Emigration and transportation

Emigration became a mass movement in the 18th century, partly as a result of the Clearances. Whole villages, families and clan communities decanted, mainly to North America. Emigration societies organised transport across the oceans, with emigrant ships coming direct to Highland ports and anchorages. 

In many ways, this made it simpler to emigrate from Orkney to Manitoba, than from the Highlands to Glasgow or Edinburgh - where it was, moreover, not practical to re-settle whole Gaelic-speaking communities.

Transportation was the forced overseas resettlement of ‘undesirables’, mainly to Australia after American independence. Many earlier Jacobite political prisoners had ended up in America or the West Indies.

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