Emigration from the United Kingdom to America from 1870 to 1897: ° Shetland and Orkney Islands ° St. Andrews
The recorded history of Scotland begins in the 1st century AD, when the Romans invaded Britain. The Romans added southern Britain to their empire as the province Britannia. They were unable, however, to subdue the fierce tribes in the north. To keep these tribes from invading Britannia, Emperor Hadrian had a massive wall built across the island from sea to sea. The Romans called the land north of the wall Caledonia, and they called the people Picts--from the Latin piclus, meaning "painted"--because they painted their bodies. Parts of Hadrian's Wall still stand on the Scottish border.
In the 5th century Celtic immigrants from Ireland, called Scots, settled north of the Clyde. The Scots were already Christians when they left Ireland. In the next century St. Columba converted the king of the Picts to Christianity. In the 9th century Kenneth MacAlpine, king of the Scots, added the Pictish kingdom to his own. In about the 10th century the land came to be known as Scotland.
The former Kingdom of Scotland (until 1603) is today one of the four constituent nations which form the United Kingdom, it occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain.
The nation shares a land border to the south with England and is bounded by seas and oceans on all other sides. The country consists of a mainland area plus several island groups, including Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides.
Glasgow
In 1768 a sequence of dykes was built along the Clyde River in Glasgow narrowing the channel and greatly increasing the flow of water, which in turn scoured the bed and deepened the river. The Clyde’s entry into the world of shipbuilding could begin and The Comet – Europe’s first sea-going steam ship – was launched at Port Glasgow in 1812.
CLYDEBUILT is an expression from the days when Scotland was the greatest shipbuilding nation on earth and was once a byword for quality, synonymous with solidity and reliability. The banks of the Clyde from Greenock to Glasgow were lined with shipyards, where tens of thousands of men built great ocean liners and warships, towers of steel rising majestically against the sparkling waters of the west coast.
The Cutty Sark was designed by the Glasgow firm of Scott and Linton and launched at Dumbarton; its design incorporated the midship attributes of Firth of Forth fishing boats, creating a hull shape stronger than any before it and allowing the ship to take more sails and be driven harder than almost any other clipper. In the late nineteenth century the Cutty Sark become one of the fastest sail-ships in the world, making record times between Britain and Australia.
March 17, 1893, IRON
London, United Kingdom
The Glasgow warrant market has been quiet on the whole, and after a little spurt prices have gone back again; the business is of a somewhat jobbing nature, and it would seem as if very few outside orders were being executed ; if the market should fall to about 40s. or less there would probably be more investment buying, but there is still an uncertainty as to the holding of the socalled London syndicate. . . . Hematite warrants are still neglected and unchanged in price. . . . Makers' iron is also quiet, with an easier tendency in prices, but we are now entering the spring shipping season when more ought to be doing, and already the shipments for Italy and Australia are improving.
A new era was around the corner, and the dawning of the twentieth century saw the Clyde shipyards producing a new generation of ocean liners; ships like the SS Persia and the Lusitania.
The Persia (old postcard above) was built at Greenock in 1900. She clocked in at 500 feet in length, weighed over 8,000 tonnes and could achieve a maximum speed of over 30 MPH; speed and tonnage which eclipsed anything achieved by wooden sailboats like the Cutty Sark. The Persia herself was to be dwarfed only six years later by a new ship under construction on the Clyde. When the Lusitania was launched in the summer of 1906 she became the largest ship afloat: almost eight hundred feet long and weighing 31,550 gross tonnes she was designed to be the last word in speed and luxury – offering passengers a swift trip across the Atlantic in five star comfort.
In May 1915 the Lusitania was on her way back from New York, and had the coastline of Ireland within sight, when she was torpedoed by the German U-Boat U-20. The great ship went down in 18 minutes, taking 1,195 lives with her; among them were 123 Americans and the tragedy undoubtedly hastened US entry into WWI. Then, just six months later, on the day before New Year’s Eve 1915, the SS Persia was sailing 71 miles south east of Crete when – at 1.10 pm, just as many of the passengers were sitting down to lunch – she was struck on the port bow by a German torpedo. Minutes later the port boiler exploded and the ship sank so rapidly that only four of her lifeboats escaped. 334 of the 500 passengers went with the ship to the bottom of the Mediterranean ten thousand feet below, along with a great quantity of gold and jewels belonging to the Maharaja Jagatiji Singh.
By the end of the 1920’s one of the next generation of liners, and one of the most iconic vessels in history, was under construction at John Brown’s shipyards in Clydebank, Glasgow. At over one thousand feet in length, weighing in at 80,000 tonnes, and with a top speed of over 30 knots, the Queen Mary would dwarf the ships that had gone before her and reassert Britain’s dominance of the Blue Riband.
Iron, February 28, 1890
London, United Kingdom
Orkney Islands
May 31, 1892, Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA
A Mermaid on View.
A strange story of the mermaid comes from Birscay, Orkney. The other day a farmer's wife was down at the seashore there and observed a strange marine animal sitting on the rocks. As it would not move she went for her husband. When she returned with her better half they both saw the animal clambering among the rocks, about four feet of, it being above water. The woman, who had a splendid view of it, described it as "a good looking person," while the man says it was "a woman covered over with brown hair." At last the couple tried to get hold of it, when it took a header into the sea and disappeared. The man is confident he has seen the fabled mermaid, but people in the district are of opinion that the animal must belong to the seal tribe. An animal of similar description was seen by several people at Sheerness two years ago,
