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MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.
_Morrison and Gibb, Edinburgh,_
_Printers to Her Majesty's Stationery Office._
[Illustration: Hugh Miller]
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
OR
THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.
BY HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF 'THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,' 'FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR,'
ETC. ETC.
[Illustration: Logo]
EDINBURGH:
W. P. NIMMO, HAY, & MITCHELL.
1889.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
A sailor's early career--First marriage--Escape from
shipwreck--Second Love--Traits of character, 1
CHAPTER II.
Childhood and childish visions--A Father's death--Favourite
books--Sketch of two maternal uncles, 20
CHAPTER III.
Dawn of patriotism--Cromarty Grammar School--Prevalent
amusements--Old Francie--Earliest geological researches, 40
CHAPTER IV.
Uncle Sandy as a Naturalist--Important discovery--Cromarty Sutors
and their caves--Expedition to the 'Doocot'--Difficulties and
dangers--Sensation produced, 62
CHAPTER V.
A would-be patroness--Boyish games--First friendship--Visit to the
Highlands--Geologizing in the Gruids--Ossian-worship, 85
CHAPTER VI.
Cousin George and Cousin William--Excursion with Cousin
Walter--Painful accident--Family bereavements--Links between
the present and the past, 107
CHAPTER VII.
Subscription school--Vacation delights--Forays and fears--Quarrel
with the schoolmaster--Poetical revenge--Johnstone the forester, 129
CHAPTER VIII.
Choice of a calling--Disappointment to relatives--Old Red Sandstone
quarry--Depression and walking-sleep--Temptations of
toil--Friendship with William Ross, 151
CHAPTER IX.
Life in the bothie--Mad Bell--Mournful history--Singular
intimacy--Manners and customs of north-country masons, 173
CHAPTER X.
Evening walks--Lines on a sun-dial--A haunted stream--Insect
transformations--Jock Moghoal--Musings, 195
CHAPTER XI.
An antiquary in humble life--Poor Danie--Proficiency in
porridge-making--Depressed health--A good omen--Close of
apprenticeship, 219
CHAPTER XII.
Swimming the Conon--Click-Clack the carter--Loch Maree--Fitting
up a barrack--Highland characteristics, 245
CHAPTER XIII.
The Brothers Fraser--Flora of the Northern Hebrides--Diving in
the Gareloch--Sabbaths in Flowerdale woods--Causes of
Highland distress, 268
CHAPTER XIV.
A cragsman's death--Providential escape--Property in Leith--First
sight of Edinburgh--Peter M'Craw--Niddry Woods--Researches
among the Coal Measures, 296
CHAPTER XV.
A worthy Seceder--The hero of the squad--Apology for
fanaticism--Strikes--Recollections of the theatre, 321
CHAPTER XVI.
Great fires in Edinburgh--Dr. Colquhoun--Dr. M'Crie--Return to
the North--Stanzas written at sea--Geological dreams, 348
CHAPTER XVII.
Religious phases--True centre of Christianity--Bearing of geology
upon theological belief--Delicate health--A gipsy wedding, 373
CHAPTER XVIII.
Convalescence--Pursuit of algeology--Jock Gordon--Theory of
idiocy--Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, 395
CHAPTER XIX.
Stone-cutting at Inverness--A jilted lover--The _Osars_--Death
of Uncle James--Farewell letter from William Ross, 416
CHAPTER XX.
Publication of poems--Newspaper criticisms--Walsh the
lecturer--Enlarged circle of friends--Miss Dunbar of Boath, 435
CHAPTER XXI.
Arenaceous formations--Antiquity of the earth--Tremendous
hurricane--_Loligo Vulgare_--Researches amid the
Lias--Interesting discoveries, 457
CHAPTER XXII.
Religious controversies--Ecclesiastical dispute--Cholera--Preventive
measures--Reform Bill, 474
CHAPTER XXIII.
Visitors in the churchyard--The Ladies' Walk--First
interview--Friendship--Love--Second visit to Edinburgh--Linlithgow
Bank--Favourable reception of "Scenes and Legends"--Marriage, 497
CHAPTER XXIV.
Married life at Cromarty--Ichthyolitic deposit of Old Red
Sandstone--Correspondence with Agassiz and Murchison--Happy
evenings--Death of eldest child, 522
CHAPTER XXV.
Voluntary principle--Position of the Establishment--Letter to
Lord Brougham--Invitation to Edinburgh--Editorship of the
_Witness_--Introduction to Dr. Chalmers--Visit from an old
friend--Removal to Edinburgh, 541
TO THE READER.
It is now nearly a hundred years since Goldsmith remarked, in his little
educational treatise, that "few subjects have been more frequently
written upon than the education of youth." And during the century which
has well-nigh elapsed since he said so, there have been so many more
additional works given to the world on this fertile topic, that their
number has been at least doubled. Almost all the men who ever taught a
few pupils, with a great many more who never taught any, deem themselves
qualified to say something original on education; and perhaps few books
of the kind have yet appeared, however mediocre their general tone, in
which something worthy of being attended to has not actually been said.
And yet, though I have read not a few volumes on the subject, and have
dipped into a great many more, I never yet found in them the sort of
direction or encouragement which, in working out my own education, I
most needed. They insisted much on the various modes of teaching others,
but said nothing--or, what amounted to the same thing, nothing to the
purpose--on the best mode of teaching one's-self. And as my
circumstances and position, at the time when I had most occasion to
consult them, were those of by much the largest class of the people of
this and every other civilized country--for I was one of the many
millions who need to learn, and yet have no one to teach them--I could
not help deeming the omission a serious one. I have since come to think,
however, that a formal treatise on self-culture might fail to supply
the want. Curiosity must be awakened ere it can be satisfied; nay, once
awakened, it never fails in the end fully to satisfy itself; and it has
occurred to me, that by simply laying before the working men of the
country the "Story of my Education," I may succeed in first exciting
their curiosity, and next, occasionally at least, in gratifying it also.
They will find that by far the best schools I ever attended are schools
open to them all--that the best teachers I ever had are (though severe
in their discipline) always easy of access--and that the special _form_
at which I was, if I may say so, most successful as a pupil, was a form
to which I was drawn by a strong inclination, but at which I had less
assistance from my brother men, or even from books, than at any of the
others. There are few of the natural sciences which do not lie quite as
open to the working men of Britain and America as Geology did to me.
My work, then, if I have not wholly failed in it, may be regarded as a
sort of educational treatise, thrown into the narrative form, and
addressed more especially to working men. They will find that a
considerable portion of the scenes and incidents which it records read
their lesson, whether of encouragement or warning, or throw their
occasional lights on peculiarities of character or curious natural
phenomena, to which their attention might be not unprofitably directed.
Should it be found to possess an interest to any other class, it will be
an interest chiefly derivable from the glimpses which it furnishes of
the inner life of the Scottish people, and its bearing on what has been
somewhat clumsily termed "the condition-of-the-country question." My
sketches will, I trust, be recognised as true to fact and nature. And as
I have never perused the autobiography of a working man of the more
observant type, without being indebted to it for new facts and ideas
respecting the circumstances and character of some portion of the people
with which I had been less perfectly acquainted before, I can hope that,
regarded simply as the memoir of a protracted journey through
_districts_ of society not yet very sedulously explored, and scenes
which few readers have had an opportunity of observing for themselves,
my story may be found to possess some of the interest which attaches to
the narratives of travellers who see what is not often seen, and know,
in consequence, what is not generally known. In a work cast into the
autobiographic form, the writer has always much to apologize for. With
himself for his subject, he usually tells not only more than he ought,
but also, in not a few instances, more than he intends. For, as has been
well remarked, whatever may be the character which a writer of his own
Memoirs is desirous of assuming, he rarely fails to betray the real one.
He has almost always his unintentional revelations, that exhibit
peculiarities of which he is not conscious, and weaknesses which he has
failed to recognise as such; and it will no doubt be seen that what is
so generally done in works similar to mine, I have not escaped doing.
But I cast myself full on the good-nature of the reader. My aims have, I
trust, been honest ones; and should I in any degree succeed in rousing
the humbler classes to the important work of self-culture and
self-government, and in convincing the higher that there are instances
in which working men have at least as legitimate a claim to their
respect as to their pity, I shall not deem the ordinary penalties of the
autobiographer a price too high for the accomplishment of ends so
important.
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
OR
THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.
CHAPTER I.
"Ye gentlemen of England,
Who live at home at ease,
Oh, little do ye think upon
The dangers of the seas."--OLD SONG.
Rather more than eighty years ago, a stout little boy, in his sixth or
seventh year, was despatched from an old-fashioned farm-house in the
upper part of the parish of Cromarty, to drown a litter of puppies in an
adjacent pond. The commission seemed to be not in the least congenial.
He sat down beside the pool, and began to cry over his charge; and
finally, after wasting much time in a paroxysm of indecision and sorrow,
instead of committing the puppies to the water, he tucked them up in his
little kilt, and set out by a blind pathway which went winding through
the stunted heath of the dreary Maolbuoy Common, in a direction opposite
to that of the farm-house--his home for the two previous twelvemonths.
After some doubtful wandering on the waste, he succeeded in reaching,
before nightfall, the neighbouring seaport town, and presented himself,
laden with his charge, at his mother's door. The poor woman--a sailor's
widow, in very humble circumstances--raised her hands in astonishment:
"Oh, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, "what's this?--what brings you
here?" "The little doggies, mither," said the boy; "I couldna drown the
little doggies; and I took them to you." What afterwards befell the
"little doggies," I know not; but trivial as the incident may seem, it
exercised a marked influence on the circumstances and destiny of at
least two generations of creatures higher in the scale than themselves.
The boy, as he stubbornly refused to return to the farm-house, had to be
sent on shipboard, agreeably to his wish, as a cabin-boy; and the writer
of these chapters was born, in consequence, a sailor's son, and was
rendered, as early as his fifth year, mainly dependent for his support
on the sedulously plied but indifferently remunerated labours of his
only surviving parent, at the time a sailor's widow.
The little boy of the farm-house we a descended from a long line of
seafaring men,--skilful and adventurous sailors,--some of whom had
coasted along the Scottish shores as early as the times of Sir Andrew
Wood and the "bold Bartons," and mayhap helped to man that "verrie
monstrous schippe the Great Michael," that "cumbered all Scotland to get
her to sea." They had taken as naturally to the water as the
Newfoundland dog or the duckling. That waste of life which is always so
great in the naval profession had been more than usually so in the
generation just passed away. Of the boy's two uncles, one had sailed
round the world with Anson, and assisted in burning Paita, and in
boarding the Manilla galleon; but on reaching the English coast he
mysteriously disappeared, and was never more heard of. The other uncle,
a remarkably handsome and powerful man,--or, to borrow the homely but
not inexpressive language in which I have heard him described, "as
_pretty_ a fellow as ever stepped in shoe-leather,"--perished at sea in
a storm; and several years after, the boy's father, when entering the
Firth of Cromarty, was struck overboard, during a sudden gust, by the
boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose
again. Shortly after, in the hope of screening her son from what seemed
to be the hereditary fate, his mother had committed the boy to the
charge of a sister, married to a farmer of the parish, and now the
mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell; but the family death was not to
be so avoided; and the arrangement terminated, as has been seen, in the
transaction beside the pond.
In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage,
grew up into a singularly robust and active man, not above the middle
size,--for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches,--but
broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone
and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed,
there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could
lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His
education had been but indifferently cared for at home: he had, however,
been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who,
like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor; and for
his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had
contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to
retain possession of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on
his-hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write; and
profited so much by the instructions of a comrade, an intelligent and
warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to
keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary
correctness,--accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary
sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his
cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a
determination to rise in it,--made his first money by storing up instead
of drinking his grog,--and, as was common in those times, drove a little
trade with the natives of foreign parts in articles of curiosity and
vertu, for which, I suspect, the custom-house dues were not always paid.
With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of
heart and placidity of temper there was some wild blood in his veins,
derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ancestors, that, when
excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable; and
which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his
plans and prospects.
On a protracted and tedious voyage in a large East Indiaman, he had,
with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern,
capricious captain; but, secure of relief on reaching port, he had borne
uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher, the
Irishman, was, however, less patient; and for remonstrating with the
tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a
mutinous spirit, he was laid hold of, and was in the course of being
ironed down to the deck under a tropical sun, when his quieter comrade,
with his blood now heated to the boiling point, stepped aft, and with
apparent calmness re-stated the grievance. The captain drew a loaded
pistol from his belt; the sailor struck up his hand; and, as the bullet
whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him, and disarmed
him in a trice. The crew rose, and in a few minutes the ship was all
their own. But having failed to calculate on such a result, they knew
not what to do with their charge; and, acting under the advice of their
new leader, who felt to the full the embarrassing nature of the
position, they were content simply to demand the redress of their
grievances as their terms of surrender; when, untowardly for their
claims, a ship of war hove in sight, much in want of men, and, bearing
down on the Indiaman, the mutiny was at once suppressed, and the leading
mutineers sent aboard the armed vessel, accompanied by a grave charge,
and the worst possible of characters. Luckily for them, however, and
especially luckily for the Irishman and his friend, the war-ship was so
weakened by scurvy, at that time the untamed pest of the navy, that
scarce two dozen of her crew could do duty aloft A fierce tropical
tempest, too, which broke out not long after, pleaded powerfully in
their favour; and the affair terminated in the ultimate promotion of the
Irishman to the office of ship-schoolmaster, and of his Scotch comrade
to the captaincy of the foretop.
My narrative abides with the latter. He remained for several years
aboard a man-of-war, and, though not much in love with the service, did
his duty in both storm and battle. He served in the action off the
Dogger-Bank,--one of the last naval engagements fought ere the
manoeuvre of breaking the line gave to British valour its due
superiority, by rendering all our great sea-battles decisive; and a
comrade who sailed in the same vessel, and from whom, when a boy, I have
received kindness for my father's sake, has told me that, their ship
being but indifferently manned at the time, and the extraordinary
personal strength and activity of his friend well known, he had a
station assigned him at his gun against two of the crew, and that during
the action he actually outwrought them both. At length, however, the
enemy drifted to leeward to refit; and when set to repair the gashed and
severed rigging, such was his state of exhaustion, in consequence of the
previous overstrain on every nerve and muscle, that he had scarce vigour
enough left to raise the marlingspike employed in the work to the level
of his face. Suddenly, when in this condition, a signal passed along the
line, that the Dutch fleet, already refitted, was bearing down to renew
the engagement. A thrill like that of an electric shock passed through
the frame of the exhausted sailor; his fatigue at once left him; and,
vigorous and strong as when the action first began, he found himself
able, as before, to run out against his two comrades the one side of a
four-and-twenty pounder. The instance is a curious one of the influence
of that "spirit" which, according to the Wise King, enables a man to
"sustain his infirmity."
It may be well not to inquire too curiously regarding the mode in which
this effective sailor quitted the navy. The country had borrowed his
services without consulting his will; and he, I suspect, reclaimed them
on his own behalf without first asking leave. I have been told by my
mother that he found the navy very intolerable;--the mutiny at the Nore
had not yet meliorated the service to the common sailor. Among other
hardships, he had been oftener than once under not only very harsh, but
also very incompetent officers; and on one occasion, after toiling on
the foreyard in a violent night-squall, with some of the best seamen
aboard, in fruitless attempts to furl up the sail, he had to descend,
cap in hand, at the risk of a flogging, and humbly implore the
boy-lieutenant in charge that he should order the vessel's head to be
laid in a certain direction. Luckily for him, the advice was taken by
the young gentleman, and in a few minutes the sail was furled. He left
his ship one fine morning, attired in his best, and having on his head a
three-cornered hat, with tufts of lace at the corners, which I well
remember, from the circumstance that it had long after to perform an
important part in certain boyish masquerades at Christmas and the New
Year; and as he had taken effective precautions for being reported
missing in the evening, he got clear off.
Of some of the after-events of his life I retain such mere fragmentary
recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most
readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when
engaged in one of his Indian voyages, he was stationed during the night,
accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of
the minor mouths of the Ganges; and he had just fallen asleep on the
beams, when he was suddenly awakened by a violent motion, as if his
skiff were capsizing. Starting up, he saw in the imperfect light a huge
tiger, that had swam, apparently, from the neighbouring jungle, in the
act of boarding the boat. So much was he taken aback, that though a
loaded musket lay beside him, it was one of the loose beams, or
_foot-spars_, used as fulcrums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold
of as a weapon; but such was the blow he dealt to the paws of the
creature, as they rested on the gunwale, that it dropped off with a
tremendous snarl, and he saw it no more. On another occasion, he was one
of three men sent with despatches to some Indian port in a boat, which,
oversetting in the open sea in a squall, left them for the greater part
of three days only its upturned bottom for their resting-place. And so
thickly during that time did the sharks congregate around them, that
though a keg of rum, part of the boat's stores, floated for the first
two days within a few yards of them, and they had neither meat nor
drink, none of them, though they all swam well, dared attempt regaining
it. They were at length relieved by a Spanish vessel, and treated with
such kindness, that the subject of my narrative used ever after to speak
well of the Spaniards, as a generous people, destined ultimately to
rise. He was at one time so reduced by scurvy, in a vessel half of whose
crew had been carried off by the disease, that, though still able to do
duty on the tops, the pressure of his finger left for several seconds a
dent in his thigh, as if the muscular flesh had become of the
consistency of dough. At another time, when overtaken in a small vessel
by a protracted tempest, in which "for many days neither sun nor moon
appeared," he continued to retain his hold of the helm for twelve hours
after every other man aboard was utterly prostrated and down, and
succeeded, in consequence, in weathering the storm for them all. And
after his death, a nephew of my mother's, a young man who had served his
apprenticeship under him, was treated with great kindness on the Spanish
Main, for his sake, by a West Indian captain, whose ship and crew he had
saved, as the captain told the lad, by boarding them in a storm, at
imminent risk to himself, and working their vessel into port, when, in
circumstances of similar exhaustion, they were drifting full upon an
iron-bound shore. Many of my other recollections of this manly sailor
are equally fragmentary in their character; but there is a distinct bit
of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy.
When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to his native town,
with money enough, hardly earned, and carefully kept, to buy a fine
large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade; and shortly
after he married his cousin's daughter. He found his cousin, who had
supported herself in her widowhood by teaching a school, residing in a
dingy, old-fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windows
of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by
their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of the last of the
buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with
Spanish gold; not, however, with a great deal of it, for,
notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had
now fallen greatly into disrepair. It was fitted up with some of the
sailor's money, and, after his marriage, became his home,--a home
rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in
years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found
consolation, amid her troubles and privations, where it was surest to be
found. She was a meek-spirited, sincerely pious woman; and the sailor,
during his more distant voyages,--for he sometimes traded with ports of
the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of
England on the other,--had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had
fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously
tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would
have otherwise enjoyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's
great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy
accidents.
He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside
the pond: for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had
remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in
preserving that of others; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his
wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had
unfortunately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his
seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never
recovered. A clear frosty moonlight evening had set in; the pier-head
was glistening with new-formed ice; and one of the sailors, when engaged
in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on
the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man
could not swim; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the
first hours of ebb; there was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily
throwing off his heavy greatcoat, he plunged after him, and in an
instant the strong current swept them both out of sight. He succeeded,
however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and, striking with him
from out the perilous tideway into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he
regained the quay. On reaching it, his wife lay insensible in the arms
of her mother; and as she was at the time in the delicate condition
incidental to married women, the natural consequence followed, and she
never recovered the shock, but lingered for more than a twelve-mouth,
the mere shadow of her former self; when a second event, as untoward as
the first, too violently shook the fast ebbing sands, and precipitated
her dissolution.
A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east had swept the Moray Firth
of its shipping, and congregated the stormbound vessels by scores in the
noble harbour of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and
they all set out to sea,--the sloop of the master among the rest. The
other vessels kept the open Firth; but the master, thoroughly acquainted
with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but
temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had
anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased
into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other
choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the
Firth in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded
Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning the
wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbour of refuge as before, and
only his sloop was amissing. The first war of the French Revolution had
broken out at the time; it was known there were several French
privateers hovering on the coast; and the report went abroad that the
missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a
weather-brained tailor in the neighbourhood, who used to do very odd
things, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom
the writer remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him
his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve
to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the
slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes.
Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured
by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated
the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he
called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all
the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to
wonder no one had yet told her that, if _his_ had not got back, it was
simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's
communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated: in
less than a week after, the master's wife was dead; and long ere her
husband's return she was lying in the quiet family burying-place, in
which--so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on
the family--the remains of none of the male members had been deposited
for more than a hundred years.
The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary
solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her
son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere
his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two
little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend,
the wife of a tradesman of the place,--a woman, like herself, of sincere
though unpretending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect
could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate
of the neighbouring parish of Nigg; and, though not one of those
intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeeded in rendering their
Church thoroughly hateful to the Scottish people,--for he was a simple,
easy man, of much good nature,--he was, if tradition speak true, as
little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that
curious work, "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a
nonsensical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set-off
against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. "Mr. James
M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, "describing eternity
to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be
immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them: a slash of a broadsword
could not hurt you, saith he; nay, a cannon-ball would play but _baff_
on you." Most of the curate's descendants were stanch Presbyterians, and
animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his; and there were none of
them stancher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who
counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a
common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great
favourites with the schoolmistress; and when, as she rose in years, her
health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's
house, to live with, and take care of her; and the younger, who was now
shooting up into a pretty young woman, used, as before, to pass much of
her time with her sister and her old mistress.
Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a site for a house
beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and
his aged relative a respectable dwelling, which cost him about four
hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the
franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of
the Reform Bill. The new house was, however, never to be inhabited by
its builder; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad
calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determination, would have
been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with
the old house as before, and almost to begin the world anew. I have now
reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connexion with the two
little girls,--both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character
of women far advanced in life,--I can be as minute in its details as I
please; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the
shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil,
blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious
_machinery_ of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given
unabridged.
Early in November 1797, two vessels--the one a smack in the London and
Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop--lay
wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of
Peterhead. The weather, which had been stormy and unsettled, moderated
towards the evening of the fifth day of their detention; and the wind
chopping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their
moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into still gloomier
night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; the
gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm: and
when, early next morning, the smack opened the Firth, she was staggering
under her storm-jib, and a mainsail reefed to the cross. Whatever wind
may blow, there is always shelter within the Sutors; and she was soon
riding at anchor in the roadstead; but she had entered the bay alone;
and when day broke, and for a brief interval the driving snow-rack
cleared up towards the east, no second sail appeared in the offing.
"Poor Miller!" exclaimed the master of the smack; "if he does not enter
the Firth ere an hour, he will never enter it at all. Good sound vessel,
and better sailor never stepped between stem and stern; but last night
has, I fear, been too much for him. He should have been here long ere
now." The hour passed; the day itself wore heavily away in gloom and
tempest; and as not only the master, but also all the crew of the sloop,
were natives of the place, groups of the town's-folk might be seen, so
long as the daylight lasted, looking out into the storm from the salient
points of the old coast-line that, rising immediately behind the houses,
commands the Firth. But the sloop came not, and before they had retired
to their homes, a second night had fallen, dark and tempestuous as the
first.
Ere morning the weather moderated: a keen frost bound up the wind in its
icy fetters; and during the following day, though a heavy swell
continued to roll shorewards between the Sutors, and sent up its white
foam high against the cliffs, the surface of the sea had become glassy
and smooth. But the day wore on, and evening again fell; and even the
most sanguine relinquished all hope of ever again seeing the sloop or
her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling,--grief in no degree
the less poignant from the circumstance that it was the tearless,
uncomplaining grief of rigid old age. Her two youthful friends and their
mother watched with the widow, now, as it seemed, left alone in the
world. The town-clock had struck the hour of midnight, and still she
remained as if fixed to her seat, absorbed in silent, stupifying sorrow,
when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. It
passed, and anon returned; ceased for a moment nearly opposite the
window; then approached the door, where there was a second pause; and
then there succeeded a faltering knock, that struck on the very hearts
of the inmates within. One of the girls sprang up, and on undoing the
bolt, shrieked out, as the door fell open, "O mistress, here is Jack
Grant the mate!" Jack, a tall, powerful seaman, but apparently in a
state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than walked in, and flung
himself into a chair. "Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him
convulsively by both his hands, "where's my cousin?--where's Hugh?" "The
master's safe and well," said Jack; "but the poor _Friendship_ lies in
_spales_ on the bar of Findhorn." "God be praised!" ejaculated the
widow. "Let the gear go!"
I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period
of life when repetition never tires; but I am not sure that I can do it
the necessary justice now. "We left Peterhead," he said, "with about
half a cargo of coal,--for we had lightened ship a day or two
before,--and the gale freshened as the night came on. We made all tight,
however; and though the snow-drift was so blinding in the thick of the
shower that I could scarce see my hand before me, and though it soon
began to blow great guns, we had given the land a good offing, and the
hurricane blew the right way. Just as we were loosening from the quay, a
poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to
the vessel's side, and begged hard of master to take her aboard. She was
a soldier's wife, and was travelling to join her husband at Fort-George;
but she was already worn out and penniless, she said; and now, as a
snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay
where she was, nor pursue her journey. Her infant, too,--she was sure,
if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the
snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such
weather, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to
take her aboard. And she was now with her child, all alone, below in the
cabin I was stationed a-head on the out-look beside the foresail
_horse_: the night had grown pitch dark; and the lamp in the binnacle
threw just light enough through the grey of the shower to show me the
master at the helm. He looked more anxious, I thought, than I had almost
ever seen him before, though I have been with him, mistress, in bad
weather; and all at once I saw he had got company, and strange company
too, for such a night: there was a woman moving round him, with a child
in her arms. I could see her as distinctly as ever I saw anything,--now
on the one side, now on the other,--at one time full in the light, at
another half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the
soldier's wife and her child; but how in the name of wonder can the
master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we
ourselves have just enough ado to keep footing? He takes no notice of
her neither, but keeps looking on, quite in his wont, at the binnacle.
'Master,' I said, stepping up to him, 'the woman had surely better go
below.' 'What woman, Jack?' said he; 'our passenger, you may be sure, is
nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone,
and that the companion-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all
over me. 'Jack,' said the master, 'the night is getting worse, and the
roll of the waves heightening every moment. I'm convinced, too, our
cargo is shifting: as the last sea struck us, I could hear the coals
rattle below; and see how stiffly we heel to the larboard. Say nothing,
however, to the men, but have all your wits about you; and look,
meanwhile, to the boat-tackle and the oars. I have seen a boat live in
as bad a night as this.' As he spoke, a blue light from above glimmered
on the deck. We looked up, and saw a dead-fire sticking to the
cross-trees. 'It's all over with us now, master,' said I. 'Nay, man,'
replied the master, in his easy, humorous way, which I always like well
enough except in bad weather, and then I see his humour is served out
like his extra grog, to keep up hearts that have cause enough to get
low,--'Nay, man,' he said, 'we can't afford to let your grandmother
board us to-night. If you will insure _me_ against the shifting coal,
I'll be your guarantee against the dead-light. Why, it's as much a
natural appearance, man, as a flash of lightning. Away to your berth,
and keep up a good heart: we can't be far from Covesea now, where, when
once past the Skerries, the swell will take off; and then, in two short
hours, we may be snug within the Sutors.' I had scarcely reached my
berth a-head, mistress, when a heavy sea struck us on the starboard
quarter, almost throwing us on our beam-ends. I could hear the rushing
of the coals below, as they settled on the larboard side; and though the
master set us full before the wind, and gave instant orders to lighten
every stitch of sail,--and it was but little sail we had at the time to
lighten,--still the vessel did not rise, but lay unmanageable as a log,
with her gunwale in the water. On we drifted, however, along the south
coast, with little expectation save that every sea would send us to the
bottom; until, in the first grey of the morning, we found ourselves
among the breakers of the terrible bar of Findhorn. And shortly after,
the poor _Friendship_ took the ground right on the edge of the
quicksands, for she would neither stay nor wear; and as she beat hard
against the bottom, the surf came rolling over half-mast high.
"Just as we struck," continued Jack, "the master made a desperate effort
to get into the cabin. The vessel couldn't miss, we saw, to break up and
fill; and though there was little hope of any of us ever setting foot
ashore, he wished to give the poor woman below a chance with the rest.
All of us but himself, mistress, had got up into the shrouds, and so we
could see round us a bit; and he had just laid his hand on the
companion-hasp to undo the door, when I saw a tremendous sea coming
rolling towards us, like a moving wall, and shouted on him to hold fast.
He sprang to the weather back-stay, and laid hold. The sea came tumbling
on, and, breaking full twenty feet over his head, buried him for a
minute's space in the foam. We thought we should never see him more; but
when it cleared away, there was he still, with his iron grip on the
stay, though the fearful wave had water-logged the _Friendship_ from bow
to stem, and swept her companion-head as cleanly off by the deck as if
it had been cut with a saw. No human aid could avail the poor woman and
her baby. Master could hear the terrible choking noise of her dying
agony right under his feet, with but a two-inch plank between; and the
sounds have haunted him ever since. But even had he succeeded in getting
her on deck, she could not possibly have survived, mistress. For five
long hours we clung to the rigging, with the seas riding over us all the
time like wild horses; and though we could see, through the snow-drift
and the spray, crowds on the shore, and boats lying thick beside the
pier, none dared venture out to assist us, till near the close of the
day, when the wind fell with the falling tide, and we were brought
ashore, more dead than alive, by a volunteer crew from the harbour. The
unlucky _Friendship_ began to break up under us ere mid-day, and we saw
the corpse of the drowned woman, with the dead infant still in its arms,
come floating out through a hole in the side. But the surf soon tore
mother and child asunder, and we lost sight of them as they drifted away
to the west. Master would have crossed the Firth himself this morning to
relieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it
best to remain in charge of the wreck."
Such, in effect, was the narrative of Jack Grant, the mate. The master,
as I have said, had well-nigh to commence the world anew, and was on the
eve of selling his new house at a disadvantage, in order to make up the
sum necessary for providing himself with a new vessel, when a friend
interposed, and advanced him the balance required. He was assisted, too,
by a sister in Leith, who was in tolerably comfortable circumstances;
and so he got a new sloop, which, though not quite equal in size to the
one he had lost, was built wholly of oak, every plank and beam of which
he had superintended in the laying down, and a prime sailer to boot; and
so, though he had to satisfy himself with the accommodation of the old
domicile, with its little rooms and its small windows, and to let the
other house to a tenant, he began to thrive again as before. Meanwhile
his aged cousin was gradually sinking. The master was absent on one of
his longer voyages, and she too truly felt that she could not survive
till his return. She called to her bedside her two young friends, the
sisters, who had been unwearied in their attentions to her, and poured
out her blessing on them; first on the elder, and then on the younger.
"But as for you, Harriet," she added, addressing the latter, "there
waits for you one of the best blessings of this world also--the
blessings of a good husband: you will be a gainer in the end, even in
this life, through your kindness to the poor childless widow." The
prophecy was a true one: the old woman had shrewdly marked where the
eyes of her cousin had been falling of late; and in about a twelvemonth
after her death her young friend and pupil had become the master's wife.
There was a very considerable disparity between their ages,--the master
was forty-four, and his wife only eighteen,--but never was there a
happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding, and
affectionate; and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large
amount of buoyant humour about him, and so equable of temper, that,
during six years of wedded life, his wife never saw him angry but once.
I have heard her speak of the exceptional instance, however, as too
terrible to be readily forgotten.
She had accompanied him on ship-board, during their first year of
married life, to the upper parts of the Cromarty Firth, where his sloop
was taking in a cargo of grain, and lay quietly embayed within two
hundred yards of the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the
night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided
in that neighbourhood; and the remaining crew consisted of but two
seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking
the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and wait their return,
the two sailors went ashore, and, setting out for a distant
public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a
bright moon overhead, but the evening was chilly and frosty; and the
boy, cold, tired, and half-overcome by sleep, after waiting on till past
midnight, shoved off the boat, and, making his way to the vessel, got
straightway into his hammock and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men
came to the shore much the worse of liquor; and, failing to make
themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and chilly
as the night was, swam aboard. The master and his wife had been for
hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the
boy: the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end
apiece. The master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and
with the air of a man who knew that remonstrance in the circumstances
would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks.
Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time
aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill
tones of agony and terror; and, promptly springing up, now followed by
his wife, he found the two sailors again belabouring the boy, and that
one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as
is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every
blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over with blood. The
master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself.
Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck;--they
seemed powerless in his hands as children; and had not his wife,
although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid
hold of him,--a movement which calmed him at once,--it was her serious
impression that, unarmed as he was, he would have killed them both upon
the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the
unwonted anger of a good-natured man.