“Like a timeless birth, the womb of fate
Bore a new death of unrecorded date,
And doubtful name.”--MONTGOMERY.
[Sidenote: THE ECONOMY OF ACCIDENT.]
In the history of every community there are periods of comparative
quiet, when the great machine of society performs all its various
movements so smoothly and regularly, that there is nothing to remind
us of its being in motion. And who has not remarked that when an
unlooked-for accident sets it a-jarring, by breaking up some minor
wheel or axis, there follows a whole series of disasters--pressing
the one upon the other, with stroke after stroke. We live, perhaps,
in some quiet village, and see our neighbours, the inhabitants,
moving noiselessly around us--the young rising up to maturity, the
old descending slowly to the grave. Death for a long series of years
drafts out his usual number of conscripts from among only the weak
and the aged; and there is no irregular impressment of the young and
vigorous in the way of accident. Anon, however, there succeeds a
series of disasters. One of the villagers topples over a precipice,
one is engulfed in a morass, one is torn to pieces by the wheels of
an engine, one perishes in fording a river, one falls by the hand of
an enemy, one dies by his own. And then in a few months, perhaps, the
old order of things is again established, and all goes on regularly
as before. In the phenomena of even the inanimate world we see marks
of a similar economy. Whoever has mused for a single half hour by the
side of a waterfall, must have remarked that, without any apparent
change in the volume of the stream, the waters descend at one time
louder and more furious, at another gentler and more subdued. Whoever
has listened to the howlings of the night wind, must have heard it
sinking at intervals into long hollow pauses, and then rising and
sweeping onwards, gust after gust. Whoever has stood on the sea-shore
during a tempest, must have observed that the waves roll towards their
iron barrier in alternate series of greater and lesser--now fretting
ineffectually against it, now thundering irresistibly over. But between
the irregularities of the inanimate world, and those of the rational,
there exists one striking difference. We may assign natural causes for
the alternate rises and falls of the winds and waters; but it is not
thus in most instances with those ebbs and flows, gusts and pauses,
which occur in the world of man. They set our reasonings at defiance,
and we can refer them to only the will of Deity. We can only say
regarding them, that the climax is a favourite figure in the book of
Providence;--that God speaks to us in His dispensations, and, in the
more eloquent turns of His discourse, piles up instance upon instance
with sublime and impressive profusion.
[Sidenote: THE BLACK YEARS.]
To the people of Scotland the whole of the seventeenth century was
occupied by one continuous series of suffering and disaster. And though
we can assign causes for every one of the evils which compose the
series, just as we can assign causes for every single accident which
befalls the villagers, or for the repeated attacks and intervening
pauses of the hurricane, it is a rather different matter to account
for the series itself. In flinging a die we may chance on any one
certain number as readily as on any other; but it would be a rare
occurrence, indeed, should the same number turn up some eight or ten
times together. And is there nothing singular in the fact, that, for
a whole century, a nation should have been invariably unfortunate in
every change with which it was visited, and have met with only disaster
in all its undertakings? There turned up an unlucky number at every
cast of the die. Even when the shout of the persecutor, and the groans
of his victim, had ceased to echo among our rocks and caverns, the very
elements arrayed themselves against the people, and wasting famine and
exterminating pestilence did the work of the priest and the tyrant. I
am acquainted with no writer who has described this last infliction of
the series so graphically, and with such power, as Peter Walker in his
Life of Cargill. Other contemporary historians looked down on this part
of their theme from the high places of society;--they were the soldiers
of a well-victualled garrison, situated in the midst of a wasted
country, and sympathized but little in the misery that approached
them no nearer than the outer gate. But it was not thus with the poor
Pedlar;--he was barred out among the sufferers, and exposed to the
evils which he so feelingly describes.
One night in the month of August 1694, a cold east wind, accompanied by
a dense sulphurous fog, passed over the country, and the half-filled
corn was struck with mildew. It shrank and whitened in the sun, till
the fields seemed as if sprinkled with flour, and where the fog had
remained longest--for in some places it stood up like a chain of hills
during the greater part of the night--the more disastrous were its
effects. From this unfortunate year, till the year 1701, the land
seemed as if struck with barrenness, and such was the change on the
climate, that the seasons of summer and winter were cold and gloomy in
nearly the same degree. The wonted heat of the sun was with-holden,
the very cattle became stunted and meagre, the moors and thickets were
nearly divested of their feathered inhabitants, and scarcely a fly
or any other insect was to be seen even in the beginning of autumn.
November and December, and in some places January and February, became
the months of harvest; and labouring people contracted diseases which
terminated in death, when employed in cutting down the corn among ice
and snow. Of the scanty produce of the fields, much was left to rot on
the ground, and much of what was carried home proved unfit for the
sustenance of either man or beast. There is a tradition that a farmer
of Cromarty employed his children, during the whole winter of 1694, in
picking out the sounder grains of corn from a blasted heap, the sole
product of his farm, to serve for seed in the ensuing spring.
In the meantime the country began to groan under famine. The little
portions of meal which were brought to market were invariably disposed
of at exorbitant prices, before half the people were supplied; “and
then,” says Walker, “there would ensue a screaming and clapping of
hands among the women.” “How shall we go home,” he has heard them
exclaim, “and see our children dying of hunger?--they have had no
food for these two days and we have nothing to give them.” There was
many “a black and pale face in Scotland;” and many of the labouring
poor, ashamed to beg, and too honest to steal, shut themselves up
in their comfortless houses, to sit with their eyes fixed on the
floor till their very sight failed them. The savings of the careful
and industrious were soon dissipated; and many who were in easy
circumstances when the scarcity came on, had sunk into abject poverty
ere it passed away. Human nature is a sad thing when subjected to
the test of circumstances so trying. As the famine increased, people
came to be so wrapped up in their own sufferings, that “wives thought
not of their husbands, nor husbands of their wives, parents of their
children, nor children of their parents.” “And their staff of bread,”
says the Pedlar, “was so utterly broken, that when they ate they were
neither satisfied nor nourished. They could think of nothing but food,
and being wholly unconcerned whether they went to heaven or hell, the
success of the gospel came to a stand.”
[Sidenote: PROGRESS OF THE PESTILENCE.]
The pestilence which accompanied this terrible visitation broke out in
November 1694, when many of the people were seized by “strange fevers,
and sore fluxes of a most infectious nature,” which defied the utmost
power of medicine. “For the oldest physicians,” says Walker, “had
never seen the like before, and could make no help.” In the parish of
West Calder, out of nine hundred “examinable persons” three hundred
were swept away; and in Livingston, in a little village called the
Craigs, inhabited by only six or eight families, there were thirty
corpses in the space of a few days. In the parish of Resolis whole
villages were depopulated, and the foundations of the houses, for they
were never afterwards inhabited, can still be pointed out by old men
of the place. So violent were the effects of the disease, that people,
who in the evening were in apparent health, would be found lying dead
in their houses next morning, “the head resting on the hand, and the
face and arms not unfrequently gnawed by the rats.” The living were
wearied with burying the dead; bodies were drawn on sledges to the
place of interment, and many got neither coffin nor winding-sheet. “I
was one of four,” says the Pedlar, “who carried the corpse of a young
woman a mile of way; and when we came to the grave, an honest poor man
came and said--‘You must go and help me to bury my son; he has lain
dead these two days.’ We went, and had two miles to carry the corpse,
many neighbours looking on us, but none coming to assist.” “I was
credibly informed,” he continues, “that in the north, two sisters, on
a Monday morning, were found carrying their brother on a barrow with
bearing-ropes, resting themselves many times, and none offering to help
them.” There is a tradition that in one of the villages of Resolis the
sole survivor was an idiot, whose mother had been, of all its more
sane inhabitants, the last victim to the disease. He waited beside the
corpse for several days, and then taking it up on his shoulders carried
it to a neighbouring village, and left it standing upright beside a
garden wall.
Such were the sufferings of the people of Scotland in the seventeenth
century, and such the phenomena of character which the sufferings
elicited. We ourselves have seen nearly the same process repeated in
the nineteenth, and with nearly the same results. The study of mind
cannot be prosecuted in quite the same manner as the study of matter.
We cannot subject human character, like an earth or metal, to the
test of experiments which may be varied or repeated at pleasure; on
the contrary, many of its most interesting traits are developed only
by causes over which we have no control. But may we not regard the
whole world as an immense laboratory, in which the Deity is the grand
chemist, and His dispensations of Providence a course of experiments?
We are admitted into this laboratory, both as subjects to be acted upon
and as spectators; and, though we cannot in either capacity materially
alter the course of the exhibition, we may acquire much wholesome
knowledge by registering the circumstances of each process, and its
various results.
In the year 1817 a new and terrible pestilence broke out in a
densely-peopled district of Hindostan. During the twelve succeeding
years it was “going to and fro, and walking up and down,” in that
immense tract of country which intervenes between British India and the
Russian dominions in Europe. It passed from province to province, and
city to city. Multitudes, “which no man could number,” stood waiting
its approach in anxiety and terror; a few solitary mourners gazed at
it from behind. It journeyed by the highways, and strewed them with
carcases. It coursed along the rivers, and vessels were seen drifting
in the current with their dead. It overtook the caravan in the desert,
and the merchant fell from his camel. It followed armies to the field
of battle, struck down their standards, and broke up their array. It
scaled the great wall of China, forded the Tigris and the Euphrates,
threaded with the mountaineer the passes of the frozen Caucasus, and
traversed with the mariner the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean. Vainly
was it deprecated with the rites of every religion, exorcised in the
name every god. The Brahmin saw it rolling onwards, more terrible than
the car of Juggernaut, and sought refuge in his temple; but the wheel
passed over him, and he died. The wild Tartar raised his war-cry to
scare it away, and then, rushing into a darkened corner of his hut,
prostrated himself before his idol, and expired. The dervish ascended
the highest tower of his mosque to call upon Allah and the prophet;
but it grappled with him ere he had half repeated his prayer, and he
toppled over the battlements. The priest unlocked his relics, and then,
grasping his crucifix, hied to the bedside of the dying; but, as he
doled out the consolations of his faith, the pest seized on his vitals,
and he sunk howling where he had kneeled. And alas for the philosopher!
silent and listless he awaited its coming; and had the fountains of the
great deep been broken up, and the proud waves come rolling, as of old,
over wide-extended continents, foaming around the summit of the hills,
and prostrating with equal ease the grass of the field and the oak of
the forest, he could not have met the inundation with a less effective
resistance. It swept away in its desolating progress a hundred millions
of the human species.
[Sidenote: THE QUARANTINE.]
In the spring of 1831 the disease entered the Russian dominions,
and in a few brief months, after devastating the inland provinces,
began to ravage the shores of the Baltic. The harbours, as is usual
in the summer season, were crowded with vessels from every port of
Britain: and the infection spread among the seamen. To guard against
its introduction into this country, a rigid system of quarantine was
established by the Government; and the Bay of Cromarty was one of the
places appointed for the reception of vessels until their term of
restriction should have expired. The whole eastern coast of Britain
could not have afforded a better station; as, from the security and
great extent of the bay, entire fleets can lie in it safe from every
tempest, and at a distance of more than two miles from any shore.
On a calm and beautiful evening in the month of July 1831, a little
fleet of square-rigged vessels were espied in the offing, slowly
advancing towards the bay. They were borne onwards by the tide, which,
when flowing, rushes with much impetuosity through the narrow opening,
and, as they passed under the northern Sutor, there was seen from the
shore, relieved by the dark cliffs which frowned over them, a pale
yellow flag dropping from the mast-head of each. As they advanced
farther on, the tide began to recede. The foremost was towed by her
boats to the common anchoring-ground; and the burden of a Danish song,
in which all the rowers joined, was heard echoing over the waves
with a cadence so melancholy, that, associating in the minds of the
town’s-people with ideas of death and disease, it seemed a coronach
of lamentation poured out over the dead and the expiring. The other
vessels threw out their anchors opposite the town;--groups of people,
their countenances shaded by anxiety, sauntered along the beach;
and children ran about, shouting at the full pitch of their voices
that the ships of the plague had got up as far as the ferry. As the
evening darkened, little glimmering lights, like stars of the third
magnitude, twinkled on the mast-heads from whence the yellow flags had
lately depended; and never did astrologer experience greater dismay
when gazing at the two comets, the fiery and the pale, which preceded
those years of pestilence and conflagration that wasted the capital of
England, than did some of the people of Cromarty when gazing at these
lights.
Day after day vessels from the Baltic came sailing up the bay, and the
fears of the people, exposed to so continual a friction, began to wear
out. The first terror, however, had been communicated to the nearer
parishes, and from them to the more remote; and so on it went, escorted
by a train of vagabond stories, that, like felons flying from justice,
assumed new aspects at every stage. The whole country talked of nothing
but Cholera and the Quarantine port. Such of the shopkeepers of
Cromarty as were most in the good graces of the countrywomen who came
to town laden with the produce of the dairy and hen-cot, and return
with their little parcels of the luxuries of the grocer, experienced
a marked falling away in their trade. Occasionally, however, a few of
the more courageous housewives might be seen creeping warily along our
streets; but, in coming in by the road which passes along the edge of
the bay, they invariably struck up the hill if the wind blew from off
the quarantine vessels, and, winding by a circuitous route among the
fields and cottages, entered the town on the opposite side. A lad who
ran errands to a neighbouring burgh, found that few of the inhabitants
were so desperately devoted to business as to incur the risk of
receiving the messages he brought them; and, from the inconvenient
distance at which he was held by even the less cautious, he entertained
serious thoughts of providing himself with a speaking-trumpet. Our poor
fishermen, too, fared but badly in the little villages of the Firth
where they went to sell their fish. It was asserted on the very best
authority, by the villagers, that dead bodies were flung out every day
over the sides of the quarantine vessels, and might be seen, bloated
by the water and tanned yellow by disease, drifting along the surface
of the bay. Who could eat fish in such circumstances? There was one
person, indeed, who remarked to them, that he might perhaps venture on
eating a haddock or whiting; but no man in his senses, he said, would
venture on eating a cod. He himself had once found a bunch of furze
in the stomach of a fish of this species, and what might not that
throat contrive to swallow that had swallowed a bunch of furze? The
very fishermen themselves added to the general terror by their wild
stories. They were rowing homewards one morning, they said, in the
grey uncertain light which precedes sunrise, along the rough edge of
the northern Sutor, when, after doubling one of the rocky promontories
which jut into the sea from beneath the crags of the hill, they saw
a gigantic figure, wholly attired in white, winding slowly along the
beach. It was much taller than any man, or as Cowley would perhaps
have described it, than the shadow of any man in the evening; and at
intervals, after gliding round the base of some inaccessible cliff,
it would remain stationary for a few seconds, as if gazing wistfully
upon the sea. No one who believed this apparition to be other than a
wreath of vapour, entertained at the time the slightest doubt of its
portending the visitation of some terrible pestilence, which was to
desolate the country.
About eighty or a hundred years ago the port of Cromarty was occupied,
as in 1831, by a fleet performing quarantine. Of course none of the
town’s-people recollected the circumstance; but a whole host of
traditions connected with it, which had been imparted to them by their
fathers, and had lain asleep in the recesses of some of their memories
for a full half century, were awakened at this time, and sent wandering
over the town, like so many ghosts. Some one had heard it told that a
crew of Cromarty fishermen had, either in ignorance or contempt of the
quarantine laws, boarded one of the vessels on this occasion; and that
aboard they were compelled to remain for six tedious weeks, exposed
to the double, but very unequally appreciated hardship of getting a
great deal to drink and very little to eat. Another vessel had, it was
said, entered the bay deeply laden; but every morning, for the time
she remained there, she was seen to sit lighter on the water, and when
she quitted it on her return to Flushing, she had scarcely ballast
enough aboard to render the voyage practicable. Gin and tobacco were
rife in Cromarty for twelve months thereafter. A third vessel carried
with her into the bay the disease to guard against which the quarantine
had been established; and opposite the place where the fleet lately
lay, there are a few little mounds on a patch of level sward, still
known to children of the town as the Dutchmen’s graves. About fifty
years ago, when the present harbour of Cromarty was in building, a poor
half-witted man, one of the labourers employed in quarrying stone,
was told one day by some of his companions, that a considerable sum
of money had been deposited in this place with the bodies. In the
evening he stayed on some pretext in the quarry until the other workmen
had gone home, and then repairing to the graves, with his shovel
and pickaxe he laid one of them open; but, instead of the expected
treasure, he found only human bones and wasted fragments of woollen
cloth. Next morning he was seized by a putrid fever, and died a few
days after. Miss Seward tells a similar story in one of her letters;
but in the case of the Cromarty labourer no person suffered from his
imprudence except himself; whereas, in the one narrated by Miss Seward,
a malignant disease was introduced into a village near which the graves
were opened, which swept away seventy of the inhabitants.
[Sidenote: THE CHOLERA.]
In a central part of the churchyard of Nigg there is a rude undressed
stone, near which the sexton never ventures to open a grave. A wild
apocryphal tradition connects the erection of this stone with the times
of the quarantine fleet. The plague, as the story goes, was brought
to the place by one of the vessels, and was slowly flying along the
ground, disengaged from every vehicle of infection, in the shape of
a little yellow cloud. The whole country was alarmed, and groups of
people were to be seen on every eminence, watching with anxious horror
the progress of the little cloud. They were relieved, however, from
their fears and the plague by an ingenious man of Nigg, who, having
provided himself with an immense bag of linen, fashioned somewhat in
the manner of a fowler’s net, cautiously approached the yellow cloud,
and, with a skill which could have owed nothing to previous practice,
succeeded in enclosing the whole of it in the bag. He then secured it
by wrapping it up carefully, fold after fold, and fastening it down
with pin after pin; and as the linen was gradually changing, as if
under the hands of the dyer, from white to yellow, he consigned it to
the churchyard, where it has slept ever since. But to our narrative.
The cholera was at length introduced into Britain, and shortly after
into Ireland; not, however, at any of the quarantine ports, but at
places where scarcely any precautions had been taken to exclude it, or
any danger apprehended; much in the manner that a beleaguered garrison
is sometimes surprised at some unnoticed bastion, or untented angle,
after the main points of attack have withstood the utmost efforts
of the besiegers. It had previously been remarked that the disease
traversed the various countries which it visited, at nearly the same
pace with the inhabitants. In Persia, where there is little trade, and
neither roads nor canals to facilitate intercourse, it was a whole year
in passing over a distance of somewhat less than three hundred leagues;
while among the more active people of Russia, it performed a journey
of seven hundred in less than six months. In Britain it travelled
through the interior with the celerity of the mail, and voyaged along
the coasts with the speed of the trading vessels; and in a few weeks
after its first appearance, it was ravaging the metropolis of England,
and the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It was introduced by
some south country fishermen into the town of Wick, and a village of
Sutherlandshire, in the month of July 1832; and from the latter place
in the following August, into the fishing villages of the peninsula of
Easter Ross. It visited Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, Urquhart,
and Rosemarkie, a few weeks after.
I shall pass hurriedly over the sad story of its ravages. Were I
to dwell on it to the extent of my information, and I know only a
little of the whole, the reader might think I was misanthropically
accumulating into one gloomy heap all that is terrible in the judgments
of God, and all that is mean and feeble in the character of man. The
pangs of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew--all that the Dominican
or the savage has inflicted on the heretic or the white man, were
realized in the tortures of this dreadful disease. Utter debility,
intense thirst, excruciating cramps of the limbs, and an unimpaired
intellect, were its chief characteristics. And the last was not the
least terrible. Amid the ruins of the body, from which it was so soon
to part, the melancholy spirit looked back upon the past with regret,
and on the future with terror. Or even if the sufferer amid his fierce
pain “laid hold on the hope that faileth not;” with what feelings must
he have looked around the deserted cottage, when the friends in whom
he had trusted proved unfaithful--or, more melancholy still, on the
affectionate wife or the dutiful child struck down by the bedside in
agonies as mortal as his own.
In the villages of Ross the disease assumed a more terrible aspect
than it had yet presented in any other part of Britain. In the little
village of Portmahomack one-fifth of the inhabitants were swept away;
in the still smaller village of Inver, one-half. So abject was the
poverty of the people, that in some instances there was not a candle
in any house in a whole village; and when the disease seized on the
inmates in the night-time, they had to grapple in darkness with its
fierce agonies and mortal terrors, and their friends, in the vain
attempt to assist them, had to grope round their beds. The infection
spread with frightful rapidity. At Inver, though the population did
not much exceed a hundred persons, eleven bodies were committed to the
earth, without shroud or coffin, in one day; in two days after they had
buried nineteen more. Many of the survivors fled from the village, and
took shelter, some in the woods, some among the hollows of an extensive
tract of sandhills. But the pest followed them to their hiding-places,
and they expired in the open air. Whole families were found lying
dead on their cottage floor. In one instance, an infant, the only
survivor, lay grovelling on the body of its mother--the sole mourner in
a charnel-house of the pestilence. Rows of cottages, entirely divested
of their inhabitants, were set on fire and burned to the ground. The
horrors of the times of Peter Walker were more than realized. Two young
persons, a lad and his sister, were seen digging a grave for their
father in the churchyard of Nigg; and then carrying the corpse to it
on a cart, no one venturing to assist them. The body of a man who
died in a cottage beside the ferry of Cromarty, was borne to a hole,
hurriedly scooped out of a neighbouring sand-bank, by his brother and
his wife. During the whole of the preceding day, the unfortunate woman
had been seen from the opposite shore, flitting around the cottage
like an unhappy ghost; during the whole of the preceding night had she
watched alone by the dead. The coffin lay beside the door; the corpse
in the middle of the apartment.--Never shall I forget the scene which
I witnessed from the old chapel of St. Regulus on the evening of the
following Sabbath.
It was one of those lovely evenings which we so naturally associate
with ideas of human enjoyment; when, from some sloping eminence, we
look over the sunlit woods, fields, and cottages, of a wide extent of
country, and dream that the inhabitants are as happy as the scene is
beautiful. The sky was without a cloud, and the sea without a wrinkle.
The rocks and sandhills on the opposite shore lay glistening in the
sun, each with its deep patch of shadow resting by its side; and the
effect of the whole, compared with the aspect which it had presented
a few hours before, was as if it had been raised on its groundwork of
sea and sky from the low to the high relief of the sculptor. There were
boats drawn up on the beach, and a line of houses behind; but where
were the inhabitants? No smoke rose from the chimneys; the doors and
windows were fast closed; not one solitary lounger sauntered about
the harbour or the shore; the inanity of death and desertion pervaded
the whole scene. Suddenly, however, the eye caught a little dark
speck moving hurriedly along the road which leads to the ferry. It
was a man on horseback. He reached the cottages of the boatmen, and
flung himself from his horse; but no one came at his call to row him
across. He unloosed a skiff from her moorings, and set himself to tug
at the oar. The skiff flew athwart the bay. The watchmen stationed
on the shore of Cromarty moved down to prevent her landing. There was
a loud cry passed from man to man; a medical gentleman came running
to the beach, he leapt into the skiff, and laying hold of an oar as
if he were a common boatman, she again shot across the bay. A case of
cholera had just occurred in the parish of Nigg. I never before felt so
strongly the force of contrast. There is a wild poem of the present age
which presents the reader with a terrible picture of a cloak of utter
darkness spread over the earth, and the whole race of man perishing
beneath its folds, like insects of autumn in the chills of a night of
October. There is another modern poem, less wild, but not less sublime,
in which we see, as in a mirror of a magician, the sun dying in the
heavens, and the evening of an eternal night closing around the last of
our species. I trust I am able in some degree to appreciate the merits
of both; and yet, since witnessing the scene which I have so feebly
attempted to describe, I am led to think that the earth, if wholly
divested of its inhabitants, would present a more melancholy aspect,
should it still retain its fertility and beauty, than if wrapped up in
a pall of darkness, surrounded by dead planets and extinguished suns.