The old weaknesses of the Highlanders had ended it—their lack of leadership, their childish faith in the laird, who must surely now change his mind, and, most insidious of all, their melancholy belief that they had been a doomed race since Culloden. Their comfort came in the stirring sadness of their own destruction.[5]
In the midst of the various waves of cruelty, there were one or two who resisted the tide. The Chisholm Clan, who had held the green and dark valleys of the Upper Valley of the River Beauly near Loch Ness for generations, were well used to standing by their beliefs before the fury of authority. Remaining defiantly Roman Catholic since the Scottish Reformation of 1560, they continued to hide Catholic priests on their estate, even allowing them to preach the old faith to their wary congregations in secret locations.
In the face of pressure to turn his rich lands over to sheep at the expense of his people, Alexander Chisholm, the ageing twenty-third chief, resisted. Folklore has it that his only daughter, Mary, burst into the room where an all-night meeting was taking place between her father and a delegation of pleading sheep farmers, hurling abuse at them. She was ordered out of the room, but instead tipped off the servants who alerted the surrounding villagers. When morning came, it is said that a thousand people had gathered outside Alexander’s door, begging him to protect them, telling him that these sheep men were worse than any enemy who had ever come to Strathglass with a broadsword in their hand. The southerners read the wind and made their escape up the glen. Looking back, they reported the old man being carried on the shoulders of his people as their saviour.
When Alexander died, his widow Elizabeth and daughter Mary continued their resistance to the Clearances, fiercely holding onto their tenants until William, the twenty-fourth Chisholm, and half-brother of Alexander, began the total dispersal of the clan. Now a married woman in London, Mary could do nothing and, brokenhearted, turned her back on the cause forever.
As if compensating in cruelty for his half-brother’s mercy, William Chisholm began one of the most thorough Clearances of all. In the case of Strathglass, not even an alternative plot on the coast was offered to the exiled tenants, who were burned out of their homes. Their only alternative was an emigrant ship to Canada. By 1812, 10,000 Chisholm clansmen and women had been exiled to the New World, with but a single solitary tenant, an ageing farmer, remaining on the once populous estate.
Although it is impossible to be exact, it is estimated that between half and two-thirds of the population of the Scottish Highlands was dispersed by the Clearances in the first 30 years of the nineteenth century. Now half a million sheep grazed the otherwise empty glens, wandering across the ruins of myriad houses, nibbling at the occasional potato shoot that still managed to appear in what had been a garden patch that had once sustained several families, wandering through the ruins of kitchens, climbing over the broken stone walls and hearths of former homes.
With awful irony, the Highlands now became something of a tourist playground. English visitors began to arrive, invigorated by the area’s magnificent walks and clean country air, now accessible with excellent new roads, bridges and inns. Deer and grouse shooting parties—which hunted for amusement the same game upon which others had relied for sustenance—began to pour into the area, happy to fork out the handsome fees the estate owners charged for the privilege. Highland culture even underwent something of a revival. The tartan and the Tam O’Shanter began to be sported by the young and fashionable of Edinburgh and London. The works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns began a romanticisation of the Highlander that persists to this day. Of the Highlanders themselves, however, there was no sign whatsoever—save for a few wandering vagrants—and only piles of scorched stones to indicate they had ever been there at all.
Clinging to their thin allotments along the coast and the islands, many dispersed Highlanders scratched out a bleak existence, but the herring fishers found that the fish were unreliable—sometimes disappearing for a year or so before inexplicably returning—and storms along the wild west coast smashed boats and split apart nets. Many worked in the kelp industry, but when the Napoleonic Wars brought an end to tariffs on cheaper Spanish kelp, the Highland market collapsed.
Then, to pile further woe on misery, in the summer of 1846, clouds of white spores began to be carried across the Highlands by wind, man and beast after a tumultuous year of severe drought followed by savage storms and floods. This fine white powder settled on everything that grew. Almost overnight, the potato plants began to blacken, their leaves turning to slime. When opened, the tubers in the earth were found to be black and rotten, and smelt of death. The blight had arrived.
Although never as severe or as prolonged as the Great Famine that had broken the previous year and continued to rage across Ireland, the Highland famine put 200,000 people at risk of starvation. The potato had only been introduced to the Highlands and islands a century before, but, particularly after the Clearances, it was found to be one of the few crops that could be relied upon in the doubtful soils along the coast. By the 1840s, one half of the entire Scottish population lived on the potato for nine months of the year, while in the Highlands, it was estimated to be two-thirds.
The blight wreaked its havoc with astonishing speed. Entire fields which were healthy on a Friday were black and rotten by Sunday. By the summer, it was evident that the entire Highland potato crop had failed.
While the death rate across the Highlands increased threefold—primarily from malnutrition and associated illnesses—the massive level of mortality seen in Ireland was avoided. As had happened there, however, the sanctity of commerce remained inviolable, and even in the face of starvation, ships departed Scottish ports weighed down to the waterline with Scottish foodstuffs such as oatmeal to honour contracts signed in England and further abroad. Soon, vessels in harbours required naval protection from rioters on the docks.
A government relief fund of sorts was established whereby recipients were required to work hard on government projects—such as road building—in order to receive any support at all. The terms were harsh. If only one member of a family of any size was deemed to be working, the rest were ineligible for any relief whatever. By 1850, however, the relief had all but run out, while the blight in some areas persisted. It was the final straw for the Highlanders. For thousands, there was now no alternative but to emigrate.
With the blight eradicating any hope that the Scottish islands might become self-sufficient, the Skye Emigration Society was formed in 1851 to deal with the humanitarian crisis unfolding there. It soon evolved to include the entire Highlands as the Highland and Island Emigration Society, with its aims being
to procure help for those who wish to emigrate but have not the means of doing so, to afford information, encouragement and assistance to all whom emigration would be a relief from want and misery.[6]
And so began the mass exodus of the Highland Scots to all parts of the world, particularly Canada and Australia, answering the calls from the labour-starved colonies. There, they were assured, they were both wanted and needed. For many Scots travelling to Australia, the irony was not lost on them: sheep had forced them out of their old homes, and it was sheep that were now luring them to the new. Since 1845, in Ross and in the Isles, the Great Cheviot Sheep had been making sure that its cousins in Australia would not want for drovers.[7]
Over the next decade, an estimated 16,000 Highlanders finally decided that, after exile and famine, their best and only hope lay on the far side of the world.