 In 1825 the entire island was leased to Dr Lachlan Maclean , a relative of Hugh Maclean of Coll , and its inhabitants ( then numbering some 450 people ) were given a year 's notice to quit their homes , which essentially meant an enforced leaving of the island . ( Most of the population of Rùm were tenant farmers , paying rent to the island 's owner ; in law they neither owned the land they worked nor the houses in which they lived . ) On 11 July 1826 , about 300 of the inhabitants boarded two overcrowded ships — the Highland Lad and the Dove of Harmony — bound for Cape Breton in Nova Scotia , Canada . Their passage was paid by Dr Lachlan and by Maclean of Coll . The remaining population followed them in 1827 on the St. Lawrence , along with some 150 inhabitants from the island of Muck , another of Maclean of Coll 's properties . These evictions were part of a wider event that came to be known as the Highland Clearances , during which people whose culture had existed there for millennia were forced to emigrate . 
