History
The Hector was first employed in local trade in waters of the British Isles as well as the immigrant trade to North America, having made at least one trip per year carrying Scottish emigrants to Boston, Massachusetts. Her most famous voyage took place in 1773 with a departure date around July 1, carrying 170 Highlanders who were immigrating to Nova Scotia from Lochbroom.
A Scottish born Presbyterian minister, Dr. John Witherspoon, along with his acquaintance, John Pagan, were responsible for bringing the settlers to Pictou. These two gentlemen purchased the contracts for 200, 000 acres of Pictou land from the Philadelphia Land Grant Company, whose shareholders included Benjamin Franklin. Witherspoon, Pagan and their agent John Ross made an attractive proposal to the Highlanders, who had been living under British oppression.

The ship
Year built: ca. 1770
Location: Holland
Length overall: 25.9 m (85 ft)
Beam: 6.7 m (22 ft)
Gross tonnage: 200
Number of masts: 3
Owner: Mr. Pagan, a merchant in Greenock, Scotland
The Hector was approximately eight-five feet long and twenty-two feet wide for the duration of their long voyage . By the time of her most famous voyage the ship was old and worn.
Passengers
All the passengers (23 families and 25 single men) aboard the Hector had one thing in common, they wanted to find a new land where they had freedom to speak their Gaelic language, play their music and wear their cherished tartan. It was only 28 years after the Battle of Culloden, in 1746. This was a fierce war fought between the Scottish Highlanders and British Loyalists. The Highlanders were defeated after only one hour and were then forced to live under British rule. After that time, life in Scotland was hard and repressive. Although they were not the first Scots to arrive in North America they were the vanguard of a massive wave of Scottish immigrants to arrive in what is now Canada. Some passengers were so destitute they only had money for their passage and food. William Fraser, a piper, had no money but was allowed on board for the sound of his bagpipes. On board there were dance competitions: the Highland fling and the sword dance.

Proposal
The proposal included a farm lot and a year's provisions, along with a promise of rich and varied land in the New World. An advertisement appeared in the Edinburgh Advertiser 1773 and they secured a shipload of passengers in short order, who were hopeful for a better life. No official passenger list was recorded on the day of sail, but many years later Will MacKay, who had been a passenger of only five years old on the voyage, compiled a passenger list from memory with some of the townspeople.
Passenger List
One interesting fact was that this list was not drawn up to the day the passengers bought their pass, or the day they boarded or the day that they arrived in Pictou. The oldest existing document relating to those firstcomers is a ragged sheet of foolscap that has been carefully preserved by the Public Archives of Nova Scotia at Halifax. It is the list of the names of the people who boarded the ship at Loch Broom and Greenock in the summer of 1773. Many Canadians and American look to this document as the most important source of their family's roots in the New World

The voyage
The hector was made for carrying cargo, not people, and there were too many passengers aboard for the size of the vessel. This lead to crowding and unsanitary conditions below deck. The ship was not fir for a long journey either, in many places the wood in the Hector had gone rotten. However, the courageous passengers, unaware of the conditions their new life held, felt that almost anything would be a vast improvement over the conditions they had left behind. Whenever they were doubtful, these hardy Scots on this tedious journey had only to listen to the thrilling music of their native bagpipes that the piper Fraser continued to play as he kept his part of the bargain that had been struck at the beginning of the journey.

The government was very frugal in the quality and amount of food that they provided on the Hector to the passengers. Because of delays caused by storms at sea, the provisions were exhausted. The passengers ended up eating poor food that had been previously thrown away and had been hoarded up by a passenger named Hugh MacLeod.
The arduous voyage to Pictou took 11 weeks, with a gale off Newfoundland causing a 14 day delay. Dysentery and smallpox claimed 18 children among the passengers. The vessel arrived in Pictou Harbour on September 15, landing at Brown's Point, immediately west of the present-day town of pictou.



Arrival in Pictou
The hardy passengers who had endured so much were now able to set foot on land and begin to make a new home for themselves and generations to come.. Upon arrival, there was no cleared land waiting for them, no shelter and the promised provisions did not materialize. Winter was approaching, and there was no time to plant crops that year. As the lands promised to them were three miles into the forest, so that they wouldn't even be able to fish the harbor, the settlers refused to settle those lands. When the provisions did arrive, the company therefore refused to give them any provisions. They then seized the provisions.
After eleven weeks, they landed at Pictou. Massive forests, with trees one hundred and fifty feet high surrounded the harbour. They were met by settlers stranded by the ship Betsey, and Mi’kmaw who fled at the shrill sound of the bagpipes. The weary travelers waded ashore to their new home. The Betsey settlers thought they were a strange group dressed in costumes and speaking a foreign tongue, the Gaelic, for the Betsey settlers from Philadelphia spoke English. However, the Betsey settlers found the Hector passengers, especially one, to be beneficial to their plight. In the past, these settlers had been helped much by the Mi'kmaq of the district. However, some of the Indians actually hindered and harassed the Betsey people. As they saw the Hector approach, these trouble making Indians threatened to kill those that were coming ashore.

Settling in
Upon arrival, there was no cleared land waiting for them, no shelter and the promised provisions did not materialise. Winter was approaching, and there was no time to plant crops that year. As the lands promised to them were three miles into the forest, so that they wouldn't even be able to fish the harbour, the settlers refused to settle those lands. When the provisions did arrive, the company therefore refused to give them any provisions. They then seized the provisions. Ironically, very few of the Hector people stayed on the Pictou Plantation. They had been cruelly deceived by the shipping company that brought them out to Nova Scotia. The land was not ready for settlement as promised and supplies for the coming winter were meager. Most of them moved on to settled parts of the province leaving an intrepid handful of their countrymen to fend for themselves in an uncultivated wilderness.
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Tributes to the Hector
People who have heard these Scottish immigrants story often are moved enough to pay tribute to them, through song, writing, ect.


The Ship Hector Tartan

The Ship Hector Tartan was designed by Janice Gammon of Lyons Brook and registered in Scotland on June 15, 1999 with the Scottish Tartans Society. The purpose of creating this tartan was to commemorate the first Scottish settlers to arrive in Nova Scotia. They landed on the Pictou shore in 1773 after many hard weeks at sea, thereby giving Pictou it's title of "The Birthplace of New Scotland". Each of the colors in the Ship Hector Tartan has a significance: white- for the whitecaps and rough seas the Ship Hector endured; royal blue- for the settlers' loyalty to their homeland of Scotland; green- for the evergreen trees that grew to the waters edge when the Hector arrived; black- for the lives lost on the journey, and gold- for the rising golden sun of a new day in a new land.

Bless the Ship Hector Song

Written by Alistair MacDonald of Pictou, and performed by his brother John "Spyder" MacDonald, "Bless the Ship Hector" is the official commemorative song of the Ship Hector Launch, which took place in 2000 in Pictou. Bless the Ship Hector appears on John Spyder MacDonald's CD "By Sea, By Land" (2000). It was recorded it at Dave Gunning's award-winning Wee House of Music in Pictou. Occasionally, as their schedules permit, John Spyder MacDonald and Alastair MacDonald can been seen in performance, live at the Hector Heritage Quay during special events.



"The Hector" Poem
Visitors to the Hector Heritage Quay are often so moved by the experience and history of the Hector that they are inspired to pay tribute to the story in their own way. Over the years, these visitors have constructed scale models of the Hector, composed songs, created artwork, and written stories and poems. In 2007, Iain MacDonald, who had visited Pictou from Aberdeen Scotland a few years before, wrote a poem in honour of the Hector and her 189 tough and resourceful Scottish passengers.
Other Tributes
In 1923 a monument was erected in the central park in Pictou. It is the statue of a kilted Highland with a musket in hand and an axe over his shoulder. He faces the harbour where the Hector dropped anchor. One wonders if the Highlander should not have been hoisting the pipes and blowing, rather than carrying a musket and axe. Each year, there is a celebration marking the anniversary of the "Landing of the Hector". And this year on September 16 a replica of the Ship Hector will be launched into the Harbour.


Replica
Thanks to a millennium project that spanned a decade, visitors can step aboard a replica of the Hector moored in Pictou Harbour. In 1992, the Ship Hector Foundation was formed from a group of volunteers in Pictou County and elsewhere who began to raise funds for the construction, maintenance and operation of a replica of the Hector.The ship was built on the premises of the Hector Heritage Quay, and launched on September 17th 2000. Visitors can view mast making, rigging, blacksmithing, the craft of the shipwrights, and other skills related to construction of a fully rigged 18th century sailing vessel.



Festivals
On July 23, 1973, thousands of Scottish-Canadians and Scottish-Americans gathered at Pictou to celebrate their common ancestry. Anchored in the harbour was the schooner Bluenose II standing in for the Hector. The guests of honour included Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court who was present to pay homage to his ancestor Colin Douglas. Throughout the day hundreds of copies of the refurbished passenger list were distributed by high school students. William MacKay's document had been transformed into an elegant souvenir of the event. For the first time the actual list of Hector passengers was available to the general public and family historians. Genealogists would have no problem finding familiar names in the crisp, new reproduction. This festival of celebration and tribute to the original Scottish immigrants soon became an annual event known as the Hector Festival.
“We've both come a long way from those hard days when that old Dutch ship slipped out of Loch Broom so we should celebrate on both sides of the big pond. We owe it to these brave people to never forget their struggle for a new life.” --Morag Anna MacLeod, Descendant
Interesting Facts
- More than 140,000 people in Canada and the US are descendants from the Hector passengers.
- The Hector was actually a Dutch ship, built in Holland.
- . In the century following the landing of the Hector more than 120 ships brought nearly 20 000 people from Scotland to the port of Pictou.
- By 1879 more than ninety-three percent of the region's rural property owners had Scottish names.
- There were approximately 189 people aboard the hector.


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