[Sidenote: LANDING ON SKYE.]
On the morning of Thursday, September 2, our travellers took boat
at Glenelg, “and launched into one of the straits of the Atlantic
Ocean.” Rowing along the Sound of Slate towards the south-west, they
reached the shore of Armidale in Skye early in the afternoon. They
had intended to visit in his castle the owner of half the island, Sir
Alexander Macdonald. But, wrote Johnson, “he had come from his seat in
the middle of the island to a small house on the shore, as we believe,
that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly.” Boswell was so
much disgusted with this chieftain’s parsimony, that he “meditated an
escape from his house the very next day; but Dr. Johnson resolved that
we should weather it out till Monday.” [Sidenote: CORRICHATACHIN.]
When the day of escape at length came, they started on horseback in
a north-westerly direction for Corrichatachin, a farm-house near
Broadford,[614] belonging to Sir A. Macdonald, but tenanted by a
Mackinnon, a clan to which all this district had formerly belonged.
“Here they were entertained better than at the landlord’s;” here “they
enjoyed the comfort of a table plentifully furnished, and here for
the first time they had a specimen of the joyous social manners of
the inhabitants of the Highlands.” Books, too, were not wanting, both
Latin and English; among them was a copy of the abridgment of Johnson’s
Dictionary. He might have said here, as four years later with some
eagerness he said at Lord Scarsdale’s, when he discovered the same book
in his lordship’s dressing-room, “Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena
laboris?” Here, too, he wrote that Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale, which so
caught Sir Walter Scott’s imagination, that when he first set foot on
Skye, it was the thing which first came into his thoughts. And here on
their return after a lapse of nearly three weeks, Boswell got so tipsy
and so piously penitent next day. He had not gone to bed till nearly
five o’clock on a Sunday morning, by which time four bowls of punch had
been finished.
“I awaked at noon,” he records, “with a severe headache. I
was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot,
and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very
inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while
the companion of the _Rambler_. About one he came into my room,
and accosted me, ‘What, drunk yet?’ His tone of voice was not
that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir,’
said I, ‘they kept me up.’ He answered, ‘No, you kept them
up, you drunken dog.’ This he said with good-humoured English
pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other
friends, assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy-bottle and
glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. ‘Ay,’ said
Dr. Johnson, ‘fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that
we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow
to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends
have no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy;
and when I offered to get up, he very good-naturedly said,
‘You need be in no such hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice,
and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my
headache. When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and
taking up Mrs. M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened it at the
Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I
read, ‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.’
Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.”
Before the afternoon was over, by the help of good cheer and good
society, he felt himself comfortable enough, and his piety was drowned
in philosophy.
“I then thought,” he says, “that my last night’s riot was no
more than such a social excess as may happen without much moral
blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a
fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health.”
[Illustration: CORRICHATACHIN NEAR BROADFORD SKYE
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON.
IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]
The Highlanders were more seasoned drinkers than he was, for the
following night they had another drinking-bout.
“They kept a smart lad lying on a table in the corner of the
room, ready to spring up and bring the kettle whenever it was
wanted. They continued drinking, and singing Erse songs,
till near five in the morning, when they all came into my
room, where some of them had beds. Unluckily for me, they
found a bottle of punch in a corner, which they drank; and
Corrichatachin went for another, which they also drank. They
made many apologies for disturbing me. I told them, that,
having been kept awake by their mirth, I had once thoughts of
getting up and joining them again. Honest Corrichatachin said,
‘To have had you done so, I would have given a cow.’”
Johnson was better lodged than Boswell, for he had a room to himself
at night, though in the day it was the place where the servants took
their meals. Yet he was pleased with the kindness shown him, and
discovered no deficiencies. “Our entertainment,” he wrote, “was not
only hospitable but elegant.” The company he describes as being “more
numerous and elegant than it could have been supposed easy to collect.”
He gave as much pleasure as he received, and when he left, “the
Scottish phrase of _honest man_, which is an expression of kindness and
regard, was again and again applied to him.”
The house he describes as “very pleasantly situated between two
brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it.”
Boswell with good reason remarks on the entire absence of a garden.
“Corrichatachin,” he writes, “has not even a turnip, a carrot, or a
cabbage.” Where these were wanting, there would be no roses clustering
on the porch, no flower-beds before the door. This scene of hospitality
and jovial riot is now a ruin. We walked to it from Broadford across
a moorland, the curlews flying round us with their melancholy cry.
The two brooks were shrunk with the long drought, and flowed in very
quiet streams. Yet one of them, I was told, in a time of flood once
broke into Mackinnon’s house. We crossed it on a bridge formed of two
trees, with a long piece of iron wire for a railing. There we rested
awhile, now looking down at the sunlight dancing in the shallows, and
now gazing at the ruined farm and the mountain rising behind in steep
crags of barren rock. Far up the valley to the west a flock of sheep
was coming white from the shearing, bleating as they spread out along
the hill-side. Another flock the dogs were gathering into what had been
the yard of the old house. It had been solidly built, two stories high,
about thirty-six feet long by fifteen broad in the inside measurements.
On the outside, over the door, was carved:—
L. M. K. J. M. K.
1747.
Johnson’s host was Lachlan Mackinnon, and the initials are, I suppose,
his and his wife’s. It was but a small place to hold the large and
festive company that was gathered at the time of our traveller’s visit;
but, as Boswell says, “it was partly done by separating man and wife,
and putting a number of men in one room and of women in another.” As
I looked up at the windows which still remain, though the floors have
fallen in, I wondered which was the room which was Johnson’s chamber
at night, and the ladies’ parlour by day, where Boswell sat among them
writing his journal.
[Sidenote: CHANGES IN SKYE.]
At the Hotel at Broadford, I was struck by the change that has come
about since Johnson’s time, “in this verge of European life,” to use
the term which he applied to Skye. Corrichatachin remains almost as he
saw it. A house had fallen in ruins and had been replaced by another,
and a small grove of trees had been planted. A garden had been made,
and patches of ground which once were pasture had been ploughed up.
But the broad face of nature is unchanged. This “region of obscurity,”
is, however, obscure no longer. Where he was nearly ten weeks without
receiving letters, now even the poor, far from their homes, by means
of the telegraphic wire can, as it were, “live along the line.” A
maid-servant who goes to distant services, on her arrival, by means of
a telegram, at once frees her mother from her “heart-struck anxious
care.” The owner of the hotel, from whom I learnt this fact, said that
“Rowland Hill had done more for the poor man than all the ministers
since, and that many of the Highlanders in gratitude had called their
sons after him.”
[Illustration: CORRICHATACHIN.]