in a shower of gold, it has been my custom, for several years back,
to seek refuge in the Hebrides. I love Loch Snizort better than the
Mediterranean, and consider Duntulme more impressive than the
Drachenfels. I have never seen the Alps, but the Cuchullins content
me. Haco interests me more than Charlemagne. I confess to a strong
affection for those remote regions. Jaded and nervous with eleven
months' labour or disappointment, there will a man find the medicine
of silence and repose. Pleasant, after poring over books, to watch
the cormorant at early morning flying with outstretched neck over the
bright frith; pleasant, lying in some sunny hollow at noon, to hear
the sheep bleating above; pleasant at evening to listen to wild
stories of the isles told by the peat-fire; and pleasantest of all,
lying awake at midnight, to catch, muffled by distance, the thunder
of the northern sea, and to think of all the ears the sound has
filled. In Skye one is free of one's century; the present wheels
away into silence and remoteness; you see the ranges of brown
shields, and hear the shoutings of the Bare Sarks.
The benefit to be derived from vacation is a mental benefit mainly.
A man does not require change of air so much as change of scene. It
is well that he should for a space breathe another mental
atmosphere--it is better that he should get release from the familiar
cares that, like swallows, build and bring forth under the eaves of
his mind, and which are continually jerking and twittering about
there. New air for the lungs, new objects for the eye, new ideas for
the brain--these a vacation should always bring a man; and these are
to be found in Skye rather than in places more remote. In Skye the
Londoner is visited with a stranger sense of foreignness than in
Holland or in Italy. The island has not yet, to any considerable
extent, been overrun by the tourist. To visit Skye is to make a
progress into "the dark backward and abysm of time." You turn your
back on the present and walk into antiquity. You see everything in
the light of Ossian, as in the light of a mournful sunset. With a
Norse murmur the blue Lochs come running in. The Canongate of
Edinburgh is Scottish history in stone and lime; but in Skye you
stumble on matters older still. Everything about the traveller is
remote and strange. You hear a foreign language; you are surrounded
by Macleods, Macdonalds, and Nicolsons; you come on gray stones
standing upright on the moor--marking the site of a battle, or the
burial-place of a chief. You listen to traditions of ancient
skirmishes; you sit on ruins of ancient date, in which Ossian might
have sung. The Loch yonder was darkened by the banner of King Haco.
Prince Charles wandered over this heath, or slept in that cave. The
country is thinly peopled, and its solitude is felt as a burden. The
precipices of the Storr lower grandly over the sea; the eagle has yet
its eyrie on the ledges of the Cuchullins. The sound of the sea is
continually in your ears; the silent armies of mists and vapours
perpetually deploy; the wind is gusty on the moor; and ever and anon
the jags of the hills are obscured by swirls of fiercely-blown rain.
[Sidenote: Spiritual atmosphere of Skye.] And more than all, the
island is pervaded by a subtle spiritual atmosphere. It is as
strange to the mind as it is to the eye. Old songs and traditions
are the spiritual analogues of old castles and burying-places--and
old songs and traditions you have in abundance. There is a smell of
the sea in the material air; and there is a ghostly something in the
air of the imagination. There are prophesying voices amongst the
hills of an evening. The raven that flits across your path is a
weird thing--mayhap by the spell of some strong enchanter, a human
soul is balefully imprisoned in the hearse-like carcass. You hear
the stream, and the voice of the kelpie in it. You breathe again the
air of old story-books; but they are northern, not eastern ones. To
what better place, then, can the tired man go? There he will find
refreshment and repose. There the wind blows out on him from another
century. The Sahara itself is not a greater contrast from the London
street than is the Skye wilderness.
The chain of islands on the western coast of Scotland, extending from
Bute in the throat of the Clyde, beloved of invalids, onward to St
Kilda, looking through a cloud of gannets toward the polar night, was
originally an appanage of the crown of Norway. [Sidenote: The Norse
element in Skye.] In the dawn of history there is a noise of Norsemen
around the islands, as there is to-day a noise of sea-birds. There
fought, as old sagas tell, Anund, the stanchest warrior that ever did
battle on wooden leg. _Wood-foot_ he was called by his followers.
When he was fighting his hardest, his men used to shove toward him a
block of wood, and resting his maimed limb on that, he laid about him
right manfully. From the islands also sailed Helgi, half-pagan,
half-Christian. Helgi was much mixed in his faith; he was a good
Christian in time of peace, but the aid of Thor he was always certain
to invoke when he sailed on some dangerous expedition, or when he
entered into battle. Old Norwegian castles, perched on the bold Skye
headlands, yet moulder in hearing of the surge. The sea-rovers come
no longer in their dark galleys, but hill and dale wear ancient names
that sigh to the Norway pine. The inhabitant of Mull or Skye
perusing the "Burnt Njal," is struck most of all by the names of
localities--because they are almost identical with the names of
localities in his own neighbourhood. The Skye headlands of
Trotternish, Greshornish, and Vaternish, look northward to Norway
headlands that wear the same or similar names. Professor Munch, of
Christiania, states that the names of many of the islands, Arran,
Gigha, Mull, Tyree, Skye, Raasay, Lewes, and others, are in their
original form Norwegian and not Gaelic. The Hebrides have received a
Norse baptism. Situated as these islands are between Norway and
Scotland, the Norseman found them convenient stepping-stones, or
resting-places, on his way to the richer southern lands. There he
erected temporary strongholds, and founded settlements. Doubtless,
in course of time, the son of the Norseman looked on the daughter of
the Celt, and saw that she was fair, and a mixed race was the result
of alliances. To this day in the islands the Norse element is
distinctly visible--not only in old castles, the names of places, but
in the faces and entire mental build of the people. Claims of pure
Scandinavian descent are put forward by many of the old families.
Wandering up and down the islands you encounter faces that possess no
Celtic characteristics; which carry the imagination to
"Noroway ower the faem;"
people with cool calm blue eyes, and hair yellow as the dawn; who are
resolute and persistent, slow in pulse and speech; and who differ
from the explosive Celtic element surrounding them as the iron
headland differs from the fierce surge that washes it, or a block of
marble from the heated palm pressed against it. The Hebrideans are a
mixed race; in them the Norseman and the Celt are combined, and here
and there is a dash of Spanish blood which makes brown the cheek and
darkens the eye. This southern admixture may have come about through
old trading relations with the Peninsula--perhaps the wrecked Armada
may have had something to do with it. The Highlander of Sir Walter,
like the Red Indian of Cooper, is to a large extent an ideal being.
But as Uncas does really wear war-paint, wield a tomahawk, scalp his
enemies, and, when the time comes, can stoically die, so the
Highlander possesses many of the qualities popularly ascribed to him.
Scott exaggerated only; he did not invent. He looked with a poet's
eye on the district north of the Grampians--a vision keener than any
other for what _is_, but which burdens, and supplements, and
glorifies--which, in point of fact, puts a nimbus around everything.
The Highlander stands alone amongst the British people. For
generations his land was shut against civilisation by mountain and
forest and intricate pass. While the large drama of Scottish history
was being played out in the Lowlands, he was busy in his mists with
narrow clan-fights and revenges. [Sidenote: Highland
characteristics.] While the southern Scot owed allegiance to the
Jameses, he was subject to Lords of the Isles, and to Duncans and
Donalds innumerable; while the one thought of Flodden, the other
remembered the "sair field of the Harlaw." The Highlander was, and
is still so far as circumstances permit, a proud, loving, punctilious
being: full of loyalty, careful of social distinction; with a bared
head for his chief, a jealous eye for his equal, an armed heel for
his inferior. He loved the valley in which he was born, the hills on
the horizon of his childhood; his sense of family relationship was
strong, and around him widening rings of cousinship extended to the
very verge of the clan. The Islesman is a Highlander of the
Highlanders; modern life took longer in reaching him, and his weeping
climate, his misty wreaths and vapours, and the silence of his moory
environments, naturally continued to act upon and to shape his
character. He is song-loving, "of imagination all compact;" and out
of the natural phenomena of his mountain region--his mist and
rain-cloud, wan sea-setting of the moon, stars glancing through rifts
of vapour, blowing wind and broken rainbows--he has drawn his poetry
and his superstition. His mists give him the shroud high on the
living heart, the sea-foam gives him an image of the whiteness of the
breasts of his girls, and the broken rainbow of their blushes. To a
great extent his climate has made him what he is. He is a child of
the mist. His songs are melancholy for the most part; and you may
discover in his music the monotony of the brown moor, the seethe of
the wave on the rock, the sigh of the wind in the long grasses of the
deserted churchyard. The musical instrument in which he chiefly
delights renders most successfully the coronach and the battle-march.
The Highlands are now open to all the influences of civilisation.
The inhabitants wear breeches and speak English even as we. Old
gentlemen peruse their _Times_ with spectacles on nose. Young lads
construe "Cornelius Nepos," even as in other quarters of the British
islands. Young ladies knit, and practise music, and wear crinoline.
But the old descent and breeding are visible through all modern
disguises: and your Highlander at Oxford or Cambridge--discoverable
not only by his rocky countenance, but by some dash of wild blood, or
eccentricity, or enthusiasm, or logical twist and turn of thought--is
as much a child of the mist as his ancestor who, three centuries ago,
was called a "wilde man" or a "red shanks;" who could, if need were,
live on a little oatmeal, sleep in snow, and, with one hand on the
stirrup, keep pace with the swiftest horse, let the rider spur never
so fiercely. It is in the Isles, however, and particularly amongst
the old Islesmen, that the Highland character is, at this day, to be
found in its purity. There, in the dwelling of the proprietor, or
still more in that of the large sheep farmer--who is of as good blood
as the laird himself--you find the hospitality, the prejudice, the
generosity, the pride of birth, the delight in ancient traditions,
which smack of the antique time. Love of wandering, and pride in
military life, have been characteristic of all the old families. The
pen is alien to their fingers, but they have wielded the sword
industriously. They have had representatives in every Peninsular and
Indian battle-field. India has been the chosen field of their
activity. Of the miniatures kept in every family more than one-half
are soldiers, and several have attained to no inconsiderable rank.
The Island of Skye has itself given to the British and Indian armies
at least a dozen generals. And in other services the Islesman has
drawn his sword. Marshal Macdonald had Hebridean blood in his veins;
and my friend Mr M'Ian remembers meeting him at Armadale Castle while
hunting up his relations in the island, and tells me that he looked
like a Jesuit in his long coat. And lads, to whom the profession of
arms has been shut, have gone to plant indigo in Bengal or coffee in
Ceylon, and have returned with gray hairs to the island to spend
their money there, and to make the stony soil a little greener; and
during their thirty years of absence Gaelic did not moulder on their
tongues, nor did their fingers forget their cunning with the pipes.
The palm did not obliterate the memory of the birch; nor the slow
up-swelling of the tepid wave, and its long roar of frothy thunder on
the flat red sands at Madras, the coasts of their childhood and the
smell and smoke of burning kelp.
[Sidenote: Macdonald and Macleod.]
The important names in Skye are Macdonald and Macleod. Both are of
great antiquity, and it is as difficult to discover the source of
either in history as it is to discover the source of the Nile in the
deserts of Central Africa. Distance in the one case appals the
geographer, and in the other the antiquary. Macdonald is of pure
Celtic origin, it is understood; Macleod was originally a Norseman.
Macdonald was the Lord of the Isles, and more than once crossed
swords with Scottish kings. Time has stripped him of royalty, and
the present representative of the family is a Baron merely. He sits
in his modern castle of Armadale amid pleasant larch plantations,
with the figure of Somerlid--the half mythical founder of his
race--in the large window of his hall. The two families intermarried
often and quarrelled oftener. They put wedding rings on each other's
fingers and dirks into each other's hearts. Of the two, Macleod had
the darker origin; and around his name there lingers a darker poetry.
Macdonald sits in his new castle in sunny Sleat with a southern
outlook--Macleod retains his old eyrie at Dunvegan, with its
drawbridge and dungeons. At night he can hear the sea beating on the
base of his rock. His "maidens" are wet with the sea foam. His
mountain "tables" are shrouded with the mists of the Atlantic. He
has a fairy flag in his possession. The rocks and mountains around
him wear his name even as of old did his clansmen. "Macleod's
country," the people yet call the northern portion of the island. In
Skye song and tradition Macdonald is like the green strath with
milkmaids milking kine in the fold at sunset, with fishers singing
songs as they mend brown nets on the shore. Macleod, on the other
hand, is of darker and drearier import--like a wild rocky spire of
Ouirang or Storr, dimmed with the flying vapour and familiar with the
voice of the blast and the wing of the raven. "Macleod's country"
looks toward Norway with the pale headlands of Greshornish,
Trotternish, and Durinish. The portion of the island which Macdonald
owns is comparatively soft and green, and lies to the south.
[Sidenote: King Haco.]
The Western Islands lie mainly out of the region of Scottish history,
and yet by Scottish history they are curiously touched at intervals,
Skye more particularly so. In 1263 when King Haco set out on his
great expedition against Scotland with one hundred ships and twenty
thousand men--an Armada, the period taken into consideration, quite
as formidable as the more famous and ill-fated Spanish one some
centuries later--the multitude of his sails darkened the Skye lochs.
Snizort speaks of him yet. He passed through the Kyles, breathed for
a little while at Kerrera, and then swept down on the Ayrshire coast,
where King Alexander awaited him, and where the battle of Largs was
fought.[1] After the battle Haco, grievously tormented by tempests,
sailed for Norway, where he died. [Sidenote: Ceding of the Hebrides
to Scotland.] This was the last invasion of the Northmen, and a few
years after the islands were formally ceded to Scotland. Although
ceded, however, they could hardly be said to be ruled by the Scottish
kings. After the termination of the Norway government, the Hebrides
were swayed by the Macdonalds, who called themselves Lords of the
Isles. [Sidenote: The Lords of the Isles.] These chieftains waxed
powerful, and they more than once led the long-haired Islesmen into
Scotland, where they murdered, burned, and ravaged without mercy. In
1411 Donald, one of those island kings, descended on the mainland,
and was sorely defeated by the Earl of Mar at Harlaw, near Aberdeen.
By another potentate of the same stock the counties of Ross and Moray
were ravaged in 1456. In the Western Islands the Macdonalds
exercised authentic sovereignty; they owned allegiance to the
Scottish king when he penetrated into their remote dominions, and
disowned it whenever he turned his back. The Macdonald dynasty, or
quasi dynasty, existed till 1536, when the last Lord of the Isles
died without an heir, and when there was no shoulder on which the
mantle of his authority could fall.
How the Macdonalds came into their island throne it would be
difficult, by the flickering rushlight of history, to discover. But
wandering up and down the islands, myself and the narrator swathed in
a film of blue peat-smoke, a ray of dusty light streaming in through
the green bull's-eye in the window, I have heard the following
account given:--The branches of the Macdonald family, Macdonald of
Sleat, Clanranald, who wears the white heather in his bonnet, the
analogue of the white rose, and which has been dipped in blood quite
as often, Keppoch, one of whose race fell at Culloden, and the rest,
were descended from a certain Godfrey, King of Argyll. This Godfrey
had four sons, and one of them was named Somerlid, youngest, bravest,
handsomest of all. But unhappily Somerlid was without ambition.
While his brothers were burning and ravaging and slaying, grasping
lands and running away with rich heiresses, after the fashion of
promising young gentlemen of that era, the indolent and handsome
giant employed himself in hunting and fishing. His looking-glass was
the stream; his drinking-cup the heel of his shoe; he would rather
spear a salmon than spear his foe; he burned no churches, the only
throats he cut were the throats of deer; he cared more to caress the
skins of seals and otters than the shining hair of women. Old
Godfrey liked the lad's looks, but had a contempt for his peaceful
ways, and, shaking his head, thought him little better than a
ne'er-do-weel or a silly one. But for all that, there was a deal of
unsuspected matter in Somerlid. At present he was peaceful as a
torch or a beacon--unlit. The hour was coming when he would be
changed; when he would blaze like a brandished torch, or a beacon on
a hill-top against which the wind is blowing.
[Sidenote: Somerlid.]
It so happened that the men of the Western Isles had lost their
chief. There was no one to lead them to battle, and it was
absolutely necessary that a leader should be procured. Much
meditating to whom they should offer their homage they bethought
themselves of the young hunter chasing deer on the Argyllshire hills.
A council was held; and it was resolved that a deputation should be
sent to Somerlid to state their case, and to offer that if he should
accept the office of chieftain, he and his children should be their
chieftains for ever. In some half-dozen galleys the deputation set
sail, and finally arrived at the court of old Godfrey. When they
told what they wanted, that potentate sent them to seek Somerlid; and
him they found fishing. Somerlid listened to their words with an
unmoved countenance; and when they were done, he went aside a little
to think over the matter. That done he came forward: "Islesmen," he
said, "there's a newly-run salmon in the black pool yonder. If I
catch him, I shall go with you as your chief; if I catch him not, I
shall remain where I am." To this the men of the Isles were
agreeable, and they sat down on the banks of the river to watch the
result. Somerlid threw his line over the black pool, and in a short
time the silvery mail of the salmon was gleaming on the yellow sands
of the river bank. When they saw this the Islesmen shouted; and so
after bidding farewell to his father, the elect of the thousands
stepped into the largest galley, and with the others in his wake,
sailed toward Skye a chief!
When was there a warrior like Somerlid? He spoiled and ravaged like
an eagle. He delighted in battle. He rolled his garments in blood.
He conquered island after island; he went out with empty galleys, and
he returned with them filled with prey, his oarsmen singing his
praises. He built up his island throne. He was the first Lord of
the Isles; and from his loins sprung all the Lords of the Isles that
ever were. He was a Macdonald, and from him the Macdonalds of Sleat
are descended. He wore a tartan of his own, which only the Prince of
Wales and the young Lord Macdonald, sitting to-day in Eton school,
are entitled to wear. And if at any time I ventured to impugn the
truth of this legend, I was told that if I went to Armadale Castle I
should see the image of Somerlid in the great window of the hall.
That was surely confirmation of the truth of the story. He must
surely be a sceptical Sassenach who would disbelieve after witnessing
_that_.
Although the Lords of the Isles exercised virtual sovereignty in the
Hebrides, the Jameses made many attempts to break their power and
bring them into subjection. James I. penetrated into the Highlands,
and assembled a Parliament at Inverness in 1427. He enticed many of
the chiefs to his court, and seized, imprisoned, and executed several
of the more powerful. Those who escaped with their lives were forced
to deliver up hostages. In fact, the Scottish kings looked upon the
Highlanders very much as they looked upon the borderers. In moments
of fitful energy they broke on the Highlands just as they broke upon
Ettrick and Liddesdale, and hanged and executed right and left. One
of the Acts of Parliament of James IV. declared that the Highlands
and Islands had become savage for want of a proper administration of
justice; and James V. made a voyage to the Islands in 1536, when many
of the chiefs were captured and carried away. It was about this time
that the last Lord of the Isles died. The Jameses were now kings of
the Highlands and Islands, but they were only kings in a nominal
sense. Every chief regarded himself as a sort of independent prince.
The Highland chieftains appeared at Holyrood, it is true; but they
drew dirks and shed blood in the presence; they were wanting in
reverence for the sceptre; they brought their own feuds with them to
the Scottish court, and when James VI. attempted to dissolve these
feuds in the wine cup, he met with but indifferent success. So
slight was lawful authority in 1589 that the island of the Lewes was
granted by the crown to a body of Fife gentlemen, if they would but
take and hold possession--just as the lands of the rebellious Maories
might be granted to the colonists at the present day.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Armada.]
Many a gallant ship of the Spanish Armada was wrecked on the shores
of the Western Islands, on the retreat to Spain; and a gun taken from
one of these, it is said, lies at Dunstaffnage Castle. In the
Islands you yet come across Spanish names, and traces of Spanish
blood; and the war ships of Spain that came to grief on the bleak
headlands of Skye and Lewes, may have something to do with that.
Where the vase is broken there still lingers the scent of the roses.
The connexion between Spain and the Western Islands is little more
than a mere accident of tempest. Then came the death of Elizabeth
and the accession of James to the English throne; and the time was
fast approaching when the Highlander would become a more important
personage than ever; when the claymore would make its mark in British
History.