victory at Assaye.
Thirty-four battalions marched from these glens to fight in America,
Germany, and India ere the eighteenth century had run its course; and
yet while abroad over the earth Highlanders were the first in assault
and the last in retreat, their lowly homes in far-away glens were being
dragged down, and the wail of women and the cry of children went out
on the same breeze that bore too upon its wings the scent of heather,
the freshness of gorse blossom, and the myriad sweets that made the
lowly life of Scotland's peasantry blest with health and happiness."
—"The Highland Clearances," by Alexander Mackenzie
(pages 320, 321).
- "Few Englishmen even now seem to be aware, notwithstanding all
that has been written on the subject, that not very long ago, in many
instances within the memory of living men, most of the Highland
counties were the scene of evictions on a wholesale scale, compared
with which the forced emigration of the Irish peasantry sinks into
insignificance. Entire communities, from the patriarch of two
generations down to the newly-born babe, were banished en bloc
to Canada, and thrown there on their own resources to establish new
homes or to starve. And although the people, except in a few cases,
submitted to expatriation quietly if unwillingly, where they did
manifest any reluctance to accept their fate, their houses were burned
down over their heads, and they themselves were turned adrift on the
bleak hill-sides, and on the wild and inhospitable sea-shores of that
northern region, to seek subsistence as best they could. Until 1745,
the year of Culloden, the clan system of land tenure prevailed in the
Highlands, under which the ground belonged not to the chief alone, but
to the community. A clansman could not be dispossessed of his holding
by his chief. After 1745, however, the English system was introduced.
The clans that had remained loyal to the Crown, as well as those that
had thrown in their lot with Prince Charles, had their lands
practically confiscated. The Highland chiefs, in short, were
assimilated in position to English landlords. They were by the
central government invested with the fee-simple of the land which was
once held by the laird and the clansmen in common, and so a great
wrong, amounting to a national crime, was done to the Highland
population."
—"Storm-Clouds in the Highlands" J. A. Cameron." Nineteenth
Century," Sept. 1884.
- "I know a glen, now inhabited by two shepherds and two
gamekeepers, which at one time sent out its thousand fighting men.
And this is but one of many that might be cited to show how the
Highlands have been depopulated. Loyal, peaceable, and high-spirited
peasantry have been driven from their native land—as the Jews were
expelled from Spain, or the Huguenots from France—to make room for
grouse, sheep, and deer. A portly volume would be needed to contain
the records of oppression and cruelty perpetrated by many landlords,
who are a scourge to their unfortunate tenants, blighting their lives,
poisoning their happiness, and robbing them of their improvements,
filling their wretched homes with sorrow, and breaking their hearts
with the weight of despair."
— Dr. D. G. F. Macdonald.
- "We come now to the third stage in the history of landlordism in
the Highlands—the stage which I have distinguished as that of the
Nineteenth Century Clearances. In consequence of the English
clearances of the sixteenth century, the spread of commercial
principles, and the dying out of the old notion and fact of collective
and limited ownership of land, the notion of individual and absolute
ownership had got pretty well established in England by the middle of
last century. So, after the Rebellion of 1745, the Highland chiefs
being greatly impoverished, the devil came to them in three different
shapes, one after another. First he appeared in a guise he very often
assumes—the guise of a pressing creditor; then he came as a jolly
sheep-farmer from the south, with lots of tin in his pockets; and,
said the jolly sheep-farmer to the impecunious Highland chief: 'Clear
out these —— rascals, who call themselves your clansmen. Sheep will
pay you better than men, and if you will let the hills and glens to
me, I'll double, triple, quadruple your rental.' And last of all the
devil came to the Highland chief in another shape he very often
assumes—that of a sharp lawyer. The chiefs knew very well that they
were but joint-owners with their clans of the land they occupied, and
that crofter townships had rights of grazing on the hills sanctioned
by immemorial custom; and they knew very well that, though many a
chief's estate had been forfeited by Acts of Attainder, by no Act of
Parliament had their clansmen's customary rights been forfeited.
'But,' said the devil in the shape of the sharp lawyer, 'never mind
that. In England they act now on the notion of absolute ownership,
and we'll just assume that your people are tenants-at-will, and that
you can do what you like with them and theirs.' And it was simply on
this assumption, a pure legal fiction, directly in the teeth of all
historical facts, that the Duke of Athole began the Highland Clearances
in clearing Glen Tilt, just one hundred years ago (1784), and worthily
have followed suit the Dukes of Sutherland and of Argyll."
—Article on "The Crofters' Revolt," by J. S. Stuart Glennie,
in "Our Corner" (p. 202).
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA XXVIII.,
PAGE 56.In his recent work on the Nationalisation of Land, Mr.
Alfred Russell Wallace, in the chapter on "Landlordism in Scotland,"
writes:—"The facts stated in this chapter will possess, I feel sure,
for many Englishmen, an almost startling novelty; the tale of
oppression and cruelty they reveal reads like one of those hideous
stories peculiar to the dark ages, rather than a simple record of
events happening upon our own land and within the memory of the
present generation. For a parallel to this monstrous power of the
land-owner, under which life and property are entirely at his mercy,
we must go back to mediæval times, or to the days when serfdom not
having been abolished, the Russian noble was armed with despotic
authority; while the more pitiful results of this landlord tyranny,
the wide devastation of cultivated lands, the heartless burning of
houses, the reckless creation of pauperism and misery out of
well-being and contentment, could only be expected under the rule of
Turkish Sultans, or greedy and cruel Pashas. Yet these cruel deeds
have been perpetrated in one of the most beautiful portions of our
native land. They are not the work of uncultured barbarians or of
fanatic Moslems, but of so-called civilised and Christian men;
and—worst feature of all—they are not due to any high-handed
exercise of power beyond the law, but are strictly legal, are in many
cases the acts of the legislature itself. . . . The general results
of the system of modern landlordism in Scotland are not less painful
than the hardship and misery brought upon individual sufferers. The
earlier improvers, who drove the peasants from their sheltered valleys
to the exposed sea-coast, in order to make room for sheep-farmers,
pleaded erroneously the public benefit as the justification of their
conduct. They maintained that more food and clothing would be
produced by the new system, and that the people themselves would have
the advantage of the produce of the sea as well as that of the land
for their support. The result, however, proved them to be mistaken,
for thenceforth the cry of Highland destitution began to be heard,
culminating at intervals into actual famines, like that of 1836-37,
when £70,000 were distributed to keep the Highlanders from death by
starvation. . . Just as in Ireland, there was abundance of land
capable of cultivation, but the people were driven to the coast and to
the towns to make way for sheep, and cattle, and lowland farmers; and
when the barren and inhospitable tracts allotted to them became
overcrowded, they were told to emigrate.
"The actual effect of this system of eviction and emigration— of
banishing the native of the soil and giving it to the stranger —is
shown in the steady increase of poverty, indicated by the amount spent
for the relief of the poor having increased from less than £300,000 in
1846 to more than £900,000 now; while in the same period the
population has only increased from 2,770,000 to 3,627,000, so that
pauperism has grown about nine times faster than population. . . .
"At the present time more than two million acres of Scottish soil
are devoted to the preservation of deer alone—an area larger than the
entire counties of Kent and Surrey combined. Glen Tilt Forest includes
100,000 acres; the Black Mount is sixty miles in circumference; and
Ben Aulder Forest is fifteen miles long by seven broad. On many of
these forests there is the finest pasture in Scotland, while the
valleys would support a considerable population of small farmers; yet
all this land is devoted to the sport of the wealthy, farms being
destroyed, houses pulled down, and men, sheep, and cattle all banished
to create a wilderness for the deer-stalkers! At the same time the
whole people of England are shut out from many of the grandest and
most interesting scenes of their native land, gamekeepers and watchers
forbidding the tourist or naturalist to trespass on some of the wildest
Scotch mountains."
"The cruel practice of evicting the Highlanders to make room for
sheep seems to be passing into the pernicious system of converting
grazing lands into sporting grounds. Only the other day an
extensive tract was cleared of 7000 sheep to add to the already wide
forests of Glenstrathfarar and Culligran, the property of Lord Lovat,
let to Mr. Winans of Brighton, at £7000 per annum. It is said that
this nobleman, being desirous of securing more broad acres for his
American "Sportsman!" who boasts of having, with the help of his two
sons, brought down twenty-seven stags in about an hour last September,
has leased the sheep-farm in question at a rent of £1000 a-year, and
sub-let it to Mr. Winans for £2000, thus netting £1000 per annum by
the transaction. I blush to think that a Scottish nobleman should lend
himself to satisfying the insatiable desire of a foreign millionaire
contractor to make a profit by a system which depopulates the
Highlands, is a curse to Scotland, and, as you very properly observed,
'a scandal to British legislation.'
"Sad it is to see the rights and welfare of the Highlanders
pitilessly disregarded, and the beautiful hills, straths, and glens of
Scotland immolated to the sporting snobbishness of greedy capitalists.
The existence of 'mammoth deer-forests' is one of the gravest wrongs
of the people, perpetrated under the mask of a false political economy,
and I defy anyone to prove the utility of the cruel clearances that
have so scandalised the Northern Highlands.
"We may wander whither we will, the busy life that once enlivened
these solitudes has departed. The cots are bare, and cold, and
roofless; the patches which once grew crops of golden corn are now
absorbed by sporting playgrounds; voices of men, women, and children no
longer echo from the surrounding hills —nought but barren solitary
pomp
'Where once a garden smiled.'
Family after family have been chased away, leaving us to
saddening memories of the past."
—D. G. F. Macdonald, LL.D.—"The Echo," 1878.
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA XLIV., PAGE
64."In former removals the tenants had been allowed to carry away
the timber of their old dwellings to erect houses on their new
allotments, but now a more summary mode was adopted by setting fire to
them. The able-bodied men were by this time away after the cattle, or
otherwise engaged at a distance, so that the immediate sufferers by the
general house-burning that now commenced were the aged and infirm, the
women and children. . . . The devastators proceeded with the greatest
celerity, demolishing all before them; and when they had overthrown
all the houses in a large tract of country, they set fire to the wreck.
Timber, furniture, and every other article that could not be
instantly removed was consumed by fire, or otherwise utterly
destroyed. The proceedings were carried on with the greatest rapidity
and the most reckless cruelty. Some old men took to the woods and the
rocks, wandering about in a state approaching to or of absolute
insanity; and several of them in this situation lived only a few days.
Pregnant women were taken in premature labour, and several children
did not long survive their sufferings. To those scenes I was an
eye-witness, and am ready to substantiate the truth of my statements,
not only by my own testimony, but by that of many others who were
present at the time. In such a scene of devastation it is almost
useless to particularise the cases of individuals: the suffering was
great and universal. I shall, however, notice a very few of the
extreme cases, of which I was myself an eye-witness. John Mackay's
wife, Ravigill, in attempting to pull down her house, in the absence
of her husband, to preserve the timber, fell through the roof. She was
in consequence taken in premature labour, and in that state was exposed
to the open air and the view of all the bystanders. Donald Munro,
Garvott, lying in a fever, was turned out of his house and exposed to
the elements. Donald Macbeath, an infirm and bed-ridden old man, had
the house unroofed over him, and was in that state exposed to the wind
and rain until death put a period to his sufferings. I was present at
the pulling down and burning of the house of William Chisholme,
Badinloskin, in which was lying his wife's mother, an old bedridden
woman of nearly one hundred years of age, none of the family being
present. . . . Fire was set to the house, and the blankets in which
she was carried out were in flames before she could be got out. She
was placed in a little shed, and it was with great difficulty they were
prevented from firing it also. Within five days she was a corpse."
—"Gloomy Memories," by Donald Macleod.
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA LXII., PAGE
73.
- "As Strathnaver, though from many causes the most widely bruited,
was by no means a solitary instance of rash reform and harsh
procedure, we must give another example of the same ruthless process
of extermination which took place some forty years later in a quite
different region. We allude to the inhabitants of the district of
Knoydart, who were cleared out of their native seats in the year 1853,
in a fashion for which the Strathnaver procedure seemed to have formed
the model, and of which an account is given by Donald Ross, an
eye-witness.
" 'The scene presented at Knoydart was most heart-rending. As far as
the eye could see the face of the strath had it black spots, where the
houses of the crofters were either levelled or burnt. The ruins of
these habitations of men, and the silence and solitude that prevailed,
rendered it unnecessary for any tongue to tell me that here humanity
was most cruelly sacrificed to the god of sheep-farming and
expatriation. The blackened rafters lying scattered among the grass,
the couple-trees cut through the middle and thrown away, the walls
broken down, thatch and cabers mixed up together, and grass beginning
to grow on the threshold and hearthstone, told a tale which required
neither tongue nor pen to unfold. The scene was rendered more painful
as the Strath was dotted with stacks of corn, large plots of potatoes,
and with grass that could be easily mowed down by the scythe. But the
voice of man was gone— he was not to be found.'"
—"The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws," by Professor
Blackie.
- "The extermination of the Highlanders has been carried on for many
years as systematically and relentlessly as of the North American
Indians. . . . Who can withhold sympathy, as whole families have
turned to take a last look at the heavens red with their burning
houses? The poor people shed no tears, for there was in their hearts
that which stifled such signs of emotion; they were absorbed in
despair. They were forced away from that which was near and dear to
their hearts, and their patriotism was treated with contemptuous
mockery."
—Dr. D. G. F. Macdonald.
- DUAN THIRD, STANZA LXIII., PAGE
73."Among the rest, a young man, Donald MacKay, of Grambmor, was
ordered out of his parents' house; he obeyed in a state of delirium,
and (nearly naked) ran into some bushes adjoining, where he lay for a
considerable time deprived of reason; the house was immediately in
flames, and his effects burned. Robert MacKay, whose whole family were
in the fever, or otherwise ailing, had to carry his two daughters on
his back a distance of about twenty-five miles. . . . A number of the
sick, who could not be carried away instantly, on account of their
dangerous situation, were collected by their friends and placed in an
uncomfortable hut, and there for a time left to their fate. The cries
of these victims were heart-rending—exclaiming in their anguish, 'Are
you going to leave us to perish in the flames?' . . . It may not be
out of place here to mention generally that the clergy, factors, and
magistrates were cool and apparently unconcerned spectators of the
scenes I have been describing, which were indeed perpetrated under
their immediate authority. The splendid and comfortable mansions of
these gentlemen were reddened with the glare of their neighbours'
flaming houses, without exciting any compassion for the sufferers; no
spiritual, temporal, or medical aid was afforded them; and this time
they were all driven away without being allowed the benefit of their
out-going crops! Nothing but the sword was wanting to make the scene
one of as great barbarity as the earth ever witnessed; and in my
opinion, this would, in a majority of cases, have been mercy, by
saving them from what they were afterwards doomed to endure. The
clergy indeed, in their sermons, maintained that the whole was a
merciful interposition of Providence to bring them to repentance,
rather than to send them all to hell, as they so richly deserved."
—"The Highland Clearances," by Alexander Mackenzie
(p. 30).
- DUAN FOURTH, STANZA V., PAGE 76.
One of the Royal Commissioners remarked—"It is said in reference to
the people that 'they were compelled to emigrate to America; some of
them had been tied before our eyes; others hid themselves in caves and
crevices for fear of being caught by authorised officers.'
"Q.—'Do you recall that these people were caught and sent to
America, just like an animal going to market?'
"A.—'Just the same way. I saw a man who lay down on his face and
knees on a little island to hide himself from the policeman, who
had dogs searching for him in order to get him aboard the emigrant
ship. . . . There was another case of a man named Angus Johnson. He
had a dead child in the house, and his wife gave birth to three
children, all of whom died. Not- withstanding this he was seized and
tied on the pier at Loch Boisdale and kicked on board. The old
priest interfered and said, 'What are you doing to this man? let him
alone, it is against the law!' The wife of the man who was tied and
put aboard afterwards went to the vessel. The four dead children
would be buried by that time. These things happened in the years
1850-51. The people were hiding themselves in caves and dens for fear
of being sent away from the island. . . . There were many such cases
at the time. It was about forty years ago."
—"Crofters' Evidence," given before the Royal Commission.
- DUAN FOURTH, STANZA XXVII.,
PAGE 87."All the Highlanders of an inland district in
Sutherlandshire were ejected from their homes by the late Duke to make
way for a few sheep-farmers. The poor people, a moral and
religious race, bound to their rugged hills with a strength of
attachment hardly equalled in any other country, could not be made to
believe the summonses of removal real. Their fathers had lived and
died among those very hills for thousands of years. They had spent
their blood and had laid down their lives of old for the good Earls of
Sutherland. Could it be possible that they were to be forced out of
their own country? They at first thought of resistance, and had they
carried the thought into action, it would have afforded perilous
employment to a thousand armed men to have ejected every eight hundred
of them; but they had read their New Testaments, and they knew that
the Duke had become proprietor of the soil; some of their houses were
actually fired over their heads, and yet there was no bloodshed.
Convinced at length that no other alternative remained for them, they
gathered in a body in the churchyard of the district, to take leave of
their country for ever, and of the dust of their fathers' last. And
there, seated among the graves, men and women, the old and the young,
with one accord, and under the influence of one feeling, 'lifted up
their voices and wept.' This tract of the Highlands is now inhabited
by sheep."
—Hugh Miller.
- DUAN FOURTH, STANZA XXXI., PAGE
89."We, the undersigned, passengers per Admiral, from Stornoway,
in the Highlands of Scotland, do solemnly depose to the following
facts:—That Colonel Gordon is proprietor of estates in South Uist of
Barra; that among many hundred tenants and cottars whom he has sent
this season from his estates to Canada, he gave directions to his
factor, Mr. Fleming, of Cluny Castle, Aberdeenshire, to ship on board
of the above-named vessel a number of nearly four hundred and fifty of
said tenants and cottars, from the estate in Barra; that accordingly,
a great majority of these people, among whom were the undersigned,
proceeded voluntarily to embark on board the Admiral at Loch Boisdale,
on or about 11th August 1851; but that several of the people who were
intended to be shipped for this port, Quebec, refused to proceed on
board, and, in fact, absconded from their homes to avoid the
embarkation. Whereupon Mr. Fleming gave orders to a policeman, who was
accompanied by a ground-officer of the estate in Barra, and some
constables, to pursue the people who had run away among the mountains;
which they did, and succeeded in capturing about twenty from the
mountains and islands in the neighborhood; but only came with the
officers on an attempt being made to handcuff them; and that some who
ran away were not brought back, in consequence of which four families
at least were divided, some having come in the ships to Quebec, while
other members of the same families are left in the Highlands. . . .
"The undersigned finally declare that they are now landed in Quebec
so destitute that, if immediate relief be not afforded them, and
continued until they are settled in employment, they will be liable to
perish with want. (Signed) HECTOR LAMONT, and seventy others
."
—"The Highland Clearances," by Alexander Mackenzie
(pp. 257, 258).
- DUAN FOURTH, STANZA XXXV.,
PAGE 91"In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not
of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the
inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one
day found to have been as short-sighted as it is unjust and selfish.
Meantime, the Highlands may become the fairy-ground for romance and
poetry, or the subject of experiment for the professors of
speculation, political and economical. But if the hour of need should
come—and it may not, perhaps be far distant—the pibroch may sound
through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered."
—Sir Walter Scott.
- DUAN FOURTH, STANZA XXXVIII.,
PAGE 93."Men talk of the Sutherland clearings as if they stood
alone amidst the atrocities of the system; but those who know fully
the facts of the case can speak with as much truth of Ross-shire
clearings, the Inverness-shire clearings, the Perthshire clearings,
and, to some extent, the Argyleshire clearings. . . . Crossing to the
south of the great glen, we may begin with Glencoe. How much of its
romantic interest does the glen owe to its desolation? Let us
remember, however, that the desolation, in a large part of it, is the
result of the extrusion of its inhabitants. Travel eastward and the
footprints of the destroyer cannot be lost sight of. Large tracts
along the Spean and its tributaries are a wide waste. The southern
bank of Loch Lochy is almost without inhabitants, though the symptoms
of former occupancy are frequent. When we enter the country of the
Frasers, the same spectacle presents itself—a desolate land. Trace
the Beauly through all its upper reaches, and how many thousands upon
thousands of acres, once peopled, are, as respects human beings, a
wild wilderness. . . . Sutherland, with all its atrocities, affords
but a fraction of the atrocities that have been perpetrated in
following out the ejectment system of the Highlands. In truth, of the
habitable portion of the whole country, but a small part is now really
inhabited.
"Let us leave the past, however, and consider the present, and it is
a melancholy reflection that the year 1849 has added its long list of
Highland ejectments. While the law is banishing its tens for terms of
seven or fourteen years, as the penalty of deep-dyed crimes,
irresponsible and infatuated power is banishing its thousands for life
for no crime whatever."
—Hugh Miller: "The Witness."