Scots have migrated all over the world, but today I m going to talk about THE most
incredible of all migration journeys. If you re interested in the people,
Places and events in Scottish history then click the subscribe button at the bottom
right of the screen. In the meantime,
let me tell you a story. When the battle of Waterloo was
being fought on the European mainland, there was another battle going on in Wester Ross.
No, not that one, this one.
Actually technically it was Sutherland.... No
In the small town of Ullapool that clings to our Atlantic coastline,
a schoolteacher and preacher called Norman MacLeod was involved in yet another feud
with the establishment. He d grown up in the rugged,
even harsh environment of Assynt working the land and fishing the sea.
But this voracious reader and solemn presbyterian saw his future fishing for men...
It s a long walk from Assynt to Aberdeen University, Gold Medals and theological studies.
It s quite another journey from there to Edinburgh
where the wheels came off the lorry as he parked it to prepare for Church of Scotland ministry.
The great schism that created the Free Church of Scotland wouldn t be for another twenty years,
but the struggle between Auld Licht sober, formal, hard-line piety
and New Licht light touch fannying aboot Presbyterianism
had been going on for some time. Norman MacLeod was Auld Lichty...
and the Church of Scotland s laxity was why he had given up on its ministry...
and what caused the stooshie with the local parish minister in Ullapool.
The minister who could control the attendance of Norman s students at school
when Norman refused attendance at Sunday services.
Locked out of his school, he went back to the fishing,
choosing the most dangerous, but best paid fishing jobs up in Wick...
to pay down debts and fund an Atlantic trip to start a new life and career... in
Nova Scotia... at the age of 36... with his first career hardly started.
En route Norman s role as a visionary leader was called on.
In a violent Mid Atlantic gale, the ship sprang a leak.
Every hand was bailing out the boat as water spilled in and threatened to overwhelm them.
The Captain announced he was turning back for Ireland.
That s when Norman s diverse roles as seaman and religious visionary coincided.
The seaman calculated their longitude was nearer to Nova Scotia, then Ireland,
but the preacher told passengers and crew that they should continue westwards...
because God had shown him a vision of disaster if they turn back.
Trusting the holy man s insight... Nova Scotia was sighted not long after.
Norman had created a congregation. I ll be preaching the gospel of Scotland back home
this autumn, with live shows all over the country. Click the link kin the description for tickets to
my live stand-up comedy show Stories of Scotland. in Aberdeen, Dumfries, Gala, Perth, Portree,
Motherwell, Dunoon, Greenock, Giffnock and Dunfermline. Links for tickets in Edinburgh and
elsewhere are still to come. Many of our Trans-Atlantic cousins
tell of families cast out across the oceans in Clearance events,
but some were pulled rather than pushed... and Norman MacLeod s letters back to Assynt
meant that, when a ship came to enlist passengers for the Americas next year,
there were one hundred and fifty ready to sail to the protection waiting
under the wings of Norman MacLeod: neighbours, boyhood friends,
acolytes and pastoral lambs, flocked by boat across the Atlantic.
Now Pictou was already established so the Sutherland emigres couldn t
gather in a consolidated settlement like they d enjoyed at home.
They were scattered where land was still available and friends could be found.
What they really wanted was to be near Norman and his church.
But they were in the world. A world full of rum and tree felling and rum
and fur traders and rum, and sailors and...
It was a rum business If Norman had left Scotland because the Church
of Scotland wasn t austere enough for him, Pictou was wall to wall sin and debauchery.
But God makes his own plans... and in his second year at Pictou,
a settlement of Highlanders in the United States invited Norman to come down there
to minister to them in Ohio. Do they have rum in Ohio?
One way or another Norman decided to go... But what about his existing flock?
They could come with him away from the worldly sinfulness of Pictou?
So they set about building a boat the sinful folks in Pictou called
The Ark. A boat big enough
to take a group of men to settle in Ohio and send back for the women and children.
As they sailed round the eastern edge of Nova Scotia, on the way to the U, S of A,
they turned to the south and stopped off in St Anne s Bay.
THIS WAS PERFECT !!! It was a sheltered bay.
It was almost entirely untouched. It had access to fishing,
it had land to spare... coastal land that could be cleared for farming,
a hinterland for logging and hunting. If God really meant them to go to Ohio
he wouldn t have led them here and given them the stuff to make lemonade.
They spent the winter preparing shelter and a fleet of smaller boats to transport their
families come Springtime. So, in the spring of 1820
they picked their families from Pictou, not realising that the alliteration would
get worse when they themselves were picked up by a pitiless north easterly storm
that threw the little boats across the Gulf of St Lawrence onto the
mercy of Nova Scotian coastlines and the inhabitants of the few
settlements around. Norman himself was
taken in by one Father McEachern... a missionary priest from North Uist.
God s deliverance sent by a Catholic? What a topsy turvey world it is.
One by one the scattered, battered groups limped slowly till finally,
on May 20th, 1820, in brilliant sunshine, they all reached their new home in St Anne s bay,
They built a community. Norman, unordained in Scotland,
got accreditation for the ministry in what had recently become The United States of America.
He was authorised as Magistrate and obtained a licence to set up
a school in what would become Canada. Friends and family who had stayed in
Pictou headed for this new haven to settle. It s a measure of the impact of this little
group of Gaels that today St Annes is the location
of Nova Scotia s Gaelic college. Teeming fish, black earth and flowering maples,
but steep land and the long isolation of lingering winters.
Paradise isn t home forever. It s someplace you spend a short
spell until competition arrives.., be it Church of Scotland ministers,
farmers, storekeepers, boatbuilders or missionary schoolmasters.
There were internal fallouts, young folks courting before it was appropriate,
unintended slights and the encroachment of that hardy wild critter...
the prickly ego... a species which seemed
to survive the chill of Canadian winter every bit as well as it clung to Scotland
s wave lashed Atlantic outcrops. Norman MacLeod could be harshly
critical of those in the community who didn t live up to the standards he set for his...
sorry God s Elect. Not in private, but from the pulpit.
But the same castigation of moral delinquency wasn t in view when it came to his own sons.....
When his second son, Donald, was given responsibility for a ship
and the job of taking the ship and its cargo to Glasgow to sell them both...
he was never heard of again.
The late 1840s brought potato famine in Ireland... but Nova Scotia had its woes.
1848 was the worst year for a community with growing mouths to feed...
...and limited land and now... Destitution and hunger knocked on the door.
How would folks make it through harsh winter. Would they be welcomed in inland Canada,
or maybe America? Then a letter arrived in St Annes...
The letter was from Norman s son. The prodigal who had absconded
with a boat eight years earlier. He was now a newspaper editor in Australia!
Where the bloody hell was Australia? It s a place with a great climate...,
no long winters... and land... Australia was huge and empty
What do you mean indigenous people?
As the letter passed round the
hungry famine ravaged community, they came to one obvious conclusion...
We re going to need a bigger boat Now I say that flippantly, but it
wasn t an easy decision. Some had been born here.
Some had already crossed one ocean to build a utopia.
How many oceans can one person cross... and how many utopias can you built in a lifetime?
Husbands and wives took different sides. For a people whose culture had been clan,
kin and land, how can you leave all three, as your parents languish in the
graveyard so recently dug? But the letter was so good...
Now this wasn t an overnight book a flight and go.
They had to build a ship. They had to finance the journey.
They had to collect together a community.
There were delays due to ill health and Canadian winters.
Finally the day came and pipers led a procession to the boat,
but even at embarkation there was a scramble when Mr and Mrs Fraser s daughter wasn t aboard.
Panicked enquiries uncovered that she had been last seen on a horse and trap
heading for the local magistrate with her sweetheart Hugh MacKenzie,
who d refused to leave Nova Scotia. A commandeered pony, a race to the
magistrates and a door burst open on a completed wedding ceremony later...
the parents headed back for the ship, and Australia, without their daughter,
the new Mrs MacKenzie. You can imagine the journey?
Six months with 140 souls on board a cramped, community-built ship,
school lessons and sermons, rations and tedium, confinement and open sea...
till in April 1852 they arrived at the mouth of the Torrence river in South Australia...,
only to discover that Norman s son Donald was nowhere to be found.
What? Again?
It turns out gold had been discovered in Melbourne
and every man and his dog had high tailed it along the south coast to prospect, pan,
mine and dig for disappointment. They d sold their ship,
but there was no block of land where the community could put down roots together.
Instead of a new Jerusalem it was more years eeking out an existence in the wilderness...
dispersed far and wide between South Australia and Victoria.
Of course, the folks back in Nova Scotia had no idea of the disappointment as
they prepared the second ship. The Highland Lass she was called.
Her journey was more eventful still. Frost caused a delayed start.
Once under way chicken pox ran through the ship. They discovered spoiled food and with nothing
to replace it for three months had to toss much of it overboard.....
but there was joy on the journey with the birth of a child...
sadness with the death of a woman...
worse still another young man was lost overboard...
Finally, on October 6th 1852, they arrived in Adelaide to the news
that, it wasn t the utopia they d hoped for, but a clan scattered hither and thither where
land and, job opportunities allowed The scarcity and quality of water
...meant typhoid had claimed many, including Norman MacLeod s three youngest sons.
But five years earlier another group of Presbyterians from Lowland
Scotland had crossed these same oceans, not stopping at Australia, but going on
to set up the town of Dunedin in New Zealand. Norman contacted the governor of New Zealand,
saying that he needed a block of land where his community could come and live together...
They bought a new ship, The Gazelle, and sailed the Tasman sea on 2nd September 1853.
The September 21st edition of The New Zealander said
"the schooner Gazelle has brought a number of immigrants who we trust will prove a valuable
addition to the population arriving as they have at a time
when practical agriculturists are so much needed all over the district.
They are originally from the north of Scotland, had first emigrated to America,
from thence to South Australia, where they remained but a year,
and have been attracted to this country by its superior agricultural advantages for
which it is becoming so deservedly famed. That wasn t the end of the story.
A second ship followed from Australia as the flock were gathered in.
Then, over the next seven years four more ships would leave Nova Scotia
to bring Highland Scots here to Waipu on New Zealand s north island...
including Mr & Mrs Hugh MacKenzie who had eloped from the quayside rather than leave Nova Scotia.
In March 1866 Norman MacLeod, the man who had never quite settled lay dying.
Many of the folks who came in those later boats weren t following him,
but they wouldn t have sailed here but for him. Some followed a man, some followed a lifestyle
Some followed their community, but all followed a dream.
A dream that had spanned four countries and three continents.
This must have been the longest ever Scottish migration...
unless you can tell me different. Why not tell your story briefly in the comments?
It s funny... every one of us owes a debt to our ancestors who dreamed, worked
and sacrificed for their children without ever knowing if we'd even exist.
There s another migration story coming up on screen now
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