THE OUTER HEBRIDES
Skye is now the “show island” of the west coast, easily invaded by its
ferries, at one being only a musket-shot’s distance from the mainland.
But comparatively few tourists trust themselves across the stormy
Minches, Great and Little, to visit the Long Island, more foreign to
thriving Scotland than Jersey to England. One used to be told that the
Minch was _La Manche_, the Highland Channel, as the _Kyles_ so frequent
here called cousins with straits of Calais; but a pundit of the Oxford
Dictionary shakes his head at these as at most popular interpretations
of place-names. The 120-mile chain of islands making a breakwater for
north-western Scotland, with the Sunday name of the Outer Hebrides,
is commonly spoken of as the Long Island, that once indeed formed one
stretch of land, and still at some parts is cut only by fords passable
at low tide. The name Long Island should perhaps be restricted to the
northern mass of Lewis and Harris, below which, across the Sound of
Harris, the smaller separate isles taper out southwards like the tail
of a kite, tipped by the lighthouse on Bernera shining thirty miles
across the Atlantic, the Beersheba of this archipelago whose Dan is the
Butt of Lewis.
[Illustration: THE STANDING STONES OF CALLERNISH, ISLAND OF LEWIS]
It is no wonder if tourists do not often get so far, when till our
own day the law had to make a long arm to reach the Hebrides, and
the Protestant Reformation only begins to set foot on some of those
remote strongholds of old ways and thoughts. Nine tourists out of ten,
indeed, would find little to repay them for the tossing of the Minch.
The archæologist may wander his difficult way among monuments of the
past, standing stones, “doons,” “tullochs,” “Picts’ houses,” crosses,
and shrines whose site is often marked only by a gathering of lonely
graves, for even of the chapels and hermitages recorded in print but
a small proportion can now be traced in the Western Islands. The rich
stranger encloses these poor islands for his deer, narrowing and
debasing the hard life of the people. Here and there snug inns invite
anglers to sport such as Izaak Walton never dreamt of. Some parts, as
Harris, show oases of real Highland scenery. But more often the Outer
Hebrides present a bleak and monotonous aspect of rock, water, sand,
and bog, where “the sea is all islands, and the land is all lakes.”
Their common features on half the days of the week are thus described
by Robert Buchanan, who was no bookworm to be afraid of a wet jacket.
“A dreary sky, a dreary fall of rain. Long low flats covered with
their own damp breath, through which the miserable cattle loomed like
shadows. Everywhere lakes and pools, as thickly sown among the land as
islands amid the Pacific waters. Huts wretched and chilly, scarcely
distinguishable from the rock-strewn marshes surrounding them. To the
east the Minch rolling dismal waters towards the far-off heads of Skye;
to the west the ocean, foaming at the lips and stretching barren and
desolate into the rain-charged clouds.”
The Long Island has cheerfuller prospects in its blinks of sunshine,
and moments of loveliness caught by William Black, who is its Turner
in words, while he seems to have a little distorted the human figures
he sets against such effective backgrounds. One who has his eye for
the scenery of sea and sky will not call these shores dismal. Another
Scottish novelist tells us of the barest southern heath:
Yet shall your ragged moor receive
The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn.
But on windy Hebrides there is hardly a tree to shiver, where docken,
broom, or thistle may be the best substitute for a switch, and every
drifting log or plank of shipwreck washed up from the Atlantic is
treasured to make the rafters of a human nest. A woman brought to the
mainland had no conception for trees but giant cabbages; and when a
basket of tomatoes came on shore an old Highlander was excited to see
“apples” for once in his life. The wild carrot is the finest fruit
that grows here naturally among the scent of the heather. Spring
coming so “slowly up this way,” some writers have said in their haste
that flowers are rare in the Hebrides; but more patient observers
like Miss Gordon Cumming and Miss Goodrich Freer give a long list of
humble blooms spangling the ground in their season, among them the
sort of convolvulus found only on Eriskay, said to have been planted
by Charles Edward, who on that rocky islet made his first landing,
lodged in a house that stood till the other day. The damp hollows nurse
luxuriant ferns; the rushy lochans show often dappled with water-lilies
and fringed with gay weeds. The Western Isles are better off for
curling-ponds than for ice. The winter climate is chilly and damp
rather than cold; and the rainfall of course varies with the height of
the islands, the flat marshy moors being spared by overcast skies that
burst more freely on mountainous shores.
The cliffs and the waters—salt, fresh, and brackish—are haunts
of innumerable wild-fowl and sea-birds. The cheery solo of lark or
lapwing may be drowned by noisy concerts in which MacCulloch could
distinguish “the short shrill treble of the Puffins and Auks, the
melodious and varied notes of the different Gulls, the tenors of the
Divers and Guillemots, and the croaking basses of the Cormorants.” On
the west coast a frequent feature is dunes of white sand piled up by
the Atlantic waves, pleasing to the eye but destructive as those of the
Gascon Landes, for if not anchored down by bent grass or other hardy
vegetation they are apt to drift over the interior, devastating whole
districts like the Culbin sand fringe of fertile Moray, said to have
been let loose through the poor people stripping off such weak fetters
for fuel.
Passionately as the islanders love their homes, they owe little to a
thankless soil. The bulk of them are half croft-farmers, half fishers,
the petty agricultural labours falling chiefly to the women’s share,
while the men alternate between spells of nautical adventure and lazy
weather-watching. The wives and daughters have the worst of it, who in
their hard daily tasks soon grow haggard, their bright eyes bleared
by the smoke of the beehive huts in which they literally gather round
the fire, amid furniture and utensils that often would not seem fit
for a gipsy camp. In these hovels, hardly to be distinguished from the
peat-stacks that shelter them, may still be found the crooked spade,
the quern mill, the cruisie lamp, and other time-honoured implements;
and in some parts rough home-made pottery is but slowly displaced.
The condition of such dwellings is deplorable from a sanitarian’s
point of view. In spite of the fresh air in which alone they are rich,
whole families are often swept away by consumption. Their food is
mainly potatoes and oatmeal, fish and unfermented bread, with milk
and eggs as luxuries. Meat they know only in the windfall of “braxy,”
unless a sheep be killed for a rare treat at Christmas or New Year.
What did they do before potatoes were planted in the islands, much
against the people’s will; and what do they do in seasons when both
the potatoes and the fishing fail them, as happens now and then? No
wonder that they are pitied or abused as indolent, languid, listless,
shiftless, downcast. In other climes, when well fed, they may be found
working hard enough and speaking their minds only too hotly; but the
lotus-eating of these mild-eyed, melancholy islanders does not put much
heart into them. Peat is their only fuel, dug from the shallow mines
that chequer their moors; and even for that they may have to reckon
closely with the landlord.
In Tiree—which indeed does not belong to the Outer Hebrides, lying
close to Johnson’s Coll—peat fails as well as wood, so coal has to
be expensively imported; but there, as compensation, the flat ground
is less poor, and the people can take livelier joy in their toil.
This island makes a contrast with South Uist, described as the most
miserable of all by Miss Goodrich Freer, the latest and not the least
sympathetic explorer of the Isles, who on Tiree found hopefuller
colouring of life on a soil lying so low that it has been threatened
with inundation by the waves as well as by the sand:—
The very existence of the island of South Uist is itself a tragedy
which shames our civilisation. Nowhere in our proud Empire is there
a spot more desolate, grim, hopelessly poverty-stricken. It is a
wilderness of rocks and of standing water, on which, in the summer,
golden lichen and spreading water-lilies mock the ghastly secrets of
starvation and disease that they conceal. The water is constantly
utterly unfit for drinking purposes. There is not a tree on the
island, and one wonders how the miserable cattle and sheep contrive
to live on the scant grey herbage. The land of the poor is not
enclosed; and to preserve the tiny crops from the hungry wandering
cows and horses they have to be continually watched, and as half
an acre of bere may be distributed over five acres of bog and rock,
the waste of human labour is considerable. The potatoes often rot in
the wet ground, and I have seen the grain and hay lying out as late
as October from the impossibility of getting it dried. Excellent and
abundant freshwater trout there is, but that is not for the poor; nor
the rabbits, nor the game; and even the sea-wrack, formerly a means
of living, is now hardly worth the getting. Nevertheless, when the
“tangle” comes on the beach—provided the factor gives them leave to
get it at all, which by no means necessarily follows—men, women, and
children crowd down with earliest daylight, and work on by moonlight
or starlight, with the hideous intensity of starvation. The houses
of the poor, especially of the cottars, are inconceivably wretched.
They are of undressed stone, piled together without mortar, and
thatched with turf. Often they have no chimney, sometimes no window;
the floor is a bog, and a few boxes, with a plank supported by stones
for a seat, is all the furniture except the unwholesome shut-in beds.
Cleanliness is impossible, with soot coating the roof overhead, wet
mud for floor, and, except in the very rare fine days, chickens, and
perhaps a sick sheep or even a cow or horse, for fellow-occupants.
To the old Boisdale and Clanranald chiefs with all their faults
the people were ready to forgive much; but the Highlander, at best
conservative, exclusive, distrustful of strangers, becomes when
oppressed, starving, terror-stricken, unreasonable in prejudice,
intolerant of change, perverse it may be in refusing to do his part in
establishing mutual understanding. Only those who have sojourned among
them, not in the cosy fishing hotel at Loch Boisdale far away from the
villages, but who have established personal relations with the people
in their own homes, can even guess at the utter hopeless dreariness of
their lives. The chronic dyspepsia which accompanies the ever-present
teapot, the wan anæmic faces of women and children, the continual
absence from the island of all able-bodied men, make the human element
almost as depressing as the flat, grey, glimmering, wet landscape.
[Illustration: A HEBRIDEAN CROFTER’S HOUSE]
The seaweeds, that here make submarine gardens reminding Miss Gordon
Cumming of her wanderings among islands of coral and palm, count not a
little among the harvests of the Hebrides. Several kinds eke out the
people’s food, and are freely given as fodder or medicine to starveling
cattle, which have to be fed up on richer pastures before coming into
Lowland markets. This crop of the sea goes to manure the thin soil, for
which purpose also are used fish bones, and the smoke-soaked thatch
of the houses; and even the drifting sands in the long run, like
far-blighting lava, may help to fresh fertility through the lime of
powdered shells. Seaweed is the abundant raw material of an industry
that for a time brought money and population to the West Highlands,
the manufacture of kelp, chief supply of soda till Le Blanc’s chemical
process showed how it could be made out of salt; then Free Trade opened
our markets to a ruinous competition of barilla and other foreign
supplies, so that in the first generation of last century the price
of kelp had fallen from £22 to £2 a ton. Again its value was enhanced
through the making of iodine used in aniline dyes; but again chemistry
and foreign competition conspired to beat down the Highland product,
in spite of the gallant struggle of a Sassenach, Mr. E. C. Stanford,
who for a generation laboured to show what various benefits might
be won from the “flowers of the sea.” On Tiree and elsewhere another
attempt is being made to revive this once thriving industry, too often
represented by deserted kelp kilns along the shore, which future
antiquaries may associate with the worship of a pagan deity whose
mysterious symbols were £ _s._ _d._ I leave to such puzzled scholars
the excursus on the Fiscal Question suggested at this point.
Donald does not take kindly to handicrafts. The only manufacture of
the Hebrides now is the so-called Harris tweedings and stockings, made
all over these islands, both for home use and for a sale much fostered
of late by aristocratic patronage. The genuine article is imitated
by machine-woven cloth of inferior texture; and aniline dyes too
much come into use in place of those cunningly extracted from roots,
bark, heather, and seaweed. But in humble homes wool is still spun,
woven, and dressed with songs and ceremonies handed down through many
generations. Miss Goodrich Freer gives a pretty picture of a fulling
“bee,” where some ten women handle the web to the accelerated rhythm
of the same choruses as an older traveller heard rising in excitement
“till you would imagine a troop of female demoniacs to have been
assembled,” a scene that again has suggested the Fates weaving their
strands of human destiny. The house is crammed with spectators; and
in the reek of peat, paraffin, and tobacco smoke the cloth takes on
fresh odours to overcome the original perfume of fish oil, tallow, and
other dressings. But the London doctors who would frighten us with the
bogey of microbes from these distant homes might be glad to inoculate
their patients with the bloom of some ill-fed Highland lasses. The
composition of wedding cake, it is said, should not be examined into
too curiously; and perhaps we can wear the waterproof tweed of the
Isles more at ease for not having been present at its preparation.
The trade of the islanders is fishing, to which most of them are
bound from boyhood, many wandering into far seas like their Viking
forefathers; and the girls, too, make long excursions to serve as fish
gutters and curers for the season in eastern ports, even as far as
Norfolk Yarmouth. Ling, cod, and lobsters yield a valuable harvest;
mussels and cockles are sent to metropolitan markets as relishes,
on which the island folk will sometimes be reduced to live. Prince
Charlie’s first meal on Scottish ground was off such vulgar shell-fish.
He was to fare worse before all was done; and perhaps he might agree
with one of his chroniclers—“Give me nettles and shell-fish in the
North before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.”
[Illustration: SHELLING MUSSELS, CROMARTY]
The chief game of their seas is, of course, the herring, which
appear off the Hebridean coasts early in the season; and there may
be an aftermath in autumn, the more enterprising fishers in summer
following the shoals round to the east coast. I have played the amateur
herring-fisher on the warmer west side; then I no longer wondered why
these men armour themselves in such thick clothing that once overboard
they would have little chance of escaping Davy Jones, even had
they learned to swim. That, I fancy, is an art not much cultivated
in the Hebrides. Once a crony of mine and I got ourselves rowed off
an island shore for a dive into deep water; and over forty years I
remember how the boatman’s boy stared at our throwing off jackets and
kilts, and the excited cry with which he jumped up, exclaiming in
Gaelic, “They will be drowned!” To youngsters a night in a fishing-boat
makes a pleasing taste of adventure, if the waves leave them appetite
for coffee sweetened by treacle, and mackerel caught and cooked
off-hand to be eaten with the hard biscuits that serve also for
plates; but the close air of the “den” may be a trying experience for
unseasoned landlubbers. Then it is a fine sight in the chill dawn, when
the phosphorescent glow of floats and cordage pales before the sheen
of the fish hauled up in wave after wave of silver; and one can catch
the melancholy cheep of herrings as they flop out of the meshes of the
net to swell a glittering, wriggling pile among which the men move
like mermaids, their legs and arms encrusted with a gleam of scales.
MacCulloch noted the phosphorescence of summer nights in these seas,
offering splendid phenomena to eyes more often keen for their profits
than their wonders:—
A stream of fire ran off on each side from the bows, and the ripple
of the wake was spangled with the glow-worms of the deep. Every
oar dropped diamonds, every fishing line was a line of light, the
iron cable went down a torrent of flame, and the plunge of the
anchor resembled an explosion of lightning. When it blew a gale
the appearance was sometimes terrific, and the whole atmosphere was
illuminated, as if the moon had been at the full. In calms, nothing
could exceed the loveliness of the night, thus enlightened by
thousands of lamps, which, as they sailed slowly by, twinkled and were
again extinguished at intervals, on the glassy and silent surface of
the water.
Miss Goodrich Freer gives a picturesque scene of Roman Catholic
islanders gathering at their little chapel to consecrate the going
forth from which some of them may never return. Protestant fishermen
will be not less earnest in their prayers; but their services want
the sense of intimate relation between heaven and earth that adorns a
more childlike faith. Religion is with them too apt to take the form
of bitter bigotry on the score of the Sabbatarian observance which
they have turned into a sacrament, though on some coasts of Scotland
ministers have still to wink at the time-honoured notion that Sunday
is a lucky day for setting sail. Miss Gordon Cumming tells the story
of an angry gathering of West Highlanders at Strome Ferry to hinder
east coast fishermen from despatching a glut of herring by special
Sunday train, when a couple of hundred policemen had to be brought
from all parts of Scotland to protect the Sabbath-breaking railway
against the Sabbath-breaking rioters. But if she meant to point a moral
of Highland orthodoxy, I can remember a similar display of violence
at an east coast harbour about the same time. A profane boat having
broken the Sabbath by salting her Saturday catch within sacred hours,
she was assaulted and wrecked at the quay in the light of day, before
the eyes of half the town. The ringleaders being brought to trial,
the authorities were in some quandary as to what might follow their
punishment; but this anxiety proved quite superfluous, for on the
clearest evidence, the facts being of public fame and the criminals as
notable as the provost and bailies, a pious or prudent jury brought in
a verdict of not guilty.
Early summer is the busy time of the Long Island, when Stornoway, Loch
Boisdale, the Castle Bay of Barra, and other havens make rendezvous
for hundreds of boats of various rigs, and the population is increased
by dealers from foreign shores, with many thousands of fish curers and
gutters, who, encamped in huts and bothies, are the followers of this
fleet, attended also by mobs of greedy sea-gulls, where the waters
will for once be smoothed by a scum of oily fish refuse. The shoals
of herring are preyed on by hateful dog-fish and other shark-like
creatures; also by whales, which sometimes fall a fat prize to the
fishermen. Indeed, there has lately been an attempt to carry on a
regular whale fishery from Harris, causing a stench vigorously assailed
as a nuisance; and at a former time it appears that whales bulked
largely in Long Island fare.
The cream of the herring fishing goes to trawlers and other well-found
craft from richer shores of our islands. The fish-curing business, too,
like everything that needs capital, is much in the hands of strangers,
the export being largely to the Baltic. The Hebridean boatmen live
from hand to mouth, setting draughts of luck against blank days and
weeks for which their competitors are better provided. The worst of
it is, if all observers may be trusted, that being brought into touch
with these rivals has a demoralising effect on the Celt, even as the
trousers or houses of civilisation are apt to spread dirt and disease
among African savages. The native Highland virtues seem to flourish
best in spots secluded from contact with the prosperous Sassenach,
whose wholesale commercialism sets a copy for retail cheatery, when the
islander who would share his last crust with a neighbour learns to look
on gain won, _quocumque modo_, from the masterful intruder as nought
but “retribution due.”
Smaller satellites left out of account, the southernmost of the Outer
Isles is Barra, whose seven miles’ length of rocky shore opens into
the harbour of Castle Bay. Here, covering an islet, stand the sturdy
ruins of Kisimul Castle, pronounced by Miss Gordon Cumming the most
picturesque thing in the Hebrides, that recalls Chillon by the way it
rises out of the water against a hilly background. This was an old
fastness of the M’Neills, supplanted by other lords who have never been
able to wean the people from their clannishness, nor from their Roman
Catholic faith, though they have long ceased to play the pirate and the
wrecker. The spoil of wrecking, here once as welcome as in the Orkneys,
was lost when the Hebrides came to be studded with lighthouses, like
that on Barra Head, which is a separate islet, _alias_ Bernera,
and that upon the perilous reef of Skerryvore towards Tiree, the
masterpiece of Alan Stevenson, uncle to a writer whose name would
shine far out into the world.
The larger South Uist shares also the poverty and the faith of Barra,
its most prosperous spot being the fishing station of Loch Boisdale in
the south-east corner. The east coast is cut by other deep inlets, over
which Ben More and Hekla rise to a height of about 2000 feet, names
making monuments of the rival races of Gael and Norseman. Among these
wild Highlands, the early home of Flora Macdonald, Prince Charlie found
one of his cave refuges, still hard to seek out; and Miss Goodrich
Freer reports a lonely loch in Glen Uisnish as rivalling the now famous
Coruisk of Skye.
A link between North and South Uist, accessible from either at low
water, is the island of Benbecula, “Hill of the Ford,” divided between
Protestants and Catholics. North Uist is Protestant, and travellers who
lean to the picturesque view of religion have to admit that it looks
rather more prosperous than its Catholic neighbour. The chief place
here is Loch Maddy, a commodious harbour on which stands the hamlet
capital of the island. Its chief interest seems the extraordinary
reticulation of the inlets, Loch Maddy, a sheet of ten square miles,
being said to have a coastline of 300 miles; but its bens are only
benjies, no higher than some hills in sight of Plymouth Sound. Its
shores are much broken into peninsulas and satellite islets that might
be let out to would-be Robinson Crusoes.
Across the strait of Harris is reached the Long Island proper,
commonly conceived as two islands, Harris and Lewis—the Lews in
the vernacular—but the smaller southern projection is joined on to
the main mass by a narrow _Tarbert_. This isthmus does not quite
mark the bounds of Harris, which like the other islands belongs to
Inverness-shire, while Lewis makes part of Ross. Nature has set another
distinction, the south part being boldly and barely mountainous, a
forest of granite and gneiss peaks, amid which shy deer enjoy the
beauties of this Hebridean Switzerland, while the north rather shows
brown flats of moorland, rimmed with cliffs, streaked with green,
dotted with patches of struggling culture and pitted with lochans. All
round, the shores are deeply cut by fiords, the largest being Loch
Seaforth on the east side, and on the west island-choked Loch Roag,
home of that “Princess of Thule” whose begetter takes a more highly
coloured view of this scenery than is revealed to most observers. Mr.
John Sinclair is another writer who has an artistic good word to say
for the Lewis:—
The shores are everywhere rugged and rocky, save where, at wide
intervals, they are interrupted by broad bays or narrow sea lochs,
which terminate in green glens among the hills. The middle and
northern districts are for the most part great stretches of flat or
undulating moorland, dotted all over with hundreds of little lochs and
tarns, into which no burns tumble and out of which no rivers flow. Yet
how pretty these flat saucers of rain-water are—scores and scores of
them glistening in the sunshine like silver ornaments laid out to view
upon a russet ground. In the south and south-west the mountains are
thickly studded and lofty, but long twisting arms of the sea boldly
creep in between them and almost meet from opposite sides of the
island. Many of these inlets taper away to narrow points, which are
hidden in deep valleys eight or ten miles from the open sea. So many
are the freshwater lochs and the insinuating arms of the ocean, that
in bird’s-eye view the whole island must resemble a diamond window
with its countless raindrops darting one into another at the beginning
of a shower. The hill tops are singularly wild and bare, scarcely a
tinge of green relieving the yellow masses of rock and stone, but in
the valleys there are many choice spots of sweet verdure and beauty.
On the neck of an eastern peninsula of Lewis stands Stornoway, which to
the islanders appears a capital of dazzling luxury, and even strangers
are struck by the gardens nursed into exotic luxuriance about its
castle, home of a family who have sown a fortune in improving their
poor lordship without reaping much gratitude in return. In Harris the
most notable spot is Rodill at the south end, where the restoration
of a cruciform church best represents the many monastic and eremitic
shrines once dotting these isles “set far among the melancholy main.”
Still less can one enumerate the traces of more hoary antiquity, over
which Mr. David MacRitchie exclaims, “It is enough to break the heart
of an antiquary to wander about the Hebrides and see again and again
the site of what once were doons now represented by a tumbled heap of
stones, and sometimes not even by that.”
On the west side of Lewis, near the fishing inn of Garrynahine, stands
the most celebrated and the least destructible of ancient monuments,
the Stones of Callernish, which used to pass for a Druid temple, when
there was as much reason for entitling them a Druid theatre, town-hall,
or house of parliament, if not the tomb of some once towering hero
long gone to Valhalla. The figure of a cross has been traced in their
position, on which account they have been credited to St. Columba, the
truth being that their origin is as mysterious as that of Stonehenge.
Not far off are the ruins of the Doon of Carloway, one of the best
specimens of this kind of fortification, often dubbed a Pictish tower.
Then, towards the Butt of Lewis, in the wildest and most primitive part
of the island, the “Troosel Stone,” tallest monolith in Scotland, may
from its name be a record of obscene rites, though it also is claimed
as an heroic tombstone.
[Illustration: THE HERRING FLEET IN STORNOWAY BAY, ISLAND OF LEWIS]
At this north end the features of the people, Gaelic-speaking as they
are, most clearly betray the Norse settlement, indicated throughout
by many of the place-names, as the recurring Fladdas, Berneras, and
Scalpas. The Macleods, once predominant here, till the Mackenzies
overlaid them in the Lewis as the Macdonalds in Skye, are believed
to have been of this foreign origin. At the end of the sixteenth
century an attempt was made to introduce another stock, when a number
of Lowland gentlemen, chiefly from Fife, formed themselves into
a Chartered Company of the period, to which the savage Lewis was
granted by James VI. as area for such a “plantation” as Elizabeth
charily patronised in Virginia. These “Adventurers” or “Undertakers”
enlisted a little army, armed with tools as well as weapons; but
three attempts at settlement disastrously failed, and the work of
civilisation was left to be carried out by nearer neighbours.
Lewis and Harris have in our day been conquered by the Free Church,
that puts its ban on the old customs and revels and would weed out the
old superstitions, though still kirk-goers will fear to jest of the
water-horse mounted by mortal men to their swift destruction, or the
water-bull that haunts lonely lochs to snap at bathing boys, or swallow
up sheep whose owner brought back from market a head not clear for
counting. Such uncanny beasts can be shot only with silver: perhaps
the origin of “Bang went sixpence!” Of late years the bitterness of
controversy between the United Free and the “Wee Free” divisions of
their Church has set congregations by the ears, while the decision
of the Lords should breathe a new sentiment of imperial loyalty into
the triumphant party, hitherto disposed to Home Rule heresies. Out
of Stornoway, there is not a licensed public-house on the Lewis, a
fact that makes for peace. Crime is hardly known here, but for a
land league agitation that has prompted incendiary fires and brutal
mutilation of cattle as well as refusal to pay rent, along with a
general sore-headedness that was poulticed for a time by the Crofters’
Commission, but may show signs of breaking out again when freshly
recurring arrears come to be demanded.
Over the island can be traced broken fold-dykes and patches of rig
and furrow lost among the heather, which are taken as signs of a
once more extended cultivation of this poor soil, reported by Martin,
two centuries ago, as fruitful in corn up till a then recent period.
However this may be, a century ago the Rev. James Hall declared that
the “scallags” (labouring class) of the Hebrides were practically
slaves, treated by their masters worse than negroes. But at that time
they seem to have been more patient, not yet having found out how they
were ill off. They can hardly expect to be over well off, when, in
spite of emigration, a century has raised the population of Lewis from
about 9000 to 29,000, an increase unparalleled in the Highlands. Yet
what with one help and another, the people of this congested area seem
not so poverty-stricken as on islands that have been more depleted of
their natural increase.
Forty miles above the Butt of Lewis, on an ocean-washed rock one of the
old hermit saints built his chapel. Then far out to the west, beyond
the uninhabited Flannan Isles or Seven Hunters, lies—
Utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race
Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds.
This remote isle, its celebrity depending on its insignificance, is
about three miles by two, a jagged mass of steep crags, which on one
side are said to present the loftiest sea-face in Britain, about 1300
feet. The climate is mild and damp, muggy and windy, the clouds of the
Atlantic being caught on those tall crags, less familiar with snow
than with a white coating of countless sea-fowl, which, with their
eggs, make the chief fare of the inhabitants. Before the days of steam
St. Kilda was cut off from intercourse with the world, except through
supply expeditions sent from Skye by its Macleod landlords, or through
chance visits, when the rare stranger would be warmly welcomed and
attended by all the male population, as MacCulloch was, like “a Jack
Pudding at a country fair followed by a mob of boys.” Nature, it is
said, serves them as a leisurely postman, when a letter sealed in a
bottle will drift on to the mainland in time; but the winds and waves
can seldom bring an answer by return. The story goes that the islanders
heard nothing of Prince Charlie’s enterprise till it was all over,
nor of Waterloo and the Hundred Days, and that William the Fourth was
prayed for three years after his death, as is by no means according
to Presbyterian orthodoxy. Even now, long dark winter months may pass
without news whether Scotland stands as it did. But Miss Goodrich Freer
laments that only too many tourists reach this remote isle in summer
to corrupt a primitive community which, with scant aid from books and
teachers, has evolved a high standard of morals and mutual helpfulness,
if not of that virtue that proverbially comes next to godliness.
Two centuries ago St. Kilda even came near to adopt a religion of
its own through the doctrine of an illiterate youth named Roderick,
who, professing to have received a revelation from John the Baptist,
imposed fasts, penances, sacrifices, and forms of prayer upon the
superstitious islanders, mixing “the laudable customs of the Church
with his own diabolical inventions.” For years he played his prophetic
part, till it became manifest that St. John’s oracle had a very human
side, when Cæsar, in the person of Macleod’s steward, persecuted him
into silence; and an orthodox minister came over to exorcise his
heresies. In those days the people seem to have been little better than
pagans with a varnish of Catholicism; but now they have a Free Church,
whose pastor was once the only inhabitant that could speak English, as
all the school children can do now.
The population numbers some few score, Gaelic speaking, though they
make no show of tartan, and, except in English pictures, kilts were
never adapted to their amphibious and crag-scrambling industries. The
oft-told tale of a severe cold breaking out among them on the arrival
of a stranger seems to relate to the sharp wind which brought a ship,
with its invisible freight of alien microbes, to their slippery
landing-place. Nature has placed them in quarantine from many ills
flesh is heir to on the mainland, yet once an infection of smallpox
had nearly exterminated the islanders; and if former statistics be
accurate, their numbers have decreased within a century or so. There is
a very high death-rate among newly born children; and the old people
are apt to be crippled by rheumatism; but in middle life they thrive
on what should be a dyspeptic diet of oily sea-birds; and consumption
is unknown in this natural Nordrach sanitorium. They have fields of
oats and potatoes, also cattle and sheep, from which they can clothe
themselves. Their landlord has provided them with a street of good
stone houses, far superior to the ordinary crofter’s home; and their
old haystack hovels are chiefly used as stores or outhouses; but their
zinc roofs cover true Highland untidiness. “Milk dishes, ropes, tarry
nets, wool, cooking pots, and fishing tackle are strewn haphazard
over the broken earthen floors; from the smoke-blackened rafters hang
a winter store of dried sea-fowl, fish, and bladders containing oil
for use in the long winter nights.” And everywhere are in evidence
the feathers that make St. Kilda’s best merchandise, as birds are its
chief stock, from the great northern diver to the so-called St. Kilda
wren, lately protected by law against extermination. “The air is full
of feathered animals, the sea is covered with them, the houses are
ornamented by them, the ground is speckled by them like a flowery
meadow in May. The town is paved with feathers; the very dunghills are
made of feathers; the ploughed land seems as if it had been sown with
feathers; and the inhabitants look as if they had been all tarred and
feathered, for their hair is full of feathers, and their clothes are
covered with feathers.”
A romance of St. Kilda is the mysterious story of Lady Grange,
imprisoned here under circumstances which have not been made very
clear. She was the daughter of a gentleman who shot the Lord President
for deciding a suit against him, so that she might seem to have
hereditarily forfeited a right to the protection of law. Married
to Erskine of Grange, a brother of the Jacobite Earl of Mar, after
a quarter of a century’s wedded life she became such a peril or a
nuisance to her husband that, himself a judge of the Court of Session,
he planned or abetted a scheme for keeping her in life-long confinement
as a madwoman. One story is that she knew of traitorous dealings on
his part with the king over the water. Kidnapped from her lodging in
Edinburgh by a party of Highlanders, she was violently dragged across
Scotland on byways and highways, apparently without any interference
at her successive places of detention, the journeys usually being
made by night, and the poor lady gagged when she would have cried out
for rescue. From Glengarry’s country she was shipped into the western
islands, and in time to St. Kilda, where she spent some eight years,
in vain trying to communicate with her friends, if she had any friends
disposed to serve her, as her own sons and her kinsfolk appear not
to have stirred in the matter. She is said to have been taken over
to Sutherland, then to Skye, where she died after years of illegal
durance. Her story seems almost incredible; but even in the nineteenth
century an ex-army officer, no doubt not very strong in his wits, was
kept imprisoned upon one of the Shetlands for twenty years or so, till
quite romantically rescued by the agency of a female missionary.