Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan

Millions of Scots have left their homeland during the last 400 years, and until now, they have mostly been written about in general terms. Gathering the tales of particular emigrants, drawn from the once-powerful Clan MacLeod, and discovering what happened to them and their families, this history breaks new ground. These are stories of, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, Aboriginal and African-American activists, Canadian mounted policemen, and Confederate rebels. One 19-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. Based on unpublished documents, letters, family histories, and the author's travels in the company of today's MacLeods, this is a tale of disastrous voyages, famine, dispossession, and the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it 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 journeys began.