Flora macdonald, p.20
Flora Macdonald, page 20
Upon receipt of her son-in-law’s letter, Flora made haste to leave the plantations once so painstakingly cleared and cultivated, now looted of livestock and barren for lack of laborers and money. In the dwelling houses on either property at Cheek’s Creek and nearby, there remained furniture, books, clothing, and bed and table linen, much of it brought from home in Skye. All was left behind to be seized by the state. When Flora and her party now struck out down the Cape Fear River for the coast, she took with her only personal property to a value of £40. Although the venture to settle in North Carolina had proved disastrous, she was not one to repine. As head of her small family in the Scots country these two years, she had negotiated the vagaries of revolution as best she could. Now she looked to asylum within the British lines in New York.
Before leaving the state, apparently, she extracted from her small hoard of possessions two rhinestone-and-glass shoe buckles. These she gave to three Wilmington sisters, the Dunbidin ladies, in token of gratitude for some gesture of kindness, then she embarked with the Lochbay family. When Flora describes the voyage from Wilmington to New York in the Sucky and Peggy in “the dead of winter [March],” her “Memorial” slips into and stays in the first person. She and her family were, she writes, “in danger of our lives for the most of the voyage by a constant storm.” After weeks at sea, however, Manhattan came into sight, and Flora was free to disembark and seek out her husband.
Two years had passed since Flora had last seen him. Both, rising fifty-six and fifty-eight, had suffered during their separation. Flora’s broken arm had not mended well, and Allan had been mentioned by General Mifflin six months earlier as “being in a Decay [poor health].” However, the Highlander had lost none of his enthusiasm to cut a figure in the great world. Although he had “contracted a great deal of debt” while a prisoner, two years’ back pay was due him from the Royal Highland Emigrants, that regiment in which he was yet to serve. Allan employed advances on that sum from Scottish merchants in New York to raise and outfit at his own expense “a company of gentlemen volunteers” that he captained. They were, Flora commented, “all dressed in scarlet and blue.”
Ardnamurchan, in Nova Scotia, meanwhile wrote: “I dare say you and your Volunteers make a formidable figure.” The officer, however, would far rather see Kingsburgh at “the head of your own company in our regiment than commanding a company of provincials.” Like other volunteer forces that drilled in the city, Allan’s company was probably tasked with little more than guarding stores. “I wd earnestly recommend it to you to join the regt as soon as possible.”
Ardnamurchan also counseled, “I dare say you must have lived expensive [as a prisoner], but it is high time now, my dear Allan, to study economy.” Economy was never a watchword with Allan, although there was now the more need for such a measure given the escalating price of food and other essentials in the occupied city. Though Kingsburgh received one advance of £1,690 among others, Ardnamurchan suspected he was “straitened for cash” in June 1778. Flora was fortunate that Lochbay could as ever be relied upon. He expended £150 “on his family” from April to October of that year in New York.
Even after Flora joined him, however, Allan lingered in the city. It would be the late summer of 1778 before he consented to head farther north; Ardnamurchan had to be satisfied with the presence, in the Emigrant barracks, of three of Kingsburgh’s sons. Sandy sailed north to join his brother Charles, who had exchanged the Bengal army for service in America two years earlier. Ranald was there on detachment from the Marines.
Flora, meanwhile, was negotiating life in New York while looking to head north herself eventually. In her youth in the 1740s, she had known London, then a metropolis with well over half a million inhabitants. She was familiar, too, with Edinburgh, which was a tenth the size of the southern capital. New York was a city of modest size by comparison, but conditions were unstable. British soldiers and volunteer corps drilled and did guard duty in every corner. Continental prisoners occupied jails, prison ships, and makeshift prisons, including churches. Loyalist fugitives crowded every lodging house and hostelry. General James Robertson, military commandant, was hard pressed to maintain order in this confused situation.
Flora, Allan, and the Lochbay Macleods, while fugitives themselves, were embraced however by all the “Scotch folks” in New York. Among these were many men of influence who were, as officeholders and members of a St. Andrew’s Society, accustomed to gather on the feast day of that tutelary saint of Scotland. The trader William McAdam, source of numerous advance payments for Allan; Norman Macleod of Tolmie, a “Skye man” made good and captain of other Highland volunteers; and Ardnamurchan himself were all enthusiastic members.
Ardnamurchan grew ever more insistent that Allan, with another laggard officer, should head north. “Pray let them know,” he wrote to McAdam, “that I am very much surprised that I don’t see or hear from them…considering the number of men of war [naval ships] and armed vessels backwards and forwards…. All officers should be with their corps with recruits.” In August 1778 he wrote still more forcefully: “As I have said before, it’s very surprising what keeps them there…. I will certainly stop their credit from receiving any more money [advances against back and current pay] if they don’t join the regiment or assign sufficient reasons to the contrary.”
Under this threat, Allan capitulated. Consigning his volunteer company to another, he set sail for Nova Scotia. Flora later recorded, “I was obliged, though tender [in poor health], to follow.” Annie and Lochbay and their children departed New York for the comforts of London this October. Flora had no such charming prospect in view. Eleven years later, she still vividly recalled the “Rough Sea and long passage” northward to Halifax. Falling victim to a “violent disorder” while at sea, she came “very near death’s door…. At last landing in Halifax,” the “Memorial” continues, she was “allowed to stay for eight days, on account of my tender state.” The British garrison town on the Atlantic coast offered superior medical services. However, the battalion in which Allan served was doing duty at Fort Edward, a barracks forty miles northwest. “The ninth day” after her arrival, Flora recorded, she “set off for Windsor,” the hamlet where the barracks were located, “on the Bay of Minos [Minas].” The Second Battalion of the Royal Highland Emigrants regiment there was tasked with repelling any Continental land attack on Nova Scotia. However remote that possibility might appear, the companies still drilled and marched in this peaceable corner of the empire as though it were a present danger.
The journey to Windsor “through woods and snow” occupied five long days. Nor were Flora’s travails over when she arrived at the garrison, which was to be her home. Fort Edward comprised only a number of log cabins and a blockhouse, or small fortification, within bastion walls. “There we continued all winter and spring,” she wrote. The ground was “covered with frost and snow.” She “almost starved with cold to death” in the officers’ quarters. It was, she later reported, “one of the worst winters ever seen there.” It was, in fact, the coldest winter on record since the founding of the colony. Ink froze in Halifax, it was said, while letters were being written near a large fire, and temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Flora could take joy, nevertheless, in being reunited with her son Charles, though Ranald, his younger brother, whom Ardnamurchan thought “a fine young fellow” sure to “make an excellent officer,” had rejoined his ship. Now in his late twenties, her eldest son was, according to Ardnamurchan, “very sensible and clever when sober,” but “rather unhappy when…disguised with liquor [inebriated].” Like father, like son, Charles had “a propensity to extravagance.”
There was a modicum of gaiety in the barracks to enjoy, even while snow and ice bound the earth outside. Every fortnight there was a ceilidh, or evening of Gaelic celebration, and far from the Scottish Highlands, officers picked out the “Guillicallum [Gillie Callum, or sword dance] over two broad swords lain across.” Moreover, rather than “sitting long after dinner and getting ourselves drunk,” as was the custom on St. Andrew’s Day in November, Ardnamurchan informed a correspondent, this year the gentlemen of Fort Edward chose “to entertain the ladies with a dance.” Flora’s sons and other younger comrades, not content with such “sober and decent” entertainment, were instead “fond of dancing and seeing the ladies” in Halifax. Charles, tiring altogether of duty in the bleak and isolated garrison, departed to join his younger brother James in a new regiment, the British Legion, then mustering near New York.
When winter yielded in 1779 to spring and summer at Windsor, Flora had fresh troubles to surmount. She already had rheumatism in the arm that she had broken when in North Carolina. Now, in a further accidental fall at the barracks, she “dislocated the wrist of the other hand and broke some tendons.” She had upon this occasion “the assistance of the regimental surgeon,” but in pain nonetheless and doubly handicapped, she was, she later wrote, “confined [to her bed] for two months.”
“When I got the better of this misfortune,” she recorded, “I fixed my thoughts on seeing my native land, though in a tender state.” Although she did not say as much, a return to Scotland brought the prospect of seeing once more her youngest children—Johnny, in Edinburgh, who was to turn twenty on October 30, and Fanny on Raasay, who had turned thirteen on May 6.
Flora’s brother Milton still occupied the family farms on the Long Island in the Outer Hebrides and had prospered. Allan’s sister Anne lived in material comfort with her second husband at Corriechatachan on Skye. Although Flora had no home on either island, her brother and sister-in-law would readily extend hospitality to her. Moreover, Flora’s own daughter Annie, who had left New York in October 1778, was now settled with her children at Dunvegan Castle on Skye. The Macleod, Lochbay’s nephew, was soon to depart with a battalion to India. Lochbay himself, promoted major, was due to return to New York and report for duty. Annie, however, in occupation at the ancient stronghold, could offer Flora a home.
Flora did not delay long once she had made the decision to return to her native land. Allan obtained a berth for her in the Dunmore, a loyalist privateer of sixteen guns bound for London. On this vessel she duly embarked in October 1779 “with three young ladies and two gentlemen” on what would prove an eventful crossing. The ship was a “letter of marque” and as such, though a private vessel, had license to board enemy craft and take prizes. Her captain, “spying a sail [on the horizon], made ready for action.” Flora recorded that in then “hurrying the ladies below to a place of safety,” she slipped on “a step in the trap [ladder].” She fell and “broke her dislocated arm in two.” When later recounting this episode, according to her daughter Annie, Flora was “accustomed to say that she had fought both for the House of Stuart and for the House of Hanover, but had been worsted in the service of each.”
The pursuit of the craft with possible booty aboard ended without result, and Flora spent the rest of the voyage with her arm roughly “set with bandages over slips of wood.” Keeping to her bed until they reached the Thames, she was still buoyed up with the prospect of making for her native land and her family in the Highlands. To her “great sorrow,” however, upon landing, she received the “melancholy news” that the ship bringing an invalid Sandy home had been lost at sea. Her son had been convalescent at Fort Windsor when Flora last saw him, following an operation for a wound in his side. This intelligence brought on a “violent fit of sickness,” and Flora was thereafter “confined to her bed in London for half a year.”
16
“All Possible Speed to the Highlands”
1780–1785
lora lay dangerously ill in London through the winter of 1779 and into the spring of 1780. Her “sickness,” she later wrote, “would have brought me to my grave if, under God’s hand [providentially], Doctor Donald Munro”—a Scot with Skye connections—“had not given his friendly assistance.” Flora was indeed fortunate in her medical attendant. Munro, then in private practice in Piccadilly, was a renowned physician formerly responsible for the health of British forces in Germany.
This “violent fit of sickness” that laid Flora low was only the latest in a catalog of ills that had assailed her since her emigration to America. She had endured the attacks of “night robbers” in North Carolina in the wake of the Moore’s Creek fiasco four years earlier. Suffering agonies of uncertainty about the whereabouts and safety of her husband and sons, she had withstood interrogation by a revolutionary committee. Rough seas and winter storms had been her lot on long passages to New York and northward to Halifax, even before she embarked on the long transatlantic voyage to England. All this time Flora’s constitution, formerly robust, was weakening. The breaks in both arms had not been well set, and rheumatism—probably rheumatoid arthritis—now afflicted both limbs.
Although still convalescent, Flora traveled north in the late spring of 1780. While in Edinburgh, she stayed with Mrs. Macdonald, a celebrated druggist or pharmacist who sold a wide variety of medicines at her laboratory or pharmacy in the Lawnmarket. Although some of these remedies may have allayed the worst of Flora’s ills, she was urged by her physicians to “make for the benefit of the goats’ whey.” She intended, she wrote from the Scottish capital to a Glasgow merchant, “to take up…residence in the Long Island.”
The watery milk that Flora was advised to imbibe was then widely believed to have curative properties for a variety of ailments. Highland goats, it was noted with approval, fed “amongst rocks and glens which abound with wild, aromatic plants.” The hills of South Uist where Flora, when young, had pastured her brother’s livestock were still, as a local minister there was later to remark, “covered with heath[er] and verdure, fit enough for pasturing black cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, during the summer and autumn months.” Over thirty years earlier at midnight in that shepherd’s hut on the Long Island, Flora had offered the famished prince a bowlful of cream. Now in her late fifties, she herself might hope to grow fat on whey, cream, cheese, and other wholesome Highland sustenance.
Flora wished her Glasgow correspondent to convey “some things [belongings]” of hers to the Long Island which she would send him “by the [new Monkland] Canal.” Ever the woman of business, Flora suggested various ways whereby she might remit “the freight” to the merchant. Meanwhile, she herself continued her journey north, pausing in Perthshire to pay her respects to Mrs. John Mackenzie of Delvine. Now a widow, this lady had been as a mother these past years in Edinburgh to Flora’s son Johnny while he was at the high school and afterward apprenticed to the law. Preferring a career in the military, the young man had secured a cadetship in the East India Company army and earlier in the year had sailed for Bombay. His mother had arrived in the Scottish capital too late to see him.
Continuing her travels north, Flora rested at Inverness some days before taking to the road again with a “female companion” bound for Skye whom she had had “the good luck to meet.” On Raasay, she reacquainted herself with her younger daughter. Flora wrote cheerfully to Mrs. Mackenzie from Skye in July that Fanny, now fourteen, promised to be a “stout Highland Caileag [Gaelic: young woman],” being “quite overgrown [very tall] of her age.”
Flora’s odyssey from North Carolina, via New York and Nova Scotia, was nearly complete. She was writing from Dunvegan, the Macleod stronghold set high above the Minch on the western coast of Skye, where she and Fanny were staying with her elder daughter. Boswell had earlier commented on the “many circumstances of natural grandeur” that made Dunvegan a worthy seat for the Macleod and his family. Annie and her “small family [children]” were now the castle’s occupants. Lochbay, as Flora informed Mrs. Mackenzie, was in the south and about to sail for America. There, in common with Flora’s sons Charles and James, he would engage in British maneuvers in the southern states of America.
In her letter to Mrs. Mackenzie in July, Flora expressed her relief that her progress north had been “without any accidents, which I always dread.” Given that fall from her horse in America and the recent break in her arm on board the Dunmore, she had good reason for this apprehension about travel. She foretold years of rheumatism to come when she referred to having reached Raasay “with difficulty,” her hands being “so pained with the [rough] riding” on the four days’ journey beforehand from Inverness to the west coast.
With no home of her own now on Skye, Flora must accept her daughter’s hospitality while she rested after her peregrinations from London. At Dunvegan the landward views, “wild, moorish [moorland], hilly, and craggy” in appearance, were desolate. Beneath the castle, the sea pounded on glistening rocks and boulders. Here was a reminder to Flora, if reminder was required, that her husband and elder sons were located far across the Atlantic and Johnny farther still, on the eastern rim of the Arabian Sea. The mother’s thoughts flitted often to that youngest son, whom she had last seen six years earlier. She wrote to Mrs. Mackenzie, “Should you get a letter from my son Johnny sooner than I would get one from him, you would very much oblige me by dropping me a few lines communicating to me the most material part.”
Flodigarry and Kingsburgh, Flora’s former homes on Skye, had been comfortable and well-appointed dwellings. Dunvegan was cold even in summer and no place for a woman, like Flora, in “tender health.” Every chimney in the house smoked, bar that in the drawing room, and a “noble cascade” outside the window of this latter room made conversation often inaudible. Moreover, in consequence of the great size of the castle, food prepared in the kitchens was invariably cold when served in the dining room. Flora told Mrs. Mackenzie in July, “I wait here till a favourable opportunity for the Long Island shall offer itself…. Please direct to me, to Mrs Macdonald, late of Kingsborrow [Kingsburgh], South Uist, by Dunvegan.”
