both the carrot (promises of good treatment of volunteers) and the stick (reminders to tenants of their rent arrears and the possibility of their eviction). A witness of it said in the 1880s: "Some people say it was voluntary. But there was a great deal of forcing and these people were sent very much against their will. That is very well known and people present know that perfectly well. Of course, they were not taken in hand by the police and all that, but they were in arrears and had to go, and remonstrated against going." Barra – "The most destitute" emigrants "I ever saw" Barra was a particularly hard case and in due course a cause celebre; it had been prosperous, but the hereditary McNeill proprietor had set up a kelp works which had drawn in outsiders; the works had proved uneconomic and to meet its losses, the crofters' rents had been raised to unsustainable levels. The kelp works were abandoned, but the high rents retained. "The poverty of the people is beyond description" wrote their parish priest in 1830. Despite the high rents, McNeill went bankrupt and his trustees in bankruptcy seized and sold most of the islanders' livestock (their main source of income) to pay rent arrears. Barra itself ended up in the hands of John Gordon of Cluny, "the richest commoner in Scotland" (he died worth £2m in 1858). Colonel Gordon (he was a colonel in the Aberdeenshire Militia) was notoriously parsimonious in his personal habits, but he authorised his factor to reduce rents to realistic levels and attempted various schemes (most notably a deep-water fishery) to improve the lot of the islanders (and his income from the island). These schemes met with little cooperation (and in some cases active opposition) from the islanders, and came to nothing: by 1850 Gordon had owned Barra for ten years, and seen no return for his money. Consequently, the islanders were still both poor and heavily dependent on potatoes. Furthermore, their landlord had no sentimental ties to them or the island, and held that the islanders were largely the authors of their own misfortune: if they had supported his improvements they would not find themselves dependent on the benevolence of others. Potato blight destroyed any possibility of Barra being self-sufficient. In November 1850, it was reported of that year's cereal crop that "it might give about 453 bolls of