Michael Veitch - Hell Ship

Perhaps the most brutal episodes of the Clearances took place across the vast shire of Sutherland, owned almost in its entirety by the phenomenally wealthy George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford and later first Duke of Sutherland. Said to be one of the richest men of nineteenth-century Britain—exceeding in wealth the fortune of even Baron Rothschild—he dubbed himself the ‘Great Improver’, although almost all he owned came through his wife, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, nineteenth Countess of Sutherland. Not that his thousands of tenants would have recognised him. It was said that in twenty years, he had visited his vast northern estates just once. His agents, sheriffs and factors, on the other hand, would soon become extremely familiar.

In the valleys of Strathnaver, entire towns and villages were cleared away like worn-out furniture. Any delay, any resistance to the evictions—even verbal protest—was taken as defiance and dealt with ruthlessly by Stafford’s men, particularly the infamous Factor for the Sutherland Estates, Patrick Sellar. His name, even today, induces a shudder of loathing to people in Scotland’s north.

Sellar employed teams of men to move people on with increasing brutality. Those slow to respond to the writs of removal had their houses torn down, with teams of horses being used to rip out beams and walls. Gone were the days when they were at least permitted to take their timbers with them—wood being a rare commodity in the Highlands. Then fire became the preferred tool. Entire villages of Strathnaver were set ablaze, houses lit at both ends at once, often with their inhabitants still inside. No pity was shown for age. Old women and children were ordered out or pushed into the elements, their furniture—often their only worldly possessions—smashed to pieces or going up in flames with the houses. In one such eviction, an old woman perished inside a house Sellar had set alight. It took two years for him to come to trial, only to be acquitted in minutes by a jury of fellow landowners and agents, along with a grovelling apology from the presiding magistrate.

Local ministers of God, not even remaining silent throughout their ordeal, sided almost exclusively with the landowning gentry, who promised them new manses and carriage roads leading up to their front doors. Thus bought, they turned on their own flock, threatening the more stubborn evictees with hellfire and eternal damnation for the slightest disobedience. Bleating waves of Cheviot sheep broke over the hills even before some tenants had had time to obey the eviction orders.

The evicted Highlanders were given no real compensation, offered no halfway houses, and no emergency or interim accommodation, no transport and no assistance to reconstruct their lives in whatever place it was they had been sent to. They were simply ordered to pack up, leave their crops to rot in the ground, take their few cattle and go.

The alternative coastal allotments generously provided by the Duke and Duchess to their ejected and homeless tenants were so miserable and so inadequate that, in many instances, it was all but impossible to eke out an existence. Rocky stretches of worthless moor and bog, whipped endlessly by the winds and waves rolling in from the Arctic. Unused to seas and tides, many were drowned or swept out to sea attempting to learn such alien activities as salt-making. The soil was, for the most part, thin and unproductive. Crops were attempted, but seeds that were not blown away on the wind sprouted weak green shoots that were killed by salt and mildew. People who had, over generations, established sustainable patterns of harvest on their modest plots now simply had to rely on what was provided by the merciless sea. In a sense, it did not matter where they had been sent:

Once expelled from the glen they had occupied for generations, it was of small consequence to them whether they travelled ten miles or four thousand. The loss was the same, the pain as great. [2] Prebble, 1963, p. 21

One Highlander remembering his home before the time of the Clearances described being able to see the next village not more than three-quarters of a mile away from his own, with the next one the same distance beyond that. Now, four shepherds, their dogs and 3000 sheep occupied land that had once supported five townships. [3] Prebble, 1963, p. 28

There were indeed improvements in the Highlands , but as one local observer, and one of the few local and articulate critics of the Clearances, Donald MacLeod, observed in a series of letters written to Edinburgh newspapers:

Roads, bridges, inns and manses to be sure, for the accommodation of the new gentlemen, tenantry and clergy, but those who spoke the Gaelic tongue were a proscribed race, and everything was done to get rid of them, by driving them into the forlorn hope of deriving subsistence from the sea while squatting on their miserable allotments where, in their wretched hovels, they lingered out an almost hopeless existence. [4] D. McLeod, 1841, History of the Destitution in Sutherlandshire , Edinburgh: self-published, p. 35

There was some mobbing and deforcing of sheriff officers, and riots occasionally erupted at places like Strath Oykel and Gruids, but such resistance was quickly and ruthlessly put down in the courts. Soon, it petered out into resignation and despair:

The old weaknesses of the Highlanders had ended it—their lack of leadership, their childish faith in the laird, who must surely now change his mind, and, most insidious of all, their melancholy belief that they had been a doomed race since Culloden. Their comfort came in the stirring sadness of their own destruction. [5] Prebble 1963, p. 125

In the midst of the various waves of cruelty, there were one or two who resisted the tide. The Chisholm Clan, who had held the green and dark valleys of the Upper Valley of the River Beauly near Loch Ness for generations, were well used to standing by their beliefs before the fury of authority. Remaining defiantly Roman Catholic since the Scottish Reformation of 1560, they continued to hide Catholic priests on their estate, even allowing them to preach the old faith to their wary congregations in secret locations.

In the face of pressure to turn his rich lands over to sheep at the expense of his people, Alexander Chisholm, the ageing twenty-third chief, resisted. Folklore has it that his only daughter, Mary, burst into the room where an all-night meeting was taking place between her father and a delegation of pleading sheep farmers, hurling abuse at them. She was ordered out of the room, but instead tipped off the servants who alerted the surrounding villagers. When morning came, it is said that a thousand people had gathered outside Alexander’s door, begging him to protect them, telling him that these sheep men were worse than any enemy who had ever come to Strathglass with a broadsword in their hand. The southerners read the wind and made their escape up the glen. Looking back, they reported the old man being carried on the shoulders of his people as their saviour.

When Alexander died, his widow Elizabeth and daughter Mary continued their resistance to the Clearances, fiercely holding onto their tenants until William, the twenty-fourth Chisholm, and half-brother of Alexander, began the total dispersal of the clan. Now a married woman in London, Mary could do nothing and, brokenhearted, turned her back on the cause forever.

As if compensating in cruelty for his half-brother’s mercy, William Chisholm began one of the most thorough Clearances of all. In the case of Strathglass, not even an alternative plot on the coast was offered to the exiled tenants, who were burned out of their homes. Their only alternative was an emigrant ship to Canada. By 1812, 10,000 Chisholm clansmen and women had been exiled to the New World, with but a single solitary tenant, an ageing farmer, remaining on the once populous estate.