"A man of glee
With hair of glittering grey,
As blythe a man as you could see
On a spring holiday."--WORDSWORTH.
There existed at this time no geological map of Scotland. Macculloch's
did not appear until about six or seven years after (in 1829 or 1830),
and Sedgwick and Murchison's interesting sketch of the northern
formations[4] not until at least five years after (1828). And so, on
setting out on the morning after that of my arrival, to provide stones
for our future erection, I found myself in a _terra incognita_, new to
the quarrier, and unknown to the geologist. Most of the stratified
primary rocks make but indifferent building materials; and in the
immediate neighbourhood of our work I could find only one of the worst
of the class--the schistose gneiss. On consulting, however, the scenery
of the district, I marked that at a certain point both shores of the
open sea-loch on whose margin we were situated suddenly changed their
character. The abrupt rugged hills of gneiss that, viewed from an
eminence, resembled a tumbling sea, suddenly sank into low brown
promontories, unbroken by ravines, and whose eminences were mere flat
swellings; and in the hope of finding some change of formation
coincident with the change of scenery, I set out with my comrade for the
nearest point at which the broken outline passed into the rectilinear
or merely undulatory one. But though I did expect a change, it was not
without some degree of surprise that, immediately after passing the
point of junction, I found myself in a district of red sandstone. It was
a hard, compact, dark-coloured stone, but dressed readily to pick and
hammer, and made excellent corner-stones and ashlar; and it would have
furnished us with even hewn work for our building, had not our employer,
unacquainted, like every one else at the time, with the mineral
capabilities of the locality, brought his hewing stone in a sloop, at no
small expense, through the Caledonian Canal, from one of the quarries of
Moray--a circuitous voyage of more than two hundred miles.
Immediately beside where we opened our quarry, there was a little
solitary shieling: it was well-nigh such an edifice as I used to erect
when a boy--some eight or ten feet in length, and of so humble an
altitude, that, when standing erect in the midst, I could lay my hand on
the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners; a few grey
embers were smouldering in the middle of the floor; a pot lay beside
them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils
of the morning ebb; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that
projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of the shieling.
Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat outside, at once tending a
few cows grouped on the moor, and employed in stripping with a
pocket-knife, long slender filaments from off a piece of moss fir; and
as he wrought and watched, he crooned a Gaelic song, not very musically
mayhap, but, like the happy song of the humble-bee, there was perfect
content in every tone. He had a great many curious questions to ask in
his native Gaelic, of my comrade, regarding our employment and our
employer; and when satisfied, he began, I perceived, like the Highlander
of the previous evening, to express very profound commiseration for me.
"Is that man also pitying me?" I asked. "O yes, very much," was the
reply: "he does not at all see how you are to live in Gairloch without
Gaelic." I was reminded by the shieling and its happy inmate, of one of
my father's experiences, as communicated to me by Uncle James. In the
course of a protracted kelp voyage among the Hebrides, he had landed in
his boat, before entering one of the sounds of the Long Island, to
procure a pilot, but found in the fisherman's cottage on which he had
directed his course, only the fisherman's wife--a young creature of not
more than eighteen--engaged in nursing her child, and singing a Gaelic
song, in tones expressive of a light heart, till the rocks rang again. A
heath bed, a pot of baked clay, of native manufacture, fashioned by the
hand, and a heap of fish newly caught, seemed to constitute the only
wealth of the cottage; but its mistress was, notwithstanding, one of the
happiest of women; and deeply did she commiserate the poor sailors, and
earnestly wish for the return of her husband, that he might assist them
in their perplexity. The husband at length appeared. "Oh," he asked,
after the first greeting, "have you any salt?" "Plenty," said the
master; "and you, I see, from your supply of fresh fish, want it very
much; but come, pilot us through the sound, and you shall have as much
salt as you require." And so the vessel got a pilot, and the fisherman
got salt; but never did my father forget the light-hearted song of the
happy mistress of that poor Highland cottage. It was one of the palpable
characteristics of our Scottish Highlanders, for at least the first
thirty years of the century, that they were contented enough, as a
people, to find more to pity than to envy in the condition of their
neighbours; and I remember that at this time, and for years after, I
used to deem the trait a good one. I have now, however, my doubts on the
subject, and am not quite sure whether a content so general as to be
national may not, in certain circumstances, be rather a vice than a
virtue. It is certainly no virtue when it has the effect of arresting
either individuals or peoples in their course of development; and is
perilously allied to great suffering, when the men who exemplify it are
so thoroughly happy amid the mediocrities of the present, that they fail
to make provision for the contingencies of the future.
We were joined in about a fortnight by the other workmen from the Low
country, and I resigned my temporary charge (save that I still retained
the time-book in my master's behalf) into the hands of an ancient mason,
remarkable over the north of Scotland for his skill as an operative, and
who, though he was now turned of sixty, was still able to build and hew
considerably more than the youngest and most active man in the squad. He
was at this time the only survivor of three brothers, all masons, and
all not merely first-class workmen, but of a class to which, at least to
the north of the Grampians, only they themselves belonged, and very
considerably in advance of the first. And on the removal of the second
of the three brothers to the south of Scotland, it was found that, amid
the stone-cutters of Glasgow, David Fraser held relatively the same
place that he had done among those of the north. I have been told by Mr.
Kenneth Matheson--a gentleman well known as a master-builder in the west
of Scotland--that in erecting some hanging stairs of polished stone,
ornamented in front and at the outer edge by the common fillet and
torus, his ordinary workmen used to complete for him their one step
a-piece per day, and David Fraser his _three_ steps, finished equally
well. It is easily conceivable how, in the higher walks of art, one man
should excel a thousand--nay, how he should have neither competitor when
living, nor successor when dead. The English gentleman who, after the
death of Canova, asked a surviving brother of the sculptor whether he
purposed carrying on Canova's _business_, found that he had achieved in
the query an unintentional joke. But in the commoner avocations there
appear no such differences between man and man; and it may seem strange
how, in ordinary stone-cutting, one man could thus perform the work of
three. My acquaintance with old John Fraser showed me how very much the
ability depended on a natural faculty. John's strength had never been
above the average of that of Scotchmen, and it was now considerably
reduced; nor did his mallet deal more or heavier blows than that of the
common workman. He had, however, an extraordinary power of conceiving of
the finished piece of work, as lying within the rude stone from which it
was his business to disinter it; and while ordinary stone-cutters had to
repeat and re-repeat their lines and draughts, and had in this way
virtually to give to their work several surfaces in detail ere they
reached the true one, old John cut upon the true figure at once, and
made one surface serve for all. In building, too, he exercised a similar
power: he hammer-dressed his stones with fewer strokes than other
workmen, and in fitting the interspaces between stones already laid,
always picked from out of the heap at his feet the stone that exactly
fitted the place; while other operatives busied themselves in picking up
stones that were too small or too large; or, if they set themselves to
reduce the too large ones, reduced them too little or too much, and had
to fit and fit again. Whether building or hewing, John never seemed in a
hurry. He has been seen, when far advanced in life, working very
leisurely, as became his years, on the one side of a wall, and two stout
young fellows building against him on the other side--toiling,
apparently, twice harder than he, but the old man always contriving to
keep a little a-head of them both.
David Fraser I never saw; but as a hewer he was said considerably to
excel even his brother John. On hearing that it had been remarked among
a party of Edinburgh masons, that, though regarded as the first of
Glasgow stone-cutters, he would find in the eastern capital at least his
equals, he attired himself most uncouthly in a long-tailed coat of
tartan, and, looking to the life the untamed, untaught, conceited little
Celt, he presented himself on Monday morning, armed with a letter of
introduction from a Glasgow builder, before the foreman of an Edinburgh
squad of masons engaged upon one of the finer buildings at that time in
the course of erection. The letter specified neither his qualifications
nor his name: it had been written merely to secure for him the necessary
employment, and the necessary employment it did secure. The better
workmen of the party were engaged, on his arrival, in hewing columns,
each of which was deemed sufficient work for a week; and David was
asked, somewhat incredulously, by the foreman, "if he could hew?" "O
yes, _he thought_ he could hew." "Could he hew columns such as these!"
"O yes, _he thought_ he could hew columns such as these." A mass of
stone in which a possible column lay hid, was accordingly placed before
David, not under cover of the shed, which was already occupied by
workmen, but, agreeably to David's own request, directly in front of it,
where he might be seen by all, and where he straightway commenced a most
extraordinary course of antics. Buttoning his long tartan coat fast
around him, he would first look along the stone from the one end, anon
from the other, and then examine it in front and rear; or, quitting it
altogether for the time, he would take up his stand beside the other
workmen, and, after looking at them with great attention, return and
give it a few taps with the mallet, in a style evidently imitative of
theirs, but monstrously a caricature. The shed all that day resounded
with roars of laughter; and the only thoroughly grave man on the ground
was he who occasioned the mirth of all the others. Next morning David
again buttoned his coat; but he got on much better this day than the
former: he was less awkward and less idle, though not less observant
than before: and he succeeded ere evening in tracing, in workman-like
fashion, a few draughts along the future column. He was evidently
greatly improving. On the morning of Wednesday he threw off his coat;
and it was seen that, though by no means in a hurry, he was seriously at
work. There were no more jokes or laughter; and it was whispered in the
evening that the strange Highlander had made astonishing progress
during the day. By the middle of Thursday he had made up for his two
days' trifling, and was abreast of the other workmen; before night he
was far ahead of them; and ere the evening of Friday, when they had
still a full day's work on each of their columns, David's was completed
in a style that defied criticism; and, his tartan coat again buttoned
around him, he sat resting himself beside it. The foreman went out and
greeted him. "Well," he said, "you have beaten us all: you certainly
_can_ hew!" "Yes," said David; "I _thought_ I could hew columns. Did the
other men take much more than a week to learn?" "Come, come, _David
Fraser_," replied the foreman; "we all guess who you are: you have had
your joke out; and now, I suppose, we must give you your week's wages,
and let you away." "Yes," said David; "work waits for me in Glasgow; but
I just thought it might be well to know how you hewed on this east side
of the country."
John Fraser was a shrewd, sarcastic old man, much liked, however, by his
brother workmen; though his severe sayings--which, never accompanied by
any ill-nature, were always tolerated in the barrack--did both himself
and them occasional harm when repeated outside. To men who have to live
for months together on oatmeal and salt, the difference between porridge
with and porridge without milk is a very great difference indeed, both
in point of salutariness and comfort; and I had succeeded in securing,
on the ordinary terms, ere the arrival of John, what was termed a _set_
of skimmed milk from the wife of the gentleman at whose dwelling-house
we were engaged in working. The skimmed milk was, however, by no means
good: it was thin, blue, and sour; and we received it without complaint
only because we knew that, according to the poet, it was "better just
than want aye," and that there was no other dairy in that part of the
country. But old John was less prudent; and, taking the dairy-maid to
task in his quiet ironical style, he began by expressing wonder and
regret that a grand lady like her mistress should be unable to
distinguish the difference between milk and wine. The maid indignantly
denied the fact _in toto_: her mistress, she said, did know the
difference. "O no," replied John; "wine always gets better the longer it
is kept, and milk always the worse; but your mistress, not knowing the
difference, keeps her milk very long, in order to make it better, and
makes it so very bad in consequence, that there are some days we can
scarce eat it at all." The dairy-maid bridled up, and, communicating the
remark to her mistress, we were told next morning that we might go for
our milk to the next dairy, if we pleased, but that we would get none
from her. And so, for four months thereafter, we had to do penance for
the joke, on that not very luxurious viand "dry porridge." The pleasures
of the table had occupied but small space amid the very scanty
enjoyments of our barrack even before, and they were now so considerably
reduced, that I could have almost wished at meal-times that--like the
inhabitants of the moon, as described by Baron Munchausen--I could open
up a port-hole in my side, and lay in at once provisions enough for a
fortnight; but the infliction told considerably more on our
constitutions than on our appetites; and we all became subject to small
but very painful boils in the muscular parts of the body--a species of
disease which seems to be scarce less certainly attendant on the
exclusive use of oatmeal, than sea-scurvy on the exclusive use of salt
meat. Old John, however, though in a certain sense the author of our
calamity, escaped all censure, while a double portion fell to the share
of the gentleman's wife.
I never met a man possessed of a more thoroughly mathematical head than
this ancient mason. I know not that he ever saw a copy of Euclid; but
the principles of the work seemed to lie as self-evident truths in his
mind. In the ability, too, of drawing shrewd inferences from natural
phenomena, old John Fraser excelled all the other untaught men I ever
knew. Until my acquaintance with him commenced, I had been accustomed
to hear the removal of what was widely known in the north of Scotland as
"the travelled stone of Petty," attributed to supernatural agency. An
enormous boulder had been carried in the night-time by the fairies, it
was said, from its resting place on the sea-beach, into the middle of a
little bay--a journey of several hundred feet; but old John, though he
had not been on the spot at the time, at once inferred that it had been
carried, not by the fairies, but by a thick cake of ice, considerable
enough, when firmly clasped round it, to float it away. He had seen, he
told me, stones of considerable size floated off by ice on the shore
opposite his cottage, in the upper reaches of the Cromarty Firth: ice
was an agent that sometimes "walked off with great stones;" whereas he
had no evidence whatever that the fairies had any powers that way; and
so he accepted the agent which he knew, as the true one in the removal
of the travelled stone, and not the hypothetical agents of which he knew
nothing. Such was the natural philosophy of old John; and in this
special instance geologic science has since fully confirmed his
decision. He was chiefly a favourite among us, however, from his even
and cheerful temper, and his ability of telling humorous stories, that
used to set the barrack in a roar, and in which he never spared himself,
if the exhibition of a weakness or absurdity gave but point to the fun.
His narrative of a visit to Inverness, which he had made when an
apprentice lad, to see a sheep-stealer hung, and his description of the
terrors of a night-journey back, in which he fancied he saw men waving
in the wind on almost every tree, till on reaching his solitary barrack
he was utterly prostrated by the apparition of his own great-coat
suspended from a pin, has oftener than once convulsed us with laughter.
But John's humorous confessions, based as they always were on a strong
good sense, that always saw the early folly in its most ludicrous
aspect, never lowered him in our eyes. Of his wonderful skill as a
workman, much was incommunicable; but it was at least something to know
the principles on which he directed the operations of what a
phrenologist would perhaps term his extraordinary faculties of _form_
and _size_; and so I recognise old John as one of not the least useful
nor able of my many teachers. Some of his professional lessons were of a
kind which the south and east country masons would be the better for
knowing. In that rainy district of Scotland of which we at this time
occupied the central tract, rubble walls built in the ordinary style
leak like the bad roofs of other parts of the country; and
mansion-houses constructed within its precincts by qualified workmen
from Edinburgh and Glasgow have been found to admit the water in such
torrents as to be uninhabitable, until their more exposed walls had been
slated over like their roofs. Old John, however, always succeeded in
building water-tight walls. Departing from the ordinary rule of the
builder elsewhere, and which on the east coast of Scotland he himself
always respected, he slightly elevated the under beds of his stones,
instead of laying them, as usual, on the dead level; while along the
edges of their upper beds he struck off a small rude champer; and by
these simple contrivances, the rain, though driven with violence against
his work, coursed in streams along its face, without entering into the
interior and soaking through.
For about six weeks we had magnificent weather--clear, sunny skies, and
calm seas; and I greatly enjoyed my evening rambles amid the hills, or
along the sea-shore. I was struck, in these walks, by the amazing
abundance of the wild flowers which covered the natural meadows and
lower hill-slopes--an abundance, as I have since remarked, equally
characteristic of both the northern and western islands of Scotland. The
lower slopes of Gairloch, of western Sutherland, of Orkney, and of the
northern Hebrides generally--though, for the purposes of the
agriculturist, vegetation languishes, and wheat is never reared--are by
many degrees richer in wild flowers than the fat loamy meadows of
England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals
as in leaves. Little of the rare is to be detected in these meadows,
save, perhaps, that in those of western Sutherland a few Alpine plants
may be found at a greatly lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the
vast profusion of blossoms borne by species common to almost every other
part of the kingdom, imparts to them an apparently novel character. We
may detect, I am inclined to think, in this singular floral profusion,
the operation of a law not less influential in the animal than 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 on 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 shorter stem, until the
successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants,
of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become
mere weeds, of scarce as many inches. But while the as yet undegenerate
plant had merely borne atop 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. In
the common scurvy-grass, too--remarkable, with some other plants 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 leaves and stems 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 Gairloch and 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; for Doubleday
seems 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;
whereas our poorer people seem increasing in more than the arithmetical
ratio. 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,
as it existed ere the famine, would have been of itself sufficient, had
the human family no other breeding-place, to people in a few ages the
world. Here too, in close neighbourhood with the flower-covered meadows,
were there miserable cottages that were swarming with children--cottages
in which, for nearly the half of every twelvemonth, the cereals were
unknown as food, and whose over-toiled female inmates did all the
domestic work, and more than half the work of the little fields outside.
How exquisitely the sun sets in a clear, calm, summer evening over the
blue Hebrides! Within less than a mile of our barrack, there rose a
tall hill, whose bold summit commanded all the Western Isles, from Sleat
in Skye, to the Butt of the Lewis. To the south lay the trap islands; to
the north and west, the gneiss ones. They formed, however, seen from
this hill, one great group, which, just as the sun had sunk, and sea and
sky were so equally bathed in gold as to exhibit on the horizon no
dividing line, seemed in their transparent purple--darker or lighter
according to the distance--a group of lovely clouds, that, though
moveless in the calm, the first light breeze might sweep away. Even the
flat promontories of sandstone, which, like outstretched arms, enclosed
the outer reaches of the foreground--promontories edged with low red
cliffs, and covered with brown heath--used to borrow at these times,
from the soft yellow beam, a beauty not their own. Amid the inequalities
of the gneiss region within--a region more broken and precipitous, but
of humbler altitude, than the great gneiss tract of the midland
Highlands--the chequered light and shade lay, as the sun declined, in
strongly contrasted patches, that betrayed the abrupt inequalities of
the ground, and bore, when all around was warm, tinted, and bright, a
hue of cold neutral grey; while immediately over and beyond this rough
sombre base there rose two noble pyramids of red sandstone, about two
thousand feet in height, that used to flare to the setting sun in bright
crimson, and whose nearly horizontal strata, deeply scored along the
lines, like courses of ashlar in an ancient wall, added to the mural
effect communicated by their bare fronts and steep rectilinear outlines.
These tall pyramids form the terminal members, towards the south, of an
extraordinary group of sandstone hills, of denudation unique in the
British islands, to which I have already referred, and which extends
from the northern boundary of Assynt to near Applecross. But though I
formed at this time my first acquaintance with the group, it was not
until many years after that I had an opportunity of determining the
relations of their component beds to each other, and to the fundamental
rocks of the country.
At times my walks were directed along the sea-shore. Naturalists well
know how much the western coasts of Scotland differ in their productions
from its eastern ones; but it was a difference wholly new to me at this
time; and though my limited knowledge enabled me to detect it in but
comparatively few particulars, I found it no uninteresting task to trace
it for myself in even these few. I was first attracted by one of the
larger sea-weeds, _Himanthalia lorea_--with its cup-shaped disc and long
thong-like receptacles--which I found very abundant on the rocks here,
but which I had never seen in the upper reaches of the Moray Firth, and
which is by no means very common on any portion of the east coast. From
the sea-weeds I passed to the shells, among which I detected not only a
difference in the proportions in which the various species occurred, but
also species that were new to me--such as a shell, not rare in Gairloch,
_Nassa reticulata_, but rarely if ever seen in the Moray or Cromarty
Firths; and three other shells which I saw here for the first time,
_Trochus umbilicatus_, _Trochus magus_, and _Pecten niveus_.[5] I found,
too, that the common edible oyster, _ostrea edulis_, which on the east
coast lies always in comparatively deep water, is sometimes found in the
Gairloch, as, for instance, in the little bay opposite Flowerdale, in
beds laid bare by the ebb of stream-tides. It is always interesting to
come unexpectedly either upon a new species or a striking peculiarity in
an old one; and I deemed it a curious and suggestive fact that there
should be British shells still restricted to our western shores, and
that have not yet made their way into the German Ocean, along the coasts
of either extremity of the island. Are we to infer that they are shells
of more recent origin than the widely-diffused ones? or are they merely
feebler in their reproductive powers? and is the German Ocean, as some
of our geologists hold, a comparatively modern sea, into which only the
hardier mollusca of rapid increase have yet made their way? Further, I
found that the true fishes differ considerably in the group on the
opposite sides of the island. The haddock and whiting are greatly more
common on the east coast: the hake and horse mackerel very much more
abundant on the west. Even where the species are the same on both sides,
the varieties are different. The herring of the west coast is a short,
thick, richly-flavoured fish, greatly superior to the large lean variety
so abundant on the east; whereas the west-coast cod are large-headed,
thin-bodied, pale-coloured fishes, inferior, even in their best season,
to the darker-coloured, small-headed variety of the east. In no respect
do the two coasts differ more, or at least to the north of the
Grampians, than in the transparency of the water. The bottom is rarely
seen on the east coast at a depth of more than twenty feet, and not
often at more than twelve; whereas on the west I have seen it very
distinctly, during a tract of dry weather, at a depth of sixty or
seventy feet. The handles of the spears used in Gairloch in spearing
flat fish and the common edible crab (_Cancer Pagurus_), are sometimes
five-and-twenty feet in length--a length which might in vain be given to
spear-handles upon the east coast, seeing that there, at such a depth of
water, flat fish or crab was never yet seen from the surface.
Deceived by this transparency, I have plunged oftener than once over
head and ears, when bathing among the rocks, in pools where I had
confidently expected to find footing. From a rock that rose abrupt as a
wall from the low-water level of stream tides to a little above the line
of flood, I occasionally amused myself, when the evenings were calm, in
practising the Indian method of diving--that in which the diver carries
a weight with him, to facilitate his sinking, and keep him steadily at
the bottom. I used to select an oblong-shaped stone, of sixteen or
eighteen pounds' weight, but thin enough to be easily held in one hand;
and after grasping it fast, and quitting the rock edge, I would in a
second or two find myself on the grey pebble-strewed ooze beneath, some
twelve or fifteen feet from the surface, where I found I could steadily
remain, picking up any small objects I chanced to select, until, breath
failing, I quitted my hold of the stone. And then two or three seconds
more were always sufficient to bring me to the surface again. There are
many descriptions, in the works of the poets, of submarine scenery, but
it is always scenery such as may be seen by an eye looking down into the
water--not by an eye enveloped in it--and very different from that with
which I now became acquainted. I found that in these hasty trips to the
bottom I could distinguish masses and colours, but that I always failed
to determine outlines. The minuter objects--pebbles, shells, and the
smaller bunches of sea-weed--always assumed the circular form; the
larger, such as detached rocks, and patches of sand, appeared as if
described by irregular curves. The dingy gneiss rock rose behind and
over me like a dark cloud, thickly dotted with minute circular spots of
soiled white--the aspect assumed, as seen through the water, by the
numerous specimens of univalve shells (_Purpura lapillus_ and _Patella
vulgata_) with which it was speckled; beneath, the irregular floor
seemed covered by a carpet that somewhat resembled in the pattern a
piece of marbled paper, save that the circular or oval patches of which
it was composed, and which had as their nuclei, stones, rocks,
shell-fish, bunches of fuci, and fronds of laminaria, were greatly
larger. There spread around a misty groundwork of green intensely deep
along its horizon, but comparatively light overhead, in its middle sky,
which had always its prodigy--wonderful circlets of light, that went
widening outwards, and with whose delicate green there mingled
occasional flashes of pale crimson. Such was the striking though
somewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human
eye submerged in from two to three fathoms of water.
There still continued to linger in this primitive district, at the time,
several curious arts and implements, that had long become obsolete in
most other parts of the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in
England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as
belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read
a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish,
which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among
other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss--a
peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern
ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that
there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. On
visiting, however, a boat-yard at Gairloch, I found the Highland builder
engaged in laying a layer of dried moss, steeped in tar, along one of
his seams, and learned that such had been the practice of
boat-carpenters in that locality from time immemorial. I have said that
the little old Highlander of the solitary shieling, whom we met on first
commencing our quarrying labours beside his hut, was engaged in
stripping with a pocket-knife long slender filaments from off a piece of
moss-fir. He was employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the
manufacture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the
fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could
scarce have been expected from materials of such venerable age and
rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked
up in the peat-mosses of the district for mayhap a thousand years. Like
the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands,
and was employed for haulsers, the cork-bauks of herring-nets, and the
lacing of sails. Most of the sails themselves were made, not of canvas,
but of a woollen stuff, the thread of which, greatly harder and stouter
than that of common plaid, had been spun on the distaff and spindle. As
hemp and flax must have been as rare commodities of old in the western
Highlands, and the Hebrides generally, as they both were thirty years
ago in Gairloch, whereas moss-fir must have been abundant, and sheep,
however coarse their fleeces, common enough, it seems not improbable
that the old Highland fleets that fought in the "Battle of the Bloody
Bay," or that, in troublous times, when Donald quarrelled with the king,
ravaged the coasts of Arran and Ayrshire, may been equipped with similar
sails and cordage. Scott describes the fleet of the "Lord of the Isles,"
in the days of the Bruce, as consisting of "proud galleys," "streamered
with silk and tricked with gold." I suspect he would have approved
himself a truer antiquary, though mayhap worse poet, had he described it
as composed of very rude carvels, caulked with moss, furnished with
sails of dun-coloured woollen stuff still redolent of the oil, and
rigged out with brown cordage formed of the twisted fibres of moss-fir.
The distaff and spindle was still, as I have said, in extensive use in
the district. In a scattered village in the neighbourhood of our
barrack, in which all the adult females were ceaselessly engaged in the
manufacture of yarn, there was not a single spinning-wheel. Nor, though
all its cottages had their little pieces of tillage, did it boast its
horse or plough. The cottars turned up the soil with the old Highland
implement, the _cass-chron_; and the necessary manure was carried to the
fields in spring, and the produce brought home in autumn, on the backs
of the women, in square wicker-work panniers, with slip-bottoms. How
these poor Highland women did toil! I have paused amid my labours under
the hot sun, to watch them as they passed, bending under their load of
peat or manure, and at the same time twirling the spindle as they crept
along, and drawing out the never-ending thread from the distaff stuck in
their girdles. Their appearance in most cases betrayed their life of
hardship. I scarce saw a Gairloch woman of the humbler class turned of
thirty, who was not thin, sallow, and prematurely old. The men, their
husbands and brothers, were by no means worn out with hard work. I have
seen them, time after time, sunning themselves on a mossy bank, when the
females were thus engaged; and used, with my brother-workmen--who were
themselves Celts, but of the industrious, hardworking type--to feel
sufficiently indignant at the lazy fellows. But the arrangement which
gave them rest, and their wives and sisters hard labour, seemed to be as
much the offspring of a remote age as the woollen sails and the moss-fir
cordage. Several other ancient practices and implements had at this time
just disappeared from the district. A good meal-mill of the modern
construction had superseded, not a generation before, several small
mills with horizontal water-wheels, of that rude antique type which
first supplanted the still more ancient handmill. These horizontal mills
still exist, however--at least they did so only two years ago--in the
gneiss region of Assynt. The antiquary sometimes forgets that, tested by
his special rules for determining periods, several ages may be found
contemporary in contiguous districts of the same country. I am old
enough to have seen the handmill at work in the north of Scotland; and
the traveller into the Highlands of western Sutherland might have
witnessed the horizontal mill in action only two years ago. But to the
remains of either, if dug out of the mosses or sand-hills of the
southern counties, we would assign an antiquity of centuries. In the
same way, the unglazed earthen pipkin, fashioned by the hand without the
assistance of the potter's wheel, is held to belong to the "bronze and
stone periods" of the antiquary; and yet my friend of the Doocot Cave,
when minister of Small Isles, found the remains of one of these pipkins
in the famous charnel cave of Eigg, which belonged to an age not earlier
than that of Mary, and more probably pertained to that of her son James;
and I have since learned, that in the southern portions of the Long
Island, this same hand-moulded pottery of the bronze period has been
fashioned for domestic use during the early part of the present century.
A chapter devoted to these lingering, or only recently departed, arts of
the primitive ages, would be a curious one; but I fear the time for
writing it is now well-nigh past. My few facts on the subject may serve
to show that, even as late as the year 1823, some three days' journey
into the Highlands might be regarded as analogous in some respects to a
journey into the past of some three or four centuries. But even since
that comparatively recent period the Highlands have greatly changed.
After some six or eight weeks of warm sunny days and lovely evenings,
there came on a dreary tract of rainy weather, with strong westerly
gales; and for three months together, while there was scarce a day that
had not its shower, some days had half-a-dozen. Gairloch occupies, as I
have said, exactly the focus of that great curve of annual rain which,
impinging on our western shores from the Atlantic, extends from the
north of Assynt to the south of Mull, and exhibits on the rain-gauge an
average of thirty-five yearly inches--an average very considerably above
the medium quantity that falls in any other part of Great Britain, save
a small tract at the Land's End, included in a southern curve of equal
fall. The rain-fall of this year, however, must have stood very
considerably above even this high average; and the corn crops of the
poor Highlanders soon began to testify to the fact. There had been a
larger than ordinary promise during the fine weather; but in the danker
hollows the lodged oats and barley now lay rotting on the ground, or, on
the more exposed heights, stood up, shorn of the ears, as mere naked
spikes of straw. The potatoes, too, had become soft and watery, and must
have formed but indifferent food to the poor Highlanders, condemned,
even in better seasons, to feed upon them during the greater part of the
year, and now thrown upon them almost exclusively by the failure of the
corn crop. The cottars of the neighbouring village were on other
accounts in more than usually depressed circumstances at the time. Each
family paid to the laird for its patch of corn-land, and the pasturage
of a wide upland moor, on which each kept three cows a-piece, a small
yearly rent of three pounds. The males were all fishermen as well as
crofters; and, small as the rent was, they derived their only means of
paying it from the sea--chiefly, indeed, from the herring
fishery--which, everywhere an uncertain and precarious source of supply,
is more so here than in most other places on the north-western coasts of
Scotland. And as for three years together the herring fishing had failed
in the Loch, they had been unable, term after term, to meet with the
laird, and were now three years in arrears. Fortunately for them, he was
a humane, sensible man, comfortable enough in his circumstances to have,
what Highland proprietors often have not, the complete command of his
own affairs; but they all felt that their cattle were their own only by
sufferance, and so long as he forbore urging his claims against them;
and they entertained but little hope of ultimate extrication. I saw
among these poor men much of that indolence of which the country has
heard not a little; and could not doubt, from the peculiar aspects in
which it presented itself, that it was, as I have said, a long-derived
hereditary indolence, in which their fathers and grandfathers had
indulged for centuries. But there was certainly little in their
circumstances to lead to the formation of new habits of industry. Even a
previously industrious people, were they to be located within the great
north-western curve of thirty-five inch rain, to raise corn and potatoes
for the autumnal storms to blast, and to fish in the laird's behalf
herrings that year after year refused to come to be caught, would, I
suspect, in a short time get nearly as indolent as themselves. And
certainly, judging from the contrast which my brother-workmen presented
to these Highlanders of the west coast, the indolence which we saw, and
for which my comrades had no tolerance whatever, could scarce be
described as inherently Celtic. I myself was the only genuine Lowlander
of our party. John Fraser, who, though turned of sixty, would have laid
or hewn stone for stone with the most diligent Saxon mason in Britain or
elsewhere, was a true Celt of the Scandinavian-Gaelic variety; and all
our other masons--Macdonalds, M'Leods, and Mackays, hard-working men,
who were content to toil from season to season, and all day long--were
true Celts also. But they had been bred on the eastern border of the
Highlands, in a sandstone district, where they had the opportunity of
acquiring a trade, and of securing in the working season regular
well-remunerated employment; and so they had developed into industrious,
skilled mechanics, of at least the ordinary efficiency. There are other
things much more deeply in fault as producing causes of the indolence of
the west-coast Highlander than his Celtic blood.
On finishing the dwelling-house upon which we had been engaged, nearly
one-half the workmen quitted the squad for the low country, and the
remainder removed to the neighbourhood of the inn at which we had spent
our first night, or rather morning, in the place, to build a kitchen and
store-room for the inn-keeper. Among the others, we lost the society of
Click-Clack, who had been a continual source of amusement and annoyance
to us in the barrack all the season long. We soon found that he was
regarded by the Highlanders in our neighbourhood with feelings of the
intensest horror and dread: they had learned somehow that he used to be
seen in the low country flitting suspiciously at nights about
churchyards, and was suspected of being a resurrectionist; and not one
of the ghouls or vampires of eastern story could have been more feared
or hated in the regions which they were believed to infest, than a
resurrectionist in the Western Highlands. Click-Clack had certainly a
trick of wandering about at nights; and not unfrequently did he bring,
on his return from some nocturnal ramble, dead bodies with him into the
barrack; but they were invariably the dead bodies of cod, gurnard, and
hake. I know not where his fishing-bank lay, or what bait he employed;
but I observed that almost all the fish which he caught were ready dried
and salted. Old John Fraser was not without suspicion that there were
occasional interferences on the part of the carter with the integrity of
our meal-barrel; and I have seen the old man smoothing the surface of
the meal just before quitting the barrack for his work, and inscribing
upon it with his knife-point the important moral injunction, "Thou shalt
not steal," in such a way as to render it impossible to break the
commandment within the precincts of the barrel, without, at the same
time, effacing some of its characters. And these once effaced,
Click-Clack, as he was no writer himself, and had no assistant or
confidant, could not have re-inscribed. Ere quitting us for the low
country, I bargained with him that he should carry my blanket in his
cart to Conon-side, and gave him a shilling and a dram in advance, as
pay for the service. He carried it, however, no further than the next
inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and second dram, he left
me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click-Clack, though one of the
cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may remark, as
at least curious, that though I have known idiocy in its unmixed state
united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attachment, I
never yet knew one of the half-witted caste who was not selfish and a
rogue.
We were unlucky in our barracks this season. Ere completing our first
piece of work, we had to quit the hay-barn, our earliest dwelling, to
make way for the proprietor's hay, and to shelter in a cow-house, where,
as the place had no chimney, we were nearly suffocated by smoke; and we
now found the innkeeper, our new employer, speculating, like the
magistrates in Joe Miller, on the practicability of lodging us in a
building, the materials of which were to be used in erecting the one
which we were engaged to build. We did our best to solve the problem,
by hanging up at the end of the doomed hovel--which had been a
salt-store in its day, and was in damp weather ever sweating
salt-water--a hanging partition of mats, that somewhat resembled the
curtain of a barn-theatre; and, making our beds within, we began pulling
down piecemeal, as the materials were required, that part of the
erection which lay outside. We had very nearly unhoused ourselves ere
our work was finished; and the chill blasts of October, especially when
they blew in at the open end of our dwelling, rendered it as
uncomfortable as a shallow cave in an exposed rock-front. My boyish
experiences, however, among the rocks of Cromarty, constituted no bad
preparation for such a life, and I roughed it out at least as well as
any of my comrades. The day had so contracted, that night always fell
upon our unfinished labours, and I had no evening walks; but there was a
delightful gneiss island, of about thirty acres in extent, and nearly
two miles away, to which I used to be occasionally despatched to quarry
lintels and corner stones, and where work had all the charms of play;
and the quiet Sabbaths were all my own. So long as the laird and his
family were at the mansion-house of Flowerdale--at least four months of
every year--there was an English service in the parish church; but I had
come to the place this season before the laird, and now remained in it
after he had gone away, and there was no English service for me. And so
I usually spent my Sabbaths all alone in the noble Flowerdale woods, now
bright under their dark hillsides, in the autumnal tints, and remarkable
for the great height and bulk of their ash trees, and of a few detached
firs, that spoke, in their venerable massiveness, of former centuries.
The clear, calm mornings, when the gossamer went sailing in long grey
films along the retired glades of the wood, and the straggling sunlight
fell on the crimson and orange mushroom, as it sprang up amid the dank
grass, and under thickly-leaved boughs of scarlet and gold, I deemed
peculiarly delightful. For one who had neither home nor church, the
autumnal woods formed by much a preferable Sabbath haunt to a shallow
cave, dropping brine, unprovided with chair or table, and whose only
furniture consisted of two rude bedsteads of undressed slabs, that bore
atop two blankets a-piece, and a heap of straw. Sabbath-walking in
parties, and especially in the neighbourhood of our large towns, is
always a frivolous, and often a very bad thing; but lonely Sabbath-walks
in a rural district--walks such as the poet Graham describes--are not
necessarily bad; and the Sabbatarians who urge that in all cases, men,
when not in church on the Sabbath, ought to be in their dwellings, must
know very little indeed of the "huts where poor men lie." In the mason's
barrack, or the farm-servant's bothy, it is often impossible to enjoy
the quiet of the Sabbath: the circumstances necessary to its enjoyment
must be sought in the open air, amid the recesses of some thick wood, or
along the banks of some unfrequented river, or on the brown wastes of
some solitary moor.
We had completed all our work ere Hallowday, and, after a journey of
nearly three days, I found myself once more at home, with the leisure of
the long happy winter before me. I still look lack on the experiences of
this year with a feeling of interest. I had seen in my boyhood, in the
interior of Sutherland, the Highlanders living in that condition of
comparative comfort which they enjoyed from shortly after the
suppression of the rebellion of 1745, and the abolition of the
hereditary jurisdictions, till the beginning of the present century, and
in some localities for ten or twelve years later. And here again I saw
them in a condition--the effect mainly of the introduction of the
extensive sheep-farm system into the interior of the country--which has
since become general over almost the entire Highlands, and of which the
result may be seen in the annual famines. The population, formerly
spread pretty equally over the country, now exists as a miserable
selvedge, stretched along its shores, dependent in most cases on
precarious fisheries, that prove remunerative for a year or two, and
disastrous for mayhap half-a-dozen; and able barely to subsist when
most successful, a failure in the potato crop, or in the expected return
of the herring shoals, at once reduces them to starvation. The grand
difference between the circumstances of the people of the Highlands in
the better time and the worse may be summed up in the one important
vocable--_capital_. The Highlander was never wealthy: the inhabitants of
a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are. But
he possessed, on the average, his six, or eight, or ten head of cattle,
and his small flock of sheep; and when, as sometimes happened in the
high-lying districts, the corn-crop turned out a failure, the sale of a
few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord,
and enabled him to purchase his winter and spring supply of meal in the
Lowlands. He was thus a capitalist, and possessed the capitalist's
peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an
accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want,
though not between him and positive hardship, and which enabled him to
rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of
throwing himself on the charity of his Lowland neighbours. Nay, in what
were emphatically termed "the dear years" of the beginning of the
present and latter half of the past century, the humble people of the
Lowlands, especially our Lowland mechanics and labourers, suffered more
than the crofters and _small_ farmers of the Highlands, and this mainly
from the circumstance, that as the failure of the crops which induced
the scarcity was a corn failure, not a failure of grass and pasture, the
humbler Highlanders had sheep and cattle, which continued to supply them
with food and raiment; while the humbler Lowlanders, depending on corn
almost exclusively, and accustomed to deal with the draper for their
articles of clothing, were reduced by the high price of provisions to
great straits. There took place, however, about the beginning of the
century, a mighty change, coincident with, and, to a certain extent, an
effect of, the wars of the first French Revolution. The price of
provisions rose in England and the Lowlands, and with the price of
provisions, the rent of land. The Highland proprietor naturally enough
set himself to determine how his rental also was to be increased; and,
as a consequence of the conclusion at which he arrived, the sheep-farm
and clearance system began. Many thousand Highlanders, ejected from
their snug holdings, employed their little capital in emigrating to
Canada and the States; and there, in most cases, the little capital
increased, and a rude plenty continues to be enjoyed by their
descendants. Many thousands more, however, fell down upon the coasts of
the country, and, on moss-covered moors or bare promontories, ill suited
to repay the labours of the agriculturist, commenced a sort of
amphibious life as crofters and fishermen. And, located on an ungenial
soil, and prosecuting with but indifferent skill a precarious trade,
their little capital dribbled out of their hands, and they became the
poorest of men. Meanwhile, in some parts of the Highlands and Islands a
busy commerce sprang up, which employed--much to the profit of the
landlords--many thousands of the inhabitants. The kelp manufacture
rendered inhospitable islets and tracts of bleak rocky shore, rich in
sea-weed, of as much value to the proprietors as the best land in
Scotland; and, under the impetus given by full employment, and, if not
ample, at least remunerative pay, population increased. Suddenly,
however, Free Trade, in its first approaches, destroyed the trade in
kelp; and then the discovery of a cheap mode of manufacturing soda out
of common salt secured its ruin beyond the power of legislation to
retrieve. Both the people and landlords experienced in the kelp
districts the evils which a ruined commerce always leaves behind it. Old
Highland families disappeared from amid the aristocracy and landowners
of Scotland; and the population of extensive islands and sea-boards of
the country, from being no more than adequate, suddenly became
oppressively redundant. It required, however, another drop to make the
full cup run over. The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple
food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato-blight came on,
the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals,
and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and
ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly
impinge on the comforts of the people of the Lowlands, utterly
prostrated the Highlanders; and ever since, the sufferings of famine
have become chronic along the bleak shores and rugged islands of at
least the north-western portion of our country. Nor is it perhaps the
worst part of the evil that takes the form of clamorous want: so heavily
have the famines borne on a class which were not absolutely the poor
when they came on, that they are absolutely the poor now;--they have
dissipated the last remains of capital possessed by the _people_ of the
Highlands.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the
Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the
first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of
Forth and Clyde.
[5] There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,--_Trochus
umbilicatus_ and _Pecten niveus_. As neither of them has yet been
detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells
of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western
centre of creation; whereas specimens of _Trochus magus_ and _Nassa
reticulata_, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the
kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more
widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient
standing.