How the Scots Invented the Modern World (56 page)

The Canadian who best exhibited the key virtues of the Scottish mind and what it could do, however was the Canadian Pacific’s hard-driving, Scottish-born chief engineer, Sandford Fleming. As the final leg of the railroad neared completion, Fleming realized one great obstacle to the cross-continental railway’s success remained: Canada’s clocks. Like clocks everywhere in the world, they were set according to local sunrise and sunset; where the sun was in the sky at any given moment determined what time it was.

This meant that everyone’s local time was different from everyone else’s. When it was noon in Toronto, it was 12:25 in Montreal, and 11:58 in Hamilton. In the United States alone, there were more than one hundred different standard times. People had learned to live with this constant disparity since they first began telling time. Even the advent of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, which increasingly made counting the hours and minutes more accurate, did nothing to help. In a horse-drawn age, when distances to be traveled were small and trips infrequent, a variation of ten or fifteen minutes, even an hour or two, did not matter much. But now it caused mass confusion for railway schedules, since no one could say exactly when a train was due in at a given station: there were simply too many different answers to the same question.
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Travel was beginning to demand a level of chronological precision the world’s clocks could no longer provide.

So Sandford Fleming decided to solve the problem. He took out a map of the world and divided it into twenty-four different time zones, each measuring fifteen degrees of longitude. The Americans had adopted a similar scheme for organizing their railroad timetables: now Fleming gave it a wider application than anyone had imagined. Then, for the next half-decade, he launched a one-man crusade to get first the Canadian government and then other world governments to adopt the new time zones and set their clocks according to the new single standard. Fleming was so tenacious and persuasive, and his idea so immediately sensible and useful, that he succeeded. An international conference held in Washington in 1882 confirmed the final arrangements. Finally, on November 17, 1883, clocks and watches around the world were for the first time in history synchronized according to one standard time. It laid the essential foundation for the globalization of travel, communications, and economies. When we are able to fly from New York and arrive in Rome or Singapore in time to meet a loved one, or phone a customer in San Francisco or Karachi to see if they received our shipment, we must thank Sandford Fleming.

Scots made it possible for Canada to be the first British colony to receive recognition as an independent nation. They did the same for Australia, but in a different way. There they turned a brutal and disorganized colony of doomed men and women into a civilized community.

After Captain James Cook (who was born in Yorkshire of Scottish parents) first landed there in 1770, Australia sat virtually forgotten until Prime Minister William Pitt established it as the site for a British penal colony. The first fleet of convict ships, carrying one thousand prisoners, arrived at Botany Bay, just south of the future Sydney Harbour, in 1788. More than 160,000 others followed, both men and women. Some were convicted of murder and other violent crimes, and accepted transportation to New South Wales, as the colony was called, in lieu of a death sentence. But many others went there for simple cases of theft or lesser offenses. One woman had stolen her employer’s dress and was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. One male prisoner, aged seventeen, stole food on board his convict ship. He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged within an hour.

Most convicts saw transportation, and the eight-month journey to Australia, as preferable to languishing in an English prison. But conditions were harsh and the work brutal. Prisoners were assigned to whatever kind of work their keepers wished, and contracted out, like slaves, to free settlers, who grew rich on the cheap labor. Beatings were common, sometimes to the point of death, as were hangings. One warder remembered a prisoner who had been flogged so often his back “appeared quite bare of flesh,” while his collarbones were exposed “like two Ivory polished horns.” It was, the warden said, “with some difficulty we could find another place to flog him.”

What sustained convicts through all this sadistic brutality was the possibility that after working four years of a seven-year sentence, or six of a fourteen-year one, you could earn your release. New South Wales offered lots of cheap, arable land, a healthy climate, and a future—if you got your certificate of emancipation. Even then, the free settlers still treated freed prisoners with suspicion and disdain. The slightest complaint might mean rearrest and more hard labor.

At the turn of the eighteenth century Australia was a hard, vicious, ugly place. Two Scots came to change that, in two contrasting ways: one by altering Australia’s economy, the other by reforming its way of life.

John MacArthur arrived at Botany Bay with the second fleet of transported prisoners, to serve as lieutenant in the local army garrison. He was tough and violent-tempered, with an animal magnetism and a shrewd nose for a business deal. He might have given
tai-pans
William Jardine and James Matheson a run for their money. MacArthur bought a farm for himself of 250 acres and began raising wheat and sheep. He also organized an illicit rum-running ring with other officers in the garrison. One day he fought a duel with his own colonel and wounded him in the shoulder. Sent back to England for court-martial, MacArthur turned the tables on his enemies. He won an acquittal, and brought back a brace of long-haired merino sheep he somehow secured from King George III’s private stock, and a special royal grant of two thousand acres of land to set up a sheep farm, which he called Camden.

MacArthur began experimenting, crossing the valuable but finicky merino with the Bengal sheep and the so-called Fat-Tail breed from South Africa. The hybrid he produced became the foundation of the Australian wool industry. Within a decade he and his wife and son had set up the first Australian sheep run or ranch, which became so successful that it grew to almost sixty thousand acres. To this day, the essential bloodlines of Australian sheep-breeding trace their origins to Camden Farm.
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MacArthur was also a compulsive meddler in New South Wales politics. When the new English military governor, William Bligh of
Bounty
mutiny fame, arrived in 1805, he found MacArthur’s high-handed ways intolerable, and ordered him arrested. From his prison cell MacArthur plotted Bligh’s downfall. His accomplice in the rum-running cartel and fellow Scot George Johnstone kidnapped Bligh at gunpoint and set him on a ship to England. For two years MacArthur, Johnstone, and a military junta ran New South Wales, rewarding cronies and terrorizing enemies. The colony had clearly reached a crisis. At last the British government recognized the need for serious reform, and dispatched the man who could set Australia straight.

Lachlan Macquarie had served nearly twenty years in the 73rd Highlanders in India and the Middle East, when he learned that the post of governor of Australia had fallen vacant. He lobbied hard for it, and in the summer of 1809 he set out on the journey to Sydney. He arrived in January, to find the colony “in most ruinous decay.” The houses and government buildings were a shambles; the Government Advocate’s house was, as he put it, “a perfect pigstye.” Sydney’s three churches were tents pitched on vacant lots. The main street was a dirt road, rutted and filled with animal excrement. Morale among prisoners and warders alike was at an all-time low, and drunkenness at an all-time high.

Macquarie was a hardheaded, clear-eyed workhorse, with a military man’s sense of order, a martinet’s sense of discipline, and a Scotsman’s sense of fairness and justice. In Robert Hughes’s words, “In guts, moral vigor, and paternal even-handedness, as well as in his bouts of self-righteousness and bull-headed vanity,” Macquarie had few equals, even among other Scottish colonial officials. He banned the trade in rum, and ordered Sydney’s bars closed during religious services on Sunday. He made church attendance compulsory for all convicts, and set up Sunday schools for the local children.

Even more important, Macquarie realized the key to keeping order in the colony was to treat the convicts as men and women, rather than as beasts of burden. He argued to his superiors in London that “emancipation” was “the greatest inducement that can be held out to the Reformation of Manners of the Inhabitants.” He met every arriving convict ship personally and reminded the prisoners that while they had an obligation to obey their warders and employers, they also had rights. He would tell them “what a fine fruitful country they are come to,” remembered one convict who first saw Macquarie standing on the dock with the medical examiner and garrison commander, “and what he will do for them if their conduct merits it.”

Macquarie set most of the convicts, almost two-thirds of the skilled ones, to sprucing up Sydney. They cleared away the garbage, put a proper road through the center of town, rebuilt the government buildings, and built permanent churches as well as schools, houses, hospitals, and squares. One of Macquarie’s prisoners turned out to be a former student of the celebrated Regency architect John Nash. Macquarie’s wife had brought with her a book of buildings and town designs. Like James Craig laying out Edinburgh’s New Town, the trio not only redesigned Sydney, but also constructed a series of townships in the surrounding territory, all in the metropolitan neoclassical style Robert Adam had established and Nash had embellished.

Macquarie also expanded the colony from its now-overcrowded enclave. He encouraged his team of cartographers and explorers to push north of Sydney, where they found the great fertile Liverpool Plains in 1818, and southwest into what is now Victoria. He contracted sixty convicts to build a road across the Blue Mountains, which locals and aborigines said were impassable. If they could do it in six months, he told them, they would be free. The convicts built the entire route, all 126 miles of it, in the time allotted, and Macquarie was as good as his word. It was proof, he told his superiors, of what could be accomplished by using incentives instead of coercion, through the work of free men rather than slave labor—the same point Adam Smith had made in the
Wealth of Nations
nearly forty years earlier.

Macquarie raised the quality of life in Sydney even as he cut costs. He even tried to find ways to assimilate Australia’s aborigines into the new community he was creating. However, his fair-minded treatment of the convicts, and his insistence that “emancipated” workers receive the same rights and benefits as other citizens of Sydney, grated on locals who were used to having their own way with convict labor (among them, it must be admitted, John MacArthur). Eventually they turned his superiors against him, and Macquarie, worn out and disappointed, returned to England in 1821. He had served longer than any other governor in Australia’s short history, almost eleven years. His successor, yet another Scot named Thomas Brisbane, was sent to reimpose the harsh discipline of the pre-Macquarie days. But he soon discovered this was impossible. Change had caught up with the penal colony, and the Emancipants, as freed convicts were called, were now embedded in the fabric of New South Wales society.

So instead Brisbane expanded many of Macquarie’s reforms, permitted freedom of the press, encouraged the planting of tobacco and sugar cane, and expanded voluntary emigration into Australia. Then he, too, ran afoul of the local landowners and was recalled. A series of English governors temporarily brought back the floggings and brutal discipline. But when, in 1840, the Edinburgh-born naval officer and former professor of geography Alexander Maconochie took over Norfolk Island, the penal colony’s own penal colony where the most recalcitrant prisoners were sent, it signaled the beginning of the end of the old system. Liberals in Parliament had already recommended abolishing transportation. Maconochie’s humane and farsighted reforms, which included setting up a prison library (with a complete set of Scott’s Waverly novels) and forming an orchestra, proved that prisons could go beyond a harsh system of punishment and discipline, even with the hardest cases. Genuine penal reform in Britain was still a generation away. But finally London stopped the convict ships in 1867—the same year Canada became the first British Dominion.

By the 1880s Australia had the fastest-growing economy and the highest per capita income in the world. Scots were as active in every major aspect of Australian life, including business, education, religion, and farming—almost 40 percent of Australia’s borrowed capital came from Scottish banks—as they were in New Zealand.
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MacArthur’s sheep produced its principal export, wool. Queensland and South Australia now hosted large-scale settlements (including Brisbane, named after Macquarie’s successor), with emigrants flooding into the country, among them a quarter of a million Scots. One of them, ironically enough, was the son of Alistair McDonnell of Glengarry. Despite the old man’s brutal clearances, the burden of debt still fell heavily on his son and heir, Anaeas. Finally, in 1840, Anaeas MacDonnell had had enough. He sold his remaining estates except a tiny section of Knoydart, and emigrated to New South Wales with his family, his servants, several bolts of tartan, a couple of prefabricated timber houses, and his piper. He set out for the South Land to start a new life—as a sheep farmer.
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Africa was the last populated continent to be explored and penetrated by the British or any Europeans. It was called “the Dark Continent” because it was shrouded in mystery. No one knew what its vast interior held, or what people or riches might be found there. All trade and contact was through African middlemen. The mosquito-infested coast and disease-ridden swamps and jungles barred any European from probing farther. Working for the Royal African Company, or serving in a British garrison in Sierra Leone or the Cape Coast Command, which monitored Britain’s ban on the slave trade, was for a European the equivalent of a death sentence. When Scottish missionary Mungo Park tried to lead an expedition up the Niger in 1805, every European on the trip died. Two-thirds of the British soldiers who landed on the Gold Coast between 1823 and 1827 died of diseases ranging from malaria and dysentery to sleeping sickness and yellow fever. In 1824 alone, 221 out of 224 perished. Africa truly was “the white man’s graveyard,” a permanent enigma sealed off from curious or prying European eyes.