The Hector and Nova Scotia

The Hector left Greenock around the end of June in 1773 with but ten passengers for Pictou. The major part of her live cargo was to be picked up at Ullapool, 300 miles north of Greenock in the Highlands. There, at Ullapool, while the Hector rode at her anchors in Loch Broom, there on the docks ready to make their way aboard -- were to be found a collection of "farmers, artisans, gentlemen's sons, and herders and their families." They had gathered there having come from as far away as Gairloch and Inverness; many had walked carrying their few possessions on their backs and their babies in their arms over what in those days were but drove roads. This collection of souls, amounting, it is said, to 189, were then ferried to their waiting vessel. Over a third of those who climbed aboard the Hector were below the age of nine years. The Hector sailed out of Loch Broom with her expectant passengers in early July, 1773. From the first of the voyage these landsmen were seasick and even after they got use to the motion of the vessel: they continued to be sick, so sick that they wished for death, as they lay huddled in the dark, in the wet and stinking hold of the Hector. For 10% of them; their wish came true. On September 15th, 1773, the Hector came into Pictou Harbour, two and half months after having left Ullapool (they had set out with supplies for a voyage that they figured would last but six weeks). This had to be a shocked group of people; for, what they beheld over the rails of the Hector did not match the vision which they had in Scotland, a vision carried before them all through their dreadful voyage. There was nothing there! Nothing -- but an untouched wilderness. The scene as these sick people waded up the shore along Pictou Harbour was set in September, a beautiful time of the year in Nova Scotia; the trouble, was: the growing season was over, they had no supplies, and winter was but three months away.

Directly that these Scottish people were landed, the Hector was despatched to Philadelphia for provisions. Arguments immediately broke out between the new arrivals that had come on the Hector and those who had established themselves during the preceding six years. The new people were directed to go inland, but they did not want to do that; they wanted to settle on the river banks near the sea so that they might sustain themselves by fishing. Let me turn, now, to an accounting of the hardships of the those who arrived on the Hector, as given in 1883 by Alexander MacKenzie:

"Most of them sat down in the forest and wept bitterly; hardly any provisions were possessed by the few who were before them, and what there was among them was soon devoured, making all -- old and new comers -- almost destitute. It was now too late to raise any crops that year. ...


Many of them left. Others, fathers, mothers, and children, bound themselves away as virtual slaves in other settlements for a mere subsistence. Those who remained lived in small huts, covered only with the bark or branches of trees to shelter them from the bitter winter cold, the severity of which they had no previous conception. They had to walk some eighty miles, through a trackless forest in deep snow to Truro, to obtain a few bushels of potatoes, or a little flower in exchange for their labour, dragging them back all the way on their backs. ...


In the following spring they set to work, and soon improved their position. They cleared some of the forest, and planted a crop. They learned to hunt the moose ... They began to cut timber ..."

Of the 180 persons, or so, to have come out on the Hector, only 78 were to be counted at Pictou the following year. To this number, for a full count at Pictou in 1774, would have to be added those who had situated themselves at Pictou before the Hector arrived, which, Professor Bailyn estimated at sixteen families. Additional Scottish families were to be added to this base in 1776 or 1777. They had come out on the Lovely Nellie from Dumfriesshire to Prince Edward Island. One disaster after another fell on them; and, hearing that a sizable collection of their fellow countrymen had already established themselves across the strait at Pictou, sent scouts out to inquire. In the result, about "fifteen families" moved over."

The Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia as is represented by those that were aboard the Hope (1767) and the Hector (1773) was but a small start and cannot be compared with that which came about during the first half of the 19th century. The fact is that the Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia no sooner got started, circa 1770, when it came to an end. When the authorities at London become aware that agents were going about in Scotland and in Ireland talking people into leaving for America, a stop was put to it as the fear was that the farms in Ireland and Scotland would be without the necessary labour to keep them in production. A new crises, beginning in 1776, the American Revolution, was, in any event, to bring all immigration to a halt. By then, however, though not in great numbers, Scottish people had made a solid beachhead at Pictou; and this territorial enclave would prove to be, in the coming century, a great attraction to Scottish Highlanders.