Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies Volume 3: Issue 1 Exceptional Peoples? Irish & Scots on the Frontier AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen JOURNAL OF IRISH AND SCOTTISH STUDIES Volume 3, Issue 1 Autumn 2009 Exceptional Peoples? Irish & Scots on the Frontier Published by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen in association with The universities of the The Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative ISSN 1753-2396 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies General Editor: Cairns Craig Issue Editors: Rosalyn Trigger, Michael Brown Associate Editor: Paul Shanks Editorial Advisory Board: Fran Brearton, Queen’s University, Belfast Eleanor Bell, University of Strathclyde Ewen Cameron, University of Edinburgh Sean Connolly, Queen’s University, Belfast Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin T. M. Devine, University of Edinburgh David Dumville, University of Aberdeen Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh Edna Longley, Queen’s University, Belfast Peter Mackay, Queen’s University, Belfast Shane Alcobia-Murphy, University of Aberdeen Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College, Dublin Graham Walker, Queen’s University, Belfast International Advisory Board: Don Akenson, Queen’s University, Kingston Tom Brooking, University of Otago Keith Dixon, Université Lumière Lyon 2 Luke Gibbons, Notre Dame Marjorie Howes, Boston College H. Gustav Klaus, University of Rostock Peter Kuch, University of Otago Graeme Morton, University of Guelph Brad Patterson, Victoria University, Wellington Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young David Wilson, University of Toronto The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies is a peer reviewed journal published twice yearly in autumn and spring by the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. An electronic reviews section is available on the AHRC Centre’s website at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/issjournal.shtml Editorial correspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should be addressed to The Editors, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to: [email protected] Subscription information can be found on www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/publications Cover image: Edward Immyns Abbot (d.1849). Detail from Dunedin from Little Paisley, 1849. Published by Fredk J. Wilson, 21 Gt Russell St., Bloomsbury, London [c.1853]. Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, B-051-014-a. Photo © National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa. CONTENTS Editorial v Scots and Imperial Frontiers 1 John M. MacKenzie Imagining the Frontier: 19 Environment, Memory and Settlement – Narratives from Victoria (Australia), 1850 – 1890 Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall ‘Green Scots and Golden Irish’: The Environmental Impact 41 of Scottish and Irish Settlers in New Zealand – Some Preliminary Ruminations Tom Brooking Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition 61 and the Development of Forestry in India Jan Oosthoek The Irish, Scots and Scotch-Irish and Lessons 75 from the Early American Frontier Patrick Griffin Evangelicalism, Enlightenment and ‘Race’ 99 on the Frontiers of Mission: Scottish-Canadian Encounters with Chinese in Montreal Rosalyn Trigger Celticism, Catholicism and Colonialism: 121 The Intellectual Frontiers of Thomas D’Arcy McGee David A. Wilson Irish and American Frontiers in the Novels 139 of James McHenry Stephen Dornan The Sojourning Settler: 157 Transatlantic Networks and Identities in the British-American Tobacco Trade, 1740-1841 M.H. Beals A ‘Primitive Germ of Discord’ in the North Atlantic World: 175 Newfoundland-Irish Roman Catholics in Scottish Cape Breton Peter Ludlow Exploiting Jurisdictions: 193 Perceptions of Political Boundaries in Southwest Scotland and Ulster, 1688 – 1715 Kathleen Middleton Free Movement of People? 213 Responses to Emigration from Ireland, 1718 – 30 Patrick Walsh Notes on Contributors 229 EDITORIAL Frontiers of Transfer and Transformation By focusing on the theme of ‘frontiers’, this issue of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies invites discussion of transfer and transformation in the Irish and Scottish diaspora. What aspects of their culture did Irish and Scottish migrants transfer from their homelands to the settler societies of North America and the Antipodes and to British colonies such as India? And how were they themselves transformed by the new environments and diverse peoples that they encountered? Were the contributions made by Irish and Scottish migrants and cultures in any way ‘exceptional’? On the one hand, the theme of ‘frontiers’ draws attention to the interactions of Irish and Scottish migrants with natural environments that they had not previously encountered, as well as with indigenous peoples and other European groups. The first six papers in this volume tackle this agenda, focusing on imperial and environmental frontiers (John MacKenzie, Lindsay Proudfoot and Dianne Hall, Tom Brooking, Jan Oosthoek), frontiers of cultural encounter, of conquest and of settlement (Patrick Griffin), and frontiers of mission (Rosalyn Trigger). As illustrated by the papers in the second half of this collection, frontiers can also be conceptualised as political boundaries, enabling an exploration of the processes of transfer and transformation that occurred when individuals or groups crossed from one jurisdiction to another, whether it be across the Irish Sea (Kathleen Middleton), the Cabot Strait (Peter Ludlow), or the Atlantic Ocean (David Wilson, Stephen Dornan, Melodee Beals, Patrick Walsh). In adopting these approaches, the authors draw on the double meaning of the term ‘frontier’ as either ‘the border or advance region of settlement and civilisation’ or as ‘that part of a country which fronts or faces another country’.1 As the first definition – purposefully chosen for its outmoded reference to ‘civilisation’ – suggests, the term ‘frontier’ is weighed down by a tremendous amount of historical freight. As a result, it has become fashionable in recent 1 Fulmer Mood, ‘Notes on the History of the Word “Frontier”’, Agricultural History, 22 (1948), 81. This definition comes from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1909. vi years to avoid its use and instead refer to settlement frontiers as ‘contact zones’ or ‘transactive borderlands’ – terms deemed to be less imbued with a ‘European expansionist perspective’.2 While there are contexts in which the use of these terms is indeed more appropriate, their adoption fails to reflect the ways in which Europeans in particular have projected their power into the lands and lives of other peoples around the world over the past five hundred years. Thus, in my own contribution to the collection, I refer to ‘frontiers of mission’ not out of a desire to endorse a European expansionist perspective, but because the phrase effectively evokes the way in which Scottish Canadians of the late nineteenth century viewed distant regions only just coming into contact with western missionaries. John MacKenzie provides a more detailed exploration of these issues in his paper in this collection. In terms of the second definition of frontier as ‘that part of a country which fronts or faces another country’, there is debate as to whether it is appropriate to regard the sea as a frontier.3 C.B. Fawcett’s classic treatise, Frontiers: A Study in Political Geography (1918), unequivocally states, however, that ‘of all the breaks in the continuity of the human population of the earth the sea is the largest and most prominent’, pointing out that ‘the Englishman feels far less severed from his own country when he goes to Scotland or Wales than when he crosses to Ireland; though he is less likely to hear a strange language in Ireland than in Wales or the Highlands, and the greater part of England is actually nearer to Dublin than to Edinburgh’ (simultaneously demonstrating that this use of the term frontier can be just as ethnocentric as its aforementioned counterpart).4 Fawcett nevertheless emphasised that the sea was also ‘an open road’ with no natural barriers, in keeping with his understanding of frontiers as areas of transition capable of serving both as ‘zones of separation’ and as ‘zones of intercourse’ between two or more regions or states.5 Discussion of the relative importance of cultural transfer and transformation in establishing the national character of settler societies has 2 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992), 6 – 7. On criticism of these terms, see John Friedmann, ‘Borders, Margins, and Frontiers: Myth and Metaphor’ in Yehuda Gradus and Harvey Lithwick (eds), Frontiers in Regional Development (London, 1996), 14 – 5. 3 In his famous Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), Dr Samuel Johnson, for example, defined the word ‘frontier’ as ‘the marches; the limit; the utmost verge of any territory; the border: properly that which terminates not at the sea, but fronts another country.’ 4 C.B. Fawcett, Frontiers: A Study in Political Geography (Oxford, 1918), 34. 5 Ibid., 32, 34; also 24. vii deep roots. In his much-cited article on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, first published in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that