Set Adrift Upon the World

The Sutherland Clearances

James Hunter

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780857902627
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This true story of a mass eviction in nineteenth-century Scotland is "a moving, gripping, definitive account of a struggle for survival ( Scots Magazine).
A Saltire Society History Book of the Year
They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were—thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned.
Such were the Sutherland Clearances, an extraordinary episode involving the deliberate depopulation of much of a Scottish Highlands county. What was done in the course of it was planned and carried out by a small group of men and one woman, seeking a more profitable use of the land. Most of those involved wrote a great deal about their actions, intentions, and feelings, and much of it has been preserved. There are no equivalent collections of material from those whose communities ceased to exist. Their feelings and fears are harder to access, but by no means irrecoverable.
In this book, James Hunter tells the story of the Sutherland Clearances. His research took him to archives in Scotland, England, and Canada, to the now deserted valleys of Sutherland, to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. The result is a story of a people's struggle for survival in the face of tragedy and disaster, covering experiences not featured in any previous such account.
"Detailed and unsparing . . . . [The author] is careful to present the evidence for all he records." — London Review of Books

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Map 1: Northern Scotland
• Map 2: Eastern Sutherland
• Map 3: North America
• Map 4: Manitoba
• Some actors in the clearance drama
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Inhuman treatment’
• 2 ‘Tribes that never saw Europeans before’
• 3 ‘There should be blood’
• 4 ‘Open and determined resistance’
• 5 ‘Damned savages from Scotland’
• 6 ‘When among wolves, howl!’
• 7 ‘A most destructive and murderous fire’
• 8 ‘He would be a very cruel man who would not mourn for the people’
• 9 ‘A combination among the better sort’
• 10 ‘To find out and punish the leaders of the people’
• 11 ‘Aborigines of Britain’
• 12 ‘The year of the burnings’
• 13 ‘Law is one thing and humanity may be another’
• 14 ‘To seek shelter in some more propitious quarter of the world’
• 15 ‘Indelible characters on the surface of the soil’
• Appendix: Jessie and Gordon Ross
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations