Recovered Health--Journey to the Orkneys--Aboard the Steamer at
Wick--Mr. Bremner--Masonry of the Harbor of Wick--The greatest
Blunders result from good Rules misapplied--Mr. Bremner's Theory
about sea-washed Masonry--Singular Fracture of the Rock near
Wick--The Author's mode of accounting for it--"Simple but not
obvious" Thinking--Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections
under Water--His exploits in raising foundered Vessels--Aspect of
the Orkneys--- The ungracious Schoolmaster--In the Frith of
Kirkwall--Cathedral of St. Magnus--Appearance of Kirkwall--Its
"perished suppers"--Its ancient Palaces--Blunder of the Scotch
Aristocracy--The patronate Wedge--Breaking Ground in Orkney--Minute
gregarious Coccosteus--True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes--Ruins
of one of Cromwell's Forts--Antiquities of Orkney--The
Cathedral--Its Sculptures--The Mysterious Cell--Prospect from the
Tower--Its Chimes--Ruins of Castle Patrick.
A twelvemonth had gone by since a lingering indisposition, which bore
heavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone a
long-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead,
rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, along
which the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had now
got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per
day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years
before, I was at least vigorous enough to enjoy a middling long walk,
and to breast a tolerably steep hill. And so I resolved on at least
glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the
Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations
mainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amends
for seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach at
Invergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a weary
ride, in a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirling
about the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides," with whom I had taken my
chance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clock
in the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumbling
sea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling into
the bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some five
hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkened
and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage from
the south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking out
upon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through the
dimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozen
other passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of being
transferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the open
bay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tall
elderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in his
appearance,--the steam company's agent for this part of the country.
"That," said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a very
extraordinary man,--in his own special walk, one of the most
original-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, you
perhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all over
Britain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every one
else gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcoming
the _vis inertiae_ of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr.
Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest in
your peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings."
I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his company
the half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish the
time doubled. I had been struck by the peculiar style of masonry
employed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray
ponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, instead
of being placed on their flatter beds, like common ashlar in a building,
or horizontal strata in a quarry, are raised on end, like staves in a
pail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as if
formed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learned
that Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarity
of his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to your
strata," I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position.
It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my old
profession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should be
always laid 'below.'" "A good rule for the land," replied Mr. Bremner,
"but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost always
perpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast like
ours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every storm
like pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term their
best beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by the
gales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice," continued Mr.
Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry land
is also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasoned
thus:--The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, and
that forms the enemy with which I have to contend, is not simply water,
with an onward impetus communicated to it by the wind and tide, and a
reactive impetus in the opposite direction,--the effect of the backward
rebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forces
above its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is also
something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtile
mixture of water and _air_, with a powerful _upward_ action,--a
consequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upward
action must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly as
the other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against a
piece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the interstices
into the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, has
by its upward action, a tendency to _set the work afloat_. And the
broader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are the
surfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet by
four, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, if
placed on end, a superficies of but _four_ square feet; whereas, if
placed on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of
_forty_ square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this aerial
upheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which no
precautions are usually adopted to bind it fast,--for the existence of
the force itself is not taken into account,--the greater bed of the
stone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; and
on a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aerial
upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one
of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on
these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,--on what was
deemed their _worst_, not their _best_ beds,--wedging them all fast
together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the
old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no
ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a
subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such
practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.
Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular
appearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the town
of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The
solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it
externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached
masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up
by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great.
Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the
solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice
had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other,
as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest
sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay.
"I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological
lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing
about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied,
"the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within
that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an
illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you
operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally
exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood
higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what
is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here
is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to
the very edge of the land;--your coast-line must have resembled the side
of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick
deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs,
icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed
the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet
in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, in
this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without
first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a
fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with
which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your
shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision
of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run
down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though
made somewhat in the dark,--for I had no opportunity of seeing the
broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,--seemed to satisfy
Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of
which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.
With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to
appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical
simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the
thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings
of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a
character which equally applies to _all_ good thinking, whatever its
special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it
seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged
mode of thinking,--the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical
poets,--and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the
representations of him which I have yet seen, is the _broad_ Hercules. I
was greatly struck by some of Mr. Bremner's views on deep-sea founding.
He showed me how, by a series of simple, but certainly not obvious
contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he
could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating
caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb
line, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had
reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms
water, where, on a bottom previously prepared for it by the diving-bell,
he had means to make it take the ground exactly at the required line.
The difficulty and vast expense of building altogether by the bell would
be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the
work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid
in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some
of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected
with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I
regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical
memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously
illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of
materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered
to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to
be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a
mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper
resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,--"a large
collier, chock-full of coal,--which an English projector had actually
engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But
the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;
and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the
employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but
also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after
I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland,
he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least
one special department,--a feat generally recognized and appreciated as
the most herculean of its kind ever performed,--the raising and warping
off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an
exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of
sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so
singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life
very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could
have performed as well. Napoleon,--himself possessed of great
genius,--could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers
the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would
not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport
town.
The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and the
Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view
as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray,
that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The
bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level
Orkney Islands, impressed everywhere, on at least their eastern coasts,
by the comparatively tame character borne by the Old Red flagstones,
when undisturbed by trap or the primary rocks, demand the full-dress
auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent.
Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and
surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long
dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and
there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I
afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they
shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according
to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for
centuries after their first discovery, I would rather have been
disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated
so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for
Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the
passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious
schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine
dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was
pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an
unintermittent hot-water _douche_ of queries, the patient courtesy of a
Member of Parliament on a visit to his constituency. At length, however,
the troubler quitted him, and took his stand immediately beside me; and,
too sanguinely concluding that I might take the same kind of liberty
with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I
addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the
schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such
sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met
with a prompt rebuff, that at once set me down. I was evidently a big,
forward lad, who had taken a liberty with the master. It is, I suspect,
scarce possible for a man, unless naturally very superior, to live among
boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while a
despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character
which the master-spirits,--our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,--have
embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have
hitherto militated against the practical realization of those
unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the
teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of
looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how
invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run every
scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village
schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from
the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.
We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and
dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and
ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South
Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling
Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the
Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the
uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the
ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing
solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,--for
its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have
entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it
occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray
straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to
show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very
narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had
got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive
eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,--that many of the older
houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to
the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their
fronts,--and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of
their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained,
but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the
buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height,
which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the
tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were in
Orkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of public
thoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made in
other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in
the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found
comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility
which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,--remnants of
a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to
their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's
society their dreary winters,--reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketch
of the Borough,"--a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to have
sat,--and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when
"tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in." But the
churchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmering
with all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained to
represent those "great men of the burgh," who, according to the poet,
used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventh
hour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests," or of its
"suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids," who kept all their
neighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in a
mood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering of
regret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described in
the "Sketch,"--suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smothered
in cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes of
dog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted by
copious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by gigantic
bowls of rum punch." But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, can
recall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup of tea, I
found I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, the
perished suppers of Kirkwall.
I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of an
hour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, sauntered
up the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomy
weather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyed
Sabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quite
unprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage of
ancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, when
viewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to the
uplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from one
special point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city in
ruins,--some such city though in a widely different style of
architecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus rises
on the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, the
bishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites so
contiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreast
gives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I know
no such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgow
are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against the
blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we have
here a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a nobler
church, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more.
And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of the
palaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. The
castle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James the
Sixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after his
defeat at Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army,
and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, his
body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The
church and palace belong to the obscure dawn of the national history,
and were Norwegian for centuries before they were Scotch.
As I was coming down the hill at a snail's pace, I was overtaken by a
countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing
me, "wi' the great man last night?" "I came in the steamer," I replied,
"with your Member, Mr. Dundas." "O, aye," rejoined the man; "but I'm no
sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see,"
jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secession
chapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the Free
Kirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to the
Establishment; and I side wi' Dundas." The aristocracy of Scotland
committed, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengthening
their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages.
They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seeking
to appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves;
and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain
landing before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the
Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of the
kingdom,--its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its Free
Church denomination,--comprising in their aggregate amount a great and
influential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters,--a
circumstance inevitable to their position as such,--have been thrown
into the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transition
state, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country;
but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; and
already, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatly
less political influence in the kingdom of which they own almost all
the soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and English
aristocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were the
representation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland,
and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the
passing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for
evermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally so
Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriated
by Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them the
great benefits of a religious Establishment, and very great these are;
but it threatens, as in the case of the sons of Carmi of old, to work
more serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted,--"evil to
themselves and all their house." As I approached the Free Church, a
squat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie," who seemed passing
towards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at my
gray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than a
Southland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Will
ye be wantin' a coo?" I replied in the negative; and the wee wifie,
after casting a jealous glance at a group of grave-featured Free Church
folk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have tolerated
Sabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over her
head, and hied away to the chapel.
In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom I
introduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I was
introduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, to
whose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some of
the less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on the
morning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to see
them all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarry
a few hundred yards to the south and east of the town. It is strange
enough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himself
restricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism,--an effect,
probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of this
formation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of
the present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, which
made each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, though
abounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which did
not belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which my
first specimen had been sent me a few years before by Mr. Robert Dick,
from the neighborhood of Thurso, and which I at that time, judging from
its general proportions, had set down as the young of the _Coccosteus
cuspidatus_. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thurso
as in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enough
analogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of the
existing fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary when
fully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as the
sillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as the
colum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, forms
a familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, found
solitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like the
coal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But a
more careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that this
minute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that its
fragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together--(in
one instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded into
a piece of flag barely six inches square)--was in reality a distinct
species. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, of
the _Coccosteus decipiens_, its plates exhibit as many of those lines
of increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature its
tortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the buckler
species were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as are
exhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times as
great; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are as
numerous;--evidences, I think,--when we take into account that in the
bulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with the
growth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to have
been affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature,--that this
ichthyolite was not an _immature_, but really a _miniature_ Coccosteus.
We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells
of bivalves, such as _Cardium echinatum_, or on those of spiral
univalves, such as _Buccinum undatum_, the diminutive markings which
they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species
we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic to
the minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regular
gradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of the
dwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to the
pointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half to
two inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three to
four. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that I
first determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus,--a
position which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusively
demonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived by
ill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral
and posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to the
animal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the _Coccosteus
minor_,--if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such
time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more
characteristic one,--there are the remains, consisting of fosse and
rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins,
of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the
assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during
which this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems to
have exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection
of even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him.
The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignity
and importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough
to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose
peculiar _setting_ in this remote northern country, joined to the
associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds,
Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance
its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red
Sandstone,--a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately
developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which
a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with
the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that
ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as
Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few
of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed
and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round
squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the
greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over
ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the
carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice
yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,--for the Gothic is
greatest in what the Grecian is least,--to the sombre sublimity of the
interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row
of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of
ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small
Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with
toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and
Torfeinar, are singularly fine,--far superior to aught else of the kind
in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A
rare Byssus,--the _Byssus aeruginosa_ of Linnaeus,--the _Leprasia
aeruginosa_ of modern botanists,--one of those gloomy vegetables of the
damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the
earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given
to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining
of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps
without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the
antique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head,
through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green
velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper
recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing
mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black
and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in
convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,--singularly
appropriate to the architecture,--was not the effect of design. The
choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were
still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world
too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than
the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least
their windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the
pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly
wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages
contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic
feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time
are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own
sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some
definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was
perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our
modern architects with the _learning_ of their profession. Extensive
knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which
can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be
wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in
danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which
is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new
vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere
presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere
damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the
exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can
alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.
Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to
have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there
was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his
work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the
architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable
antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw
a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth
carvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction into
ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so
incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places.
The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to
exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky
artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but
produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions,
and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a
monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of
Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the
betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the
solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how
unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into
ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish
between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might
come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as
precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and
grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to
usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with
malice _prepense_.
I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height
from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the
thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the
cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron
chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit
of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some
northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without
air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the
Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the
rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled
the great tower,--considerably less tall, it is said, than its
predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years
ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare,
not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into
the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck
little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long
vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so
immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be
nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the
inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not
much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray
slate,--almost the only parts of it visible from this point of
view,--and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled
hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the
narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing
ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to
kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,--avenues here and there enlivened
on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee--for the
wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine--with their border of dazzling
white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my
descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf,
somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of
chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the
monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have
descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted
the heart of old Lisle Bowles, the poet of
"Well-tun'd bell's enchanting harmony."
I could, however, have preferred listening to their music, though it
seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the
quiet clerical poet,--the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I
doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those
bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly
proposed adding a _cap_, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which
he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones,
that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never
overpower them.
"How sweet the tuneful bells responsive peal!
* * * * *
And, hark! with lessening cadence now they fall,
And now, along the white and level tide
They fling their melancholy music wide!
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of happy hours departed, and those years
When, from an antique tower, ere life's fair prime,
The mournful mazes of their mingling chime
First wak'd my wondering childhood into tears!"
From the Cathedral I passed to the mansion of Old Earl Patrick,--a
stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth
century. It stands in the middle of a dense thicket of what are _trying_
to be trees, and have so far succeeded, that they conceal, on one of the
sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the _spring_ of
the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the
base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit
the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,--of towers with
their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep
mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are rich
specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets
with which they range, they communicate a sort of _high-relief_ effect
to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of
which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome."
Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its
walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been
rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found,
made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great
hall of the erection,--an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired,
and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and
Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise
of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a _rectilinear arch_,
defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he
had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome
old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in
its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on
almost the last occasion on which it had been wrought for this purpose,
one of the two men engaged in the employment suffered a stone, which he
had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who
stood watching for it below, and killed him on the spot.