"DUNARA CASTLE,"
which had dropped anchor in the middle of the Sound. On deck we found four young sportsmen in knickerbockers and ulsters, their backs turned upon the cathedral, firing at sea-gulls and missing them very successfully. In fact, I might as well say here, they kept on firing and missing so long as they were on the steamer. A man with a wife, four children, three maids, and a deckful of baggage, was already preparing to get off at Bunessan. The domestic energy of the Englishman is only less admirable than his business-like methods of pleasure. A party of Lowlanders were playing cards. A man of universal authority was telling a small group of listeners all about the geology and religion, the fishing and agriculture, of the islands. But as we sat in a corner, sheltered from the bitter cold wind, the talk that came to us was mostly of sport.
"I played that brute for half an hour!"
"I was fishing with a worm, I think."
"The best thing for shooting rooks is an air-gun."
"He wasn't a particularly good shot."
And all the time the brave sportsmen kept showing us what particularly bad shots they were. Is Tartarin's Chasse de Casquettes really so much funnier than what is called sport in England?
Suddenly one of the Scotchmen, leaving his cards to look about him, gave the talk an unexpected literary turn. "That feller, Louis Stevverson," he said, "laid one o' the scenes o' his Keednopped here," and he pointed to the Ross and Erraid.
"Woo's 'e?" said a cockney.
"'Arts is trumps," announced a third, and literature was dropped for more engrossing themes.
Emerson was right. It would be a waste of time for the literary man to play the swell. Even the handsome and gentlemanly authors of Boston, who are praised by Arlo Bates, when they become known to the world at large may be but "fellers!"
From the Sound we steamed past the great headland of Gribun, with the caves in its dark rocks, and into Loch Slach to the pier near Bunessan. The sportsmen were the first to alight, and, with guns over their shoulders, they disappeared quickly up the hill-side. The father of the family, like a modern Noah, stood on the pier to count his wife, children, maid, boxes, bundles, fishing-rods, and gun-cases, and to see them safely on dry land. It was fortunate for the original Noah that he did not have a whole ship's company to feed when he left the Ark. We were some time putting off and taking on freight. At the last moment, back ran the four sportsmen, bearing one bird in triumph. They parted with it sadly and tenderly. It was pathetic to see their regret after they had given it to a fisherman, who seemed embarrassed by the gift. I think they knew that it was the last bird they would bring down that day.
Then again we steamed past Gribun. Beyond it rose Inch-Kenneth and Ulva, really "Ulva dark" this morning. And one by one we left behind us, Iona, its white sands shining, its cathedral standing out boldly against the sky; Staffa, for a time so near that we could see the entrance to the great cave with its clustered piers; Fladda, Lunga, and the Dutchman's Cap. It was a page from "Macleod of Dare." And what were the Dhu Harteach men saying now? we could not help asking. Everywhere we looked were tiny nameless islands and bits of rock, sometimes separated only by a narrow channel. And now the sun shone upon us in our corner and made us warm. And even after the hills of Mull had begun to go down on the horizon, and Iona and Staffa had faded into vague shadows, we could see the Dutchman, like a great Phrygian cap set upon the waters.
Straight out we went to Tiree, a long, treeless strip of land with low hills at one end, and a wide, sandy, Jersey-like beach. A few houses, scattered here and there, were in sight. There was no pier. A large boat, with three men at each of the four long oars, came out to meet the steamer, and into it were tumbled pell-mell men and women, and tables, and bags of meal, and loaves of bread, and boxes. It is another of the Duke of Argyll's islands. Looking at it from the steamship point of view, one could not but wonder if as much good might not be done for people, whose only highway is the ocean, by the building of a pier as by prohibition laws enforced by a landlord. As in Iona, so in Tiree, no spirits can be bought or sold. It is one of the anomalies of paternal government that the men made children turn upon their kind fatherly ruler. The crofters of Tiree have given trouble even as have those of Skye and Lewis. They are shielded from drunkenness, and yet they complain that they have been turned from the land that once was theirs to cultivate, and that their rents have been for long years so high that to pay them meant starvation for their families. Though these complaints are explained by the Duke as "phenomena of suggestion" to the Commissioners, part at least seemed well founded on fact. Instead of £1251 18s. according to his own estimate, his Grace, according to that of the Commission, is now entitled to but £922 10s. from the island of Tiree.
We had not time to land, but steaming past its miserable shores, it seemed dreary enough. St. Columba showed what he thought of it when he sent penitents there to test their sincerity. The island of Coll, to which Dr. Johnson and Boswell were carried in a storm, was as flat and stupid and dreary. We had come as far as Coll, partly because of the Doctor's visit. But from this time until we left the Hebrides we were so much taken up with what we saw as scarce to give him another thought. For a while we went many miles astray from his route.
CASTLE BAY, FROM BARRA.
When you steam from Tiree and Coll, a broad stretch of the Atlantic lies between you and the Long Island. If I had my choice, I would rather cross the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe, and that is saying the worst that can be said. The sunshine for the day came to an end. It was cruelly cold. The sportsmen fell prone upon the deck, and the intervals between their now languid shots were long. The man of authority shut himself up in his state-room, the best on the steamer. The card-players sat sad and silent. We, for our part, could only think of our folly in coming, and wonder if we too must be sick. Surely walking could not be greater misery than this. Though in these seas you are never quite out of sight of land, and never clear of the big and little rocks cropping up all around you, it was not until late in the afternoon that we came again close to large islands. They were wild and desolate, with hardly a house and but few cattle and sheep on their rocky shores. One or two boats, with brown sails raised, were jumping and pitching over the waves.
The gray wretchedness of the afternoon was a fit prelude to Barra. When we came to Castle Bay, rain was falling upon its waters, on the battlemented castle perched upon a rocky, sea-weed-covered islet, and on the town, set against a background of high bare hills. But the steamer stopped, and we went ashore to look about us. A few ugly new houses, shops with plate-glass windows, often cited as proofs of the island's prosperity, and then the real Barra: a group of black cottages—compared to which those of Mull were mansions, those of Kilchrennan palaces—running up and down the rocky hill-side. Only by a polite figure of speech can the stone pile in which the Hebridean crofter makes his home be called a cottage. It is, as it was described many years ago, but "a heavy thatched roof thrown over a few rudely put together stones." The long low walls are built of loose stones blackened by constant rain. The thatched roof, almost as black, is held in place without by a net-work of ropes, within by rafters of drift-wood. The crofter has no wood save that which the sea yields, and yet in some districts he must pay for picking up the beams and spars washed up on his wild shores, just as he must for the grass and heather he cuts from the wilder moorland when he makes his roof. Not until you come close to the rough stone heap can you see that it is a house, with an opening for door-way, one tiny hole for window. From a distance there is but its smoke to distinguish it from the rocks strewn around it.
At Castle Bay, where many of these "scenes of misery," as Pennant called them one hundred years ago, were grouped together, there was not even the pretence of a street, but just the rock, rough, ragged, and broken, as God made it. The people who live here are almost all fishermen, and, as if in token of their calling, they have fashioned the thatch of their roofs into the shape of boats; one cottage, indeed, is topped with a genuine boat. There were a few chimneys, but smoke came pouring from the doors, from holes in the thatch and walls. Many of the roofs bore a luxuriant growth of grass, with here and there a clump of daisies or of the yellow flowers which give color to Highland roads. But this was all the green we saw on their hill-side of rock and mud.
Through open door-ways we had glimpses of dark, gloomy interiors, dense with smoke. We did not cross a threshold, however; to seek admittance seemed not unlike making a show of the people's misery. The women and girls who passed in and out, and stood to stare at us, looked strong and healthy. Theirs is a life which must either kill or harden. Many were handsome, with strangely foreign, gypsy-like faces, and so were the bonneted men at work on the pier. It may be that there is truth in the story which gives a touch of Spanish blood to the people of the Outer Hebrides. If the ships of the Armada went down with all their treasure, it is said that their crews survived, and lived and took unto themselves wives in the islands, from which chance of deliverance was small. We heard only Gaelic spoken while we were at Castle Bay. The people of Great Britain need not go abroad in search of foreign parts; but an Englishman who only wants to see the misery and wrongs of nations foreign in name as well as in reality, would find little pleasure in Barra.
When we left the steamer the four sportsmen were getting off with their baggage, of which there was no small quantity. When we returned, hours later, they were getting in again. The one hotel in Barra was full. For consolation, I suppose, they shut themselves up in their state-room, and changed their trousers for the third time that day.
Their return brought to an end our bargaining for their state-room. The night in the ladies' cabin was one long nightmare. The steamer pitched and tossed as if she were still crossing the open Atlantic. At the many stopping-places there was a great noise of loading and unloading. At midnight a mother, with her two babies and nurse, came to fill the unoccupied berths.
TOWN OF BARRA.
J——, in the saloon, fared little better. But the advantage of the restless night was that it sent us up on deck in time to see the eastern hills grow purple against the golden light of coming day. As in the evening, there was still land on either side. All the morning we went in and out of lochs and bays, and through sounds, and between islands. Indeed, I know of no better description of the Outer Hebrides than the quotation given in the guide-book: "The sea here is all islands and the land all lakes." And the farther north we went, the drearier seemed this land—a fitting scene for the tragedy enacted on it, which, though now many years old, is ever young in the memory of the people; for it was here in Uist that, in 1851, men and women were hunted like beasts, tracked by dogs to the caves and wilds where they lay in hiding, bound hand and foot, and cast upon ships waiting to carry them against their will across the Atlantic. We might have thought that no life had been left upon the islands but for an occasional wire fence, a sprinkling of sheep on the greener hill-sides, and lonely cottages, with thin clouds of blue peat-smoke hovering over them to show that they were not mere rocks. Once, stretching across the wilderness we saw telegraph poles following the coast-line. It is wise to let them make the best showing possible. Some of the islands are cut off telegraphically from the rest of the world.
We stopped often. At many of the landings not a house was to be seen. As a rule, there was no pier. The steamer would give her shrill whistle, and as it was re-echoed from the dreary hills huge black boats came sailing out to meet us. Instead of boats waiting for the steamer, as in the Mississippi, here she waited for them. And when they had dropped their sails, and rounded her bows and brought up alongside her lower deck, there tumbled into them men and women, and loaves, and old newspapers, and ham bones, and bits of meat, for in the islands there are always people on the verge of starvation.
At Loch Maddy, in North Uist, the brave warriors left us, and other sportsmen in ulsters and knickerbockers, and with many fishing-rods, came to take their place. On shore stood a man in plain, unassuming kilt, in which he looked at home. We liked to fancy him a laird of Uist in ancestral dress, and not like the youth at Oban, a mere masquerader. We asked the purser who he was.
"Oh, that is Mr. O'Brien, of Liverpool," was his answer.
Everybody had come up on deck, for the day was comparatively fine. It kept clearing and clouding, the sun now shining on the far hills and the rain pouring upon us; but again the showers were swept landward, and we were in sunshine. As we neared