M A C V A Y S I A

My great-great-great-great-grandfather, John MacLeod, son of Duncan MacLeod, was born sometime between 1762 and 1770 in the village of Laig on the isle of Eigg and married a woman named Effy (short for Euphemia), who was born in 1771 in nearby Grulin (on an island that small, I suppose everything is nearby). John and Effy had seven children that I know of: Mary, Catherine, George, John, Donald, and a set of twins named Flora and Duncan. Duncan MacLeod, Flora’s twin brother, who was born sometime between 1807 and 1811, was my great-great-great-grandfather.

Duncan MacLeod worked as a crofter (a tenant farmer) in Lower Grulin (a small village at the base of An Sgurr) and married Annie MacIsaac, daughter of Hugh MacIsaac and Effy MacDonald of Cleadale.

Duncan MacLeod, besides being a farmer, was also an avid gardener, and was apparently skilled enough at gardening that he was eventually able to make a living from it. That is, until the MacLeods were forced to leave the island.

The hardships faced by Highland Gaels after the Battle of Culloden, which resulted in their culture being severely repressed, were compounded by another scourge that would displace many Gaels from Scotland: the Highland Clearances. As the clan system eroded, clan chiefs became landlords and their clansmen became little more than slaves. The situation was made worse by the landowners’ realisation that using their land for grazing sheep would be more profitable than having it farmed by tenant farmers. The absentee owner of Eigg (a MacPherson, if I’m not mistaken) began to force the island’s inhabitants from their homes. Among the hundreds of people who left Eigg in 1843 alone (140 families, with most of the remaining inhabitants cleared out by a decade later) were Duncan and Annie and their nine-month-old son, Duncan. They and the other families joined many, many more who left Scotland to pick up the pieces of their lives in new lands. Today there are still people living on Eigg, but there’s nothing left in the villages of Upper and Lower Grulin but the stone foundations of the houses vacated by the MacLeods and other families.

Sir Walter Scott said of the Clearances:

“In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish. Meantime, the Highlands may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or the subject of experiment for the professors of speculation, political and economical. But if the hour of need should come—and it may not, perhaps, be far distant—the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered.”

The MacLeods sailed from Tobermorey on 13 July 1843 as steerage passengers on a 448-ton ship called the Catherine. The book Mabou Pioneers, an invaluable guide for anyone doing genealogical research on the families of Inverness County, Cape Breton, lists Duncan and Anne (and their infant son Duncan) among the passengers, along with Duncan’s twin sister Flora, her husband Alex Morrison, and their children. What the book doesn’t say, however, is that the Catherine never actually made it to Cape Breton.

A couple of weeks into its journey across the Atlantic, the Catherine began to take on water. Rather than risk the possibility of sinking in the middle of the ocean, the captain turned the ship around. On or just before 23 August, the ship limped into Belfast harbour, its home port. The passengers, who were all poor and had already paid a lot of money for the passage, were starving because the ship’s master had made them pay for their own bread, pretty much the only food they got for the whole trip, which was supposed to be included in the price of the passage itself. Because the passengers were all destitute, many only got a half-pound of bread each day (the allowance for each passenger was supposed to be a pound a day); some couldn’t afford bread at all and had to rely on help from their fellow passengers.

An officer of the Government Emigration office in Belfast, Lieutenant Peter Stark, was unsuccessful in his attempts to force the ship’s masters to refund some of the passengers’ money, but he did manage to arrange for sufficient food and water to be supplied to the passengers until another ship arrived to replace the very-leaky Catherine. On 1 September, almost two months after they had left Tobermorey, Duncan MacLeod and his family left Belfast on the 501-ton John and Robert, bound once again for Cape Breton. (An account of the incident, including correspondence between Peter Stark and his superiors at Westminster, can be found here.)

Sometime in early October 1843, Duncan MacLeod and his family were among 200 people who disembarked from the John and Robert at Ship Harbour (now called Port Hawkesbury) on the Gut of Canso (now called the Strait of Canso). Duncan and Annie settled on land near Creignish; Duncan worked as a gardener for the Hon. William MacKeen in nearby Mabou. Duncan and Annie had nine more children in Creignish:
Angus, Flora Ann, Jessie (Janet), Effie, John, Hugh, William (Wild Bill), Mary, and Flora. Yes, they had two daughters named Flora, which is nothing really, compared to how many families in the area had several sons named John. I think Flora Ann was probably just called Ann.

Duncan’s siblings from Eigg — George, John, Donald, Mary, and Catherine — also moved to Cape Breton Island in 1843, settling in a place called Egypt Road near Broad Cove Marsh. Except for Mary and Catherine, they all married.

When the MacLeods arrived on Cape Breton Island in 1843, Scottish settlers had been arriving in the area for several decades, so all of the good land — the land in low-lying areas and on hillsides near the sea along the west end of Cape Breton — had already been taken up. The land Duncan MacLeod and his family lived on in Creignish may have been rented from someone else; either that or the junior Duncan, now almost 30, was farming the land and the family had grown too large for it. Whatever the case, the senior Duncan MacLeod decided to go for a bigger plot of land; in order to get one, he and his family and other latecomers had no choice but to walk up into the highlands and pick a plot of land in the less-hospitable inland areas known in Gaelic as an Cul — the Rear. Duncan moved inland with his wife and most of his children in 1871, to a plot of land that would be called MacLeod Settlement, in Upper Southwest Mabou, in the district of Glencoe. (Hugh and Effy MacIsaac, the parents of Duncan’s wife Annie, also left Eigg in 1843 and settled in the same small community in Upper Southwest Mabou) I’m not sure if they had already cleared most of the land and built a house by the time they moved there, or if they only set about doing that when the family got to their plot. But I do know Duncan MacLeod died of cancer just a year later, on 29 September 1872, leaving the new family farm to his children, one of whom was my great-great-grandfather, Angus MacLeod.

What happened after that? That’s a story for another day.

Tagged: Cape Breton, Duncan MacLeod, Eigg, family, Gaelic, genealogy, history, Ireland, language, MacLeod, migration, names, Nova Scotia, Scotland, Ulster