Scottish Emigration

In the British Isles the countries that have suffered most from emigration since the mid-eighteenth century have been Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and in Scotland especially the Border counties and the Highlands and Islands. " Lochaber no more, " by John Watson Nicol.

The break-up of the clan system during the eighteenth century caused massive emigration from the Highlands, from the 1760s onwards, to the cities and Lowlands and to America — first to the Carolinas, and Albany (New York) and, after the American War of Independence, to Canada (Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, the eastern provinces and central Canada). From the 1840s emigrants began to favour Australia and New Zealand. One group from Assynt, led by the Reverend Norman Macleod, moved first to Canada in about 1820 and thence in 1850 to Waipu in New Zealand. Successive waves of emigration took place, mostly connected to the Highland Clearances for sheep farming, and periods of destitution.

There were Government inquiries, but not until later in the century was emigration officially controlled, and usually by the new self-governing colonies. Emigration has continued at a high rate well into the twentieth century. Between 1850 and 1950 the Highland population declined by at least 100,000.

Wherever they went, the Highland emigrants carried their language, culture and traditions and eased their pain and homesickness by transporting to their new lands the place names of their homeland — Glengarry, Glenelg, etc. In the Gaelic periodicals of the nineteenth century there is much about the emigrants and their new countries. One thinks too of Norman Macleod’s work in Gaelic, The Emigrant Ship, and John Maclean’s Gaelic poem, ‘The Gael in Canada’

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