Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan

by JamesHunter (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.41

  Millions of Scots have left their homeland during the last 400 years. Until now, they have been written about in general terms. Scottish Exodus breaks new ground by taking particular emigrants, drawn from the once-powerful Clan MacLeod, and discovering, with help from their descendants, what happened to them and their families. These people became, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters and revolutionaries, Irish priests, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, prairie homesteaders, Aboriginal and African-American activists, Canadian mounted policemen, Confederate rebels and Nova Scotian farmers. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. This gripping account of Scotland's worldwide diaspora is based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories. It is also based on the author's international travels in the company of today's MacLeods - some of them still in Scotland, others in countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, New Zealand and South Africa. Scottish Exodus is a tale of horror and hardship - disastrous voyages, famine and dispossession, the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But this is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their global journeyings began.