ABSTRACT
Between 1800 and 1876 there was a great outward movement of peoples from the British Isles. The official number was more than 4 million (Simpson 1997: 7), but historians say that many more left whose departure was not recorded, with the true number perhaps being more than double that in the official statistics. This was part of a huge nineteenth century European diaspora involving around 50 million people (Belich 1996: 278). For most of these emigrants it was a one-way journey, and they never returned to the home of their birth.
