THULE
William Black went about to dub the Hebrides our Thule; but that title
better belongs to the islands of fellow-countrymen—
Who dwell beyond the Pentland’s roar
And watch dim skerries white with drowning seas;
And hear Æolian moanings of the breeze
Wandering ever about a surf-strewn shore;
Beneath broad skies with billowy mist-wreaths hoar;
Through winter days that gloom but never freeze
Nor chill the Northern heart’s devotion.
The Orkney and Shetland Isles, whoever were their original inhabitants,
became restocked from the kingdom that figures in legendary history as
“Lochlin,” and still plainly keep much of the Scandinavian character,
on other coasts of Britain appearing only in patches and strains,
or, as in the Southern Hebrides, overlaid by Celtic features. These
“Nordereys” had early been known to Gothic pirates, crushing the
nascent Christianity believed to have been planted by Cormac and
other disciples of St. Columba, ghostly fathers whose memory seems to
survive in the _Papas_ of the archipelago. The Norwegian kingdom,
converted in turn, established its power more or less firmly all over
the Hebrides, with occasional assaults on Ireland and Scotland; and
for three centuries the Orkneys made a Jarldom dependent on Norway.
The Icelandic sagas throw a weird light on their confused history of
feuds, treacheries, fire and sword, bouts of drinking and devotion,
from which, as the kingdom of Scotland took shape, begins to emerge
a contention between relationships of kindred and of vicinity. The
quasi-independent Jarls of Orkney fitfully recognised a suzerain in
Scotland as well as in Norway. At one time we find this Norwegian
Nizam seated across the Pentland as Thane of Caithness; then again a
Scottish earl is imposed on the Orkneys. The position of Shetland is
more obscure at this period, but till well on in the middle ages all
the Hebrides belonged to the archiepiscopal diocese of Trondhjem.
[Illustration: CARTING PEAT, ORKNEY]
When the last Norwegian invasion of Scotland had been defeated on the
Clyde, Haco retired to Kirkwall, there dying in 1263. The winds warred
against that armada, whose failure was not so much a decisive blow as
one strain in a gradual loosening of Norse authority over the isles.
Soon afterwards, Haco’s son formally resigned to Alexander III. all
dominion of the Hebrides, except in the Orkneys and Shetlands, which
were specially reserved to the Norwegian crown, by and by absorbed in
that of Denmark. But two centuries later, when certain differences
between these thrones came to be adjusted by the marriage of James III.
to Margaret of Denmark, her father pledged the islands to Scotland
for the bulk of her stipulated dowry, 60,000 florins, that
have never been paid; and so we hold this part of our kingdom on a
pawnbroker’s title, as to which international lawyers might cover acres
of foolscap, if Denmark were disposed to clear off the mortgage.
Even earlier, Sinclairs and other lords from the mainland had pushed on
to the Orkneys, which afterwards became so oppressively exploited by
esurient Scots that theirs was no beloved name here; and the islanders,
even now that old resentments are forgot, decline to look on themselves
as Scotsmen. The mass of the population are of Norse stock, whose
language died out here as slowly as Cornish at the other end of the
kingdom; and still it colours the local dialect, that kept a quaint
Quakerism of _thee_ and _thou_, with a continental slurring of the _h_
in such words. The islands are reckoned as a Scottish county, but their
_particularismus_ considers itself rather as a boat towed in the wake
of Great Britain; and they speak of going to Scotland as Cornishmen of
crossing the Tamar into England. Another correspondence with Cornwall
is in the prevalence here of dissenting forms of Evangelical doctrine.
Then, like the Cornish moors and cliffs, those of Thule are dotted with
grey monuments of forgotten faith and bloodshed, long washed out of
memory.
Except by isolated incidents, the islands enter little into the
history of Scotland, since the days when it was alternately a refuge
and a raiding ground for their Viking chiefs. Kirkcaldy of Grange was
shipwrecked here in pursuit of Bothwell. Montrose pressed some of the
islanders into his service, else they took slight interest in the wars
of Whig and Tory. More than one stirring naval engagement came off at
this northern end of the kingdom, long exposed to raids from French and
Dutch cruisers, against which, indeed, most of the islands were well
defended by their perilous reefs and currents. Their latest appearance
in history was a hoax that deceived newspaper readers of 1866 into
believing the account of a Fenian raid on Unst, with such details as a
forced ransom, the taking of hostages, the minister hanged by his own
bell-rope, all set forth so seriously that a man-of-war is said to have
got as far as Aberdeen on its way to the rescue.
The two groups number some eight score islands and islets, not half
of them inhabited. Lying in the Gulf Stream, they have a wet and
windy climate, variable rather than severe, often cool in summer, raw
and rheumatic in winter, when a truly dark December affords little
chance for skating or curling. That many-weathered March of our
islands usually brings the sharpest cold to this end of them. The
whole archipelago is so broken into _holms_ and indented by _voes_,
that on the largest islands one will never be more than a few miles
from the sea; nor is it easy to take a mile’s walk without coming
on a reed-fringed, foam-edged basin of fresh water, over which salt
spray blows into one’s face across the rough cliff-bound flats that
swell up into waves of moor, but seldom into imposing hills. Except
in a few favoured spots, where thin clumps of stunted wood are nursed
like gardens, a telegraph post is the only kind of tree breaking
the bleak horizon above heath and bog, with a lonely farm-house, a
huddlement of cottages, a patch of fields now and then to remind us
that this is no wilderness. Seen under its too frequent shade of sullen
sky or drizzling showers, such a landscape strikes the lover of lush
nature as dismal, yet it has its bright moments, sometimes its halcyon
seasons in the long days of the far northern summers, and at all times
taking features of its own. “The scene, which on a sunless day seems
hard and cold, with occasional gleams of sunlight, becomes a perfect
kaleidoscope of varying colours.” So writes Mr. J. R. Tudor in his
excellent book on the islands, which also tells us of “vivid greens” in
early summer, of glorious shows of red clover to relieve the prevalent
dulness, and of a rich spangling of spring flowerets that here linger
into June and July. The little purplish _Primula Scotica_ has been
called the queen of Orkney blooms, among them some rare in the North,
and some that seem dying out in a hard struggle for existence. The
writer who thinly disguised himself as “Shirley,” thus sums up our
Thule’s finest features:—
For the artist there are vast spaces of sea and sky; the shining
sands; the glories of the sunset; and above and beyond all the
pageantry of the storm. For each day a fresh drama is transacted upon
the heavens. The morning hours are often brilliantly bright; but ere
mid-day the sun is suddenly obscured; the storm-cloud rises out of
the Atlantic; sometimes the wind and rain lash the panes for hours;
sometimes the cloud breaks upon the hills of Hoy, and passes away
like a dream. The _dénoûment_ of the drama is always obscure; you
cannot predict what the end will be, and so the interest never flags.
And among the land-locked bays and through the narrow channels there
is excellent boating for those who can circumvent the tides. Unless,
indeed, you know something of the obscure laws which govern the ebb
and flow of the ocean in this network of islands, you are pretty sure
to come to grief. For round many of them it runs like a mill-race.
Between Hoy and Stennis, for instance, the ebb is simply a foaming and
swirling torrent, against which sail and even steam are powerless.
That vast body of water pouring into the Atlantic is as irresistible
as a Canadian rapid. But if you study the tides, you can seek out
secluded nooks, where the seals are basking on the tangle, and the
wild duck are wheeling round the bay, and the blue rocks are darting
out of the caves, and the grouse are crowing among the heather, and
where for ten months out of the twelve the peace is absolute, and
silence unbroken save by the shepherd’s dog.
[Illustration: AN ORCADIAN FIREPLACE]
It has been remarked how the very superstitions of such a land run
naturally to fishiness, as indeed all over the Hebrides uncouth
leviathans haunt the fog banks, dragons lurk in the hollowed
cliffs, sea-serpents in the voes as water-bulls in the lochans, and
treacherously smiling mermaids, more to be shunned than all these
monsters, delude men to their doom among slippery reefs. The mermaid
legends may well have been suggested by half-human glimpses of seals.
Our critical age is also disposed to relate them to occasional visits
of Eskimo or Lapp adventurers, seen only to the waist in their skin
canoes. Not so long ago there were people in the islands who boasted
descent from “Finn” strangers, very possibly kinsmen of an
aboriginal pigmy race, Picts, “Pechts,” or what not, that may here have
left their memory in the “Trows” or “Trolls” of land mythology, and
their name in the Pentland (_Pechtland_) Firth.
Fishing and fowling, as well as antiquarian puzzles, have long
been attractions to these rocks and waters, that begin to be more
visited for their own sake, now that our generation develops a taste
in out-of-the-way aspects of nature. It was a lucky hit for the
archipelago when in 1814 Walter Scott accompanied the Northern Lights
Commissioners on their jovial tour of office, at Stromness picking up
from a toothless Norna that story of the pirate Gow which he so well
dressed up in the contents of his note-book. One admires his dexterity
in conducting the plot so as to bring in the lions of a trip, his
companions on which could have no doubt of the authorship. Gow was a
real character, whose name, to be translated Smith, pairs with Paul
Jones, another eighteenth-century corsair, of whom it is told that he
was scared away from Lerwick by the red flannel petticoats of women
marching to market, as the French invaders of Pembrokeshire were by
red-cloaked Welshwomen, mistaken for an army of soldiers. It seems
strange to remember how Scott’s fellow-tourists were kept on the alert
by the fear of American privateers.
From the Orkneys Byron also took an authentic hero for his _Island_
in George Stewart, midshipman of the _Bounty_, “tempest-born in body
and in mind,” whose Otaheitean child was living here in the middle of
last century. Then Orkney has poets of her own, such as John Malcolm,
the soldier; David Vedder, the sailor; and Mr. T. S. Omond, known as a
writer on as in metre, from whom I have quoted at the beginning of this
chapter. Professor Aytoun, whose lyre had such a range of strings, was
connected with the islands as their Sheriff, while one of his Christian
names hints at kindred with the Shetland Edmonstons distinguished in
natural history. Clouston is the name of another “family-pen” here;
and that of Moodie, husband and wife, was transplanted to Canadian
authorship. Rae the Arctic, and Baikie the African explorer set out
from so far north. From Orkney came a whole galaxy of Traill writers.
The three Laings, all notable in literature, were of an Orkney family.
So was Washington Irving, who indeed narrowly escaped being born on
Shapinshay, as our American cousins will be interested to know. J.
R. Lowell was of Orkney blood by the spindle side; he could remember
his maternal grandmother as dressing in black on Independence Day and
lamenting “His Majesty’s unhappy differences with his colonists.” By
the way, in _Bonnie Scotland_, while explaining how, spite of such
names as Munroe, Buchanan, Grant, Arthur, McKinley, no born Scotsman
has yet been President of the United States, I forgot to mention that
President Polk (_Pollock_) boasted lineal descent from John Knox. It
may be added that President Roosevelt is certainly of Scottish stock on
one side, even if his paternal line be not connected with some John o’
Groat or Dirk Hatteraick.
In Scott’s day the islands were backward in cultivation, though what
with fishing, wrecks, smuggling, and kelp-burning, the people seemed
uncommonly well supplied with luxuries. Poverty may have originally
prompted that strange superstition as to the danger of saving lives
from the sea, which lingered in Cornwall, too, almost up to our own
day. The islanders counted on what they could make out of “God-sends”
such as helped to furnish Magnus Troil’s house and the pack of Bryce
Snailsfoot; and it was a serious loss to them when the beaconing of
their stormy waters diminished the harvest of flotsam and jetsam. Scott
tells how an Orcadian answered Mr. Stevenson remarking on the bad sails
of his boat: “If it had been His will that you hadna built sae many
lighthouses hereabout, I would have had new sails last winter.”
The ground was much divided among small proprietors, as it still is
to a less degree, and small holdings are common, so that the islands
were, quite needlessly as regards the Orkneys, some think, put under
the Crofters Commission. The people of the southern group are more
thriftily prosperous than in the Hebrides. They had their fit of
standing out obstinately against “improvements”; then they suffered
from the set-back of the kelp industry, here very profitable for a
time, but its failure proved a blessing in disguise as turning their
attention to agriculture; and they seem too well off now to trouble
about kelp, on which the landlords would still set them working at
“orra” times. In the last half-century tenants and “peerie” lairds
showed the sense to follow enterprising landlords like Balfour of
Shapinshay, so that now many of the farms compare with those on the
mainland. There is a flourishing export of cattle, much improved by
the introduction of good stock. Along with their ponies and hairy
sheep, almost as wild as goats, the islands had a breed of small cows,
from whose milk was made their peculiar drink _bland_, resembling the
koumiss of the Tartars. Some quarter of a century ago an effort was
made to push this beverage in London, where, however, it seems not to
have “caught on.” Then living in Kensington lodgings, I patriotically
ordered a case of it, which, as the weather was hot and the liquor
“up,” I put under my bed, taking this for the coolest spot at my
command, but ignorant that it was over the kitchen fire. I had hardly
got into bed when, one by one, the bottles began to explode, till
the whole battery had fired itself away. Above me slept no less a
fellow-lodger than General Gordon, not yet of Khartoum; and I wondered
whether my bombardment might have brought China into his dreams.
The Shetlands, for their part, are grander, wilder, rougher, poorer,
colder, wetter, less “improved,” in general, more Norse and primitive.
Their industry is rather at sea than on land. Mr. Tudor quotes an apt
saying as to the difference between the people: “The Shetlander is
a fisherman who has a farm; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat.”
Through the fisheries the Shetlanders were long in closer touch with
Holland and Scandinavia than with Scotland, which for centuries has
been spreading her tentacles over the adjacent Orkneys. A century ago
Dutch and Danish coins were more familiar at Lerwick than the head of
George III.; and up to a later time, Norwegian weights and measures
were used all over the islands. The Orkneys are, or were, well stocked
with grouse and snipe; sea-fowl are the game of the Shetlands, not that
they lack in the southern group, among which the great auk was killed
off three-quarters of a century ago. Straw-plaiting was once a resource
of the Orkneys. They are rich in cattle, the Shetlands rather in sheep,
where the chief home industry is the hosiery knitting that keeps
women’s fingers busy even when their backs are bowed under peat creels.
The Shetlands, in short, bear much the same relation to the Orkneys as
the Highlands to the Lowlands, though the old name _Hialtland_ seems
not so fitting as _Sea-land_, the former spelling of which is preserved
in the Earl of Zetland’s title. Till lately the Shetlands were less
visited by strangers; but now a tide of tourist-travel seems to be
setting strongly to the northern isles, that offer such a change of air
for southrons able to put up with somewhat scrimp accommodation, while
hospitable goodwill as yet must take the place of hotel luxury.
The tourist’s easiest goal is Kirkwall, capital of the Mainland,
_alias_ Pomona, central mass of the Orkneys. The old grey town,
cramped into narrow ways, stands at the head of its “Church Bay,”
about the towering Cathedral founded by Jarl Ronald in memory of his
uncle, murdered St. Magnus. This is one of the few noble Scottish fanes
that came almost unhurt through the Reformation, though mutilated
by tempest and by neglect, and only in part still used as a church.
It rivals Glasgow as the finest of northern Cathedrals, its special
character being a height and narrowness that give imposing effect, and
some of the architectural ornaments are of striking beauty, as the
east rose-window and the carved doorways in which different colours of
stone were well combined. By the will of a late eccentric Sheriff, a
considerable sum becomes available for the restoration or decoration of
this ancient fabric.
[Illustration: KIRKWALL CATHEDRAL, ORKNEY]
Beside the Cathedral stand the ruins of two palaces: the Bishop’s, in
which King Haco died, and the later Earl’s, built by Patrick Stewart,
tyrant of the Islands, as was his father before him, a left-handed
son of James V., set up in life with this misused dominion. Patrick’s
oppressions were so scandalous that he came to execution, as did his
son Robert Stewart, for rebellion, so, like the Dukedom of Orkney
conferred by Mary on Bothwell, who never got the length of admission
into Kirkwall, the Stewarts’ Earldom passed away, belying its boastful
motto, _Sic fuit, est, et erit_. These offshoots of royalty seem
unlucky in their intromissions with Latin, for one of the charges
against them was Earl Robert having described himself as “Filius
Jacobi Quinti _Rex_ Scotorum,” a slip in grammar that came to be judged
treasonable, as indeed did Wolsey’s good Latinity, “Ego et rex meus.”
The royal castle has disappeared, its site commemorated by the name of
an hotel; but Kirkwall has still several quaint and venerable mansions,
once inhabited by the island aristocracy, behind which are hidden
gardens that in this climate seem more precious than palaces. In short,
Kirkwall is quite a place to “delay the tourist,” whose visit will
probably not coincide with the New Year football Saturnalia, kept up
here as on Shrove Tuesday in some English towns; but he may come in for
the dwindled delights of the Lammas Fair, described by Scott in all its
glory.
The vicinity is full of antiquarian interest. From the hill above the
town, as Dr. John Kerr says, one can see “memorials of every form of
religion that has ever existed in Scotland.” A few miles off, towards
the other side of the island, is a region strewn with prehistoric
remains, like the moors of Karnac in Brittany. The most famous lion
here is the Stones of Stennis, a circle of sacrifice, sepulture, or
what not, second only to Stonehenge in our islands. On the opposite
side of the deep double inlet of Stennis, half fresh and half salt
water, stand or lie ruins of a similar circle, near which a modern
Vandal has demolished the “Stone of Odin,” where Minna Troil would have
pledged her faith to Cleveland by clasping hands through the opening
of a pierced obelisk, gentler rite than that carving a captive foe’s
back into “a red eagle,” for which one of these stones once made a
scaffold. Not far off is the famous Maeshowe tumulus, whose mysterious
runes have tried the ingenuity of many interpreters. Similar chambered
mounds, “fairy howes” to the people, are found nearer Kirkwall, as
in other islands, all over which may be encountered “grey, grim, and
solitary standing stones, bearded with moss, which are kith and kin
to the prehistoric obelisks of Stennis.” A sight of a very different
kind is Balfour Castle, on the island of Shapinshay, where a mansion
imitating Abbotsford has been decked out in exotic greenery, that seeks
to vie with the gardens of Lewis Castle.
At the north end of the island, Birsay is visited for the ruined
“palace” of the Jarls, and for the fishing of its lochs. The only other
town is Stromness on the west side, a snug little port, for which
the sea is “a domestic institution,” as Mr. Gorrie says. “It ripples
familiarly up the short lanes between rows of houses, and the bows of
vessels stretch across second-storey windows.” A ship’s cabin serves,
or used to serve, as smoking-room in the garden of the hotel. The shop
windows, besides sea stores, chiefly exhibit sweets and stockings,
but such hints of innocent tastes may be overlaid in early summer,
when thousands of herring-fishers come to make the place an unsavoury
rendezvous, as it once was for whalers and Hudson Bay traders.
Stromness should be noted in Scottish history for a law case in which
this champion of open markets broke down the trade monopoly hitherto
arrogated by royal burghs, like Kirkwall; and these competitors
love each other as Margate loves Ramsgate. Its museum contains an
interesting collection of fossils, among them that primæval monster
the _Asterolepis_, of which Hugh Miller made his celebrated discovery
hereabouts.
Off Stromness lies Hoy, an island containing the cream of Orkney
scenery. On the north-west side the cliffs are higher than any of our
mainland, and beside them rises the Old Man of Hoy, now on his last
leg, but he once had two to prop up “the grandest natural obelisk in
the British Isles.” The difficulty is to get a view of these giant
rocks by leave of the rushing tideways and the squally winds. I
have seen them only from their edge, yet might as well have been in
Cheapside, when such a heavy drifting mist came on that I was glad to
grope my way down, steering cautiously by half-obscured knolls, as
shown on the Ordnance Map. The clearest sight I saw was the abashment
of an English tourist, who suddenly emerged from the fog _sans
culotte_, with fluttering shirt tails, wearing his most indispensable
garment over his arm, perhaps from some mental confusion between
Arcadian and Orcadian customs, or he had reckoned on meeting no one
more modest than that Old Man of Hoy. Sights more safely visited are
the Dwarfie Stone, the glen of Berriedale, the Kaim of Hoy, whose rock
profile gratefully presents a silhouette of Sir Walter Scott, and the
Enchanted Carbuncle seen by faithful eyes sparkling on the side of the
Ward Hill. This is the highest point of the islands (1556 feet), from
whose top, on a fine day, one has them spread out on the sea like a
toy map, and can count their lower Ward Hills that once gave alarms of
the approach of a foe.
Even the short crossing to Hoy may turn out a little adventurous; and
the gentle tourist is not apt to make his way to less famous islands,
their funnelled and tunnelled cliffs cut off from each other by such
wild seas that this amphibious constituency has for its elections a
fortnight’s grace beyond the rest of Britain. Next to Hoy, Rousay is
the most Highland of the Orkneys, and North Ronaldshay is said to be
the most primitive, as South Ronaldshay the most fertile. Each sundered
portion cherishes a parish patriotism, once breeding hot feuds, but now
chiefly represented by nicknames interchanged between the islanders,
the _Hawks_ of Hoy, the _Crabs_ of Harray, the _Sheep_ of Shapinshay,
the _Limpets_ of Stronsay, the _Mares_ of Rousay, and so forth,
neighbourly pleasantries that in the Shetlands take more offensively
personal forms, as the _Thieves_ of Yell, and the “Honest Folk” of
Unst, so named with a note of interrogation. Some quaint Norse family
names abound here, such as Halcro, Harcus, Inkster, Bea, Cursiter,
Isbister; and, as one might expect, these are found so closely packed
together that, on one island, a school-inspector mentions a roll of
eighty children having among them only eight surnames. Scottish names
are commoner in the Orkneys, my own for one, a branch of which “louped”
so far north as Rapness in Westray, whence its thrivingest shoot came
back to Perthshire, buying from his impoverished chief the family
estate of that ilk with a fortune made apparently not in those wild
seas, but as a public official. The Orkneys more than the Shetlands
were overrun by Scottish lairds and their dependants who, like the
English settlers in Ireland, fell much into the popular sentiment and
grew to be more or less loyal sons of Thule.
As link between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in the middle of
Sumburgh Roost, where the Gulf Stream rushes almost as violently as
through the Pentland Firth, stands the lonely little Fair Isle, a foul
one for ships, which, like the Faröe Isles, gets its name not from
beauty, but from the Norse _faar_, “sheep.” A botanist tells us how
its one meadow is almost dyed in the season by the blue flower of the
“sheep’s bit.” This cliff-walled island was once visited chiefly in
the way of shipwreck, and still strangers are rare birds here, warmly
welcomed, unless they turn out to be revenue officers or such like, the
sight of whom used to set the people scurrying like rabbits to their
burrows, while they opened their arms to preachers of any denomination.
In Scott’s time they had a pastoral visit only once a year, sometimes
not so often, where several couples might be ready for marriage in
a lump, and a dozen children for baptism, one of them old enough to
make an unedifying comment on the ceremony, as the novelist records.
The great event in Fair Isle history was the shipwreck of the Spanish
Armada’s _Admiral_, whose people quartered themselves here through the
winter in a high-handed manner, that seems not to have hindered kinder
relations with the fair islanders. A trace of their sojourn appears
in the hosiery made by possible descendants of Spanish sailors, still
showing the Moorish patterns brought to Andalusia, and thence to this
bleak spot. These people do not always get such good words from their
rare visitors as do the unsophisticated inhabitants of Foula, which,
lying out to the west of the Shetlands, remote like St. Kilda from the
Long Island, presents in its circuit of some nine miles what has been
judged the noblest cliff scenery in Britain, in summer so clamorously
alive with sea-fowl that “the air seemed as if filled with gigantic
snow-flakes.”
One might here fill pages by quoting from enthusiastic ornithologists,
and telling exploits of the daring cragsmen who have exterminated or
thinned out some of the nobler fowl; but I have so much to say about
man that I must leave beast and bird out of view. The Shetlanders
are born fishermen, a craft that calls for no small courage in these
latitudes. It is only at odd times they turn to their rugged and thin
soil, whose most outstanding production seems the small _Sheltie_
ponies, in great demand for use in southern collieries. Sir M. Grant
Duff tells of one brought to the mainland, that it had to learn what
oats were good for. As for the hungry sheep, a Midland squire I knew
once transported a flock of them to England, where they forthwith
fell to cropping their way through the hedges in which they found
unwontedly toothsome pasture. Even domestic animals may show a touch
of the sea, for seals are sometimes tamed as family pets. Otters are
the Shetlands’ amphibious beasts of prey. The great game here is the
“Ca’in’ whales,” now and then a sperm whale, that sometimes blunder
into narrow voes, to be assailed with a general hue-and-cry of every
soul that can get near them, as described in the _Pirate_, and in Mr.
D. Gorrie’s _Summers and Winters in the Orkneys_.
Rounding the point of Torness, and stretching across the mouth of
the bay, the fleet of small craft again hove into view, and pressed
upon the rear of the slowly-advancing and imprisoned whales. Among
the onlookers there was now intense excitement, the greatest anxiety
being manifested lest the detached wing should follow the previous
practice of the main army, and again break the line of the boats in a
victorious charge. The shoutings and noise of the boatmen recommenced,
and echoed from shore to shore of the beautiful and secluded bay. A
fresh alarm seized the monsters, but instead of wheeling about, and
rushing off to the open sea as before, they dashed rapidly forwards a
few yards, pursued by the boats, and were soon floundering helplessly
in the shallows. The scene that ensued was of the most exciting
description. Fast and furious the boatmen struck and stabbed to
right and left, while the people on the shore, forming an auxiliary
force, dashed down to assist in the massacre, wielding all sorts of
weapons, from roasting-spits to ware-forks. The poor wounded monsters
lashed about with their tails, imperilling life and limb, and the
ruddy hue of the water along the stretch of shore soon indicated
the extent of the carnage. The whales that had received their death
stroke emitted shrill cries, accompanied with a strange snorting and
humming noise, which has been not inaptly compared to the distant
sound of military drums pierced by the sharp piping of fifes. As
the blood of the dead and dying more deeply incarnadined the sea,
it gave a dreadful aspect of wholesale butchery to the murderous
close of the summer whale-chase. Some of the larger whales displayed
great tenacity of life, and survived repeated strokes and stabs, but
the unequal conflict closed at last, and no fewer than a hundred
and seventy carcases were dragged up the beach. One or two slight
accidents occurred, but to me it seemed marvellous that the boatmen
did not injure each other as much as the whales amid the confusion and
excitement of the scene.
[Illustration: SHETLANDERS]
The largest of the Shetlands also bears the name of Mainland, on the
east side of which nestles Lerwick, the only town in these islands.
Chiefly consisting of one long, narrow flagged street, with a modern
esplanade upon a crescent bay, some of the houses actually standing
in the water, for the convenience, it is said, of the smugglers who
were frequent visitors, Lerwick is taken to resemble a Dutch seaport,
a comparison carried out by the Dutch and other foreign fishermen
familiar here. A new town has in our time sprung up on higher ground
above. The place of Kirkwall’s Cathedral is taken by a very fine Town
Hall, to the decoration of which the magistrates of Amsterdam and
Hamburg contributed in recognition of old intercourse, as did several
Scottish municipalities. Fort Charlotte, now station of the Naval
Reserve, was originally built by Oliver Cromwell, who stretched his
heavy hand so far north. The harbour is locked by the precipitous
Bressay Island, outside of which lies the sundered Holm of Noss, once
reached from its neighbour by a dizzy cradle, swung from cliff to
cliff, which might well be revived as one of the “fearful joys” of
the Earl’s Court Exhibition.
Other sights of the Mainland are Scalloway, on the west coast, the
ancient capital, where the tyrant Earl Patrick built a castle; Fitful
Head, with its grand view from the end of the southern promontory; the
Broch of Mousa, most perfect example of such structures, on an islet
off the east coast of this promontory; and Papa Stour, an island on
the other side, riddled with creeks and caves, one of which MacCulloch
dubbed the finest in Britain. Then the main island is pitted with
countless lochs, “one for every day in the year,” in which, as in the
inlets, fishing can still be had free.
To speak of the other islands, Yell, Fetlar, Whalsay and their
satellites, would be merely repetition of similar characteristics as
summed up in _Black’s Guide_, their interior usually a dull stretch of
hills, bogs, and pools, but the coast, especially on the west side,
a wonderful show: “Mural precipices over 1000 feet high, the abode
of myriads of sea-fowl of all descriptions; solitary islets, feeding
on their flat green tops flocks of timid lambs; isolated ‘stacks,’
cleaving the skies; gloomy ‘hellyers,’ within whose sunless shades the
tide ebbs and flows; here a gravelly beach piled high with heaps of cod
and tusk and ling in process of curing; there a narrow _gio_, with a
herd of seals sunning themselves on its tangle-covered rocks,—such are
the varieties of the Shetland seascape and landscape.”
The northernmost island is Unst, which Mr. Tudor pronounces at once
the most grandly picturesque of them all, “bar Foula,” and also the
most thriving, for along with some remarkable mineral rarities, it
has oases of cultivation that have earned it the title, “Garden of
the Shetlands.” One of the stone circles here is believed to mark the
ancient meeting-place of the Shetland _Thing_, or popular assembly,
before its removal to Tingwall on the Mainland. In modern days Unst has
been famed as residence of the Edmonstons, that family of naturalists,
and as sojourn of Biot, the French savant, while carrying out his
delicate astronomical measurements. In Biot’s account of this task, he
praises the warm hearts and peaceful lives of the Shetland families, so
close knit in kindliness, but for which he could not imagine what kept
them in their poor and ungenial country.
Off the north end of Unst, seven hundred miles from the Bishop’s Rock
Lighthouse of Scilly, England’s most southerly point, our Ultima Thule
is the isolated crag of Muckle Flugga. Here towers a lighthouse,
the building of which, half a century ago, was itself a perilous
achievement, as with so many more of
Those ever-burning fires that smile
O’er night’s bleak ocean many a mile,
To welcome Albion’s truant child
From Indian shore or western wild.
Lighthouses have indeed been a boon to the navigators of these stormy
seas, as steamers to their inhabitants, though of one pious islander
it is recorded how his first acquaintance with such a fiery craft
fulfilled his vision of the Day of Judgment.