the people came from far and near to meet in the little kirk overlooking
the loch. We were told that comparatively few were at home. This was the
season when they go to the east coast, the men to the fishing, the women
to the curing-houses; but we thought they came in goodly numbers as we
watched them winding with the road down the opposite hill-side, and
scrambling over the rocks behind the town. Boats one by one sailed into
the loch and to the pier, bringing with them old women in clean white
caps and tartan shawls, younger women in feathered hats and overskirts,
men in bonnets and blue sailor-cloth. They were a fine-looking set of
people, here and there among them a face beautiful with the rich, dark
beauty of the South--all that is left of the Armada. As they came up
upon the pier they stopped in groups under the shelter of a boat-house,
for the wind was high, the men to comb their beards and hair, the women
to tie one another's bonnet-strings and scarfs, to smooth one another's
shawls. And all the time scarce a word was spoken; they were as solemn
at their toilet as if already they stood in church.
The Islanders are as melancholy as the wilderness in which they live.
The stranger among them never gets used to their perpetual silence.
Their troubles have made them turn from the amusements they once loved.
The pipes now seldom are heard in the Hebrides. Their one consolation,
their one resource, is religion, and to them religion is a tragedy.
Nowhere was the great conflict in the Church of Scotland fought with
such intensity, such passion, as in Skye. That same Sunday in Harris, we
met the people coming home over the hills, and still they walked each
alone, and all in unbroken silence. And this Sabbath stillness lasts
throughout the week.
It is not only in Mr. Black's novels you meet kings in the Lews. From
out of the boats laden with worshippers there stepped the King of
Scalpa. He is a Campbell, we were told; and what is more, if he had his
rights it is he who would bear the Argyll titles, enjoy the Argyll
wealth, instead of the Campbell who calls himself Duke and writes books
in the castle at Inverary. His story is the usual romance of the
Highlands: a murder, a flight, the succession of the younger brother to
titles and estates, the descendants of the murderer, exiles in a far
island. And so it is that the real Duke of Argyll is but a merchant in
Scalpa. However, if the so-called Duke had nothing more serious to fear
than the pretensions of the King of Scalpa, he might rest at ease. It is
his right not to a name, but to the privilege to do with his own as he
likes, that he must needs defend. He can afford to ignore the Campbells
of the Outer Hebrides; but let him fight with his deadliest weapons
against the crofters who to-day pay him rent. All the arguments he has
set forth in "Scotland as it Was, and Scotland as it Is," in themselves
are not enough to avert the day of reckoning which even to him,
apparently, seems so near at hand.
We left Harris, as we came to it, in the _Dunara Castle_, and dropped
anchor in the Bay of Uig, in
SKYE,
one morning while the day was still young. The shores were circled about
with patches of grain and potatoes and many cottages; and Skye, as we
first saw it, seemed fair and fertile after the rocks of Harris. Its
people are little better off, however. It was here, about Uig, on the
estates of Captain Fraser, that crofters rebelled in 1884 as those of
Lewis are rebelling to-day. Their rents in many cases have been reduced,
their arrears cancelled. But landlords as they exist, or crofters, must
go before there can be more than negative improvement in the islands.
[Illustration: DOING SKYE.]
When we were rowed to the shore the landlord of the Uig Inn stood posing
as modern warden of the brand-new round tower on the hill-top. He took
our knapsacks, and set us on the way to the Quiraing.
A steep climb up a wooded corrie brought us to the moors, the long
purple distances unbroken save for the black lines marking where the
peat had been cut, and the black mounds where the cuttings had been
piled at intervals along the road. Once we passed men and women loading
a cart with them. Once we saw a rude shepherd's hut, on a little
hillock, surrounded by sheep. And in the long walk, that was all! When
we started across the moorland the sun shone and the morning was hot.
When suddenly the moorland came to an end and gave way to the tall
jagged rocks of the Quiraing, the sky was all gray and the mist fell
fast behind us. We left the road for a foot-path, and at once lost our
way. We scrambled over rocks, slipped up and down soft spongy hills,
jumped streams, and skirted lochs, J---- stopping in the most impossible
places to make notes. We were now ankle-deep in mud, now knee-high in
wet grass and heather. The guide-book says the Quiraing cannot be
described; I am sure I cannot describe it, for the simple reason that I
did not see it. At first I was too much taken up in trying not to kill
myself; when the climbing was a little less dangerous and I looked about
me, there was nothing to be seen. The mist had hidden the top of the
rocks and was rolling down fast towards us. J---- was very anxiously
looking at the guide-book and at the sea. Suddenly he seized me and
pulled me, panting, behind him, over bowlders, through bracken, down a
hill as steep as a house, in our hurry starting avalanches of stones.
Then he jumped into the bed of a stream, down which we rushed, up to
our knees in water, to the loch at the bottom. It was a mad flight. But
by this time we could not see our hands before us.
"I am half dead," said I.
"If you don't come on we'll both be dead," said J----.
And just then, more by good luck than good management, we found
ourselves on a road.
J---- had studied the lay of the land before our start. He knew this
must be the road by the coast, twice as long on its way to Uig as that
over which we had come; but there was no finding our way back in the
mist. It fell from above, it rose from the ground, it closed about us on
all sides. In a few minutes cloaks and hoods were soaked. We tried to be
as indifferent as the Highlomaniac who pretends he likes this sort of
thing. We sat on a stone by the way-side to eat the few sandwiches we
had brought with us, and declared it an excellent joke. We walked across
a dripping field as calmly as if it had been dry land, so that we might
not come face to face with a monstrous bull which kept our path. And
when the road came out close to the sea, and the mist turned into a
driving rain, J---- even pulled out his guide-book and on its back made
mysterious scrawls, which he said represented Duntulm Castle, a gray
ruin on a high cliff, looking seaward.
There were by the road many groups of huts black, soaked, chimneyless;
always near them a large manse and sometimes a larger school-house,
which the people must maintain if they starve for it. Women with hunger
on their faces looked after us. Children with old brown bags tied about
their waists for all clothing stood at the doors to watch, but not one
smiled at the sight. And yet we must have been funny! And the villages
were silent as the moorland. There was not a voice to be heard. The
women to whom we spoke shook their heads; "No English," was their only
answer. The one person we found who could talk it was a man, and he had
so many gutturals we could scarce understand him.
Near Duntulm Castle was a shooting-lodge; on the water a steam-yacht lay
at anchor. The slave-driver is found for at least six weeks in the midst
of his slaves.
We arrived at the inn about three in the afternoon, drenched and weary.
A room was ready for us, a bright fire burning on the hearth. They
always expected people to come home wet, the landlord's daughter said.
She carried off our wet clothes; she lent me a dress; she brought us hot
whiskey and water. One must be thoroughly tired to know what comfort
means.
We had our tea with two English maiden ladies of the species one meets
in Swiss and Italian pensions. We sat in a well-warmed room at a
well-spread table. In the black, smoky huts half-starved men, women, and
children were eating dry oatmeal; a few, perhaps, drinking tea with it.
This is the extravagance with which the crofters have been reproached.
They buy, or rather go into debt for, tea and sugar as well as meal, and
therefore their landlords think them prosperous. They have never been so
well off before, the Commissioners were told; once they lived on
shell-fish throughout the summer. Yes, it was true, a minister of
Snizort admitted, they did drink tea. But the people have no milk, now
pasture-land has been taken from them. The landlord needed it for his
large sheep farms and deer forests. I suppose they should go back to the
shell-fish as of old. If they have food to eat, why complain of its
quality? If this be so, if crofters of to-day, compared to their
ancestors, live in luxury, then has the time indeed come when something
should be done for them. Who will call them lazy or indifferent who has
considered what the life of the Islander has been for generations? The
wonder is that he has energy enough to keep on living.
We went the next day to
DUNVEGAN.
The road lay over long miles of moors, with now and then beautiful
distant views of the mountains of Harris, but pale blue shadows oil the
western horizon, and of the high peaks of the Cuchullins, dark and
sombre above the moorland.
Here and there at long intervals we came to the wretched groups of
cottages we had begun to know so well. Old witch-like women and young
girls passed, bent double under loads of peat or sea-weed, so heavy that
were the same thing seen in Italy, English people would long since have
filled columns of the _Times_ with their sympathy. As it is, these
burdens are accepted as a matter of course, or sometimes even as but one
of the many picturesque elements of Highland life. From one writer one
hears of the Skye lassies, half hidden under bundles of heather,
stopping to laugh and chatter; from another of Lewis women knitting
contentedly as they walked along with creels, bearing burdens that would
have appalled a railway porter of the south, strapped to their backs. We
saw no smiles, no signs of contentment. On the faces of the strongest
women there was a look of weariness and of pain. But perhaps the most
pathetic faces in this land of sorrow were those of the children,
already pinched and care-worn. I know others who have felt this even as
we did. An Englishman who last summer spent a week in Skye has since
told us how day after day he and his wife went upon their excursions
lunchless, because in the first village to which they came they emptied
their luncheon-basket among the half-naked, half-starved children they
found there. They could not bear the sight of the hungry little faces.
But even in his sympathy, the general poverty seemed to him only right,
he said, since it is in such perfect harmony with the dismal, dreary
land in which the people live. If they were happy, however, if moors and
hills were green with their crops, would it still seem so dismal?
[Illustration: A REAL HIGHLAND LASSIE.]
That day and those which had preceded and those which followed we went
into many huts, talked to many people. We became bold because we wished
to learn for ourselves the truth of what we had heard, and not to be
prejudiced by hearsay. The crofter's hut is felt to be a disgrace to the
Highlands. The landlord shifts all responsibility. The crofter alone is
at fault; he has no shame in living in his hovel, which is scarcely fit
to shelter a dog. This is the favorite argument. How the crofter,
without money, without other materials than those at his disposal, could
build anything better has not as yet been explained. If, however, he
does contrive to make it better, his rent is raised, and he might, until
within two years, have been turned out on the morrow. If he moves into a
house set up by a landlord there is again question of higher rent,
though he may find it has been put up so cheaply that cold winds pour
through cracks and crannies, heavy rains soak through roof and walls. In
his own black hut, if he lives with his cattle he can at least keep
warm. His contentment in his degradation is a myth. To many cottages we
were absolutely refused admittance. Ours was not the experience of Miss
Gordon Cumming. Whenever we approached a cottage, a kindly voice did not
bid us welcome. I remember one in particular where the door was shut
against us. Of a woman of the village who could speak English--and it
must be borne in mind that with few rare exceptions people in the
Hebrides speak but Gaelic--and who had already shown us her smoky,
dismal home, we asked that we might be let in to see the old loom. No,
was the first answer sent out; its owner will not be dressed. No, was
the second; the loom will not be working. No, was the third and final;
"we wass just pretending about the loom; it wass the house we wanted to
see." In another, though the woman drew up chairs by the peat
smouldering and smoking in the middle of the floor, there was no
mistaking she looked upon us as intruders. She shook her head and said
without a smile, "No English," when we spoke to her; and then she turned
her back and began to comb her hair. A bright, fresh-looking girl who
rowed us over the water near Kingsburgh House received us more amiably.
It was the usual interior, thick with smoke, all details lost in black
shadow, though without the sun was shining. "You will find our houses
very queer places to live in," she said. And as she ferried us across,
every few minutes she turned and asked if we didn't find their cottages
queer homes.
Nothing is left of Flora Macdonald's house which has made Kingsburgh
famous. But our ferry-woman pointed to a clump of trees on the shores of
the loch where it once stood. "Flora Macdonald was a good friend of the
people," she said; "she was a strong woman and clever, and she helped
to hide Prince Charlie from those who were in search of him, and for
that reason she will be loved and remembered."
Strange as it may seem, these were her words. They so struck us at the
time that I wrote them down once we were on shore again. I have heard
people wonder at the intelligence Italian peasants show in expressing
themselves; but it is not more striking than that of Western Islanders.
When they could speak English, it always made us marvel. No one can read
the report of their evidence before the Royal Commission without
marvelling with us.
It was not only in Skye we talked to the people; already in Harris we
had much to say to those who had the English. The very fact that we were
walking, a great part of the time with packs on our backs, made the
people meet us on more friendly terms than if we drove in coaches or
sailed in yachts. We were strangers, it was evident; but we were not
sportsmen or moneyed tourists. On every side we heard the same story of
hated landlords and exhausted crofts. We know that what we say can have
but little influence for good or evil. And yet when we remember the sad
stories to which we listened, and the cruel lot of those who told them,
we would not run the smallest risk of making that lot still more cruel,
those stories still more sad. There is ill-feeling enough between
Hebridean landlords and their slaves. In three cases at least crofters
were turned from their crofts because they gave evidence to the
Commissioners of 1883. It is well to be on the safe side. The chances
are, not a landlord will know that we have been writing about his
estates after walking over them; but we think it best to give no clew to
the identity of men who told us in a friendly way that which already had
been proclaimed officially.
The chief complaint was the same wherever we went: "We have not enough
land; we could and would pay rent willingly if we had more ground to
cultivate. As it is, our crofts are not large enough to keep us in
food." The outside world has been busy watching the battle in Ireland;
little attention has been spared to the Highlands; yet every small
paragraph on the subject for which newspapers can make room, between
accounts of stolen breeches and besieged members of Parliament, shows
the determination of the men who are fighting the same battle in the far
north. If troops are kept in Ireland, if Welsh tithes can only be
collected by hussars, war-ships are sent to the Islands. If Irishmen,
protected by a Land League, refuse to pay rent, so do Scotch crofters.
Indeed, the latter are far more determined and daring. They know, too,
how to hold together. In Glendale, an out-of-the-way corner of Skye to
which strangers seldom penetrate, not a crofter has paid rent for five
years. An old man, tenant on another estate, told us about them with
pride. "No, sir," he said, "they have no paid a penny for five years,
but the factor he will keep friends with them. He will know ferry well
if he wass not their friend it will be worse trouble that will be coming
whatever."
He was a fine, healthy old man, between sixty and seventy; and when he
found that we sympathized, he walked about half a mile just to talk with
us. He pretended he came to show us the way, but as the road was
straight before us it was easy to see through his excuse.
J---- asked him what he thought about the crofter question. "I will be a
real old Land Leaguer every time," he declared; and then he went on to
tell us that in his part of the island the crofters held together like
one man. The Commission was coming; it was slow, but they would wait for
it. Then, if it did not improve their condition, they would take matters
into their own hands. Their landlord was good enough, as landlords went;
he was a civil-spoken gentleman if rents were paid on the very day they
were due, but that was about all that could be said for him. Rents were
not so high on his estate as on others, but the taxes were heavy, and it
was more land they needed. "You will see those potatoes"--and he pointed
to a tiny green patch sloping down from the road to a ditch, beyond
which was heather--"you will see for yourself they grow well whatever.
And they would be growing as well on the other side of the ditch, where
I myself have planted them in other days. But what will grow there now?
Heather and ferns! And it will be heather and ferns you will see as far
as you can for twelve miles. If they will be giving us more land, sir,
it's no trouble from the Highlanders they will be having; but if they
don't give it to us we will take it."
[Illustration: DUNVEGAN CASTLE.]
He shook hands heartily with us both when he left. One may doubt the
demagogue who uses the people's suffering for political capital; but
one can but respect a man like this sturdy old crofter, himself one of
the people, who knows his wrongs and determines to right them. His
methods may be illegal; so have been those of many men who have
struggled for freedom.
At Dunvegan Inn we were again in civilized society. We dined with two
young men from London who were followed even here by the _Saturday
Review_ and the _Standard_. They took interest in the evicted Irish, and
ignored the existence of Highland crofters; they could tell us much of
the fish, but nothing of the fishermen. They were anxious to direct us
to many howling wildernesses within an easy walk of the dinner-table,
where we could escape from the people; and when the people, in the shape
of two Aberdeen farmers, full of the crofter's wrongs, appeared at
breakfast, they went from the room in disgust. I think this disgust
would have been greater had they known how much more interesting we
found the farmers.
Beyond the inn the road led through a dense wood to the castle of the
Macleod of Macleod. Trees will not grow on Hebridean soil until the
laird wishes to raise them for himself; then they thrive well enough. Of
course we did not expect to find them growing on northern exposed
shores; but surely there must be other sheltered spots besides those
directly around the laird's house. However, it is the same with his
crops; broad acres are covered by his grain and that of his large
tenants; his pasture-land is fresh and green. It is a strange fact that
only when the crofter asks to cultivate the land does it become
absolutely barren. It is but a step from the wild, lonely moorland to
the beautiful green wood at Dunvegan. Landward it shuts in the castle,
whose turreted keep rises high above the ivy-grown battlemented walls,
crowning a rocky island in a sheltered corner of the loch. The water has
been drained from the natural moat, but the rock falls sheer and steep
from the castle gate, and the drawbridge still crosses the gulf below.
We did not go inside; we were told that the present wife of the Macleod
objected to visitors, even though she admitted them. We believe there
are tapestries and old armor and the usual adjuncts to be seen for the
asking, such things as one can find in any museum; but it is only by
going to the islands that you can see the crofters' wrongs.
Almost at the end of the woods, and yet sheltered by them, was a pretty
old-fashioned flower-garden, surrounded by well-clipped hedges, and as
well cared for as the garden of an English castle. Nearer to the inn, on
a low hill, was the graveyard of the Macleod. We pushed open the
tumble-down gate and squeezed through. A hundred years ago Dr. Johnson
found fault with the bad English on Lord Lovat's tomb; to-day we could
hardly find the tomb. The stone on which the inscription was carved lay
in pieces on the ground. It may be that the Macleod of Macleod has
bankrupted himself to save his tenants from starvation. This is most
praiseworthy on his part. But we could not help thinking that if he and
all the Macleods, from one end of Great Britain to the other, are so
anxious to be buried here, they might among them find money enough to
free the enclosure of their dead from the whiskey bottles and sandwich
tins left by the tourist. The resting-place of the dead Macleod lies
desolate; not far off is the garden, with smooth lawn and many
blossoms. A few flowers less, perhaps, and at least the bottles and tins
that defile what should be a holy place, could be cleared away. And this
graveyard, with its broken tombs and roofless chapel, is a ruin of
yesterday. A century ago Dr. Johnson saw it still cared for and in
order. The people in Dunvegan told us that twenty years since the roof
fell in; it has never been repaired. We have been to the graveyard of
old St. Pancras in London, where every few minutes trains rush above the
desecrated graves; but here the dead are unknown, or else, like Mary
Wolstonecraft and Godwin, their tombs have been removed beyond the reach
of modern improvements. We have been to the Protestant burying-ground in
the cemetery of old St. Louis in New Orleans, neglected because those
who lie there belong to the despised faith. And yet neither of these is
dishonored as is the graveyard where sleep the Macleods of the far and
near past, whose greatness the living Macleods never cease to sing.
Beneath the weeds are old gray slabs, with carvings like those of Iona;
in the ruined weed-grown chapel walls are fresh white marble tablets. At
Dunvegan the dead are not forgotten, not despised; they are only
neglected. The mower comes and cuts the long grass from above their
trampled graves. Let the laird make hay while the sun shines, for the
day is coming when the storms, forever brooding over the Isle of Mists,
will break forth with a violence he has never felt before, and he and
his kind will be swept away from off the face of the land.
[Illustration: GRAVEYARD OF THE MACLEOD.]
To-day Macleod of Macleod is a poor man. One year of famine, to keep the
crofters from starving, he emptied his own purse. It is but another
proof of the uselessness of charity in the Hebrides. What did it profit
the crofters that Macleod became for their sake a bankrupt? They still
starve. He who would really help them must be not only their benefactor,
but their emancipator.
From Dunvegan to
STRUAN
it was all moorland. The shadeless road ran for miles between the
heather, from which now and again, as we passed, rose the startled
grouse. Far in front were the Cuchullins, only their high, jagged peaks
showing above the clouds that hung heavy about them. The little Struan
inn, which we had to ourselves, was low down by the water, at the foot
of a wide hill-side planted with turnips. On the brow of the hill, like
so many bowlders in the mud, were strewn the huts of a miserable
village. Manse and kirk were at a becoming distance across the road.