DURING the Highland Clearances the Harmony left Stornoway in 1827 with 200 emigrants on board: 13 died during the crossing; 22 died after being put ashore in an uninhabited part of Cape Breton; and five more died as the vessel reached Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Exposed on the voyage and subjected to disease and starvation onshore, these emigrants, like many other evicted Highlanders and islanders, who landed from fetid and worm riddled ships, were not physically capable of expelling anyone from their ancestral land, contrary to what Jean MacLeod states ( Letters, July 5).
Accusing evicted Highlanders of being involved in the slave trade is wide of the mark. Most of the Highlanders engaged in this despicable pursuit were the same anglicised clan chiefs and aristocrats who were also clearing the Highlands. A number of these British imperialists were sitting members in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Jean MacLeod does not mention that after Culloden hundreds of Catholic Jacobites were transported to the West Indies and used as slave labour on the plantations alongside the Africans. They inter-married and this is how one comes across many Highland surnames in the Caribbean today.
In 1852 a complaint to a Liverpool port official that 900 evicted Highlanders were crammed aboard a vessel that could barely accommodate 300 received the reply “ the Scotch boats do pretty well as they please, no law appears to reach them”.
Donald J. MacLeod,
49 Woodcroft Avenue,
Bridge of Don,
Aberdeen
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