On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small
holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to
Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An
inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of
Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in
Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct
Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full
of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance
to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true
Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The
intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman.
While yet lingering amid the Standing Stones, I was joined by Mr.
Garson, who had obligingly ridden a good many miles to meet me, and now
insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my
side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the
evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a
vessel than of a horse, and with fewer fears of mutiny; but mount I did;
and the horse, a discreet animal, finding he was to have matters very
much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such
purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind
Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely
ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to
everybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybody
in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must
have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless
waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the
island-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least
bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering
of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I
found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no
quarrel,--numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and
forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are
parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty
landowners.
A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland
about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part
of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north
of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed
proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in
reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often
remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no
inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times
of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the
disastrous wars of the French Revolution,--wars from the effects of
which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,--that the smaller
holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began,
the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred
and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen
into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that
base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any
country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to
less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of
the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place
somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have
given them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of the
kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their
extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness
in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe
limits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous to
overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist,
create almost necessarily--human nature being what it is--a species of
despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative
governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was
always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler
was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.[23] And in
a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands
of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the
territorial privileges of the great landowner into a state of
antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that
cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district
divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not
be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant
proprietor,--greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,--as in the
case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public
worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare
moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to
worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a
cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide.
The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as
stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when
possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of
society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a
useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;
while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into
extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for
their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the
stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so
respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to
them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and
which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.
Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality by
his mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow or
basin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at no
point,--though the radius of the prospect averages from four to six
miles,--does it command a view of the sea. I scarce expected being
introduced in Orkney to a scene in which the traveller could so
thoroughly forget that he was on an island. Of the parish of Harray,
which borders on Mr. Garson's property, no part touches the sea-coast;
and the people of the parish are represented by their neighbors, who
pride themselves upon their skill as sailors and boatmen, as a race of
lubberly landsmen, unacquainted with nautical matters, and ignorant of
the ocean and its productions. A Harray man is represented, in one of
their stories, as entering into a compact of mutual forbearance with a
lobster,--to him a monster of unknown powers and formidable
proportions,--which he had at first attempted to capture, but which had
shown fight, and had nearly captured him in turn. "Weel, weel, let a-be
for let a-be," he is made to say; "if thou does na clutch me in thy
grips, I'se no clutch thee in mine." It is to this primitive parish that
David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian
Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the
peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits,
their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward
district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little
intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient
customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from
their pedestals in almost all the other parts of the island. The
permanency of its population, too, is mightily in favor of 'old use and
wont,' as it is almost entirely divided amongst a class of men yelept
_pickie_, or petty lairds, each ploughing his own fields and reaping his
own crops, much in the manner their great-great-grandfathers did in the
days of Earl Patrick. And such is the respect which they entertain for
their hereditary beliefs, that many of them are said still to cast a
lingering look, not unmixed with reverence, on certain spots held sacred
by their Scandinavian ancestors."
After an early dinner I set out for the barony of Birsay, in the
northern extremity of the mainland, accompanied by Mr. Garson, and
passed for several miles over a somewhat dreary country, bare, sterile,
and brown, studded by cold, broad, treeless lakes, and thinly mottled by
groups of gray, diminutive cottages, that do not look as if there was
much of either plenty or comfort inside. But after surmounting the hills
that form the northern side of the interior basin, I was sensible of a
sudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopes
towards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriant
herbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a more
genial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild
flowers,--richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England.
They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in
leaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems as
if competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with their
general ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance
of wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western
coasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among these
last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized as
occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast
profusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of the
kingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I
am inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the
bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a law
not less influential in the animal than in the vegetable world, which,
when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or
quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalf
of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the
common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air.
Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller
leaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year
of trial had been vigorous plants of from three to four feet in height,
had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds of scarce as many inches.
But while the more flourishing, and as yet undegenerate plant, had
merely borne a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of
exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was so
thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as to
present the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were not
only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size.
The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated and
become poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with some
other plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, for taking its
place among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of our
sea-shores, it will be found that in proportion as its habitat proves
ungenial, and its stems and leaves become dwarfish and thin, its little
white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely
exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant
forming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with
seed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a vegetation that
approaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to be
the same principle, chronically operative; and hence, it would seem,
their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poor
productive _Irish_ of the vegetable world;[24] for Doubleday seems to
be quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only the
inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and
rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny
than the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse and
cattle breeder knows, that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode
of rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured,
brings forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved and
lean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is
also with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of
degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their
existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the
species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater
comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running
out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;
while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost the
mathematical ratio. The county of Sutherland is already more populous
than it was previous to the great clearings. In Skye, though fully
two-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of the
last century, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap was
completely filled; and miserable Ireland, had the human family no other
breeding-place or nursery, would of itself be sufficient in a very few
ages to people the world.
We returned, taking in our way the cliffs of Marwick Head, in which I
detected a few scattered plates and scales, and which, like nine-tenths
of the rocks of Orkney, belong to the great flagstone division of the
formation. I found the dry-stone fences on Mr. Garson's property still
richer in detached fossil fragments than the cliffs; but there are few
erections in the island that do not inclose in their walls portions of
the organic. We find ichthyolite remains in the flagstones laid bare
along the way-side,--in every heap of road-metal,--in the bottom of
every stream,--in almost every cottage and fence. Orkney is a land of
defunct fishes, and contains in its rocky folds more individuals of the
waning ganoid family than are now to be found in all the existing seas,
lakes, and rivers of the world. I enjoyed in a snug upper room a
delectable night's rest, after a day of prime exercise, prolonged till
it just touched on toil, and again experienced, on looking out in the
morning on the wide flat basin around, a feeling somewhat akin to
wonder, that Orkney should possess a scene at once so extensive and so
exclusively inland.
Towards mid-day I walked on to the parish manse of Sandwick, armed with
a letter of introduction to its inmate, the Rev. Charles Clouston,--a
gentleman whose descriptions of the Orkneys, in the very complete and
tastefully written Guide-Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, and
of his own parish in the "Statistical Account of Scotland," had, both
from the high literary ability and the amount of scientific acquirement
which they exhibit, rendered me desirous to see. I was politely
received, though my visit must have been, as I afterwards ascertained,
at a rather inconvenient time. It was now late in the week, and the
coming Sabbath was that of the communion in the parish; but Mr. Clouston
obligingly devoted to me at least an hour, and I found it a very
profitable one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which he
intended constructing a grotto, and which contained numerous specimens
of Coccosteus, that he had exposed to the weather, to bring out the fine
blue efflorescence,--a phosphate of iron which forms on the surface of
the plates. They reminded me, from their peculiar style of coloring, and
the grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces of
buff-colored china, and seemed to be chiefly of one species, very
abundant in Orkney, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. We next walked out to
see a quarry in the neighborhood of the manse, remarkable for containing
in immense abundance the heads of Dipteri,--many of them in a good state
of keeping, with all the multitudinous plates to which they owe their
pseudo-name, Polyphractus, in their original places, and bearing unworn
and untarnished their minute carvings and delicate enamel, but existing
in every case as mere detached heads. I found three of them lying in one
little slaty fragment of two and a half inches by four, which I brought
along with me. Mr. Clouston had never seen the curious arrangement of
palatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dipterus; and, drawing
his attention to it in an ill-preserved specimen which I found in the
coping of his glebe-wall, I restored, in a rude pencil sketch, the two
angular patches of teeth that radiate from the elegant dart-head in the
centre of the palate, with the rhomboidal plate behind. "We have a fish,
not uncommon on the rocky coasts of this part of the country," he
said,--"the Bergil or Striped Wrasse (_Labras Balanus_),--which bears
exactly such patches of angular teeth in its palate. They adhere
strongly together; and, when found in our old Picts' houses, which
occasionally happens, they have been regarded by some of our local
antiquaries as artificial,--an opinion which I have had to correct,
though it seems not improbable that, from their gem-like appearance,
they may have been used in a rude age as ornaments. I think I can show
you one disinterred here some years ago." It interested me to find, from
Mr. Clouston's specimens that the palatal grinders of this recent fish
of Orkney very nearly resemble those of its _Dipterus_ of the Old Red
Sandstone. The group is of nearly the same size in the modern as in the
ancient fish, and presents the same angular form; but the individual
teeth are more strongly set in the Bergil than in the Dipterus, and
radiate less regularly from the inner rectangular point of the angle to
its base outside. I could fain have procured an Orkney Bergil, in order
to determine the general pattern of its palatal dentition with what is
very peculiar in the more ancient fish,--the form of the lower jaw; and
to ascertain farther, from the contents of the stomach, the species of
shell-fish or crustaceans on which it feeds; but, though by no means
rare in Orkney, where it is occasionally used as food, I was unable,
during my short stay, to possess myself of a specimen.
Mr. Clouston had, I found, chiefly directed his palaeontological
inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as the department
of the science in which, in relation to Orkney, most remained to be
done; and his collection of these is the most considerable in the number
of its specimens that I have yet seen. It, however, serves but to show
how very extreme is the poverty of the flora of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone. The numerous fishes of the period seem to have inhabited a
sea little more various in its vegetation than in its molluscs. Among
the specimens of Mr. Clouston's collection I could detect but two
species of plants,--an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearly
resembling a club-moss than aught I have seen, and a smooth-stemmed
fucoid, existing as a mere coaly film on the stone, and distinguished
chiefly from the other by its sharp-edged, well-defined outline, and
from the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the same
diameter for a considerable distance, and this, too, after throwing off
at acute angles numerous branches, nearly equal in bulk to the parent
trunk. In a specimen about two and a half feet in length, which I owe to
the kindness of Mr. Dick of Thurso, there are stems continuous
throughout, that, though they ramify into from six to eight branches in
that space, are quite as thick atop as at bottom. They are the remains,
in all probability, of a long flexible fucoid, like those fucoids of the
intertropical seas that, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise not
unfrequently to the surface in fifteen and twenty fathoms water. I saw
among Mr. Clouston's specimens no such lignite as the fragment of true
coniferous wood which I had found at Cromarty a few years previous, and
which, it would seem, is still unique among the fossils of the Old Red
Sandstone. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions
of "Cook's Voyages," there are several entries along the track of the
great navigator that indicate where, in mid-ocean, trees, or fragments
of trees, had been picked up. The entries, however, are but few, though
they belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright,
there are only five entries in all,--two in the Northern and three in
the Southern Pacific. The floating tree, at a great distance from land,
is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the
breadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the
Old Red Sandstone, when probably the breadth of land was _not_ great,
and trees _not_ numerous, it seems to have been of rarer occurrence
still. But it is at least something to know that in this early age of
the world trees there were.
I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that of
Saturday, took boat for Hoy,--skirting, on my passage out, the eastern
and southern shores of the intervening island of Graemsay, and, on the
passage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, an
intelligent man,--one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in
the Free Church Sabbath-school,--lightened the way by his narratives of
storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history.
There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better like
to meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of his
eyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history of
almost all animals was little more than half a century ago,--a matter of
mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classification
founded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still a very great
deal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of these
denizens of the deep,--much, in short, respecting that faculty which is
in them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorable
laws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence,
within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, is
playing strange vagaries in his;--a species of knowledge this, by the
way, which constitutes by far the most valuable part,--the _mental_
department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligent
fisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled me
to fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it
ought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Graemsay
coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a
few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney
fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the
darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man,
not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an
extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain
unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely
admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his little
skiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough ado
to keep the sea. He had been married in early life to a
religiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but,
living with him in the little island of Graemsay, separated by the sea
from any place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the inside of
a church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion Sabbath in the
neighboring parish of Stromness, he seemed to yield to her entreaties,
and got ready his yawl, apparently with the design of bringing her
across the Sound to the town. They had, however, no sooner quitted the
shore than he sailed off to a green little Ogygia of a holm in the
neighborhood, on which, reversing the old mythologic story of Calypso
and Ulysses, he incarcerated the poor woman for the rest of the day till
evening. I could see, from the broad grin with which the boatman greeted
this part of the recital, that there was, unluckily, almost fun enough
in the trick to neutralize the sense of its barbarity. The unsocial
fisherman lived on, dreaded and disliked, and yet, when his skiff was
seen boldly keeping the sea in the face of a freshening gale, when every
other was making for port, or stretching out from the land as some
stormy evening was falling, not a little admired also. At length, on a
night of fearful tempest, the skiff was marked approaching the coast,
full on an iron-bound promontory, where there could be no safe landing.
The helm, from the steadiness of her course, seemed fast lashed, and,
dimly discernible in the uncertain light, the solitary boatman could be
seen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But as
his little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it was
found that there was no speculation in his stony glance: the
misanthropic fisherman was a cold and rigid corpse. He had died at sea,
as English juries emphatically express themselves in such cases, under
"the visitation of God."