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Scotland’s Global Impact Conference: Speaker Articles

11th October 2009

By: Professor David Worthington, UHI

Title: The REAL Highland Emigrants

What’s our standard image of a Highland emigrant making a new life? Usually the emigrant is a man. Usually he’s found his way to a largely English-speaking country – the United States, perhaps, or Canada, or Australia. Usually he’s doing well there. And usually, for all that he’s enjoying his newfound success and freedom, he’s still thinking longingly – or at least that’s the way we like to picture him – of the place and the people he has left behind in Scotland.

There are good historical reasons why this image has come down to us. And its relevance to the history of the Highlands is indisputable. Nevertheless, it’s an image that doesn’t leave much space for the following five people.

A man known as ‘Reichart (Richard) of Wicke (Wick)’ who was tried in Breslau (now the city of Wrocław in Poland) in 1471 for the crime of vagabondage – what we might call vagrancy.

Margaret Munro who, in 1605, petitioned the town authorities in Danzig (now Gdánsk in Poland) hoping they might help herself and her children, her husband having lost his life in the service of the Polish king of that time.

Helen Gunn, the newly-baptised daughter of William Gunn and Anne Ross, expatriate Highlanders living in the Dutch city of Breda in 1731.

Isaak Mackay, owner of an iron foundry complex in late-seventeenth-century Sweden.

John ‘Rochel’ MacLeod, an international merchant in the 1710’s and a man, as his nickname suggests, with especially strong contacts in the French port city of La Rochelle.

All these people were emigrants – or the children of emigrants – from the Highlands. But they lived in periods well before the Highland Clearances and their destination wasn’t North America, which hadn’t even been ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus when Richard of Wick left his homeland. Their destination was continental Europe.

At least one Easter Ross emigrant of those times, Alexander Ross, came back – quitting Cracow in Poland for a retirement at his family home, now Ankerville, near Nigg. Very occasionally, other Europeans of later generations, but still with recognisably Highland surnames, did the same.

But in this Year of Homecoming, are there other Europeans of Highland descent here in the Highlands? Well, the chances are we have such people among us. But neither we, nor they, are necessarily aware of their family connections with our part of the world. And they’ll be here to work – not to have a ‘homecoming’ holiday.

These people will have got here, most likely, on an inbound budget flight from Eastern Europe. They could well include descendants of the Highlanders mentioned above. If so, they’ll be working on your nearest campsite or youth hostel, in your local pub, cafe or hotel. We mostly call them ‘economic migrants’, not expatriate Highlanders, and – though some of them at least could be our distant relatives – we certainly don’t give them the sort of welcome on offer to those other expatriates who arrive from countries like the US or New Zealand.

Unlike more recent times when emigrant Highlanders mostly went to Canada, the US or Australia, the centuries when Highlanders headed for countries like England, Ireland or continental Europe can seem distant and obscure. Collective memory of the continental-bound emigrants of those days does not come close to matching the vividness with which their US- or Australia-bound counterparts – who left much later and over a much shorter period – are remembered.

Highland Games, clan societies and the like, which flourish across the English-speaking world from California to New South Wales, though they can be found here and there in Europe, do not get the publicity there – or the same number of attendees – that they get in places like San Diego or Toronto.

Historians, too, have not always given as much attention to Highland emigrants of the sort mentioned in this article. Several of the talks to be given at the ‘Scotland’s Global Impact’ conference at Eden Court in October will seek to redress the balance. This will be everyone’s chance to get to know a bit more about people like ‘Rochel’ Macleod and Isaak Mackay – people, it’s worth stressing, who had more positive reasons for leaving the Highlands than many later emigrants and who, in many instances, were to flourish, and put down roots, in countries as far apart as France, Sweden and Poland.

Proessor David Worthington will present this argument in his presentation at the Scotland’s Global Impact Conference, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness from 22 to 24 October. This Conference will reveal much about the people of Scotland, exploring why they left their country over many centuries and unravelling the huge impact this small nation has made on the rest of our planet. Opened by First Minister Alex Salmond and chaired by the BBC’s Lesley Riddoch, the Scotland’s Global Impact features a number of controversial speakers, including Eric Richards, author of Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances. For more information or tickets go to http://www.scotlandsglobalimpact.com

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