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"THE CANADIAN BOAT SONG" was not written by a Canadian. It is a poem of exile, which expresses the sorrow of those who suffered as a result of the Clearances, of the expulsion of crofters from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland which began in the later eighteenth century and went on for a hundred years. But it is the work neither of a Canadian nor of a Scottish Highlander. It has been attributed to citydwelling D. M. Moir, who was a contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, where the poem appeared in their serial symposium, the "Noctes Ambriosianae," in September 1829. It has also been attributed to John Gibson Lockhart, Walter Scott's biographer and a condemner of the Clearances.
The poem was introduced by the pseudonymous "Christopher North" (John Wilson) with the explanation that it had come to them together with a letter "from a friend of mine now in Upper Canada. He was rowed down the St. Lawrence lately, for several days on end, by a set of strapping fellows, all born in that country, and yet hardly one of whom could speak a word of any tongue but the Gaelic." The poem was described as a translation of one of their songs. As for the friend, he seems to have been the novelist John Galt, at that time a colonial ruler of Upper Canada, who was a friend of Moir's.
Some of the poem is beautiful, and has remained memorable:
From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
A letter of Lockhart's, from Inverness, indicates that these lines may have been known to him in 1821: "The room is cold, my hand shakes, the pen is Highland."
Children had been banished, the poem says, "that a degenerate Lord might boast his sheep." In came these lucrative sheep. Out went his smallholders, his crofters. A Hebridean schoolteacher of mine in Edinburgh, Hector MacIver, a gifted and sophisticated man, was, I felt, so moved by the poem that he had to convey that he couldn't abide its outsider's romantic sentimentality, though he could abide, and would recite, Wordsworth's poem about the...