“He sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale.”--KENRICK.
[Sidenote: MARTINMAS MARKET.]
On the fourth Tuesday of November every year, there is a kind of market
held at Cromarty, which for the last eighty years has been gradually
dwindling in importance, and is now attended by only the children of
the place, and a few elderly people, who supply them with toys and
sweetmeats. Early in the last century, however, it was one of the most
considerable in this part of the country; and the circumstance of its
gradual decline is curiously connected with the great change which has
taken place since that period in the manners and habits of the people.
It flourished as long as the Highlander legislated for himself and
his neighbour on the good old principle so happily described by the
poet,[7] and sunk into decay when he had flung down his broadsword,
and become amenable to the laws of the kingdom. The town of Cromarty,
as may be seen by consulting the map, is situated on the extremity
of a narrow promontory, skirted on three of its sides by the sea,
and bordered on the fourth by the barren uninhabited waste described
in a previous chapter. And though these are insurmountable defects
of situation for a market of the present day, which ought always to
be held in some central point of the interior that commands a wide
circumference of country, about a century ago they were positive
advantages. It was an important circumstance that the merchants who
attended the fair could convey their goods to it by sea, without
passing through any part of the Highlands; and the extent of moor which
separated it by so broad a line from the seats of even the nearer
clans, afforded them no slight protection when they had arrived at it.
For further security the fair was held directly beneath the walls of
the old castle, in the gorge of a deep wooded ravine, which now forms
part of the pleasure-grounds of Cromarty House.
The progress of this market, from what it was once to what it is at
present, was strongly indicative of several other curious changes which
were taking place in the country. The first achievement of commerce
is the establishment of a market. In a semi-barbarous age the trader
journeys from one district to another, and finds only, in a whole
kingdom, that demand for his merchandise which, when in an after period
civilisation has introduced her artificial wants among the people, may
be found in a single province. So late as the year 1730, one solitary
shopkeeper more than supplied the people of Cromarty with their few,
everyday necessaries, of foreign manufacture or produce; I say more
than supplied them, for in summer and autumn he travelled the country
as a pedlar. For their occasional luxuries and finery they trusted to
the traders of the fair. Times changed, however, and the shopkeeper
wholly supplanted the travelling merchant; but the fair continued to
be frequented till a later period by another class of traders, who
dealt in various articles, the produce and manufacture of the country.
Among these were a set of dealers who sold a kind of rude harness for
horses and oxen, made of ropes of hair and twisted birch; a second
set who dealt in a kind of conical-shaped carts made of basket-work;
and a third who supplied the house-builders of the period with split
lath, made of moss-fir, for thatched roofs and partitions. In time,
however, the harness-maker, cart-wright, and house-carpenter of modern
times, dealt by these artists as the shopkeeper had done by the
market-trader. The broguer, or maker of Highland shoes, kept the field
in spite of the regular shoemaker half a century later, and disappeared
only about five years ago. The dealer in home-grown lint frequented
it until last season; but the low wages, and sixteen-hour-per-day
employment of the south country weaver, were gradually undermining his
trade, and the steam-loom seems to have given it its deathblow.
[Sidenote: THE HERRING DROVE.]
Prior to the Revolution, and as late as the reign of Queen Anne,
Cromarty drove a considerable trade in herrings. About the middle of
July every year, immense bodies of this fish came swimming up the
Moray Firth; and after they had spawned on a range of banks not more
than eight miles from the town, quitted it for the main sea in the
beginning of September. In the better fishing seasons they filled the
bays and creeks of the coast, swimming in some instances as high as the
ferries of Fowlis and Ardersier. There is a tradition that, shortly
after the Union, a shoal of many hundred barrels, pursued by a body
of whales and porpoises, were stranded in a little bay of Cromarty,
a few hundred yards to the east of the town. The beach was covered
with them to the depth of several feet, and salt and casks failed the
packers when only an inconsiderable part of the shoal was cured. The
residue was carried away for manure by the neighbouring farmers; and so
great was the quantity used in this way, and the stench they caused so
offensive, that it was feared disease would have ensued. The season in
which this event took place is still spoken of as the “har’st of the
Herring-drove.”
About thirty years ago some masons, in digging a foundation in the
eastern extremity of the town, discovered the site of a packing-yard of
this period; and threw out vast quantities of scales which glittered
as bright as if they had been stripped from the fish only a few weeks
before. Near the same place, there stood about twenty years earlier
a little grotesque building two storeys in height, and with only a
single room on each floor. The lower was dark and damp, and had the
appearance of a cellar or storehouse; the upper was lighted on three
sides, and finished in a style which, at the period of its erection,
must have led to a high estimate of the taste of the builder. A rich
cornice, designed doubtless on the notion of Ramsay, that good herrings
and good claret are very suitable companions, curiously united bunches
of grapes with clusters of herrings, and divided the walls from the
ceiling. The walls were neatly panelled, the centre of the ceiling was
occupied by a massy circular patera, round which a shoal of neatly
relieved herrings were swimming in a sea of plaster. This building was
the place of business of Urquhart of Greenhill, a rich herring merchant
and landed proprietor, and a descendant of the old Urquharts of
Cromarty. But it was destined long to survive the cause of its erection.
[Sidenote: THE WHALE-FISHERS.]
In a fishing season late in this period, two men of the place,
who, like most of the other inhabitants, were both tradesfolks and
fishermen, were engaged one morning in discussing the merits of an
anker of Hollands which had been landed from a Dutch lugger a few
evenings before. They nodded to each other across the table with
increasing heartiness and good-will, until at length their heads
almost met; and as quaich after quaich was alternately emptied and
replenished, they began to find that the contents of the anker were
best nearest the bottom. They were interrupted, however, before they
had fully ascertained the fact, by the woman of the house tapping at
the window, and calling them out to see something extraordinary; and,
on going to the door, they saw a plump of whales blowing, and tumbling,
and pursuing one another, in a long line up the bay. A sudden thought
struck one of the men: “It would be gran’ fun, Charlie man,” said he,
addressing his companion, “to hook ane o’ yon chiels on Nannie Fizzle’s
crook.” “Ay, if we had but bait,” rejoined the other; “but here’s a gay
fresh codling on Nannie’s hake, an’ the yawl lies on the tap o’ the
fu’ sea.” The crook--a chain about six feet in length, with a hook at
one end, and a large ring at the other, and which, when in its proper
place, hung in Nannie’s chimney to suspend her pots over the fire--was
accordingly baited with the cod, and fastened to a rope; and the two
men, tumbling into their yawl rowed out to the _cossmee_. Like the
giant of the epigram they sat bobbing for whale, but the plump had gone
high up the Firth; and, too impatient to wait its return, they hollowed
to a friend to row out his skiff for them; and leaving their own at
anchor, with the crook hanging over the stern, they returned to Nannie
Fizzle’s, where they soon forgot both the yawl and the whales.
They were not long, however, in being reminded of both. A person came
bellowing to the window, “Charlie, Willie, the yawl! the yawl!” and, on
staggering out, they saw the unfortunate yawl darting down the Firth
with twice the velocity of a king’s cutter in a fresh breeze. Ever and
anon she would dance, and wheel, and plunge, and then shoot off in a
straight line. Wonderful to relate! one of the whales had swallowed
the crook; the little skiff was launched and manned; but the Hollands
had done its work; one of the poor fellows tumbled over the thaft, the
other snapped his oar;--all was confusion. Luckily, however, the rope
fastened to the crook broke at the ring; and the yawl, after gradually
losing way, began to drift towards the shore. The adventure was bruited
all over the town; and every one laughed at the whale-fishers except
Nannie Fizzle, who was inconsolable for the loss of her crook.
It was rumoured a few weeks after that the carcass of a whale had
been cast ashore somewhere in the Firth of Beauly, near Redcastle,
and the two fishermen set off together to the place, in the hope of
identifying the carcass with the fish in which they had enfeoffed
themselves at the expense of Nannie Fizzle. The day of the journey
chanced to be also that of a Redcastle market; and, as they approached
the place, they were encountered by parties of Highlanders hurrying
to the fair. Most of them had heard of the huge fish, but none of
them of the crook. When the Cromarty men came up to the carcass,
they found it surrounded by half the people of the fair, who were
gazing, and wondering, and pacing it from head to tail, and poking
at it with sticks and broadswords. “It is our property every inch,”
said one of the men, coming forward to the fish; “we hooked it three
weeks ago on the _cossmee_, but it broke off; and we have now come
here to take possession. It carried away our tackle, a chain and a
hook. Lend me your dirk, honest man,” he continued, addressing a
Highlander; “we shall cut out hook and chain, and make good our claim.”
“O ay! nae doubt,” said the Highlander, as he obligingly handed him
the weapon; “but och! it’s no me that would like to eat her, for
she maun be a filthy meat.” The crowd pressed round to witness the
dissection, which ended in the Cromarty man pulling out the crook
from among the entrails, and holding it up in triumph. “Did I no tell
you?” he exclaimed; “the fish is ours beyond dispute.” “Then,” said a
smart-looking little pedlar, who had just joined the throng, “ye have
made the best o’ this day’s market. I’se warrant your fishing worth
a’ the plaiding sold to-day.” The Highlanders stared. “For what is it
worth?” asked a tacksman of the place. “Oh, look there! look there!”
replied the pedlar, tapping the blubber with his elwand, “ulzie clear
as usquebaugh. I’se be bound it’s as richly worth four hunder punds
Scots as ony booth at the fair.” This piece of mischievous information
entirely altered the circumstances of the case as it regarded the two
fishermen; for the tacksman laid claim to the fish on his own behalf
and the laird’s, and, as he could back his arguments by a full score
of broadswords, the men were at length fain to content themselves
with being permitted to carry away with them Nannie Fizzle’s crook. I
am afraid it is such of our naturalists as are best acquainted with
the habits of the _cetacea_ that will be most disposed to question
the truth of the tradition just related. But, however doubtful its
foundation, a tradition it is.
[Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF THE DROVE.]
The mishap of the whale-fishers was followed by a much greater
mishap--the total failure of the herring fishery. The herring is one
of the most eccentric little fishes that frequents our seas. For many
years together it visits regularly in its season some particular firth
or bay;--fishing villages spring up on the shores, harbours are built
for the reception of vessels; and the fisherman and merchant calculate
on their usual quantum of fish, with as much confidence as the farmer
on his average quantum of grain. At length, however, there comes a
season, as mild and pleasant as any that have preceded it, in which the
herring does not visit the firth. On each evening, the fisherman casts
out his nets on the accustomed bank, on each morning he draws them in
again, but with all the meshes as brown and open as when he flung them
out; in the following season he is equally unsuccessful; and, ere the
shoal returns to its accustomed haunts, the harbour has become a ruin,
and the village a heap of green mounds. It happened thus, late in the
reign of Queen Anne, with the herring trade of the Moray Firth. After
a busy and successful fishing, the shoal as usual left the Firth in a
single night; preparations were made for the ensuing season; the season
came, but not the herrings; and for more than half a century from this
time Cromarty derived scarcely any benefit from its herring fishery.
My town’s-folk in this age--an age in which every extraordinary effect
was coupled with a supernatural cause--were too ingenious to account
for the failure of the trade by a simple reference to the natural
history of the herring; and two stories relating to it still survive,
which show them to have been strangely acute in rendering a reason,
and not a little credulous in forming a belief. Great quantities of
fish had been caught and brought ashore on a Saturday, and the packers
continued to work during the night; yet on the Sunday morning much
still remained to be done. The weather was sultry, and the fish were
becoming soft; and the merchants, unwilling to lose them, urged on the
work throughout the Sabbath. Towards evening the minister of the parish
visited the packers; and, as they had been prevented from attending
church, he made them a short serious address. They soon, however,
became impatient; the diligent began to work, the mischievous to pelt
him with filth; and the good man abruptly concluded his exhortation
by praying that the besom of judgment would come and sweep every
herring out of the Firth. On the following Monday the boats went to
sea as usual, but returned empty; on the Tuesday they were not more
successful, and it was concluded that the shoal had gone off for the
season; but it proved not for the season merely; for another and
another season came, and still no herrings were caught. In short, the
prayer, as the story goes, was so fully answered, that none of the
unlucky packers who had insulted the minister witnessed the return of
the shoal.
The other story accounts for its flight in a different and somewhat
conflicting manner. Tradition, who, as I have already shown, is even
a more credulous naturalist than historian, affirms that herrings
have a strong antipathy to human blood, especially when spilt in a
quarrel. On the last day of the fishing, the nets belonging to two
boats became entangled; the crew that first hauled applied the knife
to their neighbours’ baulks and meshes, and, with little trouble or
damage to themselves, succeeded in unravelling their own. A quarrel was
the consequence; and one of the ancient modes of naval warfare, the
only one eligible in their circumstances, was resorted to--they fought
leaning over the gunwales of their respective boats. Blood was spilt,
unfortunately spilt in the sea; the affronted herrings took their
departure, and for more than half a century were not the cause, in even
the remotest degree, of any quarrel which took place on the Moray Firth
or its shores. One of the combatants, who distinguished himself either
by doing or suffering in this unlucky fray, was known ever after by the
name of Andrew _Bleed_; and there are men still living who remember to
have seen him.
[Sidenote: URQUHART OF GREENHILL.]
The failure of the herring trade was followed by that of Urquhart of
Greenhill. He is said to have been a shrewd industrious man, of great
force of character, and admirably fitted by nature and habit, had he
lived in better times, to have restored the dilapidated fortunes of
his house. During the reign of William he was adding ship to ship, and
field to field, until about the year 1700, when he was possessed of
nearly one-half the lands of the parish, and of five large vessels.
But it was his lot to speculate in an unfortunate age; and having,
with almost all the other merchants of Scotland, suffered severely
from the Union, the failure of the herring fishery completed his ruin.
He sank by inches; striving to the last, with a proud heart and a
bitter spirit, against the evils which assailed him. All his ships
were at length either knocked down by the hammer of the auctioneer,
or broken up by the maul of the carpenter, except one; and that one,
the Swallow of Cromartie, when returning homewards from some port
of the Continent, was driven ashore in a violent night-storm on the
rocky coast of Cadboll, and beaten to pieces before morning. It was
with difficulty the crew was saved. One of them, a raw young fellow,
a much better herdsman than sailor, escaped to his friends, full of
the wild scenes he had just witnessed, and set himself to relate to
them the particulars of his voyage;--it was his first and his last.
Smooth water and easy sailing may be delineated in common language;
he warmed, however, as the narrative proceeded. He described the
gathering of the tempest, the darkening of the night, the dashing of
the waves, the howling of the winds, and the rolling of the vessel; but
being unfortunately no master of climax, language failed him in the
concluding scene, where there were rocks, and breakers, and midnight
darkness, and a huge ship wallowing in foam, like a wounded boar in
the toils of the hunters. “Oh!” exclaimed the sailor herdsman, “I can
think o’ nae likening to that puir ship, and the awfu’ crags and awfu’
jaws, except the nowt i’ the byre, when they break their fastenings
i’ the mirk night, and rout and gore, and rout and gore, till the
roof-tree shakes wi’ the brattle.” The people of the present age may
not think much of the comparison; but it was deemed a piece of very
tolerable humour in Cromarty in the good year 1715. Greenhill’s remark,
when informed of the disaster, had more of philosophy in it. “Aweel,”
said he, taking a deliberate pinch of snuff, and then handing the box
to his informant, “I have lang warstled wi’ the warld, and fain would I
have got on the tap o’t; but I may be just as weel as I am. Diel haet
can harm me now, if the laird o’ Cadboll, honest man, doesna put me to
the law for dinting the Swallow against his march-stanes.”
One other passage relating to the Greenhill branch of the family of the
Urquharts, ere I take leave of it for the time. It has produced, in a
lady of Aberdeenshire, one of the most pleasing poetesses of our age
and country--not, however, one of the most celebrated. Her exquisite
little pieces, combining with singular felicity the simplicity and
pathos of the old ballad with the refinement and elegance of our
classical poets, have been flung as carelessly into the world as the
rich plumes of the birds of the tropics on the plains and forests of
the south. But they have not lain altogether unnoticed. The nameless
little foundlings have been picked out from among the crowd, and
introduced into the best company on the score of merit alone.--The
genealogist was of a different spirit from his relative; he would have
inscribed his name on the face of the sun could he have but climbed to
it;--but may not there be something to regret in even the more amiable
extreme? The prophecies of that sibyl who committed her writings to
the loose leaves of the forest, were lost to the world on the first
slight breeze. I present the reader with a pleasing little poem of
this descendant of the Urquharts, in which, though perhaps not one of
the most finished of her pieces, he will find something better than
mere finish. It may not be quite new to him, having found its way into
Macdiarmid’s Scrap-Book, and several other collections of merit; but he
may peruse it with fresh interest, as the production of a relative of
Sir Thomas, who seems to have inherited all his genius, undebased by
any mixture of his eccentricity.
[Sidenote: POEM.]
ON HEARING A LIVELY PIECE OF MUSIC,
“THE WATERLOO WALTZ.”
A moment pause, ye British fair,
While pleasure’s phantom ye pursue,
And say if dance and sprightly air
Suit with the name of Waterloo.
Dearly bought the victory,
Chasten’d should the triumph be;
’Midst the laurels she has won,
Britain weeps for many a son.
Veil’d in clouds the morning rose,
Nature seem’d to mourn the day
Which consign’d before its close
Thousands to their kindred clay.
How unfit for courtly ball,
Or the giddy festival,
Was the grim and ghastly view
Ere evening closed on Waterloo.
See the Highland warrior rushing,
First in danger, on the foe,
Till the life-blood, stemless gushing,
Lays the plaided hero low.
His native pipe’s heart-thrilling sound,
’Mid war’s infernal concert drown’d,
Cannot soothe his last adieu,
Nor wake his sleep on Waterloo.
Crashing o’er the cuirassier,
See the foaming charger flying,
Trampling in his wild career,
All alike, the dead and dying.
See the bullets pierce his side,
See, amid a crimson tide,
Helmet, horse, and rider too,
Roll on bloody Waterloo.
Shall sights like these the dance inspire,
Or wake the jocund notes of mirth?
Oh, shiver’d be the recreant lyre
That gave the base idea birth!
Other sounds, I ween, were there,
Other music rent the air,
Other _Waltz_ the warriors knew,
When they closed at Waterloo.
Forbear, till time with lenient hand
Has heal’d the wounds of recent sorrow,
And let the picture distant stand,
The softening hue of years to borrow.
When our race has pass’d away,
Hands unborn may wake the lay,
And give to joy alone the view
Of victory at Waterloo.
[Sidenote: WILLIAM FORSYTH.]
About the time of the Rebellion, or a little after, the trade of
the place began to recover itself much through the influence of a
vigorous-minded man, a merchant of the period. Urquhart of Greenhill
had sunk with the sinking trade of the country; his townsman, William
Forsyth, enjoyed the advantage of being born at least forty years
later, and rose as it revived. The nature of the business which the
latter pursued may be regarded as illustrating, not inaptly, the
condition of society in the north of Scotland at the time. It was of
a miscellaneous character, as became the state of a country so poor
and so thinly peopled, and in which, as there was scarce any division
of labour, one merchant had to perform the part of many. He supplied
the proprietors with teas, wines, and spiceries; with broad-cloths,
glass, Delft ware, Flemish tiles, and pieces of japanned cabinet-work;
he furnished the blacksmith with iron from Sweden, the carpenter with
tar and spars from Norway, and the farmer with flax-seed from Holland.
He found, too, in other countries, markets for the produce of our own.
The exports of the north of Scotland, at this period, were mostly malt,
wool, and salmon. Almost all rents were paid in kind or in labour--the
proprietors retaining in their hands a portion of their estates, termed
demesnes or _mains_, which was cultivated mostly by their tacksmen or
feuars as part of their proper service. Each proprietor, too, had his
storehouse or girnal--a tall narrow building, the strong-box of the
time--which, at the Martinmas of every year, used to be filled from
gable to gable with the grain-rents paid him by his tenants, and the
produce of his own farm. His surplus cattle found their way south under
charge of the drovers of the period; but it proved a more difficult
matter to dispose to advantage of his surplus corn, mostly barley,
until some one, more fertile in speculation than the others, originated
the scheme of converting it into malt, and exporting it into England
and Flanders. And to so great an extent was this trade carried on about
the middle of the last century, that in the town of Inverness the
English under Cumberland found almost every second building a malt-barn.
It is quite according to the nature of the herrings to resume their
visits as suddenly and unexpectedly as they have broken them off,
though not until after a lapse of so many seasons, that the fishermen
have ceased to watch for their appearance in their old haunts, or to
provide the tackle necessary for their capture; and in this way a
number of years are sometimes suffered to pass after the return of
the fish, ere the old trade is re-established. It was a main object
with William Forsyth to guard against any such waste of opportunity
on the part of his town’s-people; and representing the case to the
more intelligent gentlemen of the district, and some of the wealthier
merchants of Inverness, he succeeded in forming them, for the
encouragement of the herring fishery, into a society, which provided a
yearly premium of twenty merks Scots for the first barrel of herrings
caught every season in the Moray Firth. The sum was small; but as
money at the time was greatly more valuable than now, it proved a
sufficient inducement to the fishermen and tradespeople of the place
to fit out, about the beginning of autumn every year, a few boats that
swept over the various fishing banks for the herrings; and there were
not many seasons in which some one crew or other did not catch enough
to entitle them to the premium. At length, however, their tackle wore
out, and Mr. Forsyth, in pursuance of his scheme, provided himself,
at some little expense, with a complete _drift_ of nets, which were
carried to sea each season by a crew of boatmen, and the search kept
up. His exertions, however, could only merit success, without securing
it. The fish returned for a few seasons in considerable bodies, and
the fishermen procuring nets, several thousand barrels were caught;
but they soon deserted the Firth as entirely as before. It was at the
period of this second return that the “Herring Fishery,” according to
Goldsmith, “employed all Grub Street;” and “formed the topic of every
coffee-house, and the burden of every ballad.” The sober English of
the times of George II. had got sanguine on the subject, and hope had
broken out into poetry. They were “to drag up oceans of gold from the
bottom of the sea, and to supply all Europe with herrings on their
own terms;” but their expectations outran the capabilities of the
speculation; “they fished up very little gold” that the essayist “ever
heard of, nor did they furnish the world with herrings.” Their herring
fishery turned out in short to be a mere herring fishery, and not even
that for any considerable length of time.
[Sidenote: THE CAITHNESS-MAN’S LEAP.]
Sir John Sinclair marks the autumn of the year 1770 as a season in
which the herring fishery of Caithness suddenly doubled its amount.
“From that time,” he adds, “the fishery gradually increased for a
few years, but afterwards fell off again, and did not revive with
spirit until the year 1788.” During the short period in which it was
plied with success, it was prosecuted by several crews of Cromarty
fishermen; and their first visit to the coast of this northern county,
I find connected with a curious anecdote of the class whose extreme
singularity gives in some measure evidence of their truth. Invention
generally loves a beaten track--it has its rules and its formulas,
beyond which it rarely ventures to expatiate; but the course of
real events is narrowed by no such contracting barrier; the range
of possibility is by far too extensive to be fully occupied by the
anticipative powers of imagination; and hence it is that true stories
are often stranger than fictions, and that their very strangeness, and
their dissimilarity from all the models of literary plot and fable,
guarantee in some measure their character as authentic.
The hill of Cromarty is skirted, as I have said, by dizzy precipices,
some of them more than a hundred yards in height; and one of these,
for the last hundred and fifty years, has borne the name of the
Caithness-man’s Leap. The sheer descent is broken by projecting
shelves, covered with a rank vegetation, and furrowed by deep sloping
hollows, filled at the bottom with long strips of loose _débris_,
which, when set in motion by the light foot of the goat, falls rattling
in continuous streams on the beach. The upper part of the precipice is
scooped out by a narrow and perilous pathway, which, rising slantways
from the shore, along the face of the neighbouring precipices, makes
an abrupt turn on the upper edge of the “leap,” and then gains the
top. Immediately above, on a sloping acclivity, covered for the last
century by a thick wood, there was a little field, the furrows of which
can still be distinctly traced among the trees, and which, about the
time of the Revolution, was tenanted by a wild young fellow, quite
as conversant with his fowling-piece as with his plough. He was no
favourite with such of the neighbouring proprietors as most resembled
himself; the game-laws in Scotland were not quite so stringent at
that period as they are now, but game had its value; and sheriffs and
barons, addicted to hunting and the chase, who had dungeons in their
castles, and gibbets on their Gallow Hills, neither lacked the will nor
the power to protect it. And so the tacksman of the the little field
found poaching no safe employment; but the dangers he incurred had
only the effect common in such cases, of imparting to his character
a sort of Irish-like recklessness--a carelessness both of his own
life and the lives of others. He had laid down his little field with
peas, and was seriously annoyed, when they began to ripen, by the
town’s boys--mischievous little fellows--who, when on their fishing
excursions, would land in a little rocky bay, immediately below the
pathway, and ascending the cliffs, carry away his property by armfuls
at a time. The old northern pirates were scarcely more obnoxious to
the early inhabitants of Scotland than the embryo fishermen to the
man of the gun: nay, the man of the gun was himself scarcely more
obnoxious to the proprietors. There was no possibility of laying hold
of the intruders; a few minutes were sufficient on the first alarm,
to bring them from the top to the bottom of the cliffs--a few strokes
of the oar set them beyond all reach of pursuit--and he saw that,
unless he succeeded in terrifying them into honesty with his gun, they
might go on robbing him with impunity until they had left nothing
behind them to rob. Matters were in this state when a Caithness boat,
laden with timber, moored one morning in the bay below, and one of
the crew, a young fellow of eighteen, after climbing the pathway on
an excursion of discovery, found out the field of peas. The farmer,
on this unlucky morning, had been rated and collared by the laird for
shooting a hare, and, very angry, and armed with the gun as usual, he
came up to his field, and found the Caithness-man employed in leisurely
filling his pockets. He presented his piece and drew the trigger,
but the powder flashed in the pan. “The circumstance of being shot,”
says the ingenious author of Cyril Thornton, “produces a considerable
confusion in a man’s ideas.” The ideas of the Caithness-man became
confused in circumstances one degree less trying; for starting away
with the headlong speed of a hare roused out of her form, instead of
following the windings of the path, he shot right over the precipice
at the abrupt angle. Downwards he went from shelf to shelf--now
tearing away with him a huge bush of ivy--now darting along a stream
of _débris_--now making somersets in mid-air over the perpendicular
walls of rock which alternate with the shelving terraces. The fear of
the gun precluded every other fear; he reached the beach unharmed,
except by a few slight sprains and a few scratches, and bolting up,
tumbled himself into the boat, and dived for shelter under the folds of
the sail. The farmer had pursued him to the top of the rock, and had
turned the angle just in time to see him dash over; when, horror-struck
at so terrible an accident, for he had intended only to shoot the
man, he flung away his gun and ran home. Years and generations passed
away; the good King William was succeeded by the good Queen Anne,
and Anne by the three Georges, successively; the farmer and all his
contemporaries passed to the churchyard--his very fields were lost
in the thickets of a deep wood;--the story of the Caithness-man
had become traditional--elderly men said it had happened in their
grandfather’s days, and pointing out to the “leap,” they adverted to
the name which the rock still continued to bear, as proofs that the
incident had really occurred--incredible as it might seem that a human
creature could possibly have survived such a fall. Ninety years had
elapsed from the time, ere the Cromarty fishermen set out on their
Caithness expedition. In the first year of the enterprise one of their
fleet was storm-bound in a rocky bay, and the crew found shelter in a
neighbouring cottage. There was a spectral-looking old man seated in
a corner beside the fire. On learning they had come from Cromarty, he
seemed to shake off the apathy of extreme age, and began to converse
with them; and they were astonished to learn from his narrative that
they had before them the hero of the “leap,” at that time in his
hundred and eighth year.