[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 124.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, MAY 15, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
THE HERRING-FISHERY AND FISHERMEN.
IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.
The herring-fishery has been prosecuted more or less by the inhabitants
of this country for several hundred years, and the industry has been
long recognised not only as an important factor in the food-supply of
the country, but as one of the most valuable export trades in Scotland.
The catching of herrings received a good deal of attention from the
fishing population last century; but as the prosecution of the fishing
was marked by great irregularities, the fishermen became disheartened
at the repeated failures in the catch, and being unacquainted with any
proper mode of curing and salting herrings that would have enabled
them to take advantage of prolific seasons, the industry began to
languish and decay. The government, however, incited by the success
of enterprising Dutchmen engaged in the fishery, saw the prospects of
developing, under enlightened auspices and unmeasured energy, a vast
sphere of operations; and with the view of encouraging both fishermen
and fishcurers to engage in the industry, an Act of Parliament was
passed in 1750, and another in 1753, offering substantial bounties
to all boats employed in the herring-fishery; which was followed up
in 1809 by payment of a bounty of two shillings for every barrel of
herrings cured, accompanied by an allowance of two and eightpence per
barrel exported. From 1815 to 1826 the export rate was deleted; but
the bounty per barrel cured was in the last-mentioned year raised to
four shillings; while in the four succeeding years, a yearly reduction
of one shilling took place; and in 1830, when the trade was fairly
established, the government bounties were abolished.
The fostering care bestowed upon the herring-trade was fruitful of
great results; and our countrymen, who had looked upon the Dutch
fishery, with all its technicalities, as quite unapproachable, were
gratified to find that the Scotch herring-industry was destined to take
first rank both in extent and excellence of cure. What was still more
satisfactory to those who had seen it in its struggling days, instead
of requiring a continuance of state aid, it was soon able to repay all
advances made from the revenue arising from fees paid by fishcurers
for receiving the government brand certifying the contents and quality
of the barrels, the annual income of which now averages nearly eight
thousand pounds.
The regular prosecution of the fishing on the north and north-east
coasts may be said not to have commenced till 1815; but from that
date, it has been looked upon as a staple industry; and its success or
failure has influenced to an enormous extent the comfort or poverty
of the communities inhabiting the smaller towns scattered along the
eastern shores of Scotland. In the early part of this century, the
quantity of fish salted presented a very sober account; and in 1810,
the grand total cured in Scotland, England, and the Isle of Man was
only 90,185 barrels; while in 1851, the total for Scotland and the Isle
of Man was 594,031 barrels. From 1851 till 1870, a period of inactivity
prevailed, and the official statistics year after year were abundant
proof that the spirit of enterprise was sadly deficient, or that the
notoriously capricious herrings had betaken themselves to other waters.
Whether the deficiency in the catch was attributable to lack of energy
on the part of curers and fishermen, or a long-continued scarcity of
fish, is a problem yet unsolved; but it remains on record that the
total quantity cured in 1851 was 594,031 barrels; while in 1869 it had
only increased to 675,143 barrels. In 1870, Scotland alone produced
833,160 barrels; while in the season of 1884, the total quantity cured
reached the enormous figures of 1,697,000 barrels!
It will thus be seen that this great fishing, which is now the mainstay
of a vast population extending round the shores of Scotland, has
gone on progressing till it has reached a position entitling it to
rank among the greatest industries of the country. The money value
of the fishing presents a fairly intelligent view of the progress
made during the last fifty years in its prosecution; and the figures
given confirm the inexhaustible riches of the sea, and prove the
boundless deep to be a mine of wealth, only now beginning to receive
the attention which it deserves. The value of the fishing in 1810 was
about seventy thousand pounds; and though it was subject to reverses
now and again, it gradually gained in dimensions until 1851, when its
value was half a million sterling! In 1870, the catch yielded about
nine hundred and sixteen thousand five hundred pounds; whereas in 1884
the total quantity cured represented a sum of two million one hundred
and twenty-one thousand three hundred and forty-six pounds; which is
equal to the rentals of the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Elgin, Nairn,
Inverness, Cromarty, Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness—or the annual
value of nearly a half of that of the total area of Scotland.
Along with other improvements, the increase in the number and size
of the herring-boats forms an interesting feature in the trade, and
is a striking proof of the immense resources at the command of the
fishermen. Not only has the numerical strength of the fleet increased
greatly, but the size and style of the boats have also changed
immensely; and the craft measuring thirty-five feet of keel and
fourteen feet of beam, used in 1830-50, have given place to handsome
and substantially built vessels, averaging fifty-six feet from stem to
stern, and not under eighteen and a half feet of beam, whose burden
runs from twenty-five to forty registered tons. Although the demand
for herrings has gone on increasing steadily, the tastes of former
large consumers have shown remarkable changes, and those—especially the
inhabitants of Ireland—who in the early days of the fishing were the
best customers of the Scotch curers, now but very moderately recognise
salt herrings as an article of food. In 1821, the exportation of salted
herrings to Ireland was 125,445 barrels; to the continent, 89,524; and
to places out of Europe, 79,836: whereas in 1851 the figures were,
Ireland, 66,138; continent, 198,403; places out of Europe, 2367: and in
1884, Ireland, 34,000; continent, 1,149,000; places out of Europe, 960
barrels. The radical changes in the quantities of fish consumed at the
different markets in the course of half a century are rather striking;
but Ireland has, it is said, largely substituted bacon and other cheap
food for the once much-prized fish; while the almost complete collapse
of the colonial trade is directly caused by the emancipation of the
West Indian slaves, who were provided by their masters with salted
herrings as the leading article of fare, and who, in order to efface
all recollections of their former degradation, studiously avoided
touching the herring after their liberty was secured!
Although not the rule, a number of fishermen often commence fishing for
herrings at various ports on the east coast early in July; but it is
generally not until about the 20th of the month that the fishermen’s
regular engagements commence and operations are begun in earnest.
At that date the fishcurers are bound to receive the fish at twenty
shillings per cran—one cran being equal to a capacity of thirty-seven
gallons, and reckoned to contain about eight hundred herrings—from
early morning till twelve o’clock midnight; and should the weather
prove favourable and the shoals abundant, a single crew of energetic
men have often earned no less than one hundred pounds in the first week
of the fishing, and continued the work with such success, that at the
end of the season of eight weeks, a sum of five hundred pounds stood
at their credit in the fishcurer’s books. In recent years, the boats
have largely increased at the leading ports of Fraserburgh, Peterhead,
Aberdeen, and Wick, where the numbers employed during the season vary
from seven or eight hundred at Fraserburgh, down to four hundred at
Aberdeen—not to mention the enormous recent increase at Shetland—each
boat being manned by six men and one boy. The extent of netting in use
has also largely increased.
For a considerable period of the season the boats prosecute the fishing
on the banks from forty to sixty miles away, gradually nearing the
shore as the season advances; but in no season imitating the modest
efforts of the fishermen of forty or fifty years ago, who never
ventured more than ten or fifteen miles off, with the result that
the fish, undisturbed in their inward course, were caught in large
quantities quite close to the shore. With regard to those days, many
of the old people now living on the Aberdeenshire coast have a vivid
recollection of the extraordinary excitement that existed in the
fishing-towns one or two generations ago when the word passed round
that ‘a body’ of herrings had at length appeared in the bay, the
indications of which were a dense flock of seagulls to be seen preying
upon the finny tribe, or a large shoal of whales pursuing the fish—the
manœuvres of the former attracting the fishermen to their mark, and
afforded an interesting sight to those on the shore.
At this stage of its history, one of the most serious drawbacks to the
prosperity of the herring-fishery was the immense shoals of dogfish
which regularly visited the north-east coast during the months of July
and August, to the almost complete prostration of the fishermen’s
efforts; for not only did those rapacious fishes greatly destroy the
nets in their pursuit of food, but the herrings, which seemed to have
a wholesome dread of this enemy, immediately disappeared from their
usual haunts whenever the dogfish arrived upon the ground. It was no
uncommon thing to see boat-loadfuls of dogfish brought in daily by
the fishermen, from whom they were purchased by farmers and crofters
for manuring the land, and also for the purpose of providing oil for
domestic uses; as, before paraffine or candles had come within the
reach of all, a great portion of the lamp-oil used by the poorer
classes, on the Aberdeenshire coast at least, was extracted from
dogfish. After having visited the coast bound by the German Ocean more
or less regularly for sixty or seventy years, the dogfish mysteriously
disappeared in 1866; and though they are still met with at intervals by
fishermen at the west coast herring-fishing (Lewis and Barra) and at
Shetland, they have never again returned to the east coast; a freak of
nature which has puzzled the most intelligent fishcurer or fisherman
to explain, but which has wielded an influence for good scarcely
conceivable, since the disappearance of these pests from the adjacent
seas marked the setting in of a tide of prosperity in the trade which
has never again receded. The greatly increased size and number of
boats, and the competition for herrings existing in the trade, have
rendered inshore fishing next to impossible; and as it is generally the
case that herrings are now more abundant at sea than near the land,
the anxiety to secure good takes is year by year drawing the fishermen
to more distant grounds; hence, there are reasonable prospects that
ere many years have elapsed, the prosecution of the fishing will have
developed into the regular employment of large smacks and steam-craft
able to venture great distances to sea, and, if need be, remain there
till a sufficient catch has been obtained.
* * * * *
Having given a short sketch of the rise and progress of the Scotch
herring business, some notes on the social aspect of the industry,
and a general description of the present mode of catching and curing
the fish, will probably prove interesting to those who have not been
privileged to visit any of the great fishing-towns during the months
of July and August, a time of each year when the mighty herring
constitutes the sole topic of conversation.
At the harbours of the herring-towns in the end of June and beginning
of July, boats are arriving from north, south, and west laden with all
kinds of household goods; and uppermost are the fisher-folk’s beds and
blankets, upon which are lying the wives and children, who have been
taken by this route to save the expense of a trip by rail, but whose
condition, from the effects of stormy seas, often demonstrates the
folly of the fishermen’s financial policy. In addition to the fishermen
and their belongings, every train brings hundreds of Highlanders from
Inverness, Sutherland, Ross, and the Isles in search of employment on
board the boats; and they, in conjunction with the influx of crofters
(to be engaged for carting purposes), tramps, itinerant dealers,
preaching representatives of various denominations, &c., soon swell
the normal population by many thousands, and form as motley a crowd
as can be well imagined. The fishing-towns of Aberdeenshire and more
northern ports awaken, after a protracted period of somnolence, to
the fact that the season of activity has arrived; and the streets
which formerly looked bare and deserted, now teem with men, women, and
children, all drawn together to share in the spoils of the deep. Order
in such a miscellaneous population is sometimes not easily maintained,
and the surging and unruly masses which on a Saturday night congregate
about the leading thoroughfares tax the energies of the police to the
uttermost; and if the Highlanders be on the ‘warpath’ from the effects
of too liberal potations of their own ‘mountain dew,’ the question
of local government has to be settled by military force—an instance
of which took place at Fraserburgh in 1874, when fully a thousand
Highlanders in an infuriated condition wrecked the police station,
bombarded the town-house, and threatened to burn the town, and were
only brought to their senses by the arrival of a detachment of soldiers
from Aberdeen.
The evening of the seventh day of the week is invariably one of
confusion, noise, and fight in every large fishing-town; but throughout
the other nights, all frivolities are cast aside, and the single aim
of the whole community is to secure as rich a harvest of herrings as
possible. Under ordinary circumstances, the sight afforded by the
departure from the harbour of so many craft crawling lazily along in
twos, threes, and half-dozens, is very pretty; but when the prospects
of a good fishing are exercising the fishermen’s minds, and every
one is anxious to reach the fishing-ground early, the excitement and
competition among the fishermen to secure a good start, transforms
the harbour channel into a scene of the wildest confusion, where the
fishermen shout, threaten, and at times deal blows at each other,
playing tragedy and comedy in turns, to the intense delight of those
watching their movements from the piers. Should the weather be
favourable, the boats keep constantly streaming from the harbour-mouth;
and if a fresh breeze prevails, a very short time will suffice to
fill the bay with hundreds of the handy little craft, gaily ploughing
their eastward course to the fishing-ground. By-and-by the horizon for
a considerable stretch will be dotted with their brown sails, still
holding onwards; and only when the sea and clouds join hands, do they
finally disappear in the wide waste of waters.
On leaving the harbour and getting the sails set and trimmed, the crew
of the craft betake themselves to comfortable quarters among the nets
and spare sails lying about the deck, where local yarns are told, and
the Highlanders sing Gaelic songs, or rehearse the leading incidents
of their life in the Western Isles since last ‘she’ was in the east
coast; but as the fishing-ground is neared, the stories cease, and
every one, from the skipper down to the ‘scummer’ boy—the lad who is
employed with a small hand-net to pick any herrings out of the water
that happen to fall from the nets—eagerly scans the water in hopes of
descrying indications of fish. Should the wished-for appearances be
discovered, so much the better; but it often happens that no certain
proofs of the existence of fish are obtained, and after reaching a
distance where fish are supposed to abound, the sails are lowered,
and the men commence to cast the nets into the sea in the dusk of the
evening. In doing this, a small portion of the sail is hoisted, and
while the craft moves slowly through the water, the fishermen continue
casting their nets overboard, until their fleet of say, fifty, nets,
attached to one another, and extending in a direct line for a length
of two thousand yards, are shot, the whole hanging perpendicularly in
the water, and suspended from a rope, to which is fastened skin or
metallic buoys floating on the surface of the water. When the whole of
the nets belonging to the boats engaged at a large station are set, the
sea for a stretch of many miles is one complete network, from which the
herrings can scarcely escape; and the work falling upon the fishermen
nightly in shooting and hauling their nets may be guessed from the fact
that the netting used by the Scotch fishermen, if stretched in a direct
line, would extend ten thousand miles, or something like three times
across the Atlantic.
Having got the nets safely into the deep, the mast is lowered, the
light hoisted, and everything put into its proper place for the night;
and as the craft drifts slowly along with the wind or tide, surrounded
by hundreds of other fishing-boats, not a sound is heard save the
occasional whistle of a steamer slowly threading its way through the
floating hamlet, or the shrill cry of the expectant seabirds. On board
the boats, the crews have retired to rest, with the exception of one
or two left to act as the watch, but who, when their conversation
runs dry, invariably seek change in the arms of Morpheus, and trust
to providence to fulfil the duties which they had undertaken. Once or
twice during the night the skipper causes a net or two to be pulled up;
and if the prospects of a successful fishing are good, the position
occupied is retained; but if no herrings are in the nets, it is not
uncommon for the crew to remove to another spot, in hopes of meeting in
with better luck, where the labour of shooting the nets has again to be
undergone.
As the morning breaks, the crews bestir themselves, and at an early
hour the work of hauling commences, which being accomplished sooner
or later, according to the weight of fish secured, all canvas is set
upon the craft; and as she speeds steadily through the sea, causing the
wavelets rippling at the bow to sparkle brilliantly in the morning sun,
the crew, all unconscious of the glorious panorama spread before them,
actively engage in shaking the herrings out of the nets and otherwise
preparing for discharging their catch on reaching the harbour. As the
net hangs like a curtain in the water, herring in their progress get
their heads into the meshes, whence they cannot retreat, and are thus
held captive till the nets are hauled on board and the fish shaken into
the hold. On many occasions the herrings strike so densely that almost
a whole complement of nets sink to the bottom, which often entails a
loss upon a single crew of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty
pounds; while at other times the craft are so deeply laden with the
precious freight, that they run the harbour for a distance of perhaps
forty miles, with the water occasionally playing upon their decks, and
only saved from foundering by the extreme calmness of the weather. In
many seasons, the fishing proves a complete blank for a protracted
period; and as the whole community in the fishing-towns is entirely
dependent upon the success of the industry, such occasions throw the
spirits of everybody below zero, and the usual bustle and smiling faces
give place to solemn countenances; and curers, coopers, and others
stand in groups on the piers and at the street corners discussing the
fishermen’s chances and prophesying the result of next week’s fishing.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XXVI.
No human eye ever again beheld Wilberforce Whitaker, alive or dead. The
torrent that had washed down the gap in the narrow horsepath tore away
with it in the course of that evening’s rain a great mass of tottering
earth that had long trembled on the edge of the precipice; and when
next day the governor’s servants went down in awed silence to hunt
among the débris for the mangled body, they found nothing but a soaked
hat on the road behind, and a broken riding-whip close to the huge rent
that yawned across the path by the crumbling ledge of newly fallen
clay. Louis Delgado alone could tell of what had happened; and in Louis
Delgado’s opinion, Dr Whitaker’s crushed and shapeless body must be
lying below under ten thousand tons of landslip rubbish. ‘I see de
gentleman haltin’ on de brink ob de hole,’ he said a hundred times over
to his gossips next day, ‘and I tink I hear him call aloud someting
as him go ober de tip ob de big precipice. But it doan’t sound to me
ezackly as if him scared and shoutin’; ’pears more as if him singing to
hisself a kind ob mounful miserable psalm-tune.’
In tropical countries, people are accustomed to hurricanes and
thunderstorms and landslips and sudden death in every form—does not
the Church service even contain that weirdly suggestive additional
clause among the petitions of the litany, ‘From earthquake, tempest,
and violent commotion, good Lord, deliver us?’—and so nobody ever tried
to dig up Wilberforce Whitaker’s buried body; and if they had tried,
they would never have succeeded in the attempt, for a thousand tons
of broken fragments lay on top of it, and crushed it to atoms beneath
them. Poor old Bobby felt the loss acutely, after his childish fashion,
for nearly a fortnight, and then straightway proceeded to make love as
usual to Miss Seraphina and the other ladies, and soon forgot his whole
trouble in that one congenial lifelong occupation.
Nora Dupuy did not so quickly recover the shock that the mulatto’s
sudden and almost supernatural death had given her system. It was many
weeks before she began to feel like herself again, or to trust herself
in a room alone for more than a very few minutes together. Born West
Indian as she was, and therefore superstitious, she almost feared that
Dr Whitaker’s ghost would come to plead his cause with her once more,
as he himself had pleaded with her that last unhappy evening on the
Italian terrace. It wasn’t her fault, to be sure, that she had been
the unwitting cause of his death; and yet in her own heart she felt to
herself almost as if she had deliberately and intentionally killed him.
That insuperable barrier of race that had stood so effectually in his
way while he was still alive was partly removed now that she could no
longer see him in person; and more than once, Nora found herself in her
own room with tears standing in both her eyes for the poor mulatto she
could never possibly or conceivably have married.
As for Tom Dupuy, he couldn’t understand such delicate shades and
undertones of feeling as those which came so naturally to Nora; and
he had therefore a short and easy explanation of his own for his
lively little cousin’s altered demeanour. ‘Nora was in love with that
infernal nigger fellow,’ he said confidently over and over again to
his uncle Theodore. ‘You take my word for it, she was head over ears
in love with him; that’s about the size of it. And that evening when
she behaved so disgracefully with him on the terrace at the governor’s,
he proposed to her, and she accepted him, as sure as gospel. If I
hadn’t threatened him with a good sound horsewhipping, and driven him
away from the house in a deuce of a funk, so that he went off with his
tail between his legs, and broke his neck over a precipice in that
terrible thunderstorm—you mark my words, Uncle Theodore—she’d have gone
off, as I always said she would, and she’d have ended by marrying a
woolly-headed brown man.’
Mr Theodore Dupuy, for his part, considered that even to mention the
bare possibility of such a disgrace within the bosom of the family was
an insult to the pure blood of the Dupuys that his nephew Tom ought to
have been the last man on earth to dream of perpetrating.
Time rolled on, however, month after month, and gradually Nora began
to recover something of her natural gaiety. Even deep impressions last
a comparatively short time with bright young girls; and before six
months more had fairly rolled by, Nora was again the same gay, light,
merry, dancing little thing that she had always been, in England or in
Trinidad.
One morning, about twelve months after Nora’s first arrival in the
island, the English mail brought a letter for her father, which he
read with evident satisfaction, and then handed it contentedly to Nora
across the breakfast-table. Nora recognised the crest and monogram in a
moment with a faint flutter: she had seen them once before, a year ago,
in England. They were Harry Noel’s. But the postmark was Barbadoes. She
read the letter eagerly and hastily.
‘DEAR SIR’—it ran—‘I have had the pleasure already of meeting some
members of your family on the other side of the Atlantic’—that was
an overstatement, Nora thought to herself quietly; the plural for
the singular—‘and as I have come out to look after some property of
my father’s here in Barbadoes, I propose to run across to Trinidad
also, by the next steamer, and gain a little further insight
into the habits and manners of the West Indies. My intention is
to stop during my stay with my friend Mr Hawthorn, who—as you
doubtless know—holds a district judgeship or something of the sort
somewhere in Trinidad. But I think it best at the same time to
inclose a letter of introduction to yourself from General Sir Henry
Laboutillière, whom I daresay you remember as formerly commandant
of Port-of-Spain when the Hundred and Fiftieth were in your island.
I shall do myself the honour of calling upon you very shortly after
my arrival, and am meanwhile, very faithfully yours,
HARRY NOEL.’
The letter of introduction which accompanied this very formal note
briefly set forth that Sir Walter Noel, Mr Noel’s father, was an
exceedingly old and intimate friend of the writer’s, and that he would
feel much obliged if Mr Dupuy would pay young Mr Noel any attentions in
his power during his short stay in the island of Trinidad.
It would be absurd to deny that Nora felt flattered. She blushed, and
blushed, and blushed again, with unmistakable pleasure. To be sure, she
had refused Harry Noel; and if he were to ask her again, even now, she
would refuse him a second time. But no girl on earth is wholly proof in
her own heart against resolute persistence. Even if she doesn’t care
a pin for a man from the matrimonial point of view, yet provided only
he is ‘nice’ and ‘eligible,’ she feels naturally flattered by the mere
fact that he pays her attention. If the attention is marked and often
renewed, the flattery is all the deeper, subtler, and more effective.
But here was Harry Noel, pursuant of his threat (or should we rather
say his promise?), following her up right across the Atlantic, and
coming to lay siege to her heart with due formalities once more, in the
very centre of her own stronghold! Yes, Nora was undeniably pleased.
Of course, she didn’t care for him; oh, dear, no, not the least little
bit in the world, really; but still, even if you don’t want to accept
a lover, you know, it is at anyrate pleasant to have the opportunity
of a second time cruelly rejecting him. So Nora blushed, and smiled to
herself, and blushed over again, and felt by no means out of humour at
Harry Noel’s evident persistence.
‘Well, Nora?’ her father said to her, eyeing her interrogatively. ‘What
do you think of it?’
‘I think, papa, Mr Noel’s a very gentlemanly, nice young man, of a very
good old English family.’
‘Yes, yes, Nora: I know that, of course. I see as much from Sir Henry
Laboutillière’s letter of introduction. But what I mean is, we must
have him here, at Orange Grove, naturally, mustn’t we? It would never
do, you see, to let a member of the English aristocracy’—Mr Dupuy
dwelt lovingly upon these latter words with some unction, as preachers
dwell with lingering cadence upon the special shibboleths of their own
particular sect or persuasion—‘go to stop with such people as your
coloured friends over yonder at Mulberry, the Hawthorns.’
Nora was silent.
‘Why don’t you answer me, miss?’ Mr Dupuy asked testily, after waiting
for a moment in silent expectation.
‘Because I will never speak to you about my own friends, papa, when you
choose to talk of them in such untrue and undeserved language.’
Mr Dupuy smiled urbanely. He was in a good humour. It flattered him,
too, to think that when members of the English aristocracy came
out to Trinidad they should naturally select him, Theodore Dupuy,
Esquire, of Orange Grove, as the proper person towards whom to look
for hospitality. The fame of the fighting Dupuys was probably not
unknown to the fashionable world even in London. They were recognised
and talked about. So Mr Dupuy merely smiled a bland smile of utter
obliviousness, and observed in the air (as men do when they are
addressing nobody in particular): ‘Coloured people are always coloured
people, I suppose, whether they’re much or little coloured; just as
a dog’s always a dog whether he’s a great big heavy St Bernard or a
little snarling snapper of a Skye terrier. But anyhow, it’s quite clear
to me individually that we can’t let this young Mr Noel—a person of
distinction, Nora, a person of distinction—go and stop at any other
house in this island except here at Orange Grove, I assure you, my
dear. Tom or I must certainly go down to meet the steamer, and bring
him up here bodily in the buggy, before your friend Mr Hawthorn—about
whose personal complexion I prefer to say absolutely nothing, for good
or for evil—has time to fasten on him and drag him away by main force
to his own dwelling-place.’ (Mr Dupuy avoided calling Mulberry Lodge a
house on principle; for in the West Indies, it is an understood fact
that only white people live in houses.)
‘But, papa,’ Nora cried, ‘you really mustn’t. I don’t think you ought
to bring him up here. Wouldn’t it—well, you know, wouldn’t it look just
a little pointed, considering there’s nobody else at all living in the
house except you and me, you know, papa?’
‘My dear,’ Mr Dupuy said, not unkindly, ‘a member of the English
aristocracy, when he comes to Trinidad, ought to be received in the
house of one of the recognised gentry of the island, and not in
that—well, not in the dwelling-place of any person not belonging to the
aristocracy of Trinidad. _Noblesse oblige_, Nora; _noblesse oblige_,
remember. Besides, when you consider the relation in which you already
stand to your cousin Tom, my dear—why, an engaged young lady, of
course, an engaged young lady occupies nearly the same position in that
respect as if she were already actually married.’
‘But I’m not engaged, papa,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And I never will
be to Tom Dupuy, if I die unmarried, either.’
‘That, my dear,’ Mr Dupuy responded blandly, looking at her with
parental fondness, ‘is a question on which I venture to think myself
far better qualified to form an opinion than a mere girl of barely
twenty. Tom and I have arranged between us, as I have often already
pointed out to you, that the family estates ought on all accounts
to be reunited in your persons. As soon as you are twenty-two, my
dear, we propose that you should marry. Meanwhile, it can only arouse
unseemly differences within the family to discuss the details of the
question prematurely. I have made up my mind, and will not go back upon
it. A Dupuy never does. As to this young Mr Noel who’s coming from
Barbadoes, I shall go down myself to the next steamer, and look out
to offer him our hospitality immediately on his arrival, before any
coloured people—I mention no names—can seize upon the opportunity of
intercepting him, and carrying him off forcibly against his will, bag
and baggage, to their own dwelling-places.’
SOME RUSTIC NAMES OF FLOWERS.
Who does not love the country names of old-fashioned flowers
better than those by which botanists and florists call them? By
old-fashioned flowers—if forms perennially renewed can ever be called
old-fashioned—are meant the flowers our oldest poets praise, and whose
simple charms find a place in the songs of modern ones—flowers, the
roots of which the old Flemings and the proscribed of Nantes brought
with them in their enforced migration to this country, and which, like
the industries they introduced, flourished into brighter bloom and
strength than in the Fatherland. Some of the rustic names of these old
flowers have a quaint prettiness and meaning in them, like the pet
names of little children, which are at once piquant and endearing;
and as some are local, others little known, and others, again, nearly
obsolete, and likely to be wholly so in another generation or two, one
is interested in endeavouring to preserve them.
The ‘Falfalaries’ (checkered snake’s head) of old Shropshire people are
properly spoken of by their children’s children as ‘Fritillaries;’[1]
and bright-looking blushful ‘Pretty Betty,’ indigenous to the Kentish
chalk, and familiar to many persons by this name, is now, thanks to
botany and Board Schools, correctly known as ‘Red Valerian.’ We,
however, who have known it from childhood by its homelier name, will
know it by no other; for us, it will always be ‘Pretty Betty,’ and
suggestive of the high bloom on the hypothetical maiden’s cheek in
honour of whom it was so named. In Chaucer’s time, it was crudely
called ‘Setwale,’ or ‘Set-a-wall,’ from its well-known habit of
cresting old castles and other crumbling walls, and of growing
above gray posterns and old garden-gates, whence, from the tender
‘Good-nights’ not unusual at such places, it probably got its
Shropshire name of ‘Kiss-at-the-wicket,’ and its Surrey synonym,
‘Kiss-behind-the-garden-gate.’ The variegated ‘Ribbon-grass’ of
our gardens, anciently called—but that was when the rood of Boxley
flourished, and village maidens, knowing no other literature, read
their saints’ calendar in flowers—‘Our Lady’s Laces,’ had become,
when Parkinson wrote, ‘Painted’ or ‘Ladies’ Laces,’ which makes all
the difference. In many places it has the common name of ‘Gardener’s
Garters;’ but in a corner of Kent not far from the Weald, where many
old-world ways and words are cherished, it has the pretty, pert,
but apposite one of ‘Match-me-if-you-can’—a name that prompted the
examination of a dozen blades of it, only to discover that, by some
exquisite diversity of arrangement of the creamy white and pale-green
stripes, not one of the delicately striated leaves exactly resembled
another.
‘I won’t have it called “London-pride,”’ said the eighty-year-old
proprietress of a garden, once fuller of bloom and colour and sweetness
than any other we have known; but that was before sight failed its
owner. ‘What have we country-folk and simple flowers to do with
“London-pride?” For my part, I like it best by its old Kentish name
of “None-so-pretty.”’ If any doubt the fitness of the sobriquet, let
them take the trouble to microscopically examine the minute painted and
jewelled corolla of this flower, and assure themselves how truly it
deserves the appellation.
No country garden is without ‘Honesty,’ or ‘White Satin-flower’ as it
is sometimes called, from the silvery lustre of its large circularly
shaped _saliques_, which, when dried, were used to dress up fireplaces
in summer, and decorate the chimney-mantels of cottages and village
inns. Our aged friend had another name for this plant also, and called
it ‘Money-in-both-pockets.’ The curious seed-vessels, which grow in
pairs, and are semi-transparent, show the flat disc-shaped seeds like
little coins within them, an appearance which no doubt originated the
name.
Reminiscent of the times to which we just now alluded, when holy
names hung about the hedgerows, and the blossoming of plants recalled
sacred seasons and events, the lilac in Devonshire bears the name of
‘Whitsuntide Flower;’ the country-people know it by no other. There
_Cardamine pratensis_, Shakspeare’s ‘Lady-smocks,’ the ‘Cuckoo-flower’
of old Gerarde, whose blossoms border the streams and rivulets in
spring ‘all silver-white,’ like lengths of bleaching linen, is
known as ‘Milkmaids;’ and in the same county the ‘Foxglove’ becomes
‘Folk’s-glove’ or ‘Fairy-glove;’ while in Ireland, children call the
drooping tubular freckled bells ‘Fairy thimbles,’ and are careful not
to meddle with them after sunset, on pain of being pinched by the
‘good-people.’
The milk-white ‘Candytuft’ (_Iberis amara_) grows plentifully on stony
upland fields in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Once, in the latter county,
when we were gathering some of it from a field in which some women were
weeding, one of them remarked to another that she should not have liked
to have done so when she was a young woman; upon which we inquired its
name, and was told, almost reluctantly, ‘Poverty’—a most expressive
name; for it loves best a poor and arid soil, and has its botanical
name from its intense bitterness. Evidently, village lads and lasses
had from early times an unwritten language of flowers, and this was one
of its phrases.
As our readers know, ‘Pansy’ is a very old name for the ‘Heart’s-ease,’
as old at least as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and probably older. Spenser
writes of the ‘pretty pauncy;’ and Ophelia gives it ‘for thought.’ It
is a plant of many names. Shakspeare twice calls it ‘Love-in-idleness.’
Poor, simple, pious folk, seeing its three lower petals rayed like a
‘glory,’ called it ‘Herb of the Trinity.’ The vagrant habit of the
plant procured it the name of ‘Kit-run-the-streets,’ which appellation
it has not wholly lost in country-places. Rustics also call it
‘Two-faces-under-a-hood.’ But it was as ‘Heart’s-ease’ we first
knew it, a name that gives sweet force to that other old-world one,
‘Call-me-to-you,’ which without it had been meaningless.
Of local names for flowers, one of the prettiest we know is that by
which a Dorsetshire girl designated the ‘Michaelmas Daisy’—a name full
of unconscious poetry; she called it ‘Summer’s Farewell.’ ‘We shall not
have many more nosegays this year, ma’am; I see “Summer’s Farewell” is
blowing;’ and upon desiring to see the unknown flower, she pointed out
the familiar ‘Michaelmas Daisy.’
In Wiltshire, the children give the names of ‘Rushlights’ and
‘Fairy-candles’ to the ‘Trip-madam’ of our ancestors, the small
fleshy-leaved erect stems and terminal flowers with spreading
anthers of the yellow sedum (or stonecrop), frequent on old walls
and housetops; and to the subtle child-fancy, we have no doubt the
resemblance is sufficiently strong to set them all alight on summer
nights.
The ‘Danewort’ or Dwarf-elder is in some districts said to be so called
because the people fancy it sprung from the blood of the Danes slain in
battle; and that if, upon a certain day of the year, you cut it, it
bleeds. It is noteworthy that the large terminal cymes of this plant,
which loves waste places, are of a purplish colour, the berries black,
and that the juice of the flowering stems, like the fruit, produces a
blood-like stain.
The curious corruption of ‘Fritillary’ to ‘Falfalarie,’ with which we
started, is easily understood; but who would recognise the poetically
named ‘Narcissus’ under the homely guise of ‘White Nancies,’ the
common name for it in Shropshire gardens? We had rather it kept its
pretty rustic name of ‘daffodil,’ a name inwoven in many a garland of
old English verse, and sweetly suggestive of woods, and nut-boughs
sparkling with buds, and village children, and the fresh young joy of
spring. The name daffodil is now generally applied to the species with
bright yellow flowers.
Another old-world plant included in these days under the generic name
of _Campanula_, and which in many parts was known as ‘Country-bells,’
keeps in its Kentish name of ‘Canterbury-bells’ a local legend;
and is so called not only from the prevalence of the plant in the
neighbourhood of the old sainted city, but because it was the type of
‘Becket’s bells,’ which pilgrims to his shrine carried away with them,
in token of their having been there. Another of its tribe, better
known than liked, has the quaint name of ‘Little-steeple-bell-flower,’
a picturesque name one would not willingly blot out from floral
nomenclature; though its common one of ‘Rampions’ is quite good enough
for it, and highly characteristic of the exuberant mode in which its
fleshy and at the same time fibrous roots take possession of the soil
and overrun it. It is a dangerous plant to admit into gardens, where
its tall tapering stem, beset with little watchet blue-bells, is
occasionally seen.
In the north of England, the wild hyacinth of the south—sometimes
erroneously called ‘Harebell’—with its pendulous flowers underhanging
each other on one side only of its drooping stem, has the curious
name of ‘Ring-of-bells’ from a fancied resemblance (a writer in
_Notes and Queries_ tells us) to the bells on which King David is
sometimes represented playing in old wood-engravings. In Shropshire,
the fertile stems of the Horsetail (_Equisetum arvenses_), which
shoot up like brown pencils out of the soil before the sterile ones
appear, are called ‘Toadpipes’ by the children; and a similar name is
applied to them in many parts of Scotland. In Shropshire, also, the
chalk-white flowers of the rock alyssum have the pretty trivial name
of ‘Summer Snow;’ and the scarlet pimpernel, that trusted hydroscope
of hind and shepherd—of which Lord Bacon wrote: ‘There is a small
flower in the stubble-fields which country-people call “Wincopipe,”
which if it openeth in the morning, you may be sure of a fine day’—is
‘Wincopeep;’ which, methinks, to use his lordship’s idiom, is the
more correct of the two, seeing the habit of the plant is to close
its petals when a rain-cloud dulls the sky, and to open them wide in
sunshine—alternations suggestive of the name ‘Wink-and-peep,’ which
time has probably contracted. In some places it is known as ‘the poor
man’s weather-glass.’
In the same district, that fine sour relish of our childhood,
‘Sorrel,’ is simply ‘Sour-dock;’ and the early Purple Orchis (_O.
mascula_), with its dark-green leaves plashed with brown, and spikes
of richly coloured flowers springing up in cowslip-covered meadows, is
hailed as ‘King’s Fingers.’
The cowslip has in Shropshire the common name of ‘Paigle,’ a name
the derivation of which no one appears to understand; but its old
Kentish name of ‘Culver-keys’ is unknown. We have lately seen the
meaning of this also queried. It had its origin most probably in the
common country fashion of christening flowers, in Gerarde’s time,
from some fancied resemblance in its drooping umbel of unopened
flowers to a ‘bunch of keys’ hanging from a ring or girdle; just as
the pendent clusters of ash-seeds are called—we presume from the same
idea—‘Ashen-keys;’ and as a bunch of keys must belong to some one or
some thing, why not to the ‘culver,’ or wood-pigeon? In this fanciful
way we can imagine the pretty rustic name of ‘Culver-key’ coming about;
an hypothesis wholly our own, and therefore open to correction.
It was after this fashion, Parkinson tells us, he named the ‘Wild
Clematis’ (_C. vitalba_), ‘Traveller’s Joy,’ because it loves to spread
green bowers in hedgerows near villages and the habitations of men. But
whence came the name of ‘Roving Sailor?’—one of the trivial ones for
the ivy-leaved Toad-flax (_Linaria cymbalaria_), the fine thread-like
runners of which hang from old garden-walls—those of Hampton Court,
for instance—bearing in their season little solitary blue or purple
petaled flowers. No rustic would have so named it; to him, its other
appellations of ‘Hen-and-chickens,’ or ‘Mother-of-thousands,’ would
have been more natural. But ‘Roving Sailor’ savours of that other
element with which the husbandman meddles not, and may have been
bestowed by some maritime superannuant, whose imagination transformed
the long streaming roots into cordage, and the tiny blue-jacketed
flowers into sailors climbing it, while the straggling habit of the
plant completed the similitude.
Traditions die hard in country villages, and faith in the specially
remedial properties of plants once dedicated to holy names and
anniversaries is by no means extinct amongst peasant-folk. Thus, we
were gravely informed last summer by a cottager of our acquaintance,
in the sweet hamlet of Harbledown, in Kent, that there was nothing
for a green wound better than the leaves of our ‘Saviour’s Flannel’
(or ‘Blanket’), a startling name for the exquisitely soft, glaucous,
green leaves of what some persons secularly call ‘Mouse-ear,’ and
which—to liken nature to art—resemble in texture the finest silken
plush, and retain their softness and pliability for months after they
are gathered. It is often seen in borders, where its silvery leaves and
pale mauve-coloured flowers render it effective.
Again, the great ‘White Lily’ (_Lilium candidum_), the ‘Sceptre
Lily’ of our time, ‘Our Lady’s Lily’ in the past, of which the old
masters made such effective use in their pictures of the Virgin, is
in Shropshire still known as ‘Ascension Lily,’ an evident misnomer.
It should be, remembering the time of its blooming, the ‘Lily of the
Annunciation.’ In the neighbourhood of the Wrekin it has another
name—it is the ‘Healing Lily;’ and the curative virtue of the whole
plant is firmly believed in.
It was a pretty custom to name the plants after the saints and holy
seasons about whose anniversaries they fell a-flowering. It saved some
absurdities and vulgarities in christening them, and left us names so
sweet and appropriate, that, like the gillyflowers and sops-in-wine,
sweetbrier, &c., of the old poets, they will never become old or inapt.
Who would exchange ‘Christmas Rose’ for ‘Black Hellebore,’ or ‘Lent
Lily’ for ‘Pseudo Narcissus,’ or prefer ‘Anemone’ to ‘Easter-flower,’
or ‘Polygally’ to ‘Crosswort?’ (carried on wands in the ancient
perambulations of Rogation-week). ‘Whitsuntide Flower’ is a prettier
name than ‘Lilac,’ and ‘Michaelmas Daisy’ than ‘Aster Tradescanti,’ the
one by which it was known when Charles I. was king.
But these are not the purely rustic names of plants with which we
started. One more example—a local one—and our personally formed
catalogue of them is ended. Any one who has observed the regular
height to which the garden fumitory grows when planted against a wall,
forming a background of its soft, finely cut, bright-green leaves,
which overhang each other, and the seemingly equal distances at which
its clusters of yellow or rose coloured flowers depend, will at
once perceive the fitness of its quaint Shropshire name of ‘Ladies’
Needlework Flower.’ It has the richness, with some of the formality, of
a flounce of old chenille embroidery, such as in other years exercised
the industry and ingenuity of English ladies. This plant is said to be
called fumitory (earth-smoke, _fume terre_) from the belief that it was
produced without seed from vapours arising from the earth. This was
an ancient and well-rooted belief as far back as 1485. In Kent it is
called ‘waxdolls,’ from the doll-like appearance of its little flowers.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Near Weston, one of the seats of the Earl of Bradford, in
Shropshire, there is a field locally called the ‘Falfalarie Field,’
which people annually visit for the sake of the fritillary, which
abounds there, as it does in Christ Church Meadows, Oxford.
SPIRITED AWAY.
IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAP. III.