 In 1825 the entire island was leased to Dr Lachlan Maclean, a relative of Hugh Maclean of Coll, and its inhabitants (then numbering some 450 people) were given a year's notice to quit their homes, which essentially meant an enforced leaving of the island. (Most of the population of Rùm were tenant farmers, paying rent to the island's owner; in law they neither owned the land they worked nor the houses in which they lived.) On 11 July 1826, about 300 of the inhabitants boarded two overcrowded ships — the Highland Lad and the Dove of Harmony — bound for Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada. Their passage was paid by Dr Lachlan and by Maclean of Coll. The remaining population followed them in 1827 on the St. Lawrence, along with some 150 inhabitants from the island of Muck, another of Maclean of Coll's properties. These evictions were part of a wider event that came to be known as the Highland Clearances, during which people whose culture had existed there for millennia were forced to emigrate.
