Mark Of The Scots - Cl

THE MARK of the SCOTS

Their Astonishing Contributions to History, Science, Democracy, Literature, and the Arts

DUNCAN A. BRUCE

"When a nation goes down or a society perishes,

one condition may always be found.

They forgot where they came from."

—Carl Sandburg

Cuimhnich air na daoine o’n d’thàinig thu.

(Remember the men from whom you have come.)

A BIRCH LANE PRESS BOOK

Published by Carol Publishing Group

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

For Tamara

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Author to Reader

1 - The Mark of the Scots

2 - The Exploring Scots

3 - The Creation of the United States of America

4 - The Construction of the British Empire

5 - The Industrial Revolution

6 - Scottish Soldiers and Sailors

7 - Civilian Scots Abroad

8 - The Printed World

9 - Science

10 - Art, Architecture, Music, and Entertainment

11 - Sports

Appendix A - American Colonial and Revolutionary Governors of Scottish Birth or Descent

Appendix B - Signers of the Declaration of Independence

Appendix C - American Government Leaders of Scottish Ancestry

Appendix D - The Presidents of the United States of America

Appendix E - Scots in American Religion

Appendix F - Scots in American Education

Appendix G - British Prime Ministers of Scottish Ancestry

Appendix H - World Population of People of Scottish Ancestry Estimated by Country

Appendix I - A Miscellany of Scottish Invention

Appendix J - Scots in Steamship Companies

Appendix K - Scottish Brand Names

Appendix L - Business Miscellany

Appendix M - Scottish Organization

Appendix N - Science Miscellany

Appendix O - The Nobel Prize

Appendix P - The Wallace Award

Appendix Q - The Scottish Achievement Demonstrated by Name-Frequency Technique

Appendix R - Scottish Versatility

Appendix S - The Scottish Passion for Education

Appendix T - The Scottish Nation

Appendix U - The Baseball Hall of Fame

Notes and References

Bibliography

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife, Tamara, and my daughters Jennifer and Elizabeth, for having put up with so much for so long so this book could happen. Special thanks to Lord Elgin for writing the foreword. And for their influence on me and this book, exceptional thanks to my parents, Archibald Duncan Bruce and Marian Colley Bruce, and to my three Scottish grandparents, Archibald Bruce, Mary MacTavish Bruce, and James Grant Colley.

Many others have been of help or have tried to be over the years. Among them I would like to mention the following people: Bernard Adnet, Alan L. Bain, Dave Black, Hillel Black, Robert M. Bowes, Jim Bruce, Donald J. Davidson, Bill Eakins, Ellen Gooch, Charles Haws, Deirdre Livingstone, Duncan MacDonald, William Naylor McDonald III, Charles MacLean, Martha Millard, Ian Ogilvy, Carol Swift, Jack Webster, and Nathaniel Weyl.

And thanks, also, to those who subscribed to the book and waited paitently for its arrival: Sarah Ford, Anne Robertson Kennedy, A. Ranald Mackenzie, Seumas MacNicol, James Harrison Monroe, J. Wallace Reid, and Marilyn Lucas Ross.

Foreword

Duncan Bruce has been an inspiring friend for a quarter of a century. When first we met in New York, his calm appearance, all through a great, if complicated, series of occasions, made an abiding impression. It was a feeling built of many parts—business ability, historic recall, joy of music, and delight in marriage and family—but above all he had curiosity. Many Scots are so obsessed, but seldom had I met one who was so totally enthralled, and as he spoke he was, in turn, enthralling.

Duncan saw with immense clarity the power of the members of a small nation when opportunity offers. He knew that the very compact nature of the diverse regions of Scotland had spawned too many skills and much more enterprise than could be required at home, so he tracked the personalities of those who had left their native land. In succeeding years, every time I met him, this remarkable table of names and deeds grew larger. Perhaps I, like others who will come to read the story, may have put a different emphasis on the achievements of certain people, but their names are there and you can do your own varied research as you will.

Much of the tale which unfolds shows the extraordinary ability of the Scot, when abroad, to be part of their surrounding nation first and use innate strength to reach the highest goal just by knowing the supremacy of their origin. The most illustrious of my Bruce forbears was King Robert I of Scots, whose supreme ability was to forge a most disparate people into one nation. Duncan Bruce has assembled those Scots who then went to other lands and amassed their contributions on a wider scene.

Nevertheless, Mr. Bruce has not forgotten his homeland. Contemporary accounts of King Robert the Bruce described him, in the courtly language of that time, as de bon air. This is indeed the way in which The Mark of the Scots has been written. As the present Chief of the Name of Bruce, I salute my kinsman Duncan Bruce and trust his research will long excite, amuse, and enthrall its readers.

Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, KT

Broomhall, Dunfermline

25th August 1995

Author to Reader

Somewhere within the depths of all of us who are of Scottish blood, there is a knowledge that despite our dispersion throughout the continents and our constantly increasing assimilation into other nations, we are still somehow one people, held together by fragments of a common culture and genes inherited of ancient kings. And because of this awareness we perceive with pride that our nation, though one of the smallest and poorest in origin, is nonetheless one of the most successful.

We notice the unusual frequency of minority Scots in a list of British prime ministers. We note the Scottish names of some of the richest families throughout the English-speaking world and of the greatest newspaper publishers of Australia, Canada, England, and the United States. Throughout modern history we observe an endless tide of Scottish scientists and inventors and a constant parade of actors, actresses, soldiers, artists, authors, and statesmen bearing the unique surnames of the grand old families created long ago in the misty little land beyond the River Tweed.

Various aspects of the phenomenon of Scottish achievement have been documented in hundreds of books and articles for more than two centuries, but none before has ever put forth the story on a worldwide historical basis, revealing Scotland’s mark in all lands, from the earliest times to the present. This book is an attempt to do that.

A subsidiary purpose of this work is to supplement the one-dimensional peasant image the Scots have chosen to present to the world which thus has been convinced that we are a people who spend most of our time swilling whiskey, eating haggis, throwing tree trunks around and emitting war whoops while listening to bagpipe music. That Scots should take great pride in their rustic past is commendable, of course, but it is time to inform the world of the intellectual might that has surged out from the glens and made such a rich contribution to civilization.

As the achievement of a nation is the sum of the individual attainments of its people, hundreds of men and women are mentioned in this book. Everyone named can be shown to have been born in Scotland or to have had an ancestor born in Scotland. This includes the Presbyterian Ulster Scots, who moved from Scotland to northern Ireland in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from there to North America, where they are known as the Scotch-Irish. Although it has been shown often that during their sojourn these people rarely intermarried with the Irish because of religious and other differences, there are still many who think of them as ethnically Irish, or partly so. Their background is comparable to the English Puritans who moved to Massachusetts after a short stay in Holland. As one historian has put it, If the Scotch-Irish be Irish, then the Puritans must be Dutch.¹

Most of the people mentioned in this book are either entirely or largely descended from the old Scottish national stock, which existed, rather more homogeneously than is usually thought, before the immigrations of the Industrial Revolution.² When the occasional person is cited who is only remotely of Scottish ancestry, such as George Washington or Winston Churchill, I have tried to disclose this remote origin. Often I have mentioned people who are less than half Scottish, realizing that some will say that their minority Scottish heritage is irrelevant to this type of study. I can only respond, in advance, that I do not agree.

For example, I believe the fact that Marconi, the Italian inventor of radio, was partly Scottish is highly significant, since such an unusual share of the world’s most important inventions have been developed by people with Scottish ancestry.³ (By the same token, I was not surprised to learn that one of Scotland’s greatest instrumental musicians of this century, Ron Gonnella, was one-fourth Italian, as Italians have produced far more eminence in music than Scots have.)

Nor, in my opinion, does the dispersion of the Scots to the far ends of the world make their diluted genes and culture irrelevant. As the Scottish scholar Gordon Donaldson has said, The history of the Scottish nation has for many centuries now been something more than the history of a small, poor and remote country. A study of the spectacular movement of people from Scotland is part of Scottish history.⁴

However diluted they have become in this emigration, the Scots in their diaspora have had an enormous impact on many countries, as we shall see. And this impact has been masked by the unusual tendency of the Scots to assimilate completely into the general population. Thus, in Toronto, it is usually only immigrant Scots, often poor and humble folk, who are considered by most Canadians to be Scots. The sons and daughters of these immigrants, who may be millionaire businessmen, professionals, authors, and scientists, are thought of as Canadians. It is hoped that this book will help to rectify this unfair perception and expose the hidden contributions of the Scottish nation.

It is their tendency to assimilate that allows these perceptions to develop, and that has allowed the mark of the Scots to go largely unrecognized, even by the Scots themselves, whether in Scotland or in the diaspora. In America we have seen how important group self-esteem, or lack of it, can be to the fortunes of minority groups in a pluralistic society, and for this reason I do not mind being the boastful representative of a normally reticent people. It is time those of us who are Scottish know who we are and what we have done. This book therefore makes no attempt to be fair or present all sides of an issue. This book is an advocate’s brief for the Scottish nation.

The inspiration, as well as the research for this book, began when I was a child on my immigrant grandmother’s knee and continued at my father’s table. They were always talking about the Scottishness of prominent people in the news and how, as Scots, we had an obligation to work hard for success and some mandate from heaven to achieve in life. I had often wondered if the Scots were really as good at things as they believed, and in 1969 I was astonished to learn that Nathaniel Weyl, a writer, had actually made an ingenious statistical survey that tended to prove it.⁵

Around the same time I read two other books. One, Jews, God and History, by Max Dimont, is an historical review of the achievements of the Jews all over the world. It is a marvelous book, and I wondered why there wasn’t one about the Scots. The second is The Scotch, by John Kenneth Galbraith, which describes with great humor the rather mediocre Scottish neighborhood in Canada from which he comes. It portrays the Scots as honest and law-abiding but also as unwashed, semiliterate, and slaves to money. It does not mention that out of such Scottish-Canadian ghettoes have come an inordinate number of prominent Canadians, including Professor Galbraith himself. Altogether, Galbraith’s somewhat negative book showed me that there was a need for a book on Scottish achievement, Dimont’s that there might be a market for it, and Weyl’s that an empirical study on Scottish achievement could be backed up statistically.

The long research for this book followed immediately. This included reading the amazing New York Times virtually every day, clipping relevant material, and perusing every interesting title in the wondrous catalogue of the New York Public Library as well as the subject index of the Edinburgh Public Library under such subjects as Scot, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, Scotland, Scots, and Scottish. (Alas, the Scottish National Library has no subject index for books before 1978.)

I have pursued all citations I thought might be pertinent in Donald Whyte’s bibliography of Scots Abroad, as well as every issue of the Scottish Historical Review from 1904 through 1986; Scottish Studies from 1957 through 1983; the Scottish Genealogist through 1986; the twentieth-century version of Scots magazine through 1987, and every issue of the Highlander and the Scottish-American (later incorporated into the Scottish Banner) up to the present. I have turned every page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fourteenth edition, 1969. I have read, in their entireties, the excellent Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland and Chambers Scottish Biographical Dictionary. I have read dozens of books, including several on Scottish history, and have written hundreds of letters to prominent people asking if they were of Scottish descent, and have received many answers.

Although I have tried scrupulously to avoid errors, I must apologize, in advance, for the mistakes in this book, which I am sure will turn out to be more than several. I have tried to check source information, but sometimes there was only one source. At other times, sources contradicted each other. Also, I must apologize that, as time has passed, it has not been possible to keep all of the information up-to-date and, therefore, someone who is described as living may now be dead or some world record mentioned may have been surpassed.

This is a book about people of Scottish ancestry who have had an influence on the world outside Scotland. Thus, artists such as Raeburn are included, while others, who are not well-known outside Scotland, are not. William Wallace is only mentioned as a soldier, while Douglas MacArthur gets some discussion.

There is still much work to be done, but as the number of new facts I learn rapidly decreases each year, I am confident that most of the story, or at least the most important parts of it, are somewhere within these pages and that, in the words of my late friend, Sir lain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, it is time to write something now rather than everything never. It has been my idea that, for the most part, only the truly great, famous, or unique should be included.

Duncan A. Bruce

New York

February 5, 1996

"No people so few in number have

scored so deep a mark in the

world’s history as the Scots have done."

—J. A. Froude (1818-1894), English historian

1

The Mark of the Scots

By any standard, the Scots constitute a tiny minority in the population of the world, yet their presence has been felt as if they were a mighty nation. Only about 28 million,¹ or a relatively insignificant one-half of one percent of the globe’s 5.7 billion inhabitants, are Scottish by either birth or descent. Yet amazingly, people of entirely or partly Scottish extraction have been recipients in almost 11 percent of all the Nobel Prizes awarded through 1990.²

Scientists of Scottish ancestry are credited with an almost incredible number of major achievements, from the pivotal inventions of the steam engine, steamboat, and railroad; through the telegraph, telephone, and television; to the motion picture, phonograph, radar, computer, transistor, and pocket calculator. Scottish mathematicians have invented logarithms and calculus, and Scottish physicians have found the causes of sleeping sickness and malaria, and have developed insulin, the typhoid and smallpox vaccines, and penicillin.

Tiny Scotland has been, perhaps, the source of more beneficial advances to civilization than any other country; and the positive impact of its people, representatives of which have been honored on the postage stamps of some sixty nations, is arguably greater than that of any other land. Modern Scotland, devastated after World War II by the loss of her great heavy industry, has made a successful switch to high technology. Silicon Glen now makes 10 percent of the world’s computers and has more than three hundred electronics plants. Little Scotland supplies England with most of its semiconductors and even has 11 percent of the huge European market.³

But Scotland’s greatest wealth has always been the talent and character of her people, which she continues to export too generously. A world survey in 1973, examining secondary students in reading comprehension, literature, and science, placed Scottish students second only to heavily-Scottish New Zealand and ahead of students in England, the United States, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium, among others.⁴

The United States of America, the most powerful nation of all time and the model for the foundation of countless countries and governments is, to a great extent, a Scottish creation, born largely of Scottish ideas and efforts: from the governing of the English colonies to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to the first presidential administration, to the settling of the wild frontier. All of the American territory outside the original thirteen colonies, all the way to Hawaii, was acquired by Scottish-American presidents, diplomats, and soldiers. Many, perhaps the majority, of the greatest generals and admirals who have defended the country since its beginnings have been Scots, and the great wealth and industrial might of America has been disproportionately created and managed by Scottish-Americans. Several times the richest man in America has been of Scottish descent, and today in many of the fifty states the richest family is of Scottish origin. In recent years two Scottish-Americans (one by way of Canada), John Kenneth Galbraith and Dwight MacDonald, were chosen by their peers as among the top five intellectuals in the country.⁵

Despite the fact that fewer than 5 percent of the American population claims Scottish ancestry, more than three-quarters of the American presidents have been at least partly of Scottish descent.⁶ All of the seven presidents of the United States since Kennedy have had at least some Scottish ancestry, although this is sometimes not noticed. In the 1984 election, for instance, Reagan and Mondale were perceived as Irish and Norwegian, while their Scottish-American mothers went unrecognized.

In 1940, according to one estimate, 45 percent of all the people listed in Who’s Who in America had either fathers or mothers bearing Scottish surnames.⁷ In 1966, Nathaniel Weyl’s work used an ingenious name-frequency technique that has supported the empirical evidence of Scottish overachievement in America.⁸ And the 1980 U.S. census corroborating all of this, concluded that of all the diverse ethnic groups that make up America, Scottish-Americans were the only ones with no illiteracy. The census also reported that Scottish-Americans had the most education, the highest income, and the lowest unemployment rate of any ancestral group.⁹

So broadly based was the Scottish contribution to the construction of the British Empire that some have suggested it should have been called the Scottish Empire. Indeed, throughout the histories of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and many other lands, the Scots have provided vastly more than their share of the explorers, pioneers, soldiers, governors, businessmen, and politicians who made the empire great.

Canada could not have conquered her vast wilderness without her cadres of Scottish fur traders. She might never have been a cohesive country had it not been for the brilliant humanity of a Scottish governor general who was sincerely just in dealing with the French-speaking minority, or without the herculean efforts of those Scots who financed, engineered, and built the unifying Canadian Pacific Railway across the barren continent. Scottish-Canadian prime ministers have governed more than two-thirds of the time since the confederation of 1867. Recently, for more than a decade and a half, the prime minister was the half-Scottish Pierre Elliott Trudeau. More recently, Kim Campbell became the first woman to hold that office.

Australia was a distressed penal colony until a Highland administrator restored order and promoted education and enterprise, while another Scot founded the country’s vital wool industry. The first British settlements in New Zealand, South Africa, and many other outposts were dominated by Scots, and in countless battles all over the globe a thin red line of Scottish soldiers made the difference in defending the imperial interests. Today, throughout the commonwealth remnant of the empire, the Scottish minority continues to play a part in politics, education, commerce, and the arts more appropriate to that of a majority.

In Great Britain itself, where only about one-seventh of the people are Scots, about half of the twentieth-century prime ministers have been at least partly of Scottish blood.¹⁰ And the Scottish prominence in British politics continues. In recent years, Highlander John Smith died suddenly while leading the Labour party. He had succeeded Neil Gordon Kinnock, a Welshman of Scottish descent. The current head of Labour bears the Scottish name of Blair. In the past decade or so David Steel has led the Liberals, and Robert Adam Ross Maclellan the Social Democrats. The long-running Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is descended from Ulster Stevensons and is therefore quite likely of Scottish descent.

Despite the fact that few Scots are Episcopalians, the head of the Church of England, the archbishop of Canterbury, has been Scottish most of the time for over a century. The very queen of the United Kingdom, without doubt the grandest monarch in the world, is in fact largely of Scottish, rather than English, descent. The symbolic stone upon which she was crowned belongs to Scotland, and its ancient traditions to the Scottish rather than to the English royalty.

The overachievement of the Scots in Britain was noticed as early as 1869 by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, who noted in his Hereditary Genius that ... the Scots produced more outstanding minds in proportion to their numbers than any other group. Per million of population, Scotland produced four class I geniuses to England’s 1 . . .¹¹ Other studies showing Scottish overachievement in Great Britain include those by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 1888, A. H. H. Maclean, in 1900, Havelock Ellis, in 1926, and Ellsworth Huntington, in 1927, the last demonstrating a Scottish overrepresentation in British science almost double that of England and Wales.¹²

The entire world economy has been greatly influenced by Scots. To the extent that it is capitalistic, the world rests upon firm Scottish philosophical foundations, particularly through the work of Adam Smith. To the extent that the world is industrialized, it is indebted to the entrepreneurs, financiers, inventors, artisans, and workers of Glasgow and its environs, where so great a part of the Industrial Revolution began and developed.

Even in countries where almost no Scots or people of Scottish descent live, the Scottish nation has left its mark in such representatives as the father of the Russian navy; the founder of the Indian tea industry; an admiral of the fleet of the Queen of Portugal; Norway’s most esteemed composer and also her greatest dramatist; mayors of the capital cities of Spain, Sweden, Bolivia, and Poland; commanders in chief of the armies of Persia, Finland, Morocco, Sweden, Russia, Austria, Venezuela, and France; a governor general of Finland; personal physicians to the monarchs of Sweden, France, Russia, Poland, and Denmark; one of Germany’s greatest philosophers; a king of Ireland and a queen of Bohemia; a president of France and a prime minister of Holland; the most prominent families of the fortified wine industries of both Spain and Portugal; a president of Nicaragua; the author of the first Chinese dictionary; a hero of the Greek independence movement; a postmaster general of Japan; a founder of the Argentine beef industry; and one of the principal liberators of Chile, Peru, and Brazil.

The story of the achievement of the Scots is truly remarkable and can serve as a model for other small, poor, and remote countries, for everywhere they have gone their industry has produced benefits to society, in general.

The mark of the Scots is indelible.

"I, who had ambitions not only to

go farther than anyone had done

before, but as far as it was

possible for man to go."

—Capt. James Cook

"Resistless seas

Surge round the storm-swept Orcades

Where erst Saint-Clair bore princely sway

O’er isle and islet, strait and bay."

—Sir Walter Scott

2

The Exploring Scots

The Scots played a very great part in the Age of Exploration. Following the ancient tradition of their Celtic ancestors, they wandered over the globe, establishing Scottish place names in its most remote reaches. There are Aberdeens in Saskatchewan and Africa, and Perths in Australia and Kansas. The great Clan Campbell has a cape in New Zealand named after it, an island in Oceana, and a town in Pakistan. Their redoubtable rivals, the Macdonalds, have an island in the Indian Ocean, a lake in Australia, and a mountain range in British Columbia. The Murrays, not to be outdone, have a cape in Antarctica and a river in Australia. The Mackenzies, one of the most northern Scottish clans, have appropriately chosen, several rather cold places as their memorials: a bay, river, and some mountains in Canada’s frigid Northwest Territory, and a bay in Antarctica.¹

In subsequent chapters of this book many Scottish explorers are mentioned where their efforts pertain to a specific country. This chapter will discuss some of the Scots who have made contributions to exploration in general. Not all of them were great or famous men. Robert Pitcairn was only a Scottish midshipman in 1767, when he first sighted and discovered Pitcairn Island (of the Bounty mutiny) and had it named after him.² Alexander Selkirk was the stranded Scottish sailor whose tales of survival on Juan Fernandez Island became the basis for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.³

The Scottish Discovery of America

June 2, 1398

Perhaps the greatest, as well as the least-known, Scottish explorer was Prince Henry Sinclair, who was, according to Frederick J. Pohl, a grand sea lord who commanded an expedition that reached North America almost a century before the first voyage of Columbus. Although this may seem a concocted claim, flying in the face of conventional wisdom, much of the story is accepted as standard history. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, Sir Henry . . . (d.c.1400) . . . rediscovered Greenland with the Venetian travelers Niccolò and Antonio Zeno.⁴

The scholarly detective work that proves that the voyage went past Greenland to America has been done by Mr. Pohl, who, after years of research, produced the book Prince Henry Sinclair, from which the following can be extracted: that Henry Sinclair was born near Edinburgh in 1345 to a noble Scottish family;⁵ that through his partly Norwegian mother he inherited the earldom of Orkney (then under Norway) wielding power near to that of a King;⁶ that he built a great fleet in the Orkney Islands;⁷ that Niccolò Zeno, brother of the Venetian naval hero Carlo Zeno, was shipwrecked in the Orkneys and was rescued by Sinclair;⁸ that Niccolò died but was survived by his son Antonio Zeno, who became admiral of Sinclair’s fleet;⁹ that Sinclair himself decided to lead an expedition to the new world described to him by Orcadian fishermen who had found it by accident;¹⁰ that Sinclair’s party made land at what is now Guysborough, Nova Scotia, on June 2, 1398;¹¹ and later went on to what is now Westford, Massachusetts, where they proceeded to punch into a rock the arms of a member of the Scottish Clan Gunn, which are still visible;¹² and that Antonio Zeno’s narrative of the expedition, some of which still survives, makes this transatlantic voyage the earliest for which we have the written record of a participant.¹³

The Zeno Narrative is also the first document to refer to the Western Hemisphere as a new world (grandissimo e quasi un nuovo mondo).¹⁴ Mr. Pohl presents detailed geographical and geological evidence as well as Indian legends which corroborate his case. And visits to the sites in both Nova Scotia and Massachusetts have shown his entire explanation to be eminently plausible and, at least in Nova Scotia, completely convincing. Independent evidence of Henry Sinclair’s discovery of America can still be seen near Edinburgh at Roslin Chapel, which was founded in 1446 by Henry’s grandson William, the third earl of Orkney. As we know that construction on the chapel stopped in 1484,¹⁵ the carvings of Indian corn (maize) and aloe cactus on the chapel’s walls prove that the Sinclair family knew of these American plants before the first voyage of Columbus.¹⁶ Since it is known that Europeans, including Norsemen and Scots, were in North America long before Columbus and as early as A.D. 1010,¹⁷ it is not really surprising to learn of the Sinclair voyage.

The probable reason no one paid immediate attention to the Sinclair discovery was that there was no practical way of informing the world of it. The Zeno manuscript had been consigned to a musty archive fifty years before Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, which was around 1447. However, the new technique of printing was widely available throughout Europe by 1492, in time to give the voyages of Columbus great renown. It seems quite possible that had the Zeno manuscript of the Sinclair expedition been printed and distributed immediately (it lay unpublished for a century and a half) Americans might now celebrate Sinclair Day on June 2, instead of Columbus Day on October 12.

The Great Navigator

Captain James Cook (1728-1779), one of the greatest explorers in history, was born in Yorkshire to Scottish parents.¹⁸ Cook was the first of the scientific navigators, and his three long voyages brought back more information on the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere than all of the explorers before him.¹⁹ Cook was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle and circumnavigate the Antarctic continent, proving the nonexistence of habitable continental land north of the Antarctic Circle. He discovered, named, and charted New South Wales. He circumnavigated New Zealand and was the first to chart it. He was also the first to chart the northwest coast of North America all the way to the Arctic Circle. Captain Cook is regarded as the discoverer of Hawaii, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, and New Caledonia, which he named, appropriately, in 1774.²⁰ He also rediscovered and named the New Hebrides.²¹

North America

A fur trader, born on the isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, became Canada’s most important explorer. In 1789, at the age of twenty-five, following the great river which is named for him, Alexander Mackenzie trekked almost three thousand miles in four months, discovering the water route from Fort Chippewyan, in what is now Alberta, to the Arctic Ocean. In 1793 he crossed the Rockies to the Pacific shore, where he scrawled on a rock, visible still:

Alex Mackenzie

from Canada

by land

22 July 1793

Mackenzie thus became the first person to make an overland crossing of the full width of the North American continent.²² At the age of thirty, he was paid a quarter of a million dollars for his accomplishment and became the youngest senior partner of the mighty North West Company. He returned to Britain with his fortune, was knighted, and became a member of Parliament. He died on a farm in Scotland in 1820.²³

William Clark, a redheaded Virginian of Scottish ancestry and brother of frontiersman George Rogers Clark, was comanager of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806.²⁴ Launched by President Jefferson, also of Scottish ancestry,²⁵ the expedition followed the Missouri and Columbia rivers to the Pacific, returning to give the world its first clear picture of the American West. Lewis and Clark were the first to cross the American continent in what is now the United States.

Russia to the Far East

In the early eighteenth century, a twenty-three-year-old physician named John Bell went to St. Petersburg in search of adventure and joined several Russian embassies traveling to Persia, China, Mongolia, and Siberia. In 1722 Peter the Great asked Bell to accompany him on a trip to the Caspian Gates. Bell’s writings of these journeys gave Europeans a vivid picture of the peoples of the East. Later, the Russian and British governments sent Bell to Constantinople, where he became a merchant, acquiring enough wealth to retire to his birthplace in Scotland at age fifty-six.²⁶

Africa

The participation of Scotland in the exploration of Africa was perhaps the most significant of any nation, regardless of size. It began in 1770 when James Bruce (1730-1794), a Stirlingshire wine merchant, found the source of the Blue Nile river in Abyssinia.²⁷

In 1796 Mungo Park (1771-1806), a surgeon from Selkirkshire, became the first European to see the upper reaches of the Niger River while exploring the Gambia. Park, who had managed to escape from a four-month imprisonment at the hands of an Arab, returned to Scotland, but in 1805 he revisited the Niger and was killed by natives.²⁸ He made a great contribution to the knowledge of the area around what is now Nigeria which, for thousands of square miles, had been just a blank on the map before his efforts.²⁹

The Niger quest was continued by Alexander Gordon Laing (1793-1826), a soldier from Edinburgh who discovered the source of the Rokell in 1822 but was prevented from reaching the source of the Niger by hostile tribesmen. On a later expedition, in 1826, he became the first European to attain Timbuktu, only to be murdered two days afterward.³⁰ A physician, William Balfour Baikie (1825-1864), opened the Niger to commerce. In 1857 he founded the town of Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger and the Benue. Acting as ruler, doctor, and educator, he established a market, collected words in a dozen dialects, and translated parts of the Bible into Hausa.³¹

Another Scottish explorer, Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827), became, along with the Englishman Dixon Denham, the first to cross the Sahara desert, a feat they performed in 1823.³² Rev. John Campbell (1766-1840) discovered the source of the Limpopo River.³³ In 1862 James Grant (1827-1892), a Scot, and John Speke, an Englishman, discovered and named Lake Victoria and proved it to be the principal source of the Nile.³⁴ In 1875 still another Scot, Lovett Cameron, became the first man to cross equatorial Africa from sea to sea.³⁵ Joseph Thomson (1858-1895) explored unknown territory between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika in 1879, discovering Lake Rukwa in the process. Thomson, then only twenty-one, did not lose a single man and did not kill a single African, even when encountering hostile peoples. On a subsequent trip he discovered Thomson’s Falls, in what is now Kenya.³⁶

The greatest of all the African explorers was the Lowland missionary David Livingstone (1813-1873) who discovered Victoria Falls, the Zambesi River, and Lake Nyasa in the 1850s.³⁷ His travels, covering thirty thousand miles in unknown areas, were so extensive, and his accounts so complete, that he is credited with opening up the entire southern half of the continent.

Livingstone, a largely self-educated physician who had been a poverty-stricken child laborer at age ten, was shocked and disgusted when he encountered the slave trade and became obsessed with ending it. He spent most of his career trying to find trade routes which he hoped would provide profitable alternatives to slavery, and although he never succeeded, his fame and work greatly contributed to the ultimate demise of the horrid traffic. Due to his efforts slavery was ended in Zanzibar in 1873.³⁸

Livingstone also forcefully liberated thousands of captives from the slave caravans in the Victorian spirit of muscular Christianity. He was a Christian in the best sense of the word: hated by the slave traders and beloved by the Africans. By 1869 Livingstone’s work had made him world famous, but nothing had been heard from him for several years. It was then that James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Scottish-American publisher of the New York Herald, sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone. Stanley relieved Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871, greeting him with the timeless, Dr. Livingstone, I presume.

In 1973, on the centennial of his demise, a thousand people, led by Kenneth Kaunda, the Presbyterian president of Zambia, made a pilgrimage to the interior to pay homage at the site of Livingstone’s death. Blantyre, named after Livingstone’s birthplace in Scotland, is the largest city in the republic of Malawi, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is still a very significant presence in the country.³⁹

The Polar Regions

Scots have been among the leaders in most of the significant explorations of the far north and south. Dr. John Rae (1813-1893), was a native Scot who mapped vast areas of the Arctic, completing the survey of the northern North American coast in 1846. In 1854 Rae won the ten-thousand-pound prize for bringing in the first evidence of the lost Franklin expedition, which had set out to try to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. Sir John Richardson (1787-1865) mapped 550 miles of Arctic coast and worked with Rae in the search for Franklin.⁴⁰ Thomas Simpson (1808-1840), born in Dingwall, made accurate maps of the Arctic and probably viewed, and therefore can be said to have discovered, the water route of the Northwest Passage in 1839. The first crossing was made, partly on foot, by Sir Robert McClure (1807–1873) in 1854.⁴¹

Sir John Ross (1777-1856) was a Scottish polar explorer who made many important oceanographic discoveries and who accompanied his nephew, Sir James Clark Ross (1800-1862), on many other voyages. Sir James Clark Ross claimed Antarctica for Britain in 1841. Ten years earlier he had discovered the North Magnetic Pole, the existence of which he confirmed by the total inaction of several horizontal needles in my possession.⁴² The South Magnetic Pole was first reached in 1909 by a team of Britons that included the Scottish physician Alistair Forbes-Mackay (1878-1914).⁴³ Rear Admiral Donald MacMillan, an American who learned to speak Gaelic as a boy while visiting his relatives on Cape Breton Island, was one of Peary’s six assistants at the discovery of the North Pole in 1909. A versatile scientist, MacMillan made the first color photographs and the first shortwave transmission in the Arctic.⁴⁴

Robert E Scott, an Englishman of Scottish descent, rediscovered the South Pole in 1912, only a month after the Norwegian Amundsen’s discovery. Compounding this heartbreaking defeat, Scott died, tragically, on the return trip. His ship, the Discovery, now lies in state in Dundee harbor.⁴⁵ Although Antarctica has few place names of any kind, Scottish names on maps of the continent abound, from the Ross Sea to the Weddell Sea, bearing testimony to the extraordinary enterprise of Scottish explorers.⁴⁶

The Scottish efforts in polar exploration continue right up to the present. On August 17, 1988, Jeff MacInnis, a Canadian whose ancestors came from Skye, completed a three-year crossing of the three-thousand-mile Northwest Passage entirely under sail, a feat never previously accomplished after four hundred years of failed attempts that have cost more lives than Mount Everest.⁴⁷

Also, a most remarkable double has been achieved by the Clan MacNicol. On September 1, 1988, Major Ian Nicholson of New Zealand, a member of the Australian MacNicol Society, planted the clan’s banner at the South Pole. Seven months later, on April 11, 1989, an American, Gerald D. McNichols, a member