call it a desolate, lonely little isle. That it is little I admit; but
you must go to the other side of the Sound for the loneliness and
desolation. In proportion to its size, it seemed to us the most
cultivated island of the Hebrides. I have heard it argued that for the
Duke of Argyll not to forfeit his ownership was a true charity to his
tenants, as if Iona was still the desert St. Columba found it. But I
think its rental would be found a fair return for the charity of a
landlord. As for the favorite myth that Iona is far out in the Hebridean
Sea, I hardly know how it could have arisen, since the island is within
easy reach of the main land and of Mull. There is no history of its old
monastery that does not tell how the pilgrim coming to it from the Ross
of Mull had but to call a summons from the granite rocks, and the monks
would hear the cry and make ready to meet him in their boats. If this be
true, however, his voice must have been phenomenal. The modern pilgrim
could no more do this than he could wield the long sword or pull the
crossbow of men of old. In our time a steamer comes to Iona every day
from Oban, and twice a week another stops on its way to and from Glasgow
and the Outer Hebrides. If Iona lay so near American shores it would
long since have become a Bar Harbor or a Campo Bello. Even where it is
it has its crowds of visitors. The writer who on one page tells you of
its loneliness, on the next mourns its daily desecration when tourists
eat sandwiches among the ruins.
[Illustration: TOMB OF MACLEOD.]
These ruins, like everything else in Iona, belong to the Duke of Argyll.
They are kept locked except when the keeper of the keys opens them to
sight-seers. It may interest his Grace to know that we trespassed,
climbing over the low stone walls into the cathedral enclosure. While we
were there we were alone, save for black sheep, the modern successors of
the monks. It is a fact that as we stood with our feet upon Macleod of
Macleod's tomb, one of the black sheep--probably the very same which
frightened Gertrude White in the moonlight--baaed at us. But the sun
was shining, and we did not screech; we merely said _shoo_ to it, and
remarked upon its impudence.
If our piety, with Dr. Johnson's, did not grow warmer among the ruins of
Iona, at least our way of seeing them was not unlike Boswell's. Perhaps
this is why we think he showed more commonsense in Iona than elsewhere
on his journey. He did not trouble to investigate minutely, he says,
"but only to receive the general impression of solemn antiquity, and the
particular ideas of such objects as should of themselves strike my
attention." But indeed, unless you have a lifetime to spend in Iona,
unless you are an architect or an archaeologist, there is little need to
care where the exact site of infirmary or refectory or library may be,
or to whom this shrine was set up, that tombstone laid, or in what year
walls were built, windows opened. It is enough to see how beautiful the
monks could make the holy place they loved, here on this rough northern
coast, as in among the vineyards and olives of the south, as in English
fenland and wooded valley.
But if Boswell's impression was one of disappointment, ours was one of
wonder to find the ruins so much more perfect than we had expected, and
so beautiful, not only with the beauty of impressiveness as a whole, but
with a grace and refinement of detail one does not look for in the far
north. Much early Italian work is not more graceful than the carving on
the capitals, the tracery in the windows, the door-way leading into the
sacristy, the arches that spring from the cloister walls to their outer
arcade in the monastery and church founded by St. Columba. If, as has
been said, no ivy covers the walls, when we were there yellow flowers
had pushed their way between the stones, while windows and rounded
arches made a framework for the unbroken blue of sea and sky and pale
distant hills. For so long as we were in the cathedral, the sun shone as
if, instead of Hebridean seas, the Mediterranean lay beyond. True, this
did not last half a morning; it rained before night; but the very breaks
in the sunshine, and the way the clouds came and went, made the day more
beautiful.
It is strange to see this wonderful work of other days in an island
where, owing to their present masters, men can now scarce support
existence. Centuries of progress or deterioration--which is it?--lie
between the cathedral, lovely even in ruin, and the new ugly kirk close
by. And yet when men had time to make their world beautiful the harvest
was as rich. There was enough to eat and to spare for the stranger when
the Celtic knots and twists were first carved on the cross standing by
the cathedral door and looking seaward, and on the tombs lying within
the chancel. But, and more's the pity, the same cannot be said to-day,
when tombs are crumbling, and pale green lichens cover the carving of
the cross. You feel this contrast between past and present still more in
the graveyard by St. Oran's chapel, into which also we made our way over
a stone wall. The long grass has been cleared from the gray slabs, where
lie the mitred bishops and the men in armor, or where the intricacy of
the Celtic designs makes space for a ship with its sails spread. They
are "only gravestones flat on the earth," as Boswell says, and now
neatly placed in senseless rows for the benefit of the tourist. But who
would exchange them for the well-polished granite obelisks of the modern
stone-cutter which rise at their side?
The old road leads from the cathedral, past McLean's weather-worn
cross--which is so thin you wonder that it still withstands the strong
winds from the sea--to the nuns' convent, whose ruins and tombs show it
to have been only less fine than the monastery. Here the gate was thrown
open. A small steam-yacht, which we could see lying at anchor in the
Sound below, had just let loose a dozen yachtsmen upon the loneliness of
Iona, and they were being personally conducted through the nunnery.
We trespassed no more, except in fields on the western side of the
island, whither we walked by the very road, for all I know, along which
St. Columba was carried in the hour before death, that he might once
more see the monks working on the land he had reclaimed, and there give
them his last blessing. But if we trespassed, no one objected. The men
whom we met greeted us in Gaelic, which, when they saw we did not
understand, they translated into a pleasant good-day or directions about
our path.
There were many other places we should have seen. But since the whole
island was a proof of St. Columba's wisdom in settling on it, nothing
was to be gained by a visit to the particular spot where he landed or
where he set up a cairn. And as for the Spouting Cave, we took the
guide-book's word for it; for as Dr. Johnson would say, we were never
much elevated by the expectation of any cave. Instead of sight-seeing,
we stayed on the western shore, looking out beyond the low white and
grass-grown sand-dunes and the bowlder-made beach to the sea, with its
many rocky isles, the fear of seamen, black upon the waters. It is just
such a coast as Mr. Stevenson has described in his "Merry Men." And,
indeed, since I have written this I have read in his "Memoirs of an
Islet" that it is this very coast, though more to the south of Iona,
where the _Christ-anna_ and the _Covenant_ went down to the bottom,
there to rot with the _Espirito Santo_ and her share of the treasures
of the Invincible Armada. When Columba sailed from Ireland to Hebridean
seas the Merry Men had long since begun their bonny dance, for they are
as old as the rocks against which they dash, and these rocks are older
than man. When you know the dangers of this coast you have no little
respect for the saint who dared them. St. Columba and his disciples, who
set up cross and bell on lonely St. Kilda and the far Faroe Islands,
were the Stanleys and Burtons of their time.
People who have never heard of crofters and their troubles can tell you
all about St. Columba and his miracles. In Iona he interested us chiefly
because all that is left of his and his followers' work gives the lie to
modern landlords. Land in the Hebrides, they say, is only fit for deer
and grouse. St. Columba showed that it could be made fit for man as
well.
The landlady of St. Columba's Inn is true to the traditions of the
island. She is as unwilling to turn the stranger from her door as were
the abbots of St. Columba's monastery. In her own way she performs
miracles and finds room for every one who comes. At first we thought
that her miracles were worked at our expense. During our absence the
party from Bunessan had arrived. Although their boxes were on the rocks
of the Ross of Mull, awaiting the ferry-man's convenience, by their
very numbers they had gained the advantage we feared, and had quietly
stepped into the room in the manse, of which we had neglected to take
possession. We were now quartered in the school-house. However, to judge
from our comfort there, we lost nothing by the change.
It was at the late supper that we enjoyed the "dairy produce" of which
Miss Gordon Cumming writes with rapture. It was a simple meal, such as
one might have shared with St. Columba himself. The breakfasts and
dinners, I should add, were less saintly, and therefore more
substantial. As for the rest of the island, the fare is regulated by
poverty and the Duke. We make a great to-do at home over the prohibition
question, but in the Highlands they manage these matters more easily.
Ducal option, we were told, reigns throughout the island. And yet the
people of Iona are not grateful for thus being spared the trouble of
deciding for themselves upon a subject whereon so few men agree. It has
been whispered that drunkenness is not unknown in the Blessed Isle, and
that natives have been seen by strangers--oh, the scandal of
it!--reeling under the very shadow of the cathedral.
A white-haired clergyman, with pleasant old-fashioned manners and
Gladstone collar, presided at supper. He introduced us at once to his
family. "My son"--and he waved his hand towards a youth we had seen
crossing the fields with his color-box--"my son is an artist; he is
studying in the Royal Academy. He has already sold a picture for forty
pounds. Not a bad beginning, is it? And my daughter," and he lowered his
voice deferentially, "will soon be in the hands of the critics. She has
just made some wonderfully clever illustrations for an old poem that hit
her fancy!"
It was pleasant to see his fatherly pride. For his sake we could have
wished her in an easier position.
Evidently, when you have exhausted saintly gossip in Iona you are at the
end of your resources. The clergyman and two or three others with him
were as eager to hear where we had been and where we were going and what
we had seen, as if they had had nothing to talk about for a fortnight.
We had decided to take the _Dunara Castle_ from Glasgow, and in it to
steam to Coll and Tiree and the Long Island. We had heard of the
steamer, as you hear of everything in the Hebrides, by chance. And now
the old man was all for having us change our minds. Here we were, safe
in Iona, he said; why should we brave the dangers of the wild coast?
Another man thought we had better not go to Harris; he had arrived there
one Saturday evening, intending to remain two weeks; but the midges
would give him no peace, and he had left with the steamer on Monday
morning. The only comfort he could give was that they would feed us well
on the _Dunara Castle_. It is strange that in Scotland, no matter what
your plans may be, your fellow-tourists are sure to fall foul of them.
It was after this the clergyman brought out of his pocket a handful of
the new coins, which we had not then seen.
"It's an ugly face," said J----, thinking only of the coin, though it
would have been no libel had he referred to her gracious Majesty
herself.
But the clergyman was down upon him at once. "I cannot let any one speak
disrespectfully of my queen in my presence," he cried; "I love her too
dearly to hear a word against her."
And he told us how, that afternoon, he had climbed to the top of the
highest hill in Iona; and standing where Columba had stood so many
hundreds of years ago, and remembering that this was the Jubilee year of
his beloved sovereign, he dropped a new shilling into the cairn which
marks the spot where the monks first made their home.
And yet I have a friend who, in the pages of the _Atlantic Monthly_, has
tried to prove that sentiment is fast decaying.
Later, when this same sentimentalist told us of the poverty, hunger, and
misery in Iona, we thought that the shilling might have been dropped to
better purpose.
It was on a gray morning that an old Hamish rowed us and two other
passengers and a load of freight to the
"DUNARA CASTLE,"
which had dropped anchor in the middle of the Sound. On deck we found
four young sportsmen in knickerbockers and ulsters, their backs turned
upon the cathedral, firing at sea-gulls and missing them very
successfully. In fact, I might as well say here, they kept on firing and
missing so long as they were on the steamer. A man with a wife, four
children, three maids, and a deckful of baggage, was already preparing
to get off at Bunessan. The domestic energy of the Englishman is only
less admirable than his business-like methods of pleasure. A party of
Lowlanders were playing cards. A man of universal authority was telling
a small group of listeners all about the geology and religion, the
fishing and agriculture, of the islands. But as we sat in a corner,
sheltered from the bitter cold wind, the talk that came to us was mostly
of sport.
"I played that brute for half an hour!"
"I was fishing with a worm, I think."
"The best thing for shooting rooks is an airgun."
"He wasn't a particularly good shot."
And all the time the brave sportsmen kept showing us what particularly
bad shots they were. Is Tartarin's _Chasse de Casquettes_ really so
much funnier than what is called sport in England?
Suddenly one of the Scotchmen, leaving his cards to look about him, gave
the talk an unexpected literary turn. "That feller, Louis Stevverson,"
he said, "laid one o' the scenes o' his Keednopped here," and he pointed
to the Ross and Erraid.
"Woo's 'e?" said a cockney.
"'Arts is trumps," announced a third, and literature was dropped for
more engrossing themes.
Emerson was right. It would be a waste of time for the literary man to
play the swell. Even the handsome and gentlemanly authors of Boston, who
are praised by Arlo Bates, when they become known to the world at large
may be but "fellers!"
From the Sound we steamed past the great headland of Gribun, with the
caves in its dark rocks, and into Loch Slach to the pier near Bunessan.
The sportsmen were the first to alight, and, with guns over their
shoulders, they disappeared quickly up the hill-side. The father of the
family, like a modern Noah, stood on the pier to count his wife,
children, maid, boxes, bundles, fishing-rods, and gun-cases, and to see
them safely on dry land. It was fortunate for the original Noah that he
did not have a whole ship's company to feed when he left the Ark. We
were some time putting off and taking on freight. At the last moment,
back ran the four sportsmen, bearing one bird in triumph. They parted
with it sadly and tenderly. It was pathetic to see their regret after
they had given it to a fisherman, who seemed embarrassed by the gift. I
think they knew that it was the last bird they would bring down that
day.
Then again we steamed past Gribun. Beyond it rose Inch-Kenneth and Ulva,
really "Ulva dark" this morning. And one by one we left behind us, Iona,
its white sands shining, its cathedral standing out boldly against the
sky; Staffa, for a time so near that we could see the entrance to the
great cave with its clustered piers; Fladda, Lunga, and the Dutchman's
Cap. It was a page from "Macleod of Dare." And what were the Dhu
Harteach men saying now? we could not help asking. Everywhere we looked
were tiny nameless islands and bits of rock, sometimes separated only
by a narrow channel. And now the sun shone upon us in our corner and
made us warm. And even after the hills of Mull had begun to go down on
the horizon, and Iona and Staffa had faded into vague shadows, we could
see the Dutchman, like a great Phrygian cap set upon the waters.
Straight out we went to Tiree, a long, treeless strip of land with low
hills at one end, and a wide, sandy, Jersey-like beach. A few houses,
scattered here and there, were in sight. There was no pier. A large
boat, with three men at each of the four long oars, came out to meet the
steamer, and into it were tumbled pell-mell men and women, and tables,
and bags of meal, and loaves of bread, and boxes. It is another of the
Duke of Argyll's islands. Looking at it from the steamship point of
view, one could not but wonder if as much good might not be done for
people, whose only highway is the ocean, by the building of a pier as by
prohibition laws enforced by a landlord. As in Iona, so in Tiree, no
spirits can be bought or sold. It is one of the anomalies of paternal
government that the men made children turn upon their kind fatherly
ruler. The crofters of Tiree have given trouble even as have those of
Skye and Lewis. They are shielded from drunkenness, and yet they
complain that they have been turned from the land that once was theirs
to cultivate, and that their rents have been for long years so high that
to pay them meant starvation for their families. Though these complaints
are explained by the Duke as "phenomena of suggestion" to the
Commissioners, part at least seemed well founded on fact. Instead of
L1251 18s. according to his own estimate, his Grace, according to that
of the Commission, is now entitled to but L922 10s. from the island of
Tiree.
We had not time to land, but steaming past its miserable shores, it
seemed dreary enough. St. Columba showed what he thought of it when
he sent penitents there to test their sincerity. The island of Coll, to
which Dr. Johnson and Boswell were carried in a storm, was as flat and
stupid and dreary. We had come as far as Coll, partly because of the
Doctor's visit. But from this time until we left the Hebrides we were so
much taken up with what we saw as scarce to give him another thought.
For a while we went many miles astray from his route.
When you steam from Tiree and Coll, a broad stretch of the Atlantic lies
between you and the Long Island. If I had my choice, I would rather
cross the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe, and that is saying the worst
that can be said. The sunshine for the day came to an end. It was
cruelly cold. The sportsmen fell prone upon the deck, and the intervals
between their now languid shots were long. The man of authority shut
himself up in his state-room, the best on the steamer. The card-players
sat sad and silent. We, for our part, could only think of our folly in
coming, and wonder if we too must be sick. Surely walking could not be
greater misery than this. Though in these seas you are never quite out
of sight of land, and never clear of the big and little rocks cropping
up all around you, it was not until late in the afternoon that we came
again close to large islands. They were wild and desolate, with hardly a
house and but few cattle and sheep on their rocky shores. One or two
boats, with brown sails raised, were jumping and pitching over the
waves.
[Illustration: CASTLE BAY, FROM BARRA.]
The gray wretchedness of the afternoon was a fit prelude to Barra. When
we came to Castle Bay, rain was falling upon its waters, on the
battlemented castle perched upon a rocky, sea-weed-covered islet, and on
the town, set against a background of high bare hills. But the steamer
stopped, and we went ashore to look about us. A few ugly new houses,
shops with plate-glass windows, often cited as proofs of the island's
prosperity, and then the real Barra: a group of black cottages--compared
to which those of Mull were mansions, those of Kilchrennan
palaces--running up and down the rocky hill-side. Only by a polite
figure of speech can the stone pile in which the Hebridean crofter makes
his home be called a cottage. It is, as it was described many years ago,
but "a heavy thatched roof thrown over a few rudely put together
stones." The long low walls are built of loose stones blackened by
constant rain. The thatched roof, almost as black, is held in place
without by a net-work of ropes, within by rafters of drift-wood. The
crofter has no wood save that which the sea yields, and yet in some
districts he must pay for picking up the beams and spars washed up on
his wild shores, just as he must for the grass and heather he cuts from
the wilder moorland when he makes his roof. Not until you come close to
the rough stone heap can you see that it is a house, with an opening for
door-way, one tiny hole for window. From a distance there is but its
smoke to distinguish it from the rocks strewn around it.
At Castle Bay, where many of these "scenes of misery," as Pennant called
them one hundred years ago, were grouped together, there was not even
the pretence of a street, but just the rock, rough, ragged, and broken,
as God made it. The people who live here are almost all fishermen, and,
as if in token of their calling, they have fashioned the thatch of their
roofs into the shape of boats; one cottage, indeed, is topped with a
genuine boat. There were a few chimneys, but smoke came pouring from the
doors, from holes in the thatch and walls. Many of the roofs bore a
luxuriant growth of grass, with here and there a clump of daisies or of
the yellow flowers which give color to Highland roads. But this was all
the green we saw on their hill-side of rock and mud.
Through open door-ways we had glimpses of dark, gloomy interiors, dense
with smoke. We did not cross a threshold, however; to seek admittance
seemed not unlike making a show of the people's misery. The women and
girls who passed in and out, and stood to stare at us, looked strong and
healthy. Theirs is a life which must either kill or harden. Many were
handsome, with strangely foreign, gypsy-like faces, and so were the
bonneted men at work on the pier. It may be that there is truth in the
story which gives a touch of Spanish blood to the people of the Outer
Hebrides. If the ships of the Armada went down with all their treasure,
it is said that their crews survived, and lived and took unto themselves
wives in the islands, from which chance of deliverance was small. We
heard only Gaelic spoken while we were at Castle Bay. The people of
Great Britain need not go abroad in search of foreign parts; but an
Englishman who only wants to see the misery and wrongs of nations
foreign in name as well as in reality, would find little pleasure in
Barra.
When we left the steamer the four sportsmen were getting off with their
baggage, of which there was no small quantity. When we returned, hours
later, they were getting in again. The one hotel in Barra was full. For
consolation, I suppose, they shut themselves up in their state-room, and
changed their trousers for the third time that day.
Their return brought to an end our bargaining for their state-room. The
night in the ladies' cabin was one long nightmare. The steamer pitched
and tossed as if she were still crossing the open Atlantic. At the many
stopping-places there was a great noise of loading and unloading. At
midnight a mother, with her two babies and nurse, came to fill the
unoccupied berths.
[Illustration: TOWN OF BARRA.]
J----, in the saloon, fared little better. But the advantage of the
restless night was that it sent us up on deck in time to see the eastern
hills grow purple against the golden light of coming day. As in the
evening, there was still land on either side. All the morning we went in
and out of lochs and bays, and through sounds, and between islands.
Indeed, I know of no better description of the Outer Hebrides than the
quotation given in the guide-book: "The sea here is all islands and the
land all lakes." And the farther north we went, the drearier seemed this
land--a fitting scene for the tragedy enacted on it, which, though now
many years old, is ever young in the memory of the people; for it was
here in Uist that, in 1851, men and women were hunted like beasts,
tracked by dogs to the caves and wilds where they lay in hiding, bound
hand and foot, and cast upon ships waiting to carry them against their
will across the Atlantic. We might have thought that no life had been
left upon the islands but for an occasional wire fence, a sprinkling of
sheep on the greener hill-sides, and lonely cottages, with thin clouds
of blue peat-smoke hovering over them to show that they were not mere
rocks. Once, stretching across the wilderness we saw telegraph poles
following the coast-line. It is wise to let them make the best showing
possible. Some of the islands are cut off telegraphically from the rest
of the world.
We stopped often. At many of the landings not a house was to be seen. As
a rule, there was no pier. The steamer would give her shrill whistle,
and as it was re-echoed from the dreary hills huge black boats came
sailing out to meet us. Instead of boats waiting for the steamer, as in
the Mississippi, here she waited for them. And when they had dropped
their sails, and rounded her bows and brought up alongside her lower
deck, there tumbled into them men and women, and loaves, and old
newspapers, and ham bones, and bits of meat, for in the islands there
are always people on the verge of starvation.