‘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