Wow! THAT post got a lot of response! Here's what Elizabeth sent me on March 29th: Extract from "Scotland Farewell" ..... page 189.......Pictou -------- Apart from weddings and the occasional Ceilidh, there was little enough excitement at the harbour, unless an emigrant ship came in. Then everyone would run to the shore and some people would canoe down the river, for there were usually relatives aboard. There was great anticipation in the summer of 1801 when they learned that their neighbour Hugh Denoon had organized two shiploads to sail from Fort William and Loch Broom with people from Loch Broom parish, Beauly and the eastern Inverness parishes of Kilmorack and Kiltarlity. Early that year Denoon had travelled the Highlands, from his native Beauly Firth to Loch Broom, soliciting emigrants with visions of bountiful farm lands and trees that provided a family with sugar, soap and fuel. He chartered two vessels, the DOVE and the SARAH, at Fort William where customs records indicate he had signed up a total of 625 passengers. There was some dispute about Denoon's own figures, which showed too few passengers on one ship and too many on the other. There is, to this day, considerable confusion over how many people Denoon managed to cram on those two ships. The DOVE, the smaller of the two at 186 tons - not quite as big as the HECTOR - carried 275 people; her passage, althoughhh squalid and uncomfortable enough, must have been uneventful since it failed to attract much notice from the chroniclers of the time. But the SARAH'S crossing was a nightmare, even in an era of terrible emigrant crossings. At 350 tons the SARAH was considerably bigger than the DOVE and although, according to Fort William Customs, she carried 350 people, of whom 144 were children, Dr. Patterson maintains in his history that she actually carried "700 souls, though two children being counted as one, and infants in arms going free, they were reckoned as 500 passengers". She was but halfway to Nova Scotia when she was stopped and boarded by sailors from a British man-of-war. It was wartime and the navy was kidnapping able- bodied landlubbers and turning them into sailors. The navy men had seized 25 of SARAH'S young male passengers and were about to sail away with them when Denoon, who had a persuasive tongue, managed to bluff the commander into believing that he was a government agent and that the men were needed in Nova Scotia; thus he won their freedom. But no sooner had they escaped the press gang when an epidemic, both smallpox and whooping cough, broke out aboard the SARAH. By the time she reached Pictou Harbour 47 passengers had died. The survivors had been at sea for 13 weeks, two weeks longs than the voyage endured by their kinfolk on the HECTOR, and it was to be longer still before they could join their friends and relatives. At the harbour they were quarantined for weeks on a narrow spit of land and no one was allowed to approach them. Listed on the passenger manifests as farmers, tenants, labourers, these newcomers from Beauly and its neighbouring south, moved up the rivers to settled or back into the bush, enlarging older settlements or carving new ones. One of them, said Dr. Patterson, was to kindle the first fire on Mount Thom (where the HECTOR people had refused to settle because of the tick forest) on New Year's Eve, December 13, 1801, His wife as she gazed through the partially open roof at the waving tree tops overshadowing them, and within, at her shivering little ones clinging around her, thought of the comforts she had left behind in the old land, and declared her wish to be back in Scotland, if it were even to be in a jail". Happy Reading All! Rob McLean