In October 1773, the factor of the estate of Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat invited Samuel Johnson and James Boswell to stay with him at a house in Armadale formerly occupied by his chief. That evening ‘the company danced as usual. We performed, with great activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Sky[e] has occasioned. They call it America.’ It was not the only time that Boswell and Johnson experienced Highland elation at the possibilities of reaching America. Boswell's recollections of the visit are replete with references of Highlanders gone or planning to go to America. But this ‘dance called America’ has become a staple of understanding connections between the Gàidhealtachd and North America, used as titles for everything from popular histories of Highland emigration to a song on Runrig's 1985 album Heartland. The potential of America as a land of opportunity for Gaels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is well established and has shaped academic and popular understandings of the relationship between the Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic world. Emigration agents and emigrants themselves were keen to portray North America as a land ideally suited to Gaels where, in the words of one promoter, ‘Is iad na tuaidh luchd-uailse na duthcha. Tha iad gun mhàl 's gun bhacadh seilge / The tenantry are the gentlemen of the country. They pay no rent and there is no restriction on hunting.’ Or, as one early emigrant told a correspondent on Islay, America ‘is one of the best poor mans [sic] Country you ever heard of ‘.

This assumption that Gaels interpreted America as a panacea to dispossession, marginalisation and the aggressive imposition of rural capitalism, however, requires careful consideration. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the uneasiness and ambiguity that stood at the centre of Gaelic contacts with the Atlantic world. As powerful as America was as a possibility for many Highland emigrants, it was also a place where the tragedy of displacement and transitory movement became harsh reality. Just as North America was constructed in the minds of potential emigrants and emigration agents – or by dancers in Armadale – it was equally made in the lived experiences of emigrants who struggled to carve out new lives in an exacting and unforgiving environment.