| Modern Name | Greenock |
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| Country | Scotland |
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The Firth of Clyde at Greenock sounds quite idyllic according to the 1799 Statistical Account
'Below them the towns of Greenock and Port Glasgow, with their convenient harbours and woods, so to speak of masts .... the propspect of the firth, branching into the Gairloch, Lochlong, and Kelly Loch is ever varying'.
1799 V 564
The harbour was, by this time profitable. A plan for the harbour had been presented to parliament in 1700 seeking funds and this was peremptorily refused. The town then entered into a contract with Sir John Shaw to finance it and paid for it, as politicians are wont to do, with a tax on beer. The main trade from Greenock, up until the American Revolutionary War, was the tobacco trade with the USA carried on by Glasgow merchants and, by 1740, the harbour debt was wiped out.
Even before the mass emigrations of the 19th century there was a large Highland presence in Greenock:
'One may at times walk from end of the town to the other, passing may people, and many people passing him, without hearing a word of any language but Gaelic.'
1799 V 582
and this did not come without its problems,
'there are in the two parishes of Greenock 1825 heads of families from the Highlands of Scotland [and] .... there are no fewer than 1185 children, whose parents are unable to defray the expense of their education; and that 883 of that number are the children of parents from the counties of Scotland above mentioned [the Highlands] .... most of the labourers, boatmen sailors &c. in Greenock, are from the Highlands, and that they often settle there with large families, so support which requires their utmost industry and application .... In no part of the Highlands or Isles of Scotland, perhaps, would the benevolent intentions of the Society for propagating Christian Knowledge be better answered, than in Greenock. The erection of a free school or two, for the education of children of the poor people from the Highlands, would be attended with the happiest effects.'
1799 V 571-2
The considerably more loquacious, though less informative, minister writing the 1845 account has nothing to say about Highlanders. The incoming menace, whose intemperance had brought pawnbroking to the town, is now the Irish. Either the Highlanders were now assimilated or they had all left for the New World. Greenock was the premier emigration port of the 19th century.
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