THEY were hunted down by dogs, bound and thrown on to ships like cattle and then transported to Canada where they were abandoned in rags on the quayside.

That was the fate of the men, women and children who had the great misfortune to be cleared off the estates of Colonel John Gordon of Cluny, whose appalling cruelty to the inhabitants of Barra in particular has seen him described as one of the most hated men in Scottish history.

Even now the eyewitness accounts of the terrible evictions on Barra in 1851 have the power to shock.

“I have seen big strong men, champions of the countryside, the stalwarts of the world, being bound on Lochboisdale quay and cast into the ship as would be done to a batch of horses or cattle, the bailiff and the ground officers and the policemen gathered behind them in pursuit,” recounted eyewitness Catherine Macphee, who called the tragic event “loathsome work”.

Another eyewitness reported: “People were seized and dragged on board. Men who resisted were felled with truncheons and handcuffed; those who escaped, including some who swam ashore from the ship, were chased by the police.”

The impoverished tenants of Barra had been lured to a compulsory public meeting in Lochboisdale in South Uist on August 11, 1851, where they were told work and land was waiting for them in Canada. Those who refused to board the waiting Admiral were seized and “bound hand and feet”, according to a local priest. Some fled, only to be hunted down by dogs, stated reports of the event.

Those who had refused to attend the meeting did not escape. Oral tradition recounts how people in the hamlet of Balnabodach on Barra were forcibly loaded on to boats and taken to Lochboisdale where they were put on board The Admiral. One young woman was said to have been seized as she was milking the family cow in the fields by the loch. She was put on a boat with nothing but the clothes she stood in.

A total of 451 residents of Barra were on board The Admiral when she sailed that night. Their pitiful state on arrival shocked the people of Quebec. An eyewitness said they were “destitute of clothing and bedding; many children of nine or ten years old had not a rag to cover them”. He saw one man without adequate clothing dressed in a woman’s petticoat.

The Quebec Times said they were dependent on charity even for a morsel of bread and their prospects were grim.

“The winter is at hand, work is becoming scarce in upper Canada. Where are these people to find food?” the writer asked.

They were despatched further west to Ontario where The Dundas Warder reported they were “destitute of any means of subsistence, and many of them sick from want and other attendant causes. They were in rags – shapeless fragments of what had once been clothes.”

On arrival, they voluntarily made and signed a statement which said that of those who ran away from Colonel Gordon’s agents some had in fact escaped – but the rest of their families had not.

At least four families were split on both sides of the Atlantic, stated the document. It also stated that Gordon had promised them land and work on arrival.

“The undersigned finally declare they are now landed in Quebec so destitute that, if immediate relief be not afforded them and continued until they are settled in employment, the whole will be liable to perish with want.”

The document was signed Hector Munro and 70 others.

The Barra contingent were nearly one third of the estimated 1700 people cleared from the colonel’s lands in the Western Isles that year.

It is not known how many survived the winter but Gordon, who also had estates in Aberdeenshire, continued to flourish, with his fortune boosted earlier by compensation from the British Government of £24,964 for the six plantations he owned in the Caribbean island of Tobago which had more than 1000 slaves.

The money was paid out after the introduction of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Gordon, who had made a grand tour of Egypt in 1804 and carved his name on many ancient monuments, and who inherited his estates including Cluny Castle in 1814, was MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis from 1826 to 1832.

Described as a miser and a hard-headed businessman, Gordon began the forced evictions after what he considered to be poor returns from his estates in the Western Isles which he had bought in 1838 on inheriting riches from his uncle, who had accumulated wealth as a merchant in West India.

The estates were sold to him by the 18th chief of Clanranald, Reginald George Macdonald, who had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, and was heavily in debt.

Within a decade of the sale, the already struggling islanders were even more impoverished as much of their farming land had been taken over for sheep grazing.

The condition of the tenants of the Cluny estates was described as “a scene of wretchedness” and “despicable, nay heart rending” by the Reverend Norman Macleod.

“On the beach the whole population of the country seems to be met, gathering the precious cockles ... I never witnessed such countenances, starvation on many faces,” he said.

Gordon, who was dubbed the “richest commoner in Scotland”, began the forced evictions just a few years later.

After his death in 1858, his lands passed to Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart, the wife of his late son John Gordon of Cluny.

She visited the Western Isles estates only once in her 54 years of ownership but continued to “encourage” the islanders to emigrate.

She died in 1932.