“I’ll give thee a wind.”--SHAKSPERE.
[Sidenote: TARBAT NESS.]
For about thirty years after the failure of the herring fishery, the
population of the town of Cromarty gradually decreased. Many of the
young men became sailors and went into foreign parts, from whence few
of them returned. One of their number, poor Lieutenant Wright, the
boatman’s son, served in the unfortunate expedition of Vernon, and
left his bones under the walls of Carthagena; another, after sailing
round the world with Anson, died on his passage homewards when within
sight of the white cliffs of England; a third was barbarously murdered
on the high seas by the notorious Captain James Lowrie. Such of the
town’s-people as had made choice of the common mechanical professions,
plied their respective trades in the fishing towns of the north of
Scotland; and I have seen, among old family papers, letters of these
emigrants written from Lerwick, Kirkwall, and Stornoway. As the
population gradually decreased in this way, house after house became
tenantless and fell into decay; until the main street was skirted by
roofless tenements, and the town’s cross, which bears date 1578, was
bounded by a stone wall on the one side, and a hawthorn hedge on the
other.
The domestic economy of the people, who still continue to inhabit
the town, differed considerably from what it had been when their
circumstances were more prosperous. There was now no just division of
labour among them--working people of all the different denominations
encroaching each on the bounds of the others’ profession. Fishermen
wrought as labourers, tradesfolk as fishermen, and both as farmers.
In the latter part of spring every year, and the two first months of
summer, the town’s-people spent their evenings in angling with rods and
hand-lines in their boats, or from the rocks at the entrance of the
bay; towards the end of July they formed themselves into parties of
eight or ten, and sailed to Tarbat Ness, a fishing station of the Moray
Firth, where they remained for several weeks catching and storing up
fish for winter. At night they converted their sails into tents, ranged
in the manner of an encampment, at the edge of the little bay where
they moored their boats.
The long low promontory of Tarbat Ness forms the north-eastern
extremity of Ross-shire. Etymologists derive its name from the practice
which prevailed among mariners in this country during the infancy
of navigation, of drawing their light shallops across the necks of
such promontories instead of sailing round them. On a moor of this
headland there may be traced the vestiges of an encampment, which
some have deemed Roman, and others Danish; and there is a cave among
the low rocks by which it is skirted, which, according to tradition,
communicates with another cave on the coast of Caithness. The scenery
of Tarbat Ness is of that character which Addison regarded as the
most sublime; but it has something more to recommend it than a mere
expansiveness, like that predicated by the poet, in which no object,
tree, house, or mountain, contracts the view of the vast arch of
heaven or the huge circle of earth. Instead of a low plain bounded by
the sky, there is here a wide expanse of ocean encircling a narrow
headland--brown, sterile, solitary, edged with rock, and studded with
fragments of stone. On the one hand, the mountains of Sutherland
are seen rising out of the sea like a volume of blue clouds; on the
other, at a still greater distance, the hills of Moray stretch along
the horizon in a long undulating strip, so faintly defined in the
outline that they seem almost to mingle with the firmament. Instead,
however, of contracting the prospect, they serve but to enhance, by
their diminished bulk, the immense space in which they are included.
Space--wide, interminable space--in which he who contemplates it finds
himself lost, and is oppressed by a sense of his own littleness, is
at all times the circumstance to which the prospect owes most of its
power; but it is only during the storms of winter, when the firmament
in all its vastness seems converted into a hall of the tempest, and
the earth in all its extent into a gymnasium for contending elements,
that the scene assumes its full sublimity and grandeur. On the north
a chain of alternate currents and whirlpools howl, toss, and rage, as
if wrestling with the hurricane; on the east the huge waves of the
German ocean come rolling against the rocky barrier, encircling it with
a broad line of foam, and join their voices of thunder to the roar
of current and whirlpool; cloud after cloud sweeps along the brown
promontory, flinging on it their burdens as they pass; the sea-gull
shrieks over it as he beats his wings against the gale; the distant
hills seem blotted from the landscape; occasionally a solitary bark,
half enveloped in cloud and spray, with its dark sails furled to the
yards, and its topmasts lowered to the deck, comes drifting over the
foam; and the mariner, anxious, afraid, and lashed to the helm, looks
wistfully over the waves for the headlands of the distant haven.
A party of Cromarty tradesfolk, who had prosecuted the fishing on the
promontory of Tarbat Ness for part of the summer and autumn of 1738,
had been less successful that season than most of their neighbours,
and had lingered for several days on the station after the tents of
the encampment had been struck, and the boats had sailed for home. At
length, however, a day was fixed for their return, but when it arrived
the wind had set in strongly from the south-west; and, instead of
prosecuting their voyage, they were compelled to haul up their boat
to the site of the encampment. The storm continued for more than two
weeks, accompanied by heavy showers, which extinguished their fire,
and so saturated the cover of their tent, that the water dropped on
their faces as they lay folded in the straw and blankets with which
they had covered the floor. Their provisions too, except the salted
fish, which they had secured in barrels, began to fail them; and they
became exceedingly anxious for a change of wind. But the storm seemed
to mock at their anxiety; night after night were they awakened by the
rain pattering against the sail, and when they raised its edge every
succeeding morning, they saw the sea whitened by the gale, and clouds
laden with water rolling heavily from the south-west.
[Sidenote: STINE BHEAG O’ TARBAT.]
Not more than a mile from the tent there stood an inhabited cottage.
The solitary tenant, an elderly woman, still known to tradition as
_Stine Bheag o’ Tarbat_, was famous at this time as one in league with
Satan, and much consulted by seafaring men when windbound in any of
the neighbouring ports. And her history, as related by her neighbours,
formed, like the histories of all the other witches of Scotland,
a strange medley of the very terrible and the very ludicrous. A
shipmaster, who had unwittingly offended her, had moored his vessel one
evening within the rocky bay of Portmahomack, a haven of Tarbat; but on
going on deck next morning, he found that the vessel had been conveyed
during the night over the rocks and the beach, a broad strip of meadow,
two corn-fields, and a large moor, into a deep muddy ditch; and there
would she have lain till now had he not found means to conciliate
the witch, who on the following night transported her to her former
moorings. With all this power, however, it so happened, that only a few
weeks after a farmer of the parish, whom she had long annoyed in the
shape of a black beetle, succeeded in laying hold of her as she hummed
round his bonnet, and confined her for four days in his snuff-box.
Shortly before the arrival of the Cromarty men, a small sloop had been
weather-bound for a few days in a neighbouring port; and the master
applied to _Stine_ for a wind. Part of his cargo consisted of foreign
spirits; and on taking leave of the witch he brought with him two empty
bottles, which he promised to fill, and send to her by the ship-boy. It
was evening, however, before he reached the vessel; the boy would not
venture on carrying the bottles by night to the witch’s cottage; and on
the following morning they were forgotten in the hurry of sailing. The
wind blew directly off the land, from what the master deemed the very
best point of the compass; the vessel scudded down the Firth before it
under a tight sail; it freshened as the land receded, and the mainsail
was lowered reef after reef, until as the evening was darkening it
had increased into a hurricane. The master stood by the helm, and in
casting an anxious glance at the binnacle, to ascertain his course, his
eye caught the two bottles of _Stine Bheag_. “Ah, witch!” he muttered,
“I must get rid of thee;” and taking up one of the bottles he raised
his arm to throw it over the side, when he was interrupted by a hoarse
croaking above-head, and on looking up saw two ravens hovering round
the vane. The bottle was replaced. An immense wave came rolling behind
in the wake of the vessel; it neared; it struck the stern, and, rushing
over the deck, washed everything before it, spars, coops, cordage;
but only the bottles were carried overboard. In the moment they rose
to the surface the ravens darted upon them like sea-gulls on a shoal
of coal-fish; and the master, as the vessel swept along, could see
them bearing the bottles away. The hurricane gradually subsided into
a moderate breeze, and the rest of the voyage was neither rough nor
unprosperous; but the shipmaster, it was said, religiously determined
never again to purchase a wind. And the Cromarty men, who had heard the
story, were so much of the master’s opinion, that it was not until the
second week after the wind had set so stiffly into the south-west, and
when all their provisions were expended, that they resolved on risking
a visit to _Stine Bheag_.
One of them, a tall robust young fellow, named Macglashan, accompanied
by two others, after collecting all the placks and boddles of the
party--little pieces of copper coin, with the head of Charles II.
on one side, and the Scotch thistle on the other--set out for the
hovel of the witch. It was situated on the shore of a little sandy
bay, which opens into the Dornoch Firth, and formed one of a range,
four in number, three of which were now deserted. The roof of one
had fallen in; the two others, with their doors ajar, the casements
of the windows bleached white by the sea winds, and with wreaths of
chickweed mantling over the sloping sides, and depending from the
eaves, seemed very dwellings of desolation. From the door and window
of the inhabited hovel, which joined to the one which had fallen, and
which in appearance was as ruinous and weather-beaten as either of
the other two, there issued dense volumes of smoke, accompanied by a
heavy oppressive scent, occasioned apparently by the combustion of some
marine vegetable. The range had been inhabited about ten years before
by a crew of fishermen and their families; one of them the husband,
another the son of _Stine Bheag_. The son had unluckily chanced to come
upon her when she was engaged in some of her orgies, and telling his
father of what he had seen, they deliberated together, it was said, on
delating her as a witch before the presbytery of Tain; but ere they
came to a full determination they unluckily went to sea. _Stine_ was
not idle;--there arose a terrible hurricane, and the boat was driven on
a quicksand, where she was swallowed up with all her crew. The widows,
disturbed by supernatural sights and noises, deserted their cottages
soon after, and _Stine Bheag_ became the sole tenant of the range.
Macglashan walked up to the door, which hung half open, and tapped
against it, but the sound was lost in a loud crackling noise,
resembling a ceaseless discharge of pocket pistols, which proceeded
from the interior. He tapped a second time, but the crackling
continued, and, despairing of making himself heard, he stooped and
entered. The apartment was so filled with smoke, that for the first
few seconds he could only distinguish a red glare of light upon the
hearth, and a small patch of sky, which appeared of a rusty-brown
colour through the dense volume which issued out at the window. The hag
sat on a low stool beside the wall, and fronting the fire, into which
at intervals she flung handfuls of dried sea-weed, of that kind (_Fucus
nodosus_) which consists of chains of little brown bladders filled with
air, and which is used in the making of kelp. As the bladders, one
after one, expanded and burst with the heat, she continued to mutter a
Gaelic rhyme. The thick smoke circled round her as she bent over the
fire, and when the flame shot up through the eddies, Macglashan could
see her long sharp features, but when it sunk her eyes were alone
visible. Her grizzled hair escaped from a red coif, and fell over her
shoulders, round which there was wrapped a square of red tartan, held
on by a large silver brooch. The imagination of a poet could scarcely
have invested one of the ancient sibyls with more circumstances of
the wild and terrible, or have placed her in a scene of a character
so suited to her own. “Sad weather this,” said Macglashan;--the hag
started at the unexpected address, and rising up gazed at the intruder
with a mixed expression of anger and surprise. “I come,” he continued,
“from _the point_, where I and my companions have been windbound for
the last fortnight, and half starved with cold and hunger to boot.
Could you not favour us with a breeze that would serve for Cromarty?”
Without waiting a reply, he thrust into her hand the joint contribution
of the crew. She spread out her palm to the light, looked at the
coins, then at Macglashan, and shook her head. “For _that_!!” she
said contemptuously. He shook his head in turn. “Bad times, mother,
bad times; not a rap more among us; but we will not forget you should
we once reach home.” “Then send one of your companions,” said the
witch, “for your lugged water-stoup.”--“Ay, an’ so you know of them,
and of the stoup,” muttered Macglashan;--“Jock, Sandy, this way,
lads.” The two men entered the apartment. “Run, Sandy,” continued the
young fellow, “for the muckle stoup,” and drawing in a huge settle of
plank which stood in the middle of the floor, he seated himself, all
unbidden, before the fire of _Stine Bheag_.
The place was darkened, as I have said, with smoke, but at intervals
the flames glanced on the naked walls of turf and stone, and on
a few rude implements of housewifery which were ranged along the
sides, together with other utensils of a more questionable form and
appearance. A huge wooden trough, filled with water, from whence there
proceeded a splashing bubbling noise, as if it were filled with live
fish, occupied one of the corners; and was sentinelled by a black cat,
that sat purring on a stool beside it, and that on every louder splash
rose from her seat, and stretched her neck over the water. A bundle of
dried herbs; a table bearing the skeleton of some animal, round part
of which a kind of red clay had been moulded, as if by a statuary; a
staff, with the tail of a fish fastened to one end, and the wings of
a raven to the other; and a large earthen vessel, like that in which
Hercules sailed to release Prometheus, with a white napkin tied in the
manner of a sail to a stick, which served for a mast, were ranged along
the wall. As Macglashan surveyed the apartment, _Stine_ seemed lost
in a reverie, with her head bent, and her eyes fixed upon the fire;
but as if struck by a sudden thought, she started into a more erect
posture, and regarded him with a malignant scowl, clutched her hands
into a hill of dried weed, and flung a fresh heap on the fire, which
for a few seconds seemed extinguished. “Od, mother,” said the young
fellow, nothing appalled by the darkness, “ye lead a terrible lonely
life of it here; were I in your place I would die of sheer longing in
less than a fortnight.” “Lonely,” muttered the hag, who seemed in no
communicative mood; “how ken ye that?” As she spoke the croak of a
raven was heard from the chimney, accompanied by the flutter of wings.
“Ug, ug!” ejaculated Macglashan’s companion; “let’s out, Mac, and see
what’s keeping Sandy.” “Nay, here he comes,” said the other; and as he
spoke Sandy entered with the stoup. “And now,” said _Stine_, rising and
laying hold of it, “ye maun out, an’ bide at the rock yonder till I
call.”
Macglashan and his companions waited for nearly half an hour; night
was fast falling, and the ruinous cottages, as the twilight darkened
round them, assumed a more dismal appearance. From the window of the
inhabited one there glimmered a dull red light, which was repeatedly
eclipsed, as if by the shadows of persons passing between the window
and the fire. At length the door opened, and the sharp harsh voice of
_Stine Bheag_ was heard calling from the entrance. Macglashan stepped
up to her, and received the stoup, stoppled with a bunch of straw. “Set
off,” said she, as she delivered it, “on the first blink of to-morrow;
but as ye love life, touch not the wisp till ye reach Cromarty.”
Macglashan promised a strict observance of the injunction, and, taking
his leave, set out with his companions for the tent.
The wind lowered during the night, and when early next morning
Macglashan raised the edge of the sail, the wide extent of the Moray
Firth presented a surface as glassy as that of a mirror; though it
still heaved in long ridges, on which the reflection of the red light
that preceded sunrise, danced and flickered like sheets of flame. He
roused his companions; the tent was struck, the boat launched, the
thwarts manned; and before the sun had risen, the whole party were
toiling at the oar. A light breeze from the north-east began to ruffle
the surface of the water; it increased into a brisk gale, and the boat,
with both her sails set, was soon scudding before it. The ancient
towers of Balone, the still more ancient towers of Cadboll, Hilton
with its ruinous chapel, and Shandwick with its sculptured obelisk,
neared and then receded, as she swept along the shore; and the sun
was yet low in the sky, when, after passing the steep overhanging
precipices of the hill of Nigg, she opened the bay of Cromarty. “What
in the name of wonder,” asked one of the crew, “can _Stine Bheag_
hae put in the stoup?” “Rax it this way,” said another; “we would
better be ony gate than in Cromarty should the minister come to hear
of it; I’m thinking Mac had as weel fling out the wisp here as on the
shore.”--“Think you so?” said Macglashan, “then send the stoup this
way.” He drew out the stopple, and flung it over his head into the sea;
but in the next moment, when half-a-dozen necks were stretched out
to pry into the vessel, which proved empty, the man stationed at the
bows roared out, “For heaven’s sake, lads, mind your haulyards! lower,
lower, a squall from the land! we shall back-fill and go down like a
mussel-shell.” The crew clustered round the sails, and had succeeded
in lowering them, when the squall struck the boat ahead with the fury
of a tornado, and almost forced her out of the water. The thwarts were
maimed, but ere the rowers had bent to the first stroke, the oars were
wrested out of their hands by the force of the hurricane. The bay
around them was agitated as if beaten by rods; the wind howled in one
continuous gust, without pause or intermission; and a cloud of spray
which arose from the waves, like a sheet of drift from a field of snow,
swept over them in so dense a volume, that it hid the land and darkened
the heavens. As the boat drifted before the tempest, the bay receded,
the cliffs, the villages, the castles, were passed in hasty succession,
and before noon the crew had landed at Tarbat Ness, where they found
_Stine Bheag_ sitting on the shore, as if waiting their arrival.
“Donnart deevils, what tak’s ye here?” was the first salutation of
the witch. “Ah, mother, that cursed wisp!” groaned out Macglashan.
“Wisp!--Look ye, my frack young man, your weird may have hemp in it,
an’ sae ye may tempt salt water when ye like; but a’ the ither drookit
bodies there have nae such protection. An’ now ye may tak’ the road,
for here maun your boat gizzen till the drift o’ Januar be heapit
oure her gunwale.” “Ah, mother!” said Macglashan, “what could we do
on the road? and home were but a cold home without either our fish or
our winbread. Od, it were better for us to plenish the old bothies at
the bay, and go and live wi’ yoursel’; but ye must just try and put
another wisp in the stoup.” To this she at length consented; and on
the following morning the party arrived in Cromarty without any new
adventure. The one detailed did not become history until many years
after, when it was related by Macglashan. He was probably well enough
acquainted with the tenth book of Homer’s Odyssey to know of that
ill-improved gift bestowed on Ulysses by old king Æolus, when
“The adverse winds in leathern bags he braced,
Compressed their force, and locked each struggling blast,
Securely fettered by a silver thong.”