Let us follow, for a little, the poor Highlanders of Sutherland to the
sea-coast. It would be easy dwelling on the terrors of their
expulsion, and multiplying facts of horror; but had there been no
permanent deterioration effected in their condition, these, all
harrowing and repulsive as they were, would have mattered less.
Sutherland would have soon recovered the burning up of a few hundred
hamlets, or the loss of a few bedridden old people, who would have
died as certainly under cover, though perhaps a few months later, as
when exposed to the elements in the open air. Nay, had it lost a
thousand of its best men in the way in which it lost so many at the
storming of New Orleans, the blank ere now would have been completely
filled up. The calamities of fire or of decimation even, however
distressing in themselves, never yet ruined a country: no calamity
ruins a country that leaves the surviving inhabitants to develope, in
their old circumstances, their old character and resources.
In one of the eastern eclogues of Collins, where two shepherds are
described as flying for their lives before the troops of a ruthless
invader, we see with how much of the terrible the imagination of a poet
could invest the evils of war, when aggravated by pitiless barbarity.
Fertile as that imagination was, however, there might be found new
circumstances to heighten the horrors of the scene--circumstances
beyond the reach of invention--in the retreat of the Sutherland
Highlanders from the smoking ruins of their cottages to their
allotments on the coast. We have heard of one man, named M'Kay, whose
family, at the time of the greater conflagration referred to by
M'Leod, were all lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his sick
children on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have heard of
the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew of some vessel
wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they might sustain life by
the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare by the ebb. Many of their
allotments, especially on the western coast, were barren in the
extreme--unsheltered by bush or tree, and exposed to the sweeping
sea-winds, and, in time of tempest, to the blighting spray; and it was
found a matter of the extremest difficulty to keep the few cattle
which they had retained, from wandering, especially in the night-time,
into the better sheltered and more fertile interior. The poor
animals were intelligent enough to read a practical comment on the
nature of the change effected; and, from the harshness of the
shepherds to whom the care of the interior had been entrusted, they
served materially to add to the distress of their unhappy masters.
They were getting continually impounded; and vexatious fines, in the
form of trespass-money, came thus to be wrung from the already
impoverished Highlanders. Many who had no money to give were obliged
to relieve them by depositing some of their few portable articles of
value, such as bed or body clothes, or, more distressing still,
watches and rings and pins--the only relics, in not a few instances, of
brave men whose bones were mouldering under the fatal rampart at New
Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt--on that spot of proud
recollection, where the invincibles of Napoleon went down before the
Highland bayonet. Their first efforts as fishermen were what might
be expected from a rural people unaccustomed to the sea. The shores of
Sutherland, for immense tracts together, are iron-bound, and much
exposed--open on the eastern coast to the waves of the German Ocean,
and on the north and west to the long roll of the Atlantic. There could
not be more perilous seas for the unpractised boatman to take his first
lessons on; but though the casualties were numerous, and the loss of
life great, many of the younger Highlanders became expert fishermen.
The experiment was harsh in the extreme, but so far, at least, it
succeeded. It lies open, however, to other objections than those which
have been urged against it on the score of its inhumanity.
The reader must be acquainted with Goldsmith's remarks on the herring
fishery of his days. 'A few years ago,' he says, 'the herring fishing
employed all Grub Street; it was the topic in every coffee-house, and
the burden of every ballad. We were to drag up oceans of gold from the
bottom of the sea; we were to supply all Europe with herrings upon our
own terms. At present, however, we hear no more of all this; we have
fished up very little gold that I can learn; nor do we furnish the
world with herrings, as was expected.' We have, in this brief passage,
a history of all the more sanguine expectations which have been
founded on herring fisheries. There is no branch of industry so
calculated to awaken the hopes of the speculator, or so suited to
disappoint them. So entirely is this the case, that were we desirous
to reduce an industrious people to the lowest stage of wretchedness
compatible with industry, we would remove them to some barren
district, and there throw them on the resources of this fishery
exclusively. The employments of the herring fisher have all the
uncertainty of the ventures of the gambler. He has first to lay down,
if we may so speak, a considerable stake, for his drift of nets and
his boat involve a very considerable outlay of capital; and if
successful, and if in general the fishery be _not_ successful, the
_take_ of a single week may more than remunerate him. A single cast of
his nets may bring him in thirty guineas and more. The die turns up in
his favour, and he sweeps the board. And hence those golden dreams of
the speculator so happily described by Goldsmith. But year after year
may pass, and the run of luck be against the fisherman. A fishing
generally good at all the stations gluts the market, necessarily
limited in its demands to an average supply, and, from the bulk and
weight of the commodity, not easily extended to distant parts: and the
herring merchant first, and the fisherman next, find that they have
been labouring hard to little purpose. Again, a fishing under average,
from the eccentric character of the fish, is found almost always to
benefit a few, and to ruin a great many. The average deficiency is
never equally spread over the fishermen; one sweeps the board--another
loses all. Nor are the cases few in which the accustomed shoal wholly
deserts a tract of coast for years together; and thus the lottery,
precarious at all times, becomes a lottery in which there are only
blanks to be drawn. The wealthy speculator might perhaps watch such
changes, and by supplementing the deficiency of one year by the
abundance of another, give to the whole a character of average; but
alas for the poor labouring man placed in such circumstances! The
yearly disbursements of our Scottish Fishery Board, in the way of
assistance to poverty-struck fishermen, unable even to repair their
boats, testify all too tangibly that they cannot regulate their long
runs of ill luck by their temporary successes! And if such be the case
among our hereditary fishermen of the north, who derive more than half
their sustenance from the white fishery, how much more must it affect
those fishermen of Sutherland, who, having no market for their white
fish in the depopulated interior, and no merchants settled among them
to find markets farther away, have to depend exclusively on their
herring fishing! The experiment which precipitated the population of
the country on its barer skirts, as some diseases precipitate the
humours on the extremities, would have been emphatically a disastrous
one, so far at least as the people were concerned, even did it involve
no large amount of human suffering, and no deterioration of
character.
One of the first writers, of unquestioned respectability, who acquainted
the public with the true character of the revolution which had been
effected in Sutherland, was the late General Stewart of Garth. He
was, we believe, the first man--and the fact says something for his
shrewdness--who saw a coming poor-law looming through the _clearing_ of
Sutherland. His statements are exceedingly valuable; his inferences
almost always just. The General--a man of probity and nice honour--had
such an ability of estimating the value of moral excellence in a
people, as the originators of the revolution had of estimating the
antagonist merits of double pounds of mutton and single pounds of
beef. He had seen printed representations on the subject--tissues of
hollow falsehood, that have since been repeated in newspapers and
reviews; and though unacquainted with the facts at the time, he saw
sufficient reason to question their general correctness, from the
circumstance that he found in them the character of the people, with
which no man could be better acquainted, vilified and traduced. The
General saw one leviathan falsehood running through the whole, and,
on the strength of the old adage, naturally suspected the company in
which he found it. And so, making minute and faithful inquiry, he
published the results at which he arrived. He refers to the mode of
ejectment by the torch. He next goes on to show how some of the ejected
tenants were allowed small allotments of moor on the coast side, of from
half an acre to two acres in extent, which it was their task to break
into corn land; and how that, because many patches of green appear
in this way, where all was russet before, the change has been much
eulogized as improvement. We find him remarking further, with
considerable point and shrewdness, that 'many persons are, however,
inclined to doubt the advantages of improvements which call for such
frequent apologies,' and that, 'if the advantage to the people were so
evident, or if more lenient measures had been pursued, vindication
could not have been necessary.' The General knew how to pass from
the green spots themselves to the condition of those who tilled them.
The following passage must strike all acquainted with the Highlanders
of Sutherland as a true representation of the circumstances to which
they have been reduced:
'Ancient respectable tenants who have passed the greater part of life
in the enjoyment of abundance, and in the exercise of hospitality and
charity, possessing stock of ten, twenty, and thirty breeding cows,
with the usual proportion of other stock, are now pining on one or two
acres of bad land, with one or two starved cows; and for this
accommodation a calculation is made, that they must support their
families, and pay the rent of their lots, not from the produce, but
from the sea, thus drawing a rent which the land cannot afford. When
the herring fishing succeeds, they generally satisfy the landlord,
whatever privations they may suffer; but when the fishing fails, they
fall into arrears. The herring fishing, always precarious, has for a
succession of years been very defective, and this class of people are
reduced to extreme misery. At first, some of them possessed capital,
from converting their farm-stock into cash, but this has been long
exhausted; and it is truly distressing to view their general poverty,
aggravated by their having once enjoyed abundance and independence.'
Some of the removals to which we have referred took place during that
group of scarce seasons in which the year 1816 was so prominent; but
the scarcity which these induced served merely to render the other
sufferings of the people more intense, and was lost sight of in the
general extent of the calamity. Another group of hard seasons came
on,--one of those groups which seem of such certain and yet of such
irregular occurrence in our climate, that though they have attracted
notice from the days of Bacon downwards, they have hitherto resisted
all attempts to include them in some definite cycle. The summer and
harvest of 1835 were the last of a series of fine summers and abundant
harvests; and for six years after there was less than the usual heat,
and more than the usual rain. Science, in connection with agriculture,
has done much for us in the low country, and so our humbler population
were saved from the horrors of a dearth of food; but on the green
patches which girdle the shores of Sutherland, and which have been
esteemed such wonderful improvements, science had done and could do
nothing. The people had been sinking lower and lower during the
previous twenty years, and what would have been great hardship before
had become famine now. One feels at times that it may be an advantage
to have lived among the humbler people. We have been enabled, in
consequence, to detect many such gross misstatements as those with
which the apologists of the disastrous revolution effected in
Sutherland have attempted to gloss over the ruin of that country. In
other parts of the Highlands, especially in the Hebrides, the failure
of the kelp trade did much to impoverish the inhabitants; but in the
Highlands of Sutherland the famine was the effect of _improvement_
alone.
The writer of these chapters saw how a late, untoward year operates on
the bleak shores of the north-western Highlands, when spending a
season there a good many years ago. He found what only a few
twelvemonths previous had been a piece of dark moor, laid out into
minute patches of corn, and bearing a dense population. The herring
fishing had failed for the two seasons before, and the poor cottars
were, in consequence, in arrears with their rent; but the crops had
been tolerable; and though their stores of meal and potatoes were all
exhausted at the time of our coming among them (the month of June),
and though no part of the growing crop was yet fit for use, the white
fishing was abundant, and a training of hardship had enabled them to
subsist on fish exclusively. Their corn shot in the genial sunshine,
and gave fair promise, and their potatoes had become far enough
advanced to supplement their all too meagre meals, when, after a
terrible thunder-storm, the fine weather broke up, and for thirteen
weeks together there scarce passed a day without its baffling winds
and its heavy chilling showers. The oats withered without ripening;
the hardy bear might be seen rustling on all the more exposed slopes,
light as the common rye-grass of our hay-fields, the stalks, in vast
proportion, shorn of the ears. It was only in a very few of the more
sheltered places that it yielded a scanty return of a dark-coloured
and shrivelled grain. And to impart a still deeper shade to the
prospects of the poor Highlanders, the herring fishery failed as
signally as in the previous years. There awaited them all too
obviously a whole half year of inevitable famine, unless Lowland
charity interfered in their behalf. And the recurrence of this state
of things no amount of providence or exertion on their own part, when
placed in such circumstances, can obviate or prevent. It was a
conviction of this character, based on experience, which led the
writer of these remarks to state, when giving evidence before the
present Poor-Law Commissioners for Scotland, that though opposed to
the principle of legal assessment generally, he could yet see no other
mode of reaching the destitution of the Highlands. Our humane Scottish
law compels the man who sends another man to prison to support him
there, just because it is held impossible that within the walls of a
prison a man can support himself. Should the principle alter, if,
instead of sending him to a prison, he banishes him to a bleak,
inhospitable coast, where, unless he receives occasional support from
others, he must inevitably perish?
The sufferings of the people of Sutherland during the first of these
years of destitution (1836), we find strikingly described by M'Leod:
'In this year,' says the author, 'the crops all over Britain were
deficient, having bad weather for growing and ripening, and still
worse for gathering in. But in the Highlands they were an entire
failure; and on the untoward spots, occupied by the Sutherland small
tenants, there was literally nothing fit for human subsistence. And to
add to the calamity, the weather had prevented them from securing the
peats, their only fuel; so that, to their previous state of
exhaustion, cold and hunger were to be superadded. The sufferings
endured by the poor Highlanders in the succeeding winter truly beggar
description. Even the herring fishing had failed, and consequently
their credit in Caithness, which depended on its success, was at an
end. Any little provision they might be able to procure was of the
most inferior and unwholesome description. It was no uncommon thing to
see people searching among the snow for the frosted potatoes to eat in
order to preserve life. As the harvest had been disastrous, so the
winter was uncommonly boisterous and severe, and consequently little
could be obtained from the sea to mitigate the calamity. The distress
rose to such a height as to cause a sensation all over the island; and
there arose a general cry for Government interference, to save the
people from death by famine.'
Public meetings were held, private subscriptions entered into, large
funds collected, the British people responded to the cry of their
suffering fellow-subjects, and relief was extended to every portion of
the Highlands except one. Alas for poor Sutherland! There, it was
said, the charity of the country was not required, as the noble and
wealthy proprietors had themselves resolved to interfere; and as this
statement was circulated extensively through the public prints, and
sedulously repeated at all public meetings, the mind of the community
was set quite at rest on the matter. And interfere the proprietors at
length did. Late in the spring of 1837, after sufferings the most
incredible had been endured, and disease and death had been among the
wretched people, they received a scanty supply of meal and seed-corn,
for which, though vaunted at the time as a piece of munificent
charity, the greater part of them had afterwards to pay.
In the next chapter we shall endeavour bringing these facts to bear on
the cause of the Free Church in Sutherland. We close for the present
by adding just one curious fact more. We have already shown how the
bleak moors of Sutherland have been mightily improved by the
revolution which ruined its people. They bear many green patches which
were brown before. Now it so happened that rather more than ten years
ago, the idea struck the original improvers, that as green was an
improvement on brown, so far as the moors were concerned, white would
be an equally decided improvement on black, so far as the houses were
concerned. An order was accordingly issued, in the name of the Duke
and Duchess of Sutherland, that all the small tenants on both sides
the public road, where it stretches on the northern coast from the
confines of Reay to the Kyle of Tongue, a distance of about thirty
miles, should straightway build themselves new houses of stone and
mortar, according to a prescribed plan and specification. Pharaoh's
famous order could not have bred greater consternation. But the only
alternative given was summed up in the magic word _removal_; and the
poor Highlanders, dejected, tamed, broken in spirit as in means, well
knew from experience what the magic word meant. And so, as their
prototypes set themselves to gather stubble for their bricks, the poor
Highlanders began to build. We again quote from M'Leod:
'Previous to this, in the year 1829, I and my family had been forced
away, like others, being particularly obnoxious to those in authority
for sometimes showing an inclination to oppose their tyranny, and
therefore we had to be made examples of to frighten the rest; but in
1833 I made a tour of the district, when the building was going on,
and shall endeavour to describe a small part of what met my eye on
that occasion. In one locality (and this was a specimen of the rest) I
saw fourteen different squads of masons at work, with the natives
attending them. Old grey-headed men, worn down by previous hardship
and present want, were to be seen carrying stones, and wheeling them
and other materials on barrows, or conveying them on their backs to
the buildings, and with their tottering limbs and trembling hands
straining to raise them on the walls. The young men also, after
toiling all night at sea endeavouring for subsistence, were obliged to
yield their exhausted frames to the labours of the day. Even female
labour could not be dispensed with; the strong as well as the weak,
the delicate and sickly, and (shame to their oppressors) even the
pregnant, barefooted and scantily clothed, were obliged to join in
those rugged, unfeminine labours. In one instance I saw the husband
quarrying stones, and the wife and children dragging them along in an
old cart to the building. Such were the building scenes of that
period. The poor people had often to give the last morsel of food they
possessed to feed the masons, and subsist on shell-fish themselves.
This went on for several years, in the course of which many hundreds
of these houses were erected on unhospitable spots unfit for a human
residence.'
We add another extract from the same writer:
'It might be thought,' adds M'Leod, 'that the design of forcing the
people to build such houses was to provide for their comfort and
accommodation, but there seems to have been quite a different
object,--which, I believe, was the true motive,--and that was to hide
the misery that prevailed. There had been a great sensation created in
the public mind by the cruelties exercised in these districts; and it
was thought that a number of neat white houses, ranged on each side of
the road, would take the eye of strangers and visitors, and give a
practical contradiction to the rumours afloat. Hence the poor
creatures were forced to resort to such means, and to endure such
hardships and privations as I have described, to carry the scheme into
effect. And after they had spent their remaining all, and more than
their all, on the erection of these houses, and involved themselves in
debt, for which they have been harassed and pursued ever since, what
are these erections but whitened tombs! many of them now ten years in
existence, and still without proper doors or windows, destitute of
furniture and of comfort,--the unhappy lairs of a heart-broken,
squalid, fast-degenerating race.'