EMIGRATION TO THE BRITISH COLONIES
During the century beginning 1800 there began a vast migration of hundreds of thousands of families from England, Ireland, and especially Scotland, to the colonies which were later to form the British Empire. We deal with some of these in detail below.
The first emigrants to the British colonies comprised military personnel, convicts and some merchant adventurers – they were later joined by gold prospectors and those who took advantage of the government's policy of encouraging emigration in order to relieve the population explosion in the industrial cities of England and Scotland.
One of the first Porteous family members to migrate to the colonies for whom we have a record is Henry Porteous, who emigrated from Edinburgh to St Helena Island about 1787. He became manager of the East India Company, but is more well-known for having welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte to the island in 1815 on the first night of his eventual six-year exile to St Helena (see biographies).
Migration to Australia began soon after the discovery of the continent by Captain James Cook in 1770, and this led to a gradual opening up of the continent, with towns being founded along the coast of New South Wales.
Within twenty years it had been decided that the newly-discovered land held potential as a destination for the transportation of convicts. The first British settlement was established at Botany Bay, New South Wales in 1788, although by 1793 grants of land were also being offered to free settlers. The first member of the Porteous family to set foot on the continent was probably Captain John Porteous, who arrived aboard the 'Speke' in 1808.
In 1815 a further penal colony was established in Tasmania, at Macquarie Harbour. William Porteus, surgeon aboard the convict ship 'Circassion' bound for Hobart, Tasmania arrived in 1833.
Although the main destination of Scottish emigrants was originally Tasmania, some also went to New South Wales. Gradually, the continent was being opened up, with the first settlement in Queensland founded in 1824, followed in 1829 by the settlement on the Swan River, Western Australia. In 1834 the first permanent settlement in Victoria was founded, followed two years later by the settlement alongside the Gulf St Vincent in South Australia. In 1837 the first land sales took place in Melbourne.
As Scotland and England changed from a rural based economy, mainly due in the Highlands to the Clearances, and industrialisation took over in the cities of Glasgow, Carlisle, Newcastle and Liverpool, many Scots families in search of economic stability and the means to bring up families were encouraged to look firstly to those industrial centres, and later overseas to the Americas and the colonial countries of the British Empire.
As Roger Porteous puts it:
"It is not surprising that most emigrants from Britain in the 1840s went to America. Not that Atlantic travelling conditions were any better than those prevailing on the Australian run, but distance and fares being much less, emigrants could cling to the hope of returning home, Australia was frighteningly remote, a place associated with felons. Not until the end of the forties did the total number of free emigrants in Australia out-number the total number of convicts."
From Porteous Australia by Roger Porteous (published privately 2001)
In 1823 the first gold discovery was reported, but went largely unnoticed overseas. In 1851, however, emigration to Australia increased hugely with news of the discovery of gold in Victoria. Tens of thousands came from all over Europe, and many of them were Scots, but the rate of emigration to Australia was still far less than that to the Americas.
And so a flood of emigrants bearing the Porteous family name also began to arrive. John and Mary Howden (née Porteous) sailed from Edinburgh to Newcastle, Australia aboard 'Hero' in 1839. Two years later Andrew Porteous arrived in Australia and David Porteus left Enniskillen, Northern Ireland for Australia.
It was in 1851, the year of the first gold rush, that Andrew McKay Porteous arived at Port Adelaide, followed the year later by Andrew Peter Porteous who arrived aboard 'Success' at Port Henry, Victoria.
In 1853 Thomas Porteous arrived aboard the 'Edmond' at Melbourne, and Alexander Porteouss sailed from London, arriving at Newcastle, Australia on the 'Libertas'. And so began a swelling tide of Porteous immigrants, which continued right through to the end of the twentieth century.
Gold was discovered at Rockhampton, Queenland in 1866, and in Western Australia at Kimberley in 1885 and Kalgoorlie in 1893, each of these finds triggering another rush of immigrants.
Population growth in Australia remained slow between the years of the gold rushes, despite the best efforts of the progressive government of the 1920s to provide incentives, only to find that costs outstripped original estimates. This was followed by the Depression of the 1930s, and it was only after the introduction of the Assisted Passage scheme in the 1950s that immigrants once again found it a practical option to emigrate from Scotland and England, which they did again in large numbers.
Many other Scots chose to emigrate to New Zealand, also chosen as a proposed destination to alleviate Scotland's growing population problem in the early part of the nineteenth century.
So popular was it as a destination for emigrant Scots that, by the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish immigrants accounted for a quarter of the population of New Zealand. At the peak of the nineteenth century emigration, over one-third of all Scots emigrants were heading for New Zealand. Of course, amongst that number were many Porteous families.
The first direct emigrant we know of is George Porteous who in 1851 emigrated from Musselburgh, East Lothian to Wellington, later settling in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Around 1860 John Porteous moved from Stranraer, Scotland to Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand – a city which has rightly been described as 'The Edinburgh of the South', and became the father of Dr William James Porteous (1884–1969), renowned medical missionary to the Punjab.
Around the following year, around 1861, John Porteous of Edinburgh emigrated to Waikouaiti, Otago, South Island, New Zealand, later marrying Isabella Philips in Dunedin.
Later, in 1864, William Porteous travelled from Bo'ness, Falkirk, Linlithgowshire, Scotland aboard the 'Beautiful Star' to Port Chalmers and then on to Otaga, New Zealand. Probably in the same year George Robert Porteous and his wife Barbara Brown emigrated from Holytown, Lanarkshire to South Oamaru and then to Otago, New Zealand.
There were others who came later in the century, including whole families like the brothers Tom and George Porteous from Holytown, Glasgow who both emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand.
It was not unusual for Scots to be involved in the military administration, in banking and in other places of influence in the settlement of British colonial territories. More than a quarter of the British army's officers in the East India Company were Scotsmen, as were a large number of its civilian officers in Madras and Bengal.
It is not surprising, then, that Scottish emigrants were to be found amongst the ranks of the military establishment of the British Raj in India and Burma. Amongst them we find Colonel Charles Arckoll Porteous, born into a military family, the son of Henry William Porteous who had been with the Madras Medical Service. Charles obtained a cadetship with the East India Company and served with the 27th Madras Infantry, being present at the Battle of Lucknow in 1857, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the Indian Mutiny. His son, Brigadier-General Charles McLeod Porteous was born in Tinnevelly, Madras and commissioned into the 9th Gurkha Rifles, serving in the Second Afghan Campaign (1878–80).
Porteous families found their way to South Africa, British West Africa and the former colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Many British emigrated to Cape Colony and Natal in the early years of British rule and, like everywhere else, a large proportion of these were Scots – as well as Dutch and Germans. We know of William Bevill Porteous who settled in Cape Town about 1830 and went into practice as a dentist. Research is continuing regarding those Porteous families who emigrated to the African continent.
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