Meanwhile, what of the Manx people? Their condition was pitiful. An
author who wrote fifty years after the advent of the Athols gives a
description of such misery that one's flesh creeps as one reads it.
Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed, and hardly taught at all, the very
poor were in a state of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs and
they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the vices of dogs, and none of
their virtues. That was what happened to a part of the Manx people; they
developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters, the other dogs,
the gay dogs, were playing their bad game together. Smuggling became
common on the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the goods chiefly
smuggled, and the illicit trade rose to a great height. There was no
way to check it. The island was an independent kingdom. My lord of Athol
swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his people got what they could. It
was a game of grab. Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries,
England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering grievously. The name of the
island must have smelt strong in those days.
But there was a fouler odour than that of smuggling. Wrecking was not
unknown. The island lent itself naturally to that evil work. The mists
of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not forsake our island when Saint
Patrick swept him out of it. They continued to come up from the south,
and to conspire with the rapid currents from the north to drive ships on
to our rocks. Our coasts were badly lighted, or lighted not at all. An
open flare stuck out from a pole at the end of a pier was often all
that a dangerous headland had to keep vessels away from it. Nothing was
easier than for a fishing smack to run down pole and flare together, as
if by accident, on returning to harbour. But there was a worse danger
than bad lights, and that was false lights. It was so easy to set them.
Sometimes they were there of themselves, without evil intention of any
human soul, luring sailors to their destruction. Then when ships came
ashore it was so easy to juggle with one's conscience and say it was the
will of God, and no bad doings of any man's. The poor sea-going men were
at the bottom of the sea by this time, and their cargo was drifting up
with the tide, so there was nothing to do but to take it. Such was the
way of things. The Manxman could find his excuses. He was miserably
poor, he had bad masters, smuggling was his best occupation, his coasts
were indifferently lighted, ships came ashore of themselves--what was he
to do? That the name of Manxman did not become a curse, an execration,
and a reproach in these evil days of the Athols seems to say that
behind all this wicked work there were splendid virtues doing noble duty
somewhere. The real sap, the true human heart of Manxland, was somehow
kept alive. Besides cut-throats in ruffles, and wreckers in homespun,
there were true, sweet, simple-hearted people who would not sell their
souls to fill their mouths.
Does it surprise you that some of all this comes within the memory of
men still living? I am myself well within the period of middle life,
and, though too young to touch these evil days, I can remember men
and women who must have been in the thick of them. On the north of the
island is Kirk Maughold Head, a bold, rugged headland going far out into
the sea. Within this rocky foreland lie two bays, sweet coverlets of
blue waters, washing a shingly shore under shelter of dark cliffs. One
of these bays is called Port-y-Vullin, and just outside of it,
between the mainland and the head, is a rock, known as the Carrick, a
treacherous grey reef, visible at low water, and hidden at flood-tide.
On the low _brews_ of Port-y-Vullin stood two houses, the one a mill,
worked by the waters coming down from the near mountain of Barrule,
the other a weaver's cottage. Three weavers lived together there, all
bachelors, and all old, and never a woman or child among them--Jemmy of
eighty years, Danny of seventy, and Billy of sixty something. Year in,
year out, they worked at their looms, and early or late, whenever you
passed on the road behind, you heard the click of them. Fishermen coming
back to harbour late at night always looked for the light of their
windows. "Yander's Jemmy-Danny-Billy's," they would say, and steer home
by that landmark. But the light which guided the native seamen misled
the stranger, and many a ship in the old days was torn to pieces on the
jagged teeth of that sea-lion, the Carrick. Then, hearing loud human
cries above the shrieks of wind and wave, the three helpless old men
would come tottering down to the beach, like three innocent witches,
trembling and wailing, holding each other's hands like little children,
and never once dreaming of what bad work the candles over their looms
had done.
But there were those who were not so guileless. Among them was a sad old
salt, whom I shall call Hommy-Billy-mooar, Tommy, son of big Billy. Did
I know him, or do I only imagine him as I have heard of him? I cannot
say, but nevertheless I see him plainly. One of his eyes was gone, and
the other was badly damaged. His face was of stained mahogany, one side
of his mouth turned up, the other side turned down, he could laugh and
cry together. He was half landsman, tilling his own croft, half seaman,
going out with the boats to the herrings. In his youth he had sailed
on a smuggler, running in from Whitehaven with spirits. The joy of "the
trade," as they called smuggling, was that a man could buy spirits at
two shillings a gallon for sale on the island, and drink as much as he
"plazed abooard for nothin'." When Hommy married, he lived in a house
near the church, the venerable St. Maughold away on the headland, with
its lonely churchyard within sound of the sea.
There on tempestuous nights the old eagle looked out from his eyrie on
the doings of the sea, over the back of the cottage of the old weavers
to the Carrick. If anything came ashore he awakened his boys, scurried
over to the bay, seized all they could carry, stole back home, hid his
treasures in the thatch of the roof, or among the straw of the loft,
went off to bed, and rose in the morning with an innocent look, and
listened to the story of last night's doings with a face full of
surprise. They say that Hommy carried on this work for years, and though
many suspected, none detected him, not even his wife, who was a good
Methodist. The poor woman found him out at last, and, being troubled
with a conscience, she died, and Hommy buried her in Kirk Maughold
churchyard, and put a stone over her with a good inscription. Then he
went on as before. But one morning there was a mighty hue and cry. A
ship had been wrecked on the Carrick, and the crew who were saved had
seen some rascals carrying off in the darkness certain rolls of Irish
cloth which they had thrown overboard. Suspicion lit on Hommy and his
boys. Hommy was quite hurt. "Wrecking was it? Lord a-massy! To think,
to think!" Revenue officers were to come to-morrow to search his house.
Those rolls of Irish cloth were under the thatch, above the dry gorse
stored up on the "lath" in his cowhouse. That night he carried them off
to the churchyard, took up the stone from over his wife's grave, dug the
grave open and put in the cloth. Next day his one eye wept a good deal
while the officers of revenue made their fruitless search. "Aw well,
well, did they think because a man was poor he had no feelings?"
Afterwards he pretended to become a Methodist, and then he removed the
cloth from his wife's grave because he had doubts about how she could
rise in the resurrection with such a weight on her coffin. Poor old
Hommy, he came to a bad end. He spent his last days in jail in Castle
Rushen. A one-eyed mate of his told me he saw him there. Hommy was
unhappy. He said "Castle Rushen wasn't no place for a poor man when he
was gettin' anyways ould."