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THE English emigrant is prosaic; Highland and Irish
emigrants are poetical. How is this? The wild-rose lanes of England, one would
think, are as bitter to part from, and as worthy to be remembered at the
antipodes, as the wild coasts of Skye or the green hills of Ireland.
Oddly enough, poet and painter turn a cold shoulder on the English
emigrant, while they expend infinite pathos on the emigrants from Erin
or the Highlands. The Highlander has his Lochaber-no-more, and the
Irishman has the Countess of Gifford’s pretty song. The ship in the
offing, and the parting of Highland emigrants on the sea-shore, have
been made the subject of innumerable paintings; and yet there is a
sufficient reason for it all. Young man and maid are continually
parting; but unless the young man and maid are lovers, the
farewell-taking has no attraction for the singer or the artist. Without
the laceration of love, without some tumult of sorrowful emotion, a
parting is the most prosaic thing in the world; with these it is perhaps
the most affecting. "Good-bye" serves for
the one; the most sorrowful words of the poet are hardly sufficient for
the other. Rightly or wrongly, it is popularly understood that the
English emigrant is not mightily moved by regret when he beholds the
shores that gave him birth withdrawing themselves into the dimness of
the far horizon,—although, if true, why it should be so? and if false,
how it has crept into the common belief? are questions not easy to
answer. If the Englishman is obtuse and indifferent in this respect, the
Highlander is not. He has a cat-like love for locality. He finds it as
difficult to part from the faces of the familiar hills as from the faces
of his neighbours. In the land of his adoption he cherishes the
language, the games, and the songs of his childhood; and he thinks with
a continual sadness of the gray-green slopes of Lochaber, and the
thousand leagues of dim, heartbreaking sea tossing between them and him.
The Celt clings to his birthplace, as the ivy nestles
lovingly to its wall; the Saxon is like the arrowy seeds of the
dandelion, that travel on the wind and strike root afar. This simply
means that the one race has a larger imagination than the other, and an
intenser feeling of association. Emigration is more painful to the Highlander than it is to the Englishman—this
poet and painter have instinctively felt—and in wandering up and down
Skye you come into contact with this pain, either fresh or in
reminiscence, not unfrequently. Although the member of his family be
years removed, the Skyeman lives in him imaginatively - just as
the man who has endured an operation is for ever conscious of the
removed limb. And this horror of emigration—common to the entire
Highlands—has been increased by the fact that it has not unfrequently
been a forceful matter, that potent landlords have torn down houses and
turned out the inhabitants, have authorised evictions, have deported the
dwellers of entire glens. That the landlords so acting have not been
without grounds of justification may in all probability be true. The
deported villagers may have been cumberers of the ground, they may have
been unable to pay rent, they may have been slowly but surely sinking
into pauperism, their prospect of securing a comfortable subsistence in
the colonies may be considerable, while in their own glens it may be nil,—all
this may be true; but to have your house unroofed before your eyes, and
made to go on board a ship bound for Canada, even although the
passage-money be paid for you, is not pleasant. An obscure sense of
wrong is kindled in heart and brain. It is just possible that what is
for the landlord’s interest may be for yours also in the long run; but
you feel that the landlord has looked after his own interest in the
first place. He wished you away, and he has got you away; whether you
will succeed in Canada is matter of dubiety. The human gorge rises at
this kind of forceful banishment—more particularly the gorge of the
banished!
When Thursday came, the
Landlord drove us over to Skeabost, at which place, at noon, the emigrants
were to assemble. He told me on the way that some of the more sterile
portions of his property were over-populated, and that the people there
could no more prosper than trees that have been too closely planted. He
was consequently a great advocate of emigration. He maintained that force
should never be used, but advice and persuasion only; that when consent
was obtained, there should be held out a helping hand. It was his idea
that if a man went all the way to Canada to oblige you, it was but fair
that you should make his journey as pleasant as possible, and provide him
employment, or, at all events, put him in the way of obtaining it when he
got there. In Canada, consequently, he purchased lands, made these lands
over to a resident relative, and to the charge of that relative, who had
erected houses, and who had trees to fell, and fields to plough, and
cattle to look after, he consigned his emigrants. He took care that they
were safely placed on shipboard at Glasgow or Liverpool, and his relative
was in waiting when they arrived. When the friendly face died on this side
of the Atlantic, a new friendly face dawned on them on the other. With
only one class of tenant was he inclined to be peremptory. He had no wish
to disturb in their turf-hut the old man and woman who had brought up a
family!; but when the grown-up son brought home a wife to the same hut, he
was down upon them, like a severing knife, at once. The young people could
not remain there; they might go where they pleased; he would rather they
would go to Canada than anywhere, but out of the old dwelling they must
march. And the young people frequently jumped at the Landlord’s offer—labour
and good wages calling sweetly to them from across the sea. The Landlord
had already sent out a troop of emigrants, of whose condition and
prospects he had the most encouraging accounts, both from themselves and
others, and the second troop were that day to meet him at Skeabost.
When we got to Skeabost
there were the emigrants, to the number perhaps of fifty or sixty, seated
on the lawn. They were dressed as was their wont on Sundays, when prepared
for church. The men wore suits of blue or gray kelt, the women were
wrapped for the most part in tartan plaids. They were decent, orderly,
intelligent, and on the faces of most was a certain resolved look, as if
they had carefully considered the matter, and had made up their minds to
go through with it. They were of every variety of age too; the greater
proportion young men who had long years of vigorous work in them, who
would fell many a tree, and reap many a field before their joints
stiffened: women, fresh, comely, and strong, not yet mothers, but who
would be grandmothers before their term of activity was past In the party,
too, was a sprinkling of middle-aged people, with whom the world had gone
hardly, and who were hoping that Canada would prove kinder than Skye. They
all rose and saluted the Landlord respectfully as we drove down toward the
house. The porch was immediately made a hall of audience. The Landlord sat
in a chair, Pen took his seat at the table, and opened a large scroll-book
in which the names of the emigrants were inscribed. One by one the people
came from the lawn to the porch and made known their requirements :—a
man had not yet made up his passage-money, and required an advance; a
woman desired a pair of blankets; an old man wished the Landlord to buy
his cow, which was about to calve, and warranted an excellent milker. With
each of these the Landlord talked sometimes in Gaelic, more frequently in
English; entered into the circumstances of each, and commended, rebuked,
expostulated, as occasion required. When an emigrant had finished his
story, and made his bargain with the Landlord, Pen wrote the conditions
thereof against his or her name in the large scroll-book. The giving of
audience began about noon, and it was evening before it was concluded. By
that time every emigrant had been seen, talked with, and disposed of. For
each the way to Canada was smoothed, and the terms set down by Pen in his
scroll-book; and each, as he went away, was instructed to hold himself in
readiness on the 15th of the following month, for on that day they were to
depart.
When the emigrants were
gone we smoked on the lawn, with the moon rising behind us. Next morning
our party broke up. Fellowes and the Landlord went off in the mail to
Inverness; the one to resume his legal reading there, the other to catch
the train for London. Pen went to Bracadale, where he had some business to
transact preparatory to going to Ireland, and I drove in to Portree to
meet the southward-going steamer, for vacation was over, and my Summer in
Skye had come to an end. |
