The government’s anti-emigration stance required it to lament the loss of people, and yet it needed loyal British emigrants for its North American colonies. It would have to face up to this quandary eventually, but in 1773 the government’s principal aim was to contain the exodus that appeared to be spiralling out of control. Although parliamentary action to curb emigration was resisted, the government instructed customs officials at every port to record the numbers emigrating, thus providing passenger lists for the period from 1773 to 1775, showing who left on each ship and their reasons for leaving.22 Overall, the results reveal that farmers and craftsmen and tradesmen were particularly wellrepresented among the Yorkshire emigrants, while there were relatively few labourers and unskilled workers.
The disruption and higher rents caused by the creation of enclosed farms in Yorkshire was given as the principal motive for emigrating. As Mathew Walker, who sailed from Scarborough in 1774, explained, “all the small farms [had been] taken into large ones in his parish” and he “could not get bread.”23 Michael Pinkney, who travelled at the same time, said that he had been “turned off his farm, it being taken into a larger one.”24 In fact, Yorkshire had the largest acreage enclosed of any county in England, most of which took place from the late 1760s to the 1770s in the North and East Ridings. Men like Walker and Pinkney were in the front line. They faced higher rents, and eviction if they could not afford to pay them.
Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the American colonies and owner of estates in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had first-hand knowledge of enclosures. The distress being caused by rent rises on his estates was made very clear to him by William Lister, one of his tenants: If his Lordship “could see the tears running from his eyes I’m sure it would melt your heart.” 25 Claiming that Edward Elmsall, Lord Dartmouth’s farm manager, was singling out tenants whom he disliked to raise their rents and evict them if they could not pay, he thought the situation to be very unjust and that his Lordship should know that his neighbour Robert Dixon had “now gone to America.” But Lister knew his place: “Nay my dear, dear Landlord … I had rather go to my bare and bended knees [than cause any provocation].”26
However, contrary to William Lister’s account, Elmsall was well aware of the discontent on Lord Dartmouth’s estate and advised against further rent rises and brutal evictions. He deplored the extent to which “old tenants” were being removed by Thomas Gasgoine’s agent in Shropshire, stating that “the tenants have made much noise in this country,” and conveying his hope that similar action in West Yorkshire would “be disagreeable to your Lordship.”27 But although the pain was as great, few people emigrated from the West Riding since, in this more industrialized region, people had more employment alternatives and wages were generally regarded as good.28 Around the time that Lord Dartmouth was raising rents on his Yorkshire estates, he was also speculating on land in Nova Scotia and east Florida. Conveniently, his cousin Francis Legge happened to be governor of Nova Scotia and could offer sound advice:
Many of the nobility are soliciting for grants of land within this province [Nova Scotia] … and considering your numerous family, it may be of some advantage hereafter to some of your younger sons if they could obtain grants … if your Lordship could procure for four or five of your sons twenty thousand acres each, I shall take care to have them located in such places as they must of course in time become valuable, in the doing of which I shall be assisted by the Surveyor General.29
William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801). Portrait by Pompeo Batoni, circa 1753–56.
Courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Purchased through gifts from Jane and W. David Dance, Class of 1940; Jonathan Cohen, Class of 1960, Tuck 1961; Frederick B. Whittemore, Class of 1953, Tuck 1954; Barbara Dau Southwell, Class of 1978; and David Southwell, Tuck 1988; Parnassus Foundation/Jane and Raphael Bernstein; and an anonymous donor.
Benefiting financially from one’s political position carried little or no stigma at the time. People in high office, with large ambitions, felt they were entitled to grab the choicest land and did so. And yet, seemingly unmindful that colonizers would have to be found for his and his sons’ newly acquired lands, Lord Dartmouth railed against the rising level of emigration from Yorkshire:
The increase of the inhabitants in the province of Nova Scotia by emigration from this Kingdom may be of local advantage to this colony but is a circumstance of very alarming consequence and consideration in respect to the interests and security of Great Britain … it is an evil that must soon require some remedy.30
Nevertheless, despite the government-inspired pressure on people not to emigrate, the exodus from Yorkshire continued. The numbers peaked during the three-month period from March to May 1774 when the ships Two Friends, Albion, Thomas and William, Prince George, Mary, and Providence carried around seven hundred Yorkshire emigrants to Nova Scotia. John Bulmer, who sailed with his wife and family in the Two Friends, said that he had left “on account of their rents being raised” by Beilby Thompson, MP; Christopher Harper from Rillington, who sailed in the same ship, made the same complaint about his landlord, William Weddell, MP.31 Both landlords contributed unwittingly to the peopling of Nova Scotia, with substantial numbers leaving from Thompson’s estate just south of York and Weddell’s estate near Ripon (see Map 3). Both groups were among the 103 passengers who sailed in the Two Friends from Hull. It had clearly been a very difficult crossing. An unnamed young woman said it gave her “great pleasure to see land after being nine weeks at sea, and the ill-treatment that we met with. I assure you that our usage was as bad as though we had been transports, not being permitted to go on deck when the weather permitted, but as the captain pleased.”32
Those who sailed in the Albion included the former tenants of the Duke of Rutland, Lord Cavendish and Thomas Duncombe, and they, too, complained of increased rents. In fact, “rents being raised” was the repeated refrain of people who were asked why they were leaving England. Some men, like Thomas Lumley from Rillington and William Chapman from Hawnby, both farmers, and William Trueman, a miller from Bilsdale (near Thirsk), were probably sufficiently affluent to have afforded higher rents, but preferred emigration to lowered living standards. Nathaniel Smith, a farmer from Appleton-by-Wisk who came with his entire household, including servants, certainly had considerable means. Complaining that “Hull and York have lightened our purses,” he had to finance lodgings for his large contingent at the exorbitant rate of a guinea a day while awaiting the Albion’s departure from Hull. Captain James Watt added to their woes when he said “to our comfort, if I may use the expression, he shall think himself well off if one third of us survive our journey.”33 Enduring seasickness, an outbreak of smallpox, and dreadful storms, the ship’s 188 passengers finally reached Halifax: “When we came nigh the shores we thought it prudent to take a pilot up the Bay as our captain was altogether a stranger to the place.” They anchored two miles from shore, with the governor’s schooner blocking “our people from landing” for fear of spreading the infection.34
In the same month that the Albion had sailed, the York Chronicle claimed that three ships carrying emigrants from Sutherland in Scotland to North America had suffered serious fatalities: “One was wrecked on Shetland, and most of the people perished; another is thought to be totally lost, no account being received of her arrival; and the third arrived after a dismal passage of three months with the loss of 70 people.”35 However, anti-emigration campaigners sometimes resorted to rumours and scare stories, and the reporting of such faraway incidents in a Yorkshire newspaper, whether true or not, was clearly intended to focus