‘There sails the ships; there is the Leveathon’: A Transatlantic Missionary's Journeys

Abstract

A first-person account of a missionary's return transatlantic voyage linking the Scottish Highlands and Upper Canada in the 1850s offers a valuable insight into church operations and migrant networks as well as the realities of travel at a time of profound societal change. By considering the journal in its local contemporary situations, and by drawing on modern scholarship, this article considers the motivations for keeping the journal, push and pull factors related to religious and socioeconomic influences and observes that previous scholars have been correct in identifying an ongoing trend of episodic or temporary emigration for Highlanders and Scots in the mid-nineteenth century.