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In 1848 and 1849 the scottish crops failed, and all the devices to provide work whereby meal might be earned became more and more absurd for half starved people.
So, at the last, responsibility for the people fell again on their own social leaders, the landowners, who were now faced with having to pay extra local rates - the Poor Rate - of almost six pence per £1 on the value of their five estates. In Skye and the Hebrides the rate was almost fourteen pence. The Poor Law Board, under whose scrutiny the conditions in the Highlands now fell, saw the mass removal of a surplus population as providing the only answer to the problem. In 1857 Parliament encouraged this removal by the Emigration Advances Act, and in 1852 there was formed the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society. The best that chiefs could now do for their people was to make arrangements for emigrant ships to call, to take away into the refuge of exile the people who might have made their land sustain them, but had never been allowed to hold enough of it to make success possible.
Except for a few scattered acts of resistance on South Uist, Barra and Benbecula, the deportees went quietly; and where a pathetic defiance was offered, the owners and their agents destroyed all shelter, and the law backed them up. The lack of resistance, unlike the behaviour of the Irish, was later admitted to be 'an important reason for official neglect.' Hugh Miller - labourer, geologist and theologian - summed up by writing 'the poor Highlander will shoot no one . . . and so they will be left to perish.' There was no resistance because there was no notion in the Gaelic community of such a thing. The clan had deferred to its chiefs, had honoured them, followed them to death itself. They had never combined against their chiefs; the very concept was beyond them. Homesick, and emotionally scarred forever, they boarded the ships for Canada, and elsewhere, where they could recreate their glen, living off the land and using their own tongue.
But the Atlantic was wide, and the journey for most was for ever. The people who went, exploited, rejected and betrayed, suffered all the mental sorrows and physical hardships which their exile brought. The country from which they were evicted suffered too. Scotland lost half her heritage, and the desolation which then began has never found a remedy.
Jacobite defeat at Culloden had brought about the destruction of the old social system in the Highlands, and these further disasters had removed any hopes that a successful new way of life could be devised for the people who remained. It is remarkable, therefore, that the image of Scotland, which the rest of the world holds, is a Highland one, with tartan and bagpipe, the most immediately recognised symbol of a Scottish presence.
In part this is due to the regard quickly earned by the Highland regiments in the British army, where the military traditions of clans were encouraged and directed against Britain's enemies. This war-like, chivalrous side of the Highland story, whether fact or myth, was given world-wide credibility by the work of Sir Walter Scott.
Scott, in the poetry which formed the bulk of his early work, had chosen to write on themes of a romantic and heroic character, frequently with a Highland setting; and he quickly captured the attention and admiration of the literary and literate world. In 1814 he published, anonymously, his first novel, Waverley, set in the period of the 1745 Rising.