Highland and Island Emigration Society
The deaths from starvation were so high that, in 1848–1849, the government delivered shipments of oatmeal to locations along the western coast to give to starving families.
For example, in Skye, one of the hardest hit areas, the local clan chief, Norman McLeod, bankrupted himself between 1846 and 1849 providing relief to his people.
[11] By April 1852, Trevelyan had founded the Highland and Island Emigration Society, with McNeill, following a meeting at the Freemasons' Tavern[12] in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden.
[14][15] MacMillan attributes the success of the Society primarily to this powerful trio: Trevelyan and Murdoch for Treasury and Emigration, and McNeill as the chief administrator of Poor Relief in Scotland.
Evidence cited to support this view include the close involvement of senior civil servants in the Society, the Emigration Advances Act 1851 (14 & 15 Vict.
[25] The list of benefactors included The Queen (£300), Prince Albert (105), three Scottish Dukes (£100 each), Members of Parliament, the Australian Agricultural Company, and numerous clergy.
[26] Yorkshire manufacturers, fearing a labour shortage affecting the supply of wool from Australia, were keen to subscribe large amounts to the Society.
[27] The London Committee, which in addition to Trevelyan himself, included other influential individuals such as Thomas Baring, Baron Rothschild, and W. G. Prescott, Governor of the Bank of England, wrote personal letters to prominent Scots in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras[28] asking for funds to help ... this final effort to put an end to the misery that is breaking the spirit and degrading the character of our Highlanders, now that an absolute necessity of removing them has coincided with such an opportunity of providing for them elsewhere as never has, and perhaps never will, occur again.
The Society's emigration scheme was sometimes exploited by landlords, leading to some of the notorious forced evictions that figure in the history of the Highland Clearances.
For example, in 1854, Donald Ross published a pamphlet entitled "Real Scottish Grievances" in which he describes some of the results of the activities of what he refers to as "a body calling itself the Highland and Island Emigration Society".
According to Kent: The active principles on which the Highland and Island Emigration Society was founded, and which it consistently espoused, were a mixture of liberal political economy, ill-disguised racism and a grudging form of charity.
He could defend his emigrants against the criticisms of Robert Lowe and the critics of his schemes in New South Wales, but he could also contemplate with satisfaction "the prospect of flights of Germans settling here in increasing numbers – an orderly, moral, industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us that the Irish or Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with our body politic".
He certainly believed that he was benefiting both Britain and the Highlanders, for he wrote on another occasion, "The Irish and Scotch, especially the latter, do much better when they have a fresh start in other countries, and become mixed up with other people, than when they stay at home".
[41] However, other voyages went smoothly; a well-documented one is that of the Sir Alan McNab, which sailed from Liverpool in 1854, where: Only trifling sickness occurred, chiefly diseases of the throat and glands, which the Surgeon thought might have been caused by the ship's being lined with salt to preserve its timbers.
Writing to McNeill in 1852, he stated: Five hundred years hence, a few of the most aristocratic families of the great Australian Republic will boast of being able to trace their ancestors in the Highland Emigration Book of 1852–53.
According to MacMillan, "It is to Trevelyan's sense of history and his concern for the safety of documentation, characteristics of a great civil servant, that we owe the remarkable survival of the central records of the Society.
