The MacAskills
by Bill MacAskill
Deprivation-Driven Emigration It was from this point that the appalling misery of the emigrants really began. Leaking hulks held
together with chains around the hull transported logs from America's eastern seaboard to Britain. Ill
fed, ill clad emigrants, the victims of brutal evictions in the Highlands and Islands were cargo on the
return trip to America in the holds of these unaltered, damp dark hulls. The enabling tacksman structure
that had paid for reasonable ships had been destroyed, logs were the paying cargo, impoverished people
only a return load. Apart from the many ships that foundered and were lost at sea, hundreds died on
these terrible passages.John MacLeod of Woodstock, Ontario and originally from Bernera Uist, now in his 97th year, recalls working his first prairie harvest as a young man in a Gaelic speaking community of settlers. An old man, 'almost as old as I am now' told him of his awful childhood memories of crossing the Atlantic with his parents from Mull. He was haunted by the memory of the daily throwing of bodies over the side. There is no doubt, the earlier emigrants who went under the guidance of Kenneth MacAskill and other tacksmen like him were fortunate indeed by comparison. The young Assynt emigrants who wished to send money home for farms make the perfect comparison.(see A Dance Called America by James Hunter)
When Captain Kenneth returned home from the Carolinas he joined the Highland Agricultural
Society and won prizes for his brood mares. In 1821 he came to an agreement with MacLeod
for a further enlargement of his farm, effectively from 'OLd Rubha', as Kenneth was known late in life died on March 1st, 1841. He was 85 years old. In his will he left some property in America but his wealth in Scotland was wholly bound up in his farm. His estate was worth just over £5,000 of which furniture and plate accounted for £82, farm implements £15, crops £24, horses £38, cattle £302 and sheep £4,614.
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Whitsunday 1825. Under the agreement
the neighbouring farms of Crakinish, Braeynort, Carbost, Trien and Sataran were to be
incorporated into Rhundunan. The rent was fixed at £1,260 a year and this was calculated
on the basis of sales at the recently established Inverness Sheep and Wool Market.