The aged lady whose recollections I condense, and combine with my own
observations, says:
Remote, but still distinct, the view appears,
Thro’ the long vista of departed years;
although, towards the conclusion of the American War, the fish town of
Footdee was not one of those “green spots on which memory delights to
dwell.” The town consisted of several rows of low-thatched cottages
running from east to west, between the high-road and the harbour, or,
as it is called, the tide. During the high spring-tides, the furthest
waves came up to the bank of sand on which the ends of the houses were
built. Exteriorly, these cottages appeared comfortless enough, as each
dwelling fronted the back of its opposite neighbour, and, as in the
narrow space between there was a line of dunghills crossed over with
spars, upon which were hung lines, bladders, and buoys, intermixed with
dried dog-fish and skate. Their interior was not more alluring to a
stranger. The earthen-floor was uneven, and sometimes dirty, although
generally sanded over of an evening, or at least every Saturday, in
preparation for the Sabbath. Upon the wood or rafters which stretched
across horizontally from the tops of the walls, was a ceiling of old
oars and bits of drift-wood. The bare rough walls were not whitewashed.
Roof, walls, and rafters were all blackened by smoke from a fire at
one end of the cottage, placed upon the floor, and made of turf and
sea-weed. Soot-drops--curious black glossy accumulations, formed by
a similar process, doubtless, to that which produces stalactites and
stalagmites--hung here and there upon the walls, rafters, and roof.
These collections of pendulous carbon might have been deemed ornaments,
if they had not been signs of defective cleanliness. There was a small
window at each side of the door. Under each window was a clumsy black
bedstead. There was but one small deal table. There were only two or
three chairs, and as many sunkies, or low fixed seats resting upon
stakes driven into the floor, to sit upon. Beside the wall opposite the
door were seen the requisites of the fishing occupation--lines, creels,
murlains, &c. Such were the principal property and furniture visible.
There was no press or cupboard; and the only depository for keeping
things in was a chest or locker, in which lay the precious stores and
the Sunday clothes. The salt-backet, or box, was suspended in the
chimney.
Such were the cottages in the eighteenth century. In the first quarter
of the nineteenth, the cottages were arranged upon the four sides
of squares, with a large open space in the centre; and outside every
cottage, upon the walls, hung fish-hakes or wooden triangles for drying
haddock. Inside the cottages the walls were occasionally whitewashed;
and there was fixed against the wall a series of wooden shelves for the
preservation and display of delft and earthenware crockery. There were
tea-cups in the cupboard in the corner. The little round table was of
pine-deal, but scrubbed into a whiteness by a truly Dutch cleanliness,
which made it rival tables covered with a fair white linen cloth. The
cruisie, an iron lamp of simple structure, consisting of one cup or
ladle, with a narrow lip for the whale-oil and wick, and another cup
of broader and larger dimensions, to receive the droppings, hangs in
the nineteenth, as in many centuries previously, near the chimney, and
produces, Rembrandt-like, lights and shades well worthy of the study of
an artist who should wish to rival the Dutch painters of the present
day, in the pictures they paint to show the effects of a lamp.
The costumes of the fishers were, and continue to be, peculiar. The
elderly men wore broad blue woollen bonnets, coarse blue jackets,
and canvass kilts or short trousers. The younger men were rather
good-looking, had good-humoured faces, and were smarter in their dress.
The women wore caps, the original patterns of which still abound upon
the Continent, which did not prevent their features being injured by
the weather, and their skins being tanned by the sun. The middle-aged
women wore stuff gowns, with large flowered calico wrappers or short
gowns, over them. The young girls wore stuff wrappers and petticoats,
with their hair either drawn back with a large comb, which reached from
ear to ear, or fastened up in a very slovenly and unbecoming manner
with a head-dress of red worsted tape. The boys under fifteen were the
worst clad. They ran about in tattered old garments of their fathers’,
a world too wide, and remained in this condition until they were able
to earn a more decent covering for themselves. The little children of
both sexes were comfortably clad in a simple dress of white plaiding,
called a walliecoat, which, with their fair curly heads and rosy
cheeks, made them look very pretty, as they paddled in the pools of
water, and played with their tiny boats.
In the last century, the fishermen were mostly ignorant of everything
unconnected with their own business. Few of them could read, and none
of the grown-up people could write. Some of the lads could read and
write a little; but as they went to sea in the night, and took their
repose in the day, they were not placed in favourable circumstances for
the development of the social faculties. No instance of intellectual
talent--no single person displaying a tendency towards any art or
science--occurred among them. Music and song, no doubt, contributed
to the enjoyment of their merry meetings; but the music was confined
to a fiddle, and their collection of songs scarcely extended beyond
The Praise of Paul Jones, The Waefu’ Ballad of Captain Glen, and the
Christmas carol of By Southend. As for the women--toiling, as they
were, incessantly--they had no time for mental improvement. But as they
grew old they gained practical knowledge and experience. Many of them
had a knowledge of simple remedies for curing diseases, which obtained
for their prescriptions a preference to those of medical men. Some of
them were supposed to be invested with supernatural powers, which made
it dangerous to offend them.
I may interpose here a general remark. The superstitions which were
sweepingly condemned by the philosophy of the eighteenth century as
falsehood and imposture, the philosophy of the nineteenth finds to be
true in a sense. Instead of rejecting it in a heap, the student of the
present day shakes and washes the rubbish, and separates the grains of
truth from it. What, I may be asked, was it true that old fish-crones
possessed the powers of witchcraft? I have not a doubt of it. The
word witchcraft comes from wiccian, whence witchery, wickedness. It
means evil influence. Gifted with the power of reading characters and
actions, of seeing consequences and calculating results, and capable
of imparting a bias, laying a snare, adapting a temptation, planning a
vengeance, or instilling a physical or moral poison; and years give all
these powers to malignant intelligence.
Anything may be twisted into stupid or incredible shapes. When affairs
did not prosper among the Footdee folk, it was attributed to an evil
foot, an “ill fit.” Prior to setting out upon any expedition or
enterprise, they were careful and particular about the first “fit” they
met in the morning. The Scum of the Well was an object of rivalry every
New Year’s Day morning, Old Style. As the midnight hour approached,
and the last moments of the year came on, the women assembled in a
solemn group, around the large old draw-well, and scolded and scuffled
to decide whose pan or bucket should carry off the first fraught (or
first freight). The superstition of the first foot may afford some
explanation of the phrase Putting his foot into it. Prior to commencing
anything, is it not well to note carefully who may be taking the
initiative for evil in it? Is not the first evil foot astir in it a
serious thing for any enterprise? As for the scum of the well, is not
the energetic housewife who obtains the first supply of the first
necessary of life,--water--likely to surpass all rivals in providing
for her household? I opine it is only a sort of piety due to our
forefathers to guess they were shrewder fellows than we might suppose
from our views of their superstition, witchcraft, and sorcery.
Indeed there is something small in the minds which study superstitions
only to find in them occasions for indulging the sudden elation of
self-glory which Hobbes says is the cause of laughter. Our forefathers
inherited a spirit-world of personifications; and we have inherited
a mass of philosophical abstractions. Our forefathers inherited a
poetical and popular nomenclature, and we express our scientific
generalisations in crack-jaw words of Greek and Latin derivation.
Ghosts, wraiths, witches, fairies, mermaids and water-kelpies, are
personifications which have been covered with ridicule, and undoubtedly
there have been an abundance of ridiculous stories told respecting
them; but I suspect there is philosophy in them after all. The minds of
Coast Folk are peopled from early childhood with spectres belonging to
the land, sea, and sky; and no wonder, since, during long centuries,
catastrophes have desolated the homes of Coast Folk which have issued
mysteriously and terribly from land, sea, and sky. Seven miles from
Aberdeen there is a fishing-village which was buried in a sand-storm in
one night. Almost every soul of the inhabitants was smothered in the
sand-drift, and for many years the spire of the village church alone
marked the spot in the hollow treacherous sand-hills. When a boy I was
warned by words and looks of horror from approaching the fatal locality
where it was thought the wrath of the Almighty had displayed itself
so awfully. Several instances have occurred in which all the men of a
village have gone to sea, and perished in one night. A boat or a corpse
heard of as having been cast ashore on a distant beach, was sometimes
the only tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have frightened many a
brave man; and, in several of the monthly magazines published in the
last century their existence was as seriously discussed as apparitions
of sea-serpents have been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw one. “I
recollect Andrew perfectly well. He was a stout man, with a broad
good-humoured face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet upon the back of
his head.” Occasionally employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked more
like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman. One summer day Andrew was
found lying insensible on the hill of Torry which faces the sea upon
the side of the river Dee, opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke
confusedly and incoherently. He was thought to be deranged. He was
carried to the ferry and rowed home. After several weeks of delirious
fever he became low and melancholy, and declined to give any account
of his illness. Under medical treatment he recovered, although reduced
to a skeleton. The fearful belief spread through the village that
Andrew Brands had seen something. When questioned after his recovery,
he said in substance: “I was upon the outlook lying upon my breast,
and looking over the top of the rocks, when I saw a creature like a
woman sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have something like a white
sheet, or grave-clothes wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed her
hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms in the air. All her ways were
fearsome, and at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished beneath the
waves. My heart lap (leapt), I grew blind, and I remember nothing more
until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the men lifting me up.” The
medical theory of his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was, that
he had gone out with incipient fever upon him, had fallen asleep in
an exposed situation, and the hallucinations of delirium had done all
the rest. My informant who remembered him well, maintained he had been
unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing Diana at a time when ladies rarely
bathed in Scotland, and had been punished by the vengeance of the
goddess. Probably, however, an accumulation of foam among the stones
of the beach had taken the flickering form of a woman. The white scum
would seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and Andrew Brands was
frightened by a mermaid because he had never been taught the effects
of perspective. Was it in some such way as this that Cytherea herself
was seen by the poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing from
the froth of the sea until she was wafted in a shell to the shore by
Zephyrus, where the Graces received and adorned her for presentation to
the celestials of Olympus?
Extraordinary physical phenomena generally precede extraordinary
catastrophes. Everybody has heard of the warning blue lights. During
the night which preceded a storm, in which seven men of a seaside
village were lost, an aged man, I have been assured, saw seven blue
lights passing in solemn procession from the roofs of their cottages
towards their grave-yard. He entreated the men to stay at home, and
not to go to sea. But they were obstinate, and went. He told some old
and some young people, who would listen to him, what he had seen, and
had scarcely finished his vaticination when the lightning leaped high
into the sky, the thunder pealed, and a hurricane lashed the sea into
furious madness. The boats were not far from the shore, but before
they could reach it a boat capsized, and seven men were lost within
sight of their families. A week afterwards, at the very hour of the day
corresponding to the hour of the night of the procession of the blue
lights, the funeral procession of the seven fishermen was seen going
from their cottages by the very way the lights had gone; and beneath
the very spots where the lights stood in the churchyard the corpses
rested for evermore. The law of the elders in these villages is, that
no boats ought to go to sea when the old men say they have seen
the blue lights. The blue lights are possibly electrical facts. The
traditions respecting their direction are as variable as the winds. The
guess is not a very hazardous one, that science would agree with the
old men in warning the fishers against going to sea when the air was
charged with electricity after midnight, in the coldest hours of the
twenty-four.
When the Footdee fishers were found in the last century to be no more
scrupulous than other people respecting custom-house oaths, an oath was
framed for them, founded upon their superstitious fears, which proved
to be far more effectual than the ordinary one. It concluded with these
words: “If I do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, may my boat be a bonnet to me.”
Of course the fishers leaned to the side of the smugglers against the
excise and customs officers. Almost everybody did, in the last century
except the lawyers, something of a legal education being necessary
to see the propriety of establishing what Adam Smith, while himself
a Commissioner of the Board of Customs, denounced as the outposts of
Pandemonium. When examined before the courts in smuggling cases, the
fishermen contrived occasionally, under an appearance of simplicity, to
baffle with considerable cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel
for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in those days on the side of the
smugglers, who called themselves free-traders, a designation which
has since attained universal honour. The principle of obedience to
law, the sine quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned upon
uneducated consciences than the principle of buying cheap and selling
dear. Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore, all admired the cool
duplicity with which the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when under
cross-examinations. Some of them were once witnesses in a case of
deforcement. The counsel for the prosecution asked a fisherman,--“While
the men were struggling in the water, did you not hear the prisoner
call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”
“We saw nae dogs there, sir,” was the demure and composed reply.
“I do not ask you what you saw; but, on your oath, did you not hear him
call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”
“There was nae ony dogs there, sir,” was again the obstinate answer.
Although no man of distinction in science or letters has ever arisen in
any of these villages, it cannot be doubted they have produced many men
whom Poodle or Doodle might have safely trusted upon his legs on the
floor of the House of Commons to answer the questions of honourable and
independent members.
A century ago the fishers, who were hardy, industrious, decorous, and
honest, were nevertheless inveterate swearers--a fault which I did not
observe among them in an offensive degree in the nineteenth century.
Indeed, I have heard more swearing from two admirals in a London club
than I ever heard in fishing villages. In the last century, however,
the fishers would use the most tremendous oaths upon the most trivial
occasions. Anger was not necessary to provoke them; the oaths seeming
to be as necessary to the hauling up of a lugger, or the pushing out
of a boat, as the cries of “Yo-hee O!” Persons unaccustomed to hear
the strong phrases of swearing, feel their minds shocked by the ideas
conveyed by them, being ignorant that they have ceased to convey ideas
to the persons who use them. When a lady rebuked one of them for using
the word deil (devil), he said,
“Eh! mem, I didna think it meant ony ill. Does it mean ony ill? I
thocht it was just a word to dad” (knock) “aboot.”
The wrath of these good-natured and kind-hearted people was notoriously
harmless. Stabs were unknown, and blows rare among them, but the
language of their vituperation was expressive and opprobrious. My
informant has seen a woman in a passion take up a handful of burning
coals, and lay them down without seeming to feel pain. Ladies drilled
in the control of their gestures, if not of their feelings, in
boarding-schools, witnessed, with great astonishment, the violence
with which the women expressed grief and lamentation. The boats were
frequently in great danger in crossing the bar, and on these occasions
the women assembled upon the beach would tear their hair, clap their
hands, and utter piercing cries and shrieks. The simple and natural
principles upon which their marriages were formed, the chastity and
honour in which the married fishers lived, and the connubial and
family happiness of their homes, may explain, in part, the violence
of the emotions and the exuberance of the gestures of the wives when
their husbands were in danger. A fashionable dame of London related
sarcastically that she had known a fisherwoman of the Scotch east
coast who required four men to keep her from throwing herself over the
rocks when her drowned husband was carried into her cottage, become
calm in a fortnight, recommence work in a month, and marry again in a
twelvemonth. The poor child of nature had no sentiment!
The marriages of the fishers were as natural and simple as the unions
of Isaac with Rebekah and Boaz with Ruth. Perversions about dowries,
pin-money, establishments, and settlements, did not interfere with the
natural action of mutual interest and honest preference. They married
young. The young man and young woman had probably played together in
childhood. Running, leaping, tumbling, paddling, laughing, the children
of the fishers are as joyous as their fathers are serious; and if their
mothers could not match them against the children of the Tuileries’
Gardens, or of St. James’s Park, in point of pretty costumes, they
could challenge the world for them in regard to the healthiness of
their respiratory organs and the glee of their animal spirits. The boys
and girls soon become useful, the elder children being early employed
to nurse the younger. Both boys and girls thus grow up in systematic
training for the performance of the duties of their lives.
The boy or lad went out to sea with the men, and worked at the oar
until he got enough of money to buy a share of a boat--and a boat
with its nets costs from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds.
When he had a share of a boat, he required some one to bait his lines
and sell his fish. Among the girls he knew, and whose tempers he had
tested in play, he naturally selected the girl he liked best, and asked
her first; and then, perhaps, like Kepler, the great astronomer, he
had a list in his mind, and asked one girl after another until he was
accepted. On the other hand, it is probable the principles of affinity
may sometimes have been in operation for years, and the boat may have
been a greater difficulty than the wife. As soon as they were betrothed
by the consent and blessings of the old folks, the young woman went
to live with her future father and mother-in-law for a week or two,
and in the house with the young man. No doubt she had been taught by
her own mother to search for bait, to tip and bait the lines, and do
all manner of household work; but the fisher-people judged wisely she
would be all the better for knowing all her mother-in-law could teach
her; and her husband would be likely to think all the more of her for
being as clever as his own mother could make her. A few days prior to
the marriage, she returned to her father’s roof, and the ceremony took
place in the house of her childhood. After the ceremony, the young
couple went to a house of their own. They went in procession from the
paternal to the connubial home. A fiddler playing merry strains, headed
the procession, and he was followed by a boat-mate of the bridegroom,
carrying the flag of the boat. When the bride arrived before the door
of the home of her husband, his boat-mates rolled their flag around
her. The spectators witnessed the ceremony in silence until she was
enveloped in the folds, and then they applauded the actors in it with
loud and long cheers. The ceremony seemed to be a public intimation
that the young wife was henceforth placed within the sanctuary of the
honour of the crew, who engaged themselves solemnly to protect her from
insult and injury, as brave men defend their flag.
When a young couple had not money enough to pay for the share of the
boat, the furnishing of the house, and the expenses of the wedding,
they had what was called a penny-wedding. There was nothing royal or
aristocratic in a penny-wedding, to which any one might come who chose
to pay a shilling. The significance and rationale of the penny-wedding
was this: “We are a couple of young people who think it better to
marry than to do worse, and we deem it foolish and wicked to begin the
world with debt. We therefore invite you, good neighbours, to amuse
yourselves by dancing at our marriage, and, by paying as generously
as may be convenient for the amusement, help us to begin the world
with a fair chance of making both ends meet.” A common argument in
favour of the penny-wedding was: the young man wants ten pounds of
his share of the boat, and many persons gave their money who never
went to the dances. The canvas for the penny-wedding took place among
the carpenters, coopers, and sailors of the port; and employers,
shopkeepers, ship-owners, and captains had generally a half-crown to
spare for the young couple. The dinner at a penny-wedding consisted
of abundance of meat and Scotch broth, served in broad pewter dishes.
After dinner, the party adjourned to the links or downs, to dance “the
shame dance;” and then they danced until they were tired. Known bad
characters were inexorably excluded, decorum rigorously maintained,
and “liberties” would have been indeed dangerous in a community in
which every woman lived under the protection of a flag and at least
half-a-score of hard fists. A severe critic of propriety would not
probably have approved the amount of public kissing at a penny-wedding.
Indeed, in this respect, Footdee resembled more the Court of the Neva
than the Courts of the Thames or of the Seine; but in regard to the
moral essentials of the problem of life, if there be a word of truth
in court chronicles, the courtiers and courted of all the three royal
rivers might have learned lessons from the Coast Folk of Footdee.