The Welsh and the Bretons were active in the European colonisation of North America from the outset. The Catholic church’s prohibition against eating meat on Fridays ensured that medieval Europe supported a thriving trade in salted and dried fish. By the fifteenth century ships from Brittany, the Basque country and the English West Country port of Bristol were pushing further and further out into the Atlantic in search of new fishing grounds. These seafarers regarded their discoveries as commercially sensitive information and did not publicise them, but there are hints in contemporary documents that ships from Bristol had already sighted the North American coast by the 1480s: certainly something was in the air. Bristol was a convenient base for many Welsh ship owners, the most prominent of whom was John Thloyde (Lloyd), who was described as the ‘most expert shipmaster of all England’. In 1466 Thloyde made a mysterious voyage to ‘exterior parts’ and in 1480 he spent nine weeks on the open sea searching unsuccessfully for ‘the island of Brasil to the west of Ireland’. Another Welshman who sponsored voyages of exploration from Bristol was the merchant and customs officer Richard Amerike (i. e. ap Meurig). Amerike was a patron of the Italian navigator John Cabot’s voyages to Newfoundland and it is just possible that it was for him, rather than the better-known Amerigo Vespucci, that America was named. John Dee, Elizabeth I’s Welsh astrologer and latter-day Merlin, later popularised stories of even earlier Welsh voyages to the New World, by the legendary Prince Madog c. 1180 and earlier still by King Arthur, as a way of legitimising his queen’s territorial claims there. It was also Dee who first coined the term ‘British Empire’, though he was of course thinking of the ancient Britons. There was also an unsuccessful attempt to found a ‘New Wales’ in Newfoundland by Robert Vaughan of Llangyndeyrn between 1616 and 1632.
Soon after John Cabot discovered the Grand Banks in 1496, fishermen from St Malo in Brittany, as well as from England, Spain and Portugal, began to cross the Atlantic to exploit their astonishingly abundant stocks of cod. The shoals were so vast that it was said that the tightly packed cod could be caught simply by lowering a basket into the sea. Those medieval fishermen would find it hard to believe that their modern descendants had fished the Grand Banks’ cod to extinction. Though the Bretons preferred to fish well offshore, like fishermen from other countries, they sometimes set up temporary summer camps on the coast of Newfoundland for ship repairs or for drying and salting fish to preserve it for the long trip home. The Breton navigator Jacques Cartier was undoubtedly exploiting the geographical knowledge of Breton fishermen when he discovered and explored the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1534-6. Cartier led the first French attempt to found a permanent colony in the New World in 1541-3 and, though it failed, Breton ships continued to sail to the St Lawrence to fish and trade for furs with the Iroquois Indians for the rest of the century. After the settlement of ‘New France’ began with the foundation of Quebec in 1608, Bretons became the first emigrants from the Celtic countries to live permanently in the New World. Bretons even continued to emigrate to Quebec after the British conquered it in 1759, but in the nineteenth century it was the USA that became the favoured destination of Breton emigrants. The Industrial Revolution led to a collapse of the rural textile industry in Brittany and emigration increased dramatically in the nineteenth century. In the century between 1851 and 1951 over a million Bretons left, equivalent to a third of the population.
Scots and Irish already numbered among England’s colonial subjects by the end of the seventeenth century. Some of them were the descendants of Scots and Irish prisoners of war transported to the West Indies and Virginia by Parliament during the civil wars. Others were Catholic Irish displaced by the Jacobean plantations who had settled in the West Indies as indentured servants of English planters - many of them later left for Maryland after it introduced toleration for Catholic worship in 1649. Scots merchants and planters were settled on Barbados and Scottish courts often transported criminals to English colonies, which welcomed the cheap labour. Scottish Presbyterians emigrated to South Carolina and New Jersey, to escape the religious oppression of their own government. However, before the Act of Union in 1707, Scots who wished to emigrate had tended to favour the Baltic, for its commercial opportunities, or Ulster, for land. Scotland’s two attempts at founding colonies of its own were failures. An early seventeenth-century settlement in Nova Scotia fell foul of Anglo-French rivalry in the region, while an attempt to found a colony at Darien in Panama in 1698-9 was a disaster that almost bankrupted the country and paved the way for the union with England. However ambiguous Scots felt about the union, it did at least give them equal access to the British Empire. Proportionate to their numbers, the Scots proved to be even more enthusiastic imperialists than the English. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Scots wholeheartedly participated in the British Empire, whether as settlers, merchants, colonial administrators, missionaries, engineers or soldiers.
It would be simplistic to present all Scottish emigration as Celtic emigration. It is not the case that even today all Scots would regard themselves as Celts, and before the mid nineteenth century the cultural divide between the Anglophone Lowlands and Gaelic-speaking Highlands was a sharp one. And before the nineteenth century it was from the Lowlands that most Scottish emigrants came. Given the cultural differences, it is not surprising that Lowland and Highland emigration differed in nature. Lowlanders were more individualistic and were generally seeking improved personal career opportunities, much like English emigrants in fact. Highlanders were much more likely to emigrate in family or community based groups, often trying to transplant their communal way of life to a new country. The unique character of Highland emigration was a result of the Clearances, which uprooted entire communities in the name of agricultural modernisation.
World History
