Britain sent at least forty governors of Scottish descent to America before it declared independence in 1776, including General John Campbell, governor general of Virginia and commander-in-chief of British forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War (he was later replaced by James Abercrombie, another Scot).
As the American colony grew restless, it was Pitt the Younger’s Edinburghian right-hand man Henry Dundas – bitterly nicknamed ‘the uncrowned king of Scotland’ – who called most vocally for the harsh punishment of the rebels. He also devoted much time and energy to blocking attempts to outlaw the slave trade – according to one estimate, he single-handedly delayed its abolition in the British Empire by ten or fifteen years through his ‘skilful obstructions’.
As Home Secretary, Dundas acted to open India to his fellow Scots, and they soon came to dominate the administration of the colony and the East India Company. The first three governors general of India were Scots, and later, seven of the twelve viceroys. Others, like Sir Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, son of the Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, skipped from colony to colony, serving as governor of Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, New Zealand, and finally Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka).
Thus in America, India, the Caribbean and the Pacific, the hand of empire stretched out in the form of opportunistic Scots, as the colonised became the colonisers. In Gippsland, Australia, Angus McMillan wreaked destruction upon the indigenous people in the name of British expansion.
I had known – however vaguely – that men like him had existed. Men who had fled a homeland made miserable by colonisation, then made it their lives’ work to extend the empire, some of them, like McMillan, killing wholesale in its name. But whereas previously they had been aberrations, incongruous footnotes to a rousing narrative, now here he was, right there in the family tree. Part of my story, part of my heritage, part of me.
I returned to London determined to put the whole sorry business out of my mind. I took another job, at another paper, and tried to concentrate on fitting in and getting on. But I couldn’t forget what had been, for me, a momentous discovery. It rolled around in the back of my head, unsettling me. All my easy assumptions about my heritage had proved to be flimsy.
What I was feeling reminded me of a concept I’d once stumbled across in a book: ‘intergenerational guilt’. It described a generation of Germans who felt a profound sense of guilt and remorse for their nation’s role in the Holocaust, although they had not been born at the time it took place. At the time I had flicked through the pages with indifferent curiosity, but now I rolled back through their reasoning. I couldn’t help but wonder: what responsibility for our ancestors’ actions do we all unwittingly take on?
It seemed to me that McMillan’s story sat at the very crossroads of what makes a person victim or aggressor, good or evil. From my reading I had been presented with two characters: McMillan the hero – the hard-working, generous Scot honoured with plaques, portraits and cairns – and McMillan the villain – a bloodthirsty tyrant who rampaged through the bush, cutting down unarmed women and children. But what was the truth? I was left with the task of fitting both together to construct the image of one man, seen from two different directions.
Was it the views of his contemporaries or the harsh realities of life in the outback that had prompted such an apparent transformation – from virtuous Presbyterian lad to cold-blooded killer – or even the ravages of the landscape itself? I struck upon the idea of travelling to Australia to retrace his journey, as closely as I could, in search of the answer. Perhaps I might find it wandering still the rough tracks through the bush in the Snowy River gorge and the foothills of the Australian Alps. Perhaps it was grazing with the cattle in the Gippsland pastures.
There too I could confront the true legacy of McMillan’s actions by seeking out the present-day representatives of the Aboriginal group he had terrorised. What state were they in? What could I do to help them? Would they want my pity? I had no way of knowing; I would have to go there to find out.
2
It started with a departure, as so many stories do.
Friday, 8 September 1837. Angus McMillan stood on the dockside in Greenock, looking for the ship that would carry him across the ocean. All his goodbyes had been said, all his belongings stowed in sturdy wooden trunks. He was an emigrant – or rather, a would-be emigrant. All he needed was to secure his passage to the other end of the earth.
McMillan had a vessel in mind: the Minerva. His friend Allan MacCaskill was already booked to travel on it to the colony of New South Wales. Or ‘New Holland’, as McMillan still called it, an old name that conjured up some of the old mystery: unknown coastlines, islands of knowledge swimming in great seas of empty mapspace. He had seen her too, her great bulk at the quay, the bright flags flying, readying herself for flight. But there was no room, said MacCaskill. All her berths had been filled.
Half of Scotland seemed to have got there ahead of him, and they all seemed to have planned in advance. Men in plaid, cheekbones protruding like broken glass; hollow-eyed women with children hiding in amongst their skirts; families with everything they owned slung onto their backs. All desperate for passage on board, an escape, pouncing upon what tickets there were. They were rats from a sinking ship, and McMillan was one of them; paws scrabbling for purchase on polished decks as an entire country upended beneath them. Those who had lost their grip were flooding out through the ports across the ocean, looking for a new life in the New World: New Zealand, New South Wales, New York, Newfoundland. They’d go anywhere there was room to sit down.
He, like many of his compatriots, had mixed feelings. Sailing out from Barra, only three days previously, he had pressed himself against the rail to watch the retreating shores of the beloved island slipping away from him, not for their sake, as he told his journal, but for the love of some of its ever to be remembered inhabitants.* Clear light danced on a rippling sea, flecked far off with the fins of basking sharks soaking up the late-summer sun. But none of this could cheer him, nor his friend Finlayson Kilbride. Alas he had no cure for the deep wounds of my tortured heart.
Still, it had been set in motion. The future beckoned, and however reluctantly, he had heeded its call. O’er the blue waves I go.
After a long day trudging the docks, from agent to ship and back again, McMillan retired to his inn and MacCaskill with no news to speak of. The ship’s crew had only confirmed MacCaskill’s warning: there were no second-class berths, and all the first-class cabins were already filled. As for going in the hold, he wrote, I could never dream of it. The Minerva had not long retired from her career as a transport for convicts, and conditions on board were little better now than they had been then. He could not face all those weeks below deck: the double layer of bunks down either side, no ventilation, no natural light. Two to a bed. For four months! God only knew the horrors of the hold, the filth and the lice and the disease that would whip through the steerage passengers as they lay packed together at night, waves slamming the hull by their feet. For all this they would pay £21 a head. No. He did not have much, but it had not come to that, not yet.
But what were the alternatives? A whole day’s enquiry had turned up little else. There was space in the cabins on the Bullant, but that would cost £74 – his entire savings. Or he could try Liverpool, and spend yet more of his dwindling funds getting there, with no promise of a better offer. All around him, others were making the same calculation: what worth pride, when with every day their financial position was weakening? But then, to arrive ragged in the port at the other side, one of those pale, faceless hundreds – poor wretches – that could cost