The emigrants

This work by the English artist William Allsworth became known as the definitive depiction of nineteenth-century Scottish emigration to New Zealand thanks largely to its publication as a lithograph by Day Haghe in London around 1855. It shows a prosperous Scottish family in a Highland landscape, surrounded by their worldly goods — piles of luggage, animals, cases of trees and plants, and farm implements. Clearly, they are emigrating, with everything needed for successful colonial life.

Their destination is signalled by the ship anchored just offshore. Close inspection reveals that it is flying the 1835 New Zealand flag. The family’s Scottishness is loudly proclaimed by the wearing of tartan: they are the Mackays, gathered near their ancestral home, Drumduan, in Sutherlandshire, and it is their chartered ship, the Slains Castle, that rides at anchor in the background.

But there is a degree of artistic licence in this painting and the stories that have been generated in association with it over the years. A family named Mackay did arrive at Nelson on the Slains Castle in January 1845, but their real name was Mackie. While their father, James’s great-grandfather had been born in the Highlands, in Elgin, Moray c.1705, James himself was the second son of a merchant, born in 1804 in Aberdeen (not the brother of a laird as he later claimed). Furthermore, he had spent most of his life in London, where he worked as a banker. He married an English woman and the children were all London born. And the Slains Castle was not chartered by the family — nor did it sail from Scotland. It was a New Zealand Company ship that sailed from Plymouth in October 1844 with several other passengers besides the ‘Mackays’.

Mackay commissioned the artist, William Allsworth to produce this family portrait in 1844. To make the painting, Allsworth probably made individual portrait sketches of each family member in London, then united them all against a suitable Highland landscape. It has previously been speculated that James Mackay took advantage of the potential of painting to embellish his family history, and that emigration to such a distant destination as New Zealand gave him the opportunity to make a new start with a noble, and fashionably, Scottish identity. However, it is equally possible that Mackay wanted to provide a visual record of his Scottish ancestry for his family, to represent their origins in the Scottish Highlands, particularly as they were about to embark on a journey to the other side of the earth, from which they may never return.

Based on the essay that originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009) by Michael Fitzgerald, with updates by Rebecca Rice in 2021.