Many of those whose visits to Coll in the eighteenth century were mentioned in the last issue were amateur economists as well as tourists. As some of them had foreseen, Coll society was to undergo a revolution in the space of two generations after 1780. Steady population growth had given rise to continued voluntary emigration, new agricultural methods, and the replacement of the old common farms by crofts. Land previously waste was brought into cultivation, and landless families squatted where they could. This precarious new balance was then destroyed by bad harvests, falling cattle and kelp prices and above all by potato blight, which removed from the people the principal - and in many cases the only - element in their daily diet. Few visitors to Coll now had eyes for its scenery: reports from a procession of official visitors show how the distress of the people reached a depth almost comparable with parts of Africa today.

The agony was a prolonged one. In six of the sixteen years before 1827 there was a shortage of food on the island. In 1823, the laird - himself largely a visitor now, for the Macleans spent much time on Mull or in more distant parts - asked the Colonial Secretary to assist part of "our suffering population" to go to Canada. He described conditions on his estate: "no fishing or manufacture except one hundred tons of kelp, which would give full employment for about three months to about seventy individuals. Cattle and sheep our only saleable produce, in the best seasons not raising grain sufficient for our own consumption.. At least half the people are in a state which would be considered starvation in any other part of Britain."

In 1836-37 things were even worse, though the real crisis did not come upon Coll till the autumn of 1846, when blight destroyed the potato crop. The government began to take steps to import food. The Hugh Maclean's factor told him that he hoped supplies would arrive soon. "They are beginning to cry loudly from Coll, where the destitution will be first felt." Years of privation unknown to their fathers and grandfathers were taking their toll on the population. One official account sets out the conditions of those with little or no land of their own:-

"Widow Charles MacFadyen, aged 32. Has been twelve years a widow. Gets half a stone of meal a week, says it is for one of her children... Would be sewing, but has got none this four weeks; used to get caps and gowns to make.

"Margaret and Mary Patterson, forty and sixty, two sisters, unmarried. Get a half stone of meal each. Live with a widowed sister who gets none.. but her boy, aged 14, gets 71b. a week. No croft, no cow, but keep a horse to bring home peats and carry seaware..

"Nanny and Euphemia Maclean, 84 and 64, sisters and live by themselves. They get the house for nothing but have no land. Euphemia got two bottles of treacle today.. She goes to Arinagour every Monday for their meal."

These were not isolated instances. Echoing the laird a generation earlier, an inspector from the Committee responsible for doling out the meal wrote in the spring of 1848 that half the entire population was in receipt of free meal, "and I am fairly at a loss to know.. what is to become of these poor people when the means of support is withdrawn from them." An attempt to bring the meal-issue to an end was postponed and, near the end of that year, an official wrote, "I never heard such cries for food in Coll before, and had it not been for the draining works at Gallanach, great numbers of families would have been very ill off. These drains are now nearly finished, and I am afraid some of these people will starve."

Everything must have seemed to fall apart at once. Emigration took some Coll people to Canada or Australia and others to Glasgow, so that few remained who knew how humble families were related to the laird or to each other by marriages long past. Connections with the land, perhaps maintained for generations in the same place, were broken in a moment. Shortly after the famine, the Macleans at last sold the estate which for many years they had been unable to keep up. The new Stewart landlords turned to dairying. It is hardly surprising that scars were long in healing. Forty years after the famine had passed, the troubles of Coll were brought before a Royal Commission. One witness called on a truly Gladstonian vocabulary to give his view of events in mid-century, speaking of watery graves in mid-Atlantic, and adding, "Verily, that (1856) was a year of gloom and doom in the calendar of Coll. Helpless old people with a helpless family might be seen weeping and wailing, leaving the homes of their childhood and sent adrift upon the world, with nothing before them but to quit the island or jump into the sea." The witness then gave a dramatic account of the first rent collection after the sale:
"There was a six-chambered revolver on the table.. One Allan Mackinnon went in to pay his rent, which he had in full but not a penny more. It was about that date it became law that all receipts for sums over £2 should be affixed with a penny stamp. Allan was asked for a penny, and when he told that he had not a penny, he was ordered to go and get it, while his Glengarry bonnet was kept as security."

The value of this striking evidence was rather diminished by the assertion, which is well beyond rational belief, that in mid-century the majority of people had been happy "and poverty unknown amongst them"! Nevertheless, if the content is questionable, the bitterness of tone is unmistakeable. Coll had not only come within a range of visitors with an economic interest in its progress: politics had broken in.