The Story of Hebridean Emigration

The Outer Hebrides of Scotland has a historical legacy of centuries of forced and voluntary emigration, which has left the islands with descendants spread far and wide around the world. The history of these emigrations is a fascinating story of violent clan feuds, powerful landlords, poverty, pioneers and new aspirations. Bill Lawson, Genealogist, gives an overview of the history of emigration from the Outer Hebrides:

The earlier emigrations from the Hebrides, prior to 1800, were mainly those of wealthier merchant and tacksman (farmer under lease) families, who took with them subtenants and workers, many of whom set up as settlers on their own.

In the Hebrides the trade in kelp (seaweed ash) provided employment and encouraged landowners to retain a workforce on their land. When the industry failed after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and employment ceased, many families used their reserves of capital to emigrate to Cape Breton and start a new life as pioneers there. As the kelp trade became more uneconomic, landlords no longer needed a resident work-force, and began to encourage crofters to leave. Sheep-farming became the new industry in the Hebrides, as it already had in the Highlands, and many villages were cleared of all their inhabitants to add to the sheep-farms, with encouragement from landlords changing to compulsion. In the 1820s large tracts of Uig in Lewis, the machair of the west coast of Harris, Clachan and other areas in North Uist, parts of the Middle District in South Uist and Eoligarry area in Barra were cleared, and their people sent to Cape Breton, other than a few who found land elsewhere on their home island. However, we should not allow the scale of the Clearances to divert attention from the many thousands of adventurous pioneers who saw the potential of the new world, and took up the challenge of making a new life for themselves there.

Most of the kelp-shores had been on land incapable of supporting a population by agriculture, and the potato was the only possible crop. When Potato Blight struck the Hebrides in the mid-1840s, destitution followed, and famine on the scale seen in Ireland was only averted by funds and supplies sent to the Islands by charitable bodies on the mainland.

In the 1850s, the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society sponsored assisted emigration to Australia, and many hundreds of families from Harris and North Uist took the opportunity to leave for a new life there. In Lewis, Sir James Matheson, by a mixture of assistance and compulsion, persuaded many landless cottars to join earlier emigrants to the Eastern Townships of Quebec, or to Bruce County, Ontario.

Because of the size of these group emigrations, it is easy to forget the steady stream of families leaving the Islands to find employment in the cities of the industrial belt or on the farms of the Lowlands, and it is only in checking the census returns for these areas that the extent of this less well-publicised emigration is seen.

From the 1880s, land in the Canadian Prairies became available for settlement, and there were several assisted schemes to take settlers there from Lewis and Harris and from South Uist, at the same time as many young men in particular were heading across the Atlantic for work in the new lands.

All through the nineteenth century, young men had been leaving the Islands to work in the less accessible parts of the Americas. Early in the century, many Lewismen had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, some to settle in Canada and others to return to Lewis with a wife and family. Towards the end of the century the main destination for Lewismen was the sheep-ranches of Patagonia, while Harrismen tended more to the Falkland Isles.

After the First World War, there was a renewed impetus to emigration from the Hebrides, but it was no longer whole families who were emigrating, but young men and women, unwilling or unable to settle in post-war circumstances. The mass emigrations of the Metagama, the Marloch and the Canada were the most spectacular emigrations, but there were many hundreds of others who left in smaller groups to find employment in Canada and the United States, a process which is still continuing today.