Hi Greg,

This is where the "slaves speaking Scots Gaelic" started for me:

Willie Ruff

My Apologies, Willie Ruff is Professor at Yale not Harvard.

I have mentioned this to people interested in the subject and a number of them have pointed me to literary references. For example, a character in a Rudyard Kipling story is a gaelic speaking black sailor.

Ruff believes that the slaves learned Gaelic from their Scottish slave masters, but there is a body of opinion which points to the possibility that they learned it from fellow white bonded slaves from the Highlands.   There is an incident referred to as "The ship of men" where some of the people that the lairds had "sold" to an unscrupulous captain escaped when the ship stopped off in Belfast on its way to the Carolinas. The incident caused a scandal and some believe is was the threat of this scandal being revived that kept Sir Alexander MacDonald and McLeod of Dunvegan out of the '45 Jacobite rebellion.

There are references to this "white slavery" (it wasn't quite the same as the iniquitous African experience) in "The Lyon in Mourning" A book of eye witness accounts and interviews written after the rebellion. This is a source for every writer on the subject and has been digitised by the National Library of Scotland and is available via the internet.

Gaelic as a language, if not actually supressed, was certainly deliberately marginalised after the '45. There is even a pretty vigorous debate about Gaelic medium education in Scotland today. The more I go into this, the more convinced I become that there is a side to the history of the British Isles that is in danger of being lost. A number of people have indicated to me that the Americas may be a better place to look than the UK, as the emigrants would have carried this history with them.

Sorry I have shamelessly drifted this thread. But I find this is a fascinating topic.

SM