Outlander Book Club: A Breath of Snow and Ashes Chapter 5 breakdown

Just the Outlander chapter

We’re back at the Big House and finding out what MacDonald is in the area for. It all starts with a discussion about houses and ships that have been burned down.

There are people around who are burning places down. It all seems to be linked to people traveling from mainland Europe, although there may be some instances of them traveling from Britain. It’s not exactly clear what this group of men want right now. Are they trying to stop emigrants settling or is there something bigger going on?

This is where the plot development is. More on that in the foreshadowing section.

After that, we get to why MacDonald is really in the area. He needs Jamie to offer up some land to some of the emigrants coming over. It turns out that there isn’t that much land available around the plantations. However, Jamie has 10,000 acres and is only using around 20 acres of it at the moment. That’s a lot of land still to cover.

Claire thinks about the problems with land in the backcountry. It doesn’t lend itself to slave work because of the type of products that can’t be farmed on the land. That means Jamie needs to find people who understand farming, and it looks like the new Governor of North Carolina wants Jamie to spend time teaching some people.