sportsmen in ulsters and knickerbockers, and with many fishing-rods,
came to take their place. On shore stood a man in plain, unassuming
kilt, in which he looked at home. We liked to fancy him a laird of Uist
in ancestral dress, and not like the youth at Oban, a mere masquerader.
We asked the purser who he was.
"Oh, that is Mr. O'Brien, of Liverpool," was his answer.
Everybody had come up on deck, for the day was comparatively fine. It
kept clearing and clouding, the sun now shining on the far hills and
the rain pouring upon us; but again the showers were swept landward, and
we were in sunshine. As we neared
HARRIS,
a little old lady came bustling up. When the steamer stopped in the
Sound the men in the boats all touched their bonnets to her, a few even
got on board to speak to her. She was better than a guide-book, and told
the passengers near her all about Harris. She explained the difficulties
of the channel through the Sound, which, like all Hebridean waters, is
full of islands and rocks hidden at high tide, and is unprotected by
lights. She pointed out Rodil Church, whose gray tower just showed above
the green hills. She always called this bit of Harris the Switzerland of
the Hebrides, she said. And with its checker-board-like patches of green
and yellowing grain between the hills and the water, and lying, while we
were there, in sunshine, it might have looked bright and even happy, but
for the wretched cottages, of which there were more in this one place
than we had seen on all the journey from Iona.
[Illustration: MOUNTAINS OF HARRIS, FROM TARBET.]
Once, as we watched the boats rounding the steamer's bows, we found
ourselves next to this old lady. She seemed so glad to talk that we
asked her could she perhaps tell us if the people of Harris were as
miserable as their cottages.
"Oh," she said, "their condition is hopeless!" And then she went on to
tell us that she lived only for Harris, and that there was no one who
knew better than she its poverty. She was, we learned afterwards,
Mrs.--or Mistress, as Lowlanders on board called her--Thomas. Her
husband had been a Government surveyor in the island, and since his
death she had interested herself in the people, among whom, for many
years, she made her home.
The story of Harris, as she told it and as we have since read it in the
report of the Commission of 1883, is in the main that of all the Islands
and Highlands. It is the story of men toiling on land and sea, that by
the sweat of their brow they may make, not their own bread, but the
venison and game of others. Thousands starve that two or three may have
their sport. The land in the Hebrides is barren, it is argued in behalf
of the sportsmen. Harris is the barrenest of all, Mrs. Thomas declared.
We could see this for ourselves; after the Switzerland of the Hebrides,
the mountains rose a solid mass of black rock with scarce a trace of
vegetation. But even Harris once supported its people. That was before
they were made to share the land with the deer. To-day a few valleys and
hill-sides are overcrowded, crofts divided and subdivided; while others
once as green are now purple with heather, and silent save for the guns
of sportsmen. Deer forests and large farms grow larger and larger;
crofts shrink, until from the little patch of ground, long since
overworked, the crofter can no longer reap even that which he sows. And
yet he sees better land, where perhaps once grew his potatoes and grain,
swallowed up in the cruel moors. While his harvest is starvation, deer
and grouse live and multiply.
Many villages were cleared when the great deer forest of Harris was
extended, not so many years ago. The people were turned from homes where
they had always lived, the old with the young, and women about to become
mothers. Highlanders love their land. Many went back again and again,
even after their cottages were but black piles of ruin. Because he
evicts tenants who will not pay their rent, the Irish landlord is called
cruel. The evicted in the Hebrides have hitherto been those who
interfere with the landlord's convenience or amusement. The rent has had
nothing to do with it. And yet of Scotch evictions but comparatively
little has been heard. Journalists skilled in their trade have published
abroad, from one end of the land to the other, the tale of Irish wrongs.
But who knows the injustice that has been done in Scotland in order to
lay waste broad tracts of good ground? "I will tell you how Rodil was
cleared," said John McDiarmid, of Scalpa, to the Commissioners. "There
were one hundred and fifty hearths in Rodil. Forty of these paid rent.
When young Macleod (the landlord) came home with his newly married wife
to Rodil, he went away to show his wife the place, and twenty of the
women of Rodil came and met them, and danced a reel before them, so glad
were they to see them. By the time the year was out--twelve months from
that day--these twenty women were weeping and wailing, their houses
being unroofed and their fires quenched by the orders of the estate. I
could not say who was to blame, but before the year was out one hundred
and fifty fires were quenched."
As in Rodil, so it was where now stretches the deer forest of
Harris--wherever, indeed, deer are hunted in the Highlands. Whoever
wants to learn the nature of some of the blessings which come to the
many from the proprietary power and right of the few--a right and power
to which the Duke of Argyll refers all advance in the Highlands--let him
read the "History of the Highland Clearances" as told by Alexander
Mackenzie, the "Gloomy Memories of the Highlands," by Donald Macleod,
himself one of the evicted. Their story is too cruel for me to tell
again. Their country was desolate; their cities were burned with fire;
their land, strangers devoured it in their presence, and it was
desolate. Never did negro slaves in the South fare as did the Highland
men and women cleared from the glens and valleys of Sutherland. Slaves
at least represented so much money; but the crofter was and _is_ less
valuable to the laird than his sheep and his deer. Slaves could be sold.
This was the one thing which the landlord, despite all his rights, could
not do with his crofters. He could burn their cottages, starve them and
their families, turn them adrift, and chase them over seas, there
perhaps to meet anew starvation, disease, and death. From every part of
the Highlands and Islands, from Ross and Argyllshire, as from
Sutherland, hundreds and thousands were forced to fly, whether they
would or not.
And with those who stayed at home, how fared it? The evicted squatted,
we would call it, on the crofts of friends and relations in other parts
of the estate. There was no place else for them to go. When there, they
sought to solve the bitterest problem of life--how to make that which is
but enough for one serve for two--and therein were unsuccessful. The
landlord washed his hands of them and their poverty. They had brought it
upon themselves, he reasoned; if crofts were overcrowded, the fault was
theirs. You might as well force a man into the jungle or swamp reeking
with malaria, and then when he is stricken upbraid him for living in
such a hot-bed of fever. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace does not exaggerate
when he says, "For a parallel to this monstrous power of the land-owner,
under which life and property are entirely at his mercy, we must go
back to mediaeval, or to the days when, serfdom not having been
abolished, the Russian noble was armed with despotic authority, while
the more pitiful results of this landlord tyranny, the wide devastation
of cultivated lands, the heartless burning of houses, the reckless
creation of pauperism and misery out of well-being and contentment,
could only be expected under the rule of Turkish sultans or greedy and
cruel pashas."
Emigration is the principal remedy suggested. The landlords of old
enforced it, and now, for very shame, are content to commend it. It is
the remedy most to their taste. It would leave them alone with their
sheep and their game. If the only Highlanders were the gillies and
shepherds, there would be an end of bothersome tales of wrongs, rousing
the sympathy of the public. The real reason for emigration is that "any
remedies which might be expected from land law reform or land acts will
be and are likely to be long deferred, while in the mean time the people
are dying like dogs from starvation." It has been urged that it would be
better if many of the Islanders, like men of the east coast, became
fishermen altogether and gave up their land. But if they did, the gain
would not be theirs. In many lochs and bays the people are not allowed
to fish for food because gentlemen must fish for pleasure. Few have
boats for deep-sea fishing; none have money to buy them. As it is, in
the Long Island they must compete with well-equipped fishing-smacks sent
into northern seas from Billingsgate markets.[G] Not only this, but in
both Harris and Lewis, piers and harbors are few, and fishing-boats must
be light that fishermen may pull them up on shore beyond reach of the
tide. In parts of the northern Highlands people have been removed from
the glens to the shores in hopes that they would become fishermen; but
they were given no boats, no harbors.
[G] I have just heard that Americans are about to send
fishing-vessels over to these waters.
For Skye and the Long Island, the nearest way to the main-land is by
Strome Ferry, where the entrance to the harbor is intricate, and so
poorly lighted that once the short winter days set in, as its passage
cannot be attempted after dark, traffic between the islands and the
main-land is seriously interrupted. But indeed one can but wonder at the
few light-houses on this dangerous west coast. Here and there one
erected on a lonely rock far out at sea is a triumph of engineering
skill. But the most difficult channels, the wildest coasts, are left
without a light. In the course of our long journey in Hebridean waters I
think we saw but half a dozen. The life-boat institution in British
islands is now supported by charity. It seems as if the light-house
service as well must fall to the benevolence of advertisers and city
corporations.
It is well to say what the people ought to do; it is better to explain
what they cannot do. They are hampered and held back on every side, and
then the stranger is told that he need not pity them, they are so lazy.
They are thriftless and good-for-nothing, Lowlanders on the steamer
assured us. When you first go among them you believe in their laziness.
Their little patches of potatoes and grain are full of weeds, and their
ditches are choked; broken windows are mended with rags or heather, dirt
and rubbish lie waiting to be cleared away. From their doors they step
into the mud. A very little industry is needed to set these things
right. You wonder if, after all, it may not be their own fault that they
are so poor. But this is what a doctor of Raasay told the Commissioners,
"The prevailing disease is poverty, and the chief remedy is food." The
people have not enough to eat; that is why they do not work hard. You
have but to look into their faces to know that they are starving. Hardly
a winter passes that food has not to be begged for them. Even as I
write, petitions come from a school-master in Lewis. Unless money and
meal are sent to them, the people in his district cannot live through
the winter. But until two years ago had they not been from morning to
night, from night to morning, weak from hunger; if fields had been made
to yield a richer harvest; if crofts and houses had been kept neat and
pretty, the profit would have been the landlords'. The greater the
people's industry, the higher the rent they paid. If they made
improvements, the rent was raised. Nor did they know at what moment the
fruits of their labor might be swept away. The landlord had but to say,
"I want my land, you must go," and their work of years had come to
naught. No matter how long the crofter lived in the cottage where dwelt
his father and grandfather before him, the day never came when he could
say of a surety, "To-morrow this roof will be over my head, these fields
and pastures will be mine to care for."
In the Hebrides, the landlord has always had rights; the crofter, until
the passing of the Crofters' Bill of 1886, had none. I remember that on
that day on the boat, with the shores of hopeless Harris in sight, Mrs.
Thomas said to me, "There are two sides to the question, of course. The
landlord has a right to do as he chooses with his own land." This is the
argument of the landlords. They can quote Scripture in its support. "A
man may do as he likes with his own," an Irish land-owner reminded his
tenants the other day when he threatened to sweep them off the face of
his estates. It is an old, well-worn argument; to answer it French
revolutions and American civil wars have been fought. Englishmen have
been ever ready to dispute it abroad; at home they are its advocates.
Probably we ought to have seen this other side; I admit that it would
have been far pleasanter. A few letters of introduction--at that time,
at any rate, not impossible to obtain--would have opened the doors of
many of the big houses on our route, would have furnished J---- with a
gun and me with days of boredom, would have introduced us to the natives
in another fashion; for, according to all accounts, they would then have
greeted us as if they were slaves, and not the most fearless and
independent people in Great Britain. Of course we understand that
strangers in the islands who do see this side of island life, find it as
delightful as strangers in the South at home once found that of the old
Southern gentleman. But we defy any one who visits the islands after our
manner, not to be filled as we were with the thought of the people's
misery; for the bondage in which they are held to-day is more cruel than
was that of slaves in the slave States of America or of serfs in Russia.
There are good landlords in the Highlands, just as there were bad
slave-owners in the South--men who give the half-starved, half-frozen
crofter the blankets and meal which, if he were emancipated, he could
provide for himself; for the crofter is no better, but indeed worse than
a slave, since he must bear the burdens both of freedom and of slavery.
He is free to pay more for land than it is worth, to be taxed for roads
which are never built, and for schools where his language is scorned,
and, in some islands, his religion dishonored; and, moreover, in
proportion to his means, to be taxed more heavily than men in any other
part of Scotland; in some districts he is free to cut from the moorland
peat for fuel, to gather from the shore sea-weed for manure, to take
from waste lands heather or grass to thatch his roof, only if he pays
for the privilege. Here his freedom ends. In his house--the Englishman's
castle--he is so little his own master that he cannot keep a sheep or a
pig or a dog, unless it be the will of his laird. If he asks to lay his
grievances before the factor he is called a rebel, and warned not to
dare speak in such fashion; and this by a landlord praised by the great
world because of the winter distribution of blankets and meal. If his
complaints should be listened to, there is little chance of redress from
men who value rabbits and grouse more highly than they do their tenants.
He is wholly at the mercy of the factor, who usually holds all the
highest offices on the estate, and has the power, as at Barra, to
disenfranchise an entire island. This is the account of his position
given by a minister in Skye: "The crofter has no protection from the
large tacksmen; if he makes a complaint he can get no redress. There is
no law in Skye. Might is the only right, and that, too, in the last
decade of the nineteenth century. One great evil which sadly needs
reform is the state of terrorism under which the small tenantry live
through the insolent threats of subordinate officials, whose impudence
increases in proportion to the smallness of their authority." It was
time, indeed, when the Royal Commission was sent to the Highlands; and
yet, though the Commission has reduced rents and cancelled arrears, it
has not struck at the root of the evil--the existing relations between
landlord and crofter.
[Illustration: GATHERING PEAT.]
The crofter's representative in Parliament is often, fortunately not
always, a stranger who comes just before or after his election--as a
candidate for Skye came to that island while we were there--and tells
the people he has never been there before, they do not know him as yet,
but he hopes they may later; and then he steams away in his yacht.
Whether elected or not, we may feel sure he will never come again. But
what is to be hoped for from Parliament? "They are all landlords in the
House of Commons: what will they do for us?" the crofters and cotters of
Lewis asked the other day. That is why they are taking matters into
their own hands. They know there is no one else to help them. In a body
they marched upon deer forest and sheep farm, and scattered over the
island or drove into the sea sheep and deer. When there were no more
sheep and deer, the landlord would be glad enough to give them back land
which in days of old was green with their crops. And now, in further
proof of the justice done to crofters, the leaders of these raids await
trial in Edinburgh, to which town they cannot afford to bring their
witnesses, and where no lawyers of note will defend them.[H]
[H] I have explained elsewhere the result of this trial.
The crofter is a slave not only to landlord and factor, but often to the
merchant. The Englishman, when he finds the truck system far from home,
cannot too strongly revile it. A report has but come from Newfoundland
declaring that because of it a Newfoundlander is no more master of his
own destiny than was a mediaeval serf or a Southern negro in 1860. The
writer need not have gone 1600 miles to the colonies to expose an evil
which exists in the British Isles but 600 miles from London.[I] The Duke
of Argyll regrets that it is employed in Tiree. His power as proprietor,
the one power for good on his estates, stops short most unaccountably
where other people might think it could be exercised to best advantage.
Many Western Islanders, like Newfoundlanders, are bound hand and foot to
the merchant. The latter provides them on credit with all the
necessaries of life, often the poorest in quality, but always the
highest in price. In return the crofter's earnings, before he has gained
them, belong to the merchant, who, moreover, is at times his employer as
well as his creditor. In Harris the women support their families by
weaving the famous Harris cloth. To Edinburgh and London tailors it
brings good profit; to them, starvation wages, paid in tea or sugar or
meal. No money is in circulation on the island. Harris people have given
their consent to emigrate, and then at the last moment have been kept
prisoners at home because of a debt of years against them.
[I] A Truck Act has been passed which has somewhat modified the
system in the Hebrides, but, as we have learned from a reliable source,
it has not proved effectual.
As we lay by the island of Scalpa, not far from Tarbert, a man came on
board from one of the boats. He had a roll of cloth under his arm. He
gave it to Mrs. Thomas, and asked if some one on board would buy it. As
we looked at it he said nothing, but the pitiful pleading of his eyes,
and their more pitiful disappointment as he turned away with his cloth,
told the story. She tried to dispose of their cloth for them, Mrs.
Thomas said; and we have since heard that she buys more from them than
even the local merchant.
[Illustration: THE "DUNARA CASTLE."]
The _Dunara Castle_ finally anchored at
TARBERT.
The principal building in the village was the large white manse, half
hidden in trees. A parson's first care, even if he went to the Cannibal
Islands, would be, I fancy, to make himself, or have made for him at
somebody else's expense, a comfortable home. There were also on the
outskirts of the village two or three new, well-built cottages for men
in Lady Scott's, the landlord's, direct service, and a large, excellent
hotel, the only place in Tarbert where spirits could be bought. The rich
may have their vices, though the poor cannot. Beyond was misery.
Wherever we went in the island we found a rocky wilderness, the
mountains black as I have never seen them anywhere else, their tops so
bare of even soil that in the sunlight they glistened as if ice-bound.
Here and there, around the lochs and sloping with the lower rocky hills,
were weed-choked patches of grain and huts wreathed in smoke, their
backs turned hopelessly to the road. Near Tarbert there was one burrowed
out like a rabbit-hole, its thatched roof set upon the grass and weeds
of the hill-side. Just below, in the loch, Lady Scott's steam-yacht came
and went. Beyond, her deer forest, a range of black mountains, stretched
for miles. Within sight and low on the water were the thick woods, in
the heart of which stands her shooting-lodge. The contrast gave the
last bitter touch to the condition of the people. They starve on tiny
crofts, their only homes; their landlord holds broad acres as
play-ground for a few short weeks.
The hovels were as cheerless within as without. I do not know why it is
that one takes liberties with the poor which one would not dare take
with the rich. It is no small evil of poverty that it is everybody's
privilege to stare at it. The people of Harris are hospitable, and
receive the stranger with courtesy, but you can see that they resent the
intrusion. It is not, I fear, to our credit that curiosity got the
better of our scruples. We knocked at a cottage door, one Sunday
afternoon, J----, as an excuse, asking for a light. As we drew near we
heard the voice of some one reading aloud. Now it was silenced, and a
tall old man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door with an open Bible in
his hands. Within, on the left, was the dwelling-room of the household;
on the right, the stable, cattle, and family share the only entrance.
Into the room, through a single pane of glass, one ray of daylight fell
across the Rembrandt-like shadows. On the mud floor, at the far end, a
fire of peat burned with a dull red glow, and its thick, choking smoke
curled in clouds about the rafters and softened the shadows. We could
just make out the figures of two women crouching by the fire, the
curtained bed in the corner, the spinning-wheel opposite. All other
details were lost in gloom and smoke. Until you see it for yourself, you
could not believe that in our nineteenth century men still live like
this. Miss Gordon Cumming says that to the spinning and weaving of the
women "is due much of such comfort as we may see by a peep into some of
their little homes." But our peep showed us only that women weave and
men work in vain, and that to speak of comfort is mockery in a cottage
of Harris, or, indeed, in any cottage we saw in any part of the islands,
for all those we went into were alike in their poverty and their
darkness. As a rule, the fire burned in the centre on a circle of
stones, and over it, from the roof, hung chain and hook for the kettle.
They have not changed one jot or tittle since, a century ago, they moved
Pennant to pity.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A WEAVER'S COTTAGE.]
As we left the hut on the hill-side, the first we visited, "I beg
pardon," said the old crofter, who had not understood J----'s thanks.
His words seemed a reproach. We felt that we should be begging his
pardon. To force our way in upon him in his degradation was to add one
more to the many insults he has had to bear. He stood at the door a
minute, and then went back into the gloom of the low room, with its mud
floor and smoky rafters, which he calls his home.
All day long, even when the sun shone, as it did at intervals during
our stay, Harris was a land of sorrow and desolation, but in the evening
it became a land of beauty. The black rock of the mountain-side softened
into purple shadows against the gold of sky and sea, and in this glory
the hovels and the people and the misery disappeared. And when the sun
sank behind the western waters and the gold faded, there fell a great
peace over the island, and with it began the twilight, that lingered
until it grew into the coming day.