Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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society, but without the vast incomes of the English landed gentry, they began to turn their attentions to generating new profits from their estates.
There has been much discussion of the motivations that underlay the turmoil of the subsequent decades, but whether the chiefs’ decisions were driven by personal greed or simply market forces, the transition to capitalism would be a painful one. The great Highland estates underwent a seismic shift which saw unprofitable tenants, who had depended on the lairds for their livelihoods, displaced – initially to provide a workforce for the burgeoning kelp industry, and later to make way for sheep. To the peasantry, these upheavals were a profound betrayal of the trust they had placed in their traditional patriarchs.
Between 1780 and 1880, an estimated half a million people left the Highlands – some under their own steam, many under duress – permanently skewing the country’s demographics towards the newly urban south and sending tens of thousands across the oceans to the New World.
It was not only the destitute who left, although many were destitute. For many young men like Angus McMillan, this was a chance to better themselves in new, more egalitarian countries, where land was cheap, or even free. Coming from a culture where land equated to power more than money ever had, this was a startling opportunity.
Australia in particular was becoming a hub of migration from the Hebrides. Visiting Skye in 1840, the novelist Catherine Sinclair commented that every family she met seemed to have a member settled in or en route there. In Angus McMillan’s immediate family, for example, it is known that four of the brothers lived at some stage in Australia: Angus himself, and his brothers John, William and Donald – who had also lived in Jamaica for some years before he joined Angus in Gippsland. A fifth brother, Norman, travelled to South America, only to drown in the Amazon.
The newspapers of the day were full of advertisements for cheap passages to the US, Canada and the new colonies of the far-off Southern Ocean, Australia and New Zealand. Some offered government assistance towards the cost. One such advert from 1835, placed by the Colonization Committee of South Australia, noted, ‘Commissioners are also prepared to receive applications from such intending Settlers as may wish to have their Servants or Labourers conveyed to the Colony FREE OF CHARGE by means of the Emigration Fund.’
As the rural population dwindled, entire villages fell empty and were abandoned to the elements and to the blackfaced sheep that now grow fat on the grass that grows high amid the ruins. Huge round stones slip one by one from their places in crumbling walls to the ground; roofless buildings shrink and sink as they are reclaimed by the land.
Balnabodach is one such village. It lies on the north-west edge of Barra, four miles from the pier at Castlebay, overlooking a tiny pebbled cove. I spotted it from the road as I cycled back from the airport, left my bike unlocked on the verge, shimmied under the fence where the sheep had got through, and headed down to inspect. A fat-rumped roan pony watched me uninterestedly as I waded through drifts of sphagnum moss, thigh-deep in places, as wet and as soft as a cloud. Within seconds my feet were squelching in their boots, peaty water oozing between my toes, my jeans soaked to the crotch.
The remains of the old village were rendered in texture and colour, most house sites made visible only by the changes in vegetation – rectangles of sheep-cropped grass gleaming amidst crowds of dark, rubbery reeds and the burned-out orange of the bracken. A single cottage was roofless but otherwise almost perfectly preserved, with a doorway and shoulder-height walls, the rocks dry-stacked, slotted together perfectly, its good condition a testament to the skill of its builder. Its windows had been sealed with rocks sometime in the distant past – the mark of the plague.
Across a stream and up a bank huddled four or five more ruins, in poorer condition. The walls had tumbled many years before; now grown over, but sitting proud to the ground, the same rounded humps of old graves.
It is a lonely prospect. In Angus McMillan’s time – the 1820s and ’30s – this would have been a busy, bustling township: a tight huddle of one-roomed blackhouses thatched with reeds, cattle penned at their backs as dogs and chickens roamed loose between the walls. But now there was nothing. Less than nothing; a palpable absence. A negative.
In the course of those two decades, a financial drama unfolded that would see the island’s ownership fall from the hands of the MacNeils of Barra, who had held the title since the eleventh century. General MacNeil, who had brought the McMillans to the island, found he had inherited an estate shackled by legalities and weighted with liabilities. Although he had served with distinction at the Battle of Waterloo, this had apparently not been enough to impress his father, Colonel Roderick, whose lack of faith in his son’s financial acumen had manifested itself in the imposition of a deed of entail upon the estate before his death to prevent its being sold off piecemeal; it had then been further bound with a large number of settlements to the colonel’s other children. At the time of his death it was already foundering.
That same year, 1822, the bottom fell out of the Scottish kelp industry when the lifting of import restrictions after the defeat of Napoleon saw the market flooded with cheaper European alternatives. Until then, lairds had been able to produce a ton of kelp for around £3 – gathering seaweed from the beaches and burning it down to create soda ash – and sell it on as fertiliser for £20. By these vertiginous profits the MacNeil accounts had been buoyed. Without them, it sank without trace.
MacNeil the younger turned to ever more desperate means of staying afloat. He established an alkali works, so the kelp could be processed on the island and thus sold at a higher price, at which the islanders were forced to work. It failed miserably. He threatened local fishermen with eviction if they sold their catch in Glasgow or to passing boats rather than at Castlebay, where he could take his cut. He seized his tenants’ cattle, and later their sheep. There was not much else to take: ‘The poverty of the people is beyond description,’ their parish priest wrote in 1831.
For all of the islanders it was a time of enormous stress and uncertainty. Even the tacksmen, like Angus’s father, were not safe: his counterpart in the south was evicted from his farm at Vatersay, which had been passed down in his family for generations.
The estate reached crisis point in 1837, when the general finally admitted defeat. As MacNeil was facing bankruptcy and preparing to sell up, Angus McMillan packed his bags and sailed for the mainland with the intention of joining his friend Allan MacCaskill on the boat to New South Wales. He was not alone. That same year, 1,253 other emigrants left Scottish ports for Australia, 2,391 for the American colonies (including Nova Scotia), and 1,130 for the United States.
This sorry tale forms the backdrop to McMillan’s departure. He was, however, fortunate to have left in time to miss the very worst the Clearances had to throw at the island.
The Barra estate was sold to an outsider, Colonel John Gordon of Cluny. Gordon was a notoriously ruthless man of vast means – ‘the richest commoner in the kingdom’ – who on his death would leave £2 million and numerous estates scattered across Scotland as well as lucrative plantations on Tobago. Over the following decade the destitute tenants would be pushed from the estate, initially in a trickle and finally in a great torrent now regarded as one of the most brutal clearances of the period.
During the 1840s, a series of crop failures left the island in a constant state of near-famine. In one particularly bleak period, the minister reported ‘a scene of horror’ as starving families scratched in the sand for cockles, without which ‘there would have been hundreds dead this day’. Gordon found that, far from the estate being an investment, he was now responsible for supporting the majority of its two-thousand-strong population. And so he began to evict them.
By the winter of 1850, the piteous state of Gordon’s expelled tenants had attracted the concerned attention of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who heard reports that a number of families from Barra had arrived in the city ‘in a state of absolute starvation’. A few months earlier, 132 families had been removed from their crofts, a feat accomplished by ‘demolishing their cottages, and then, after they were cast out desolate on the fields, getting them shipped off the island’. None ‘could speak a word of English’ – only the heavily accented Gaelic of the island.
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