CHAPTER V.
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 425 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 426 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 427 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. 428
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 429 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 430 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 431 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: 432
‘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 433 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 434 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 435 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.’ 436