The texture of life on board an emigrant ship in the nineteenth century required a modicum of patience to cope with a dire lack of personal space, and was run on a regimented system within a framework of rules set according to the  values of Victorian Britain. Emigrants came with distinct languages, customs, beliefs, prejudices and institutions. As on land, they were divided along social lines in every aspect of shipboard life. Emigrants were strictly separated according to class, marital status and gender. There were rules and expectations of behaviour on matters of morality that continued to cause consternation to authorities throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.  Improper liberties, especially among single men and women, blasphemy, language, gambling, and violence were strictly monitored. To further complicate matters, divisions along lines of religion and ethnicity played out as discomfort and tensions increased.

Emigration was a defining event for Sutherland, McIver and Webster individuals and families, so what set of circumstances encouraged them to emigrate on a lengthy, uncomfortable and risky voyage? For John and Mary Sutherland, County Sutherland, their home in the far north of Scotland was infamous for both the organisation and scale of the clearance of tenants from the interior of the estate to its coastal regions for sheep. Between six and ten thousand people were removed from their homes between 1807-1821 alone. It has been described as an ‘extraordinary episode.’^[1] The next three decades saw the collapse of the kelp industry,  potato crop failures in the 1830s and 1840s, a severe winter in 1837 and typhoid and scarlet fever.