GLIMPSES OF THE SCOT ABROAD.
A few years ago, I was what is called a ‘globe-trotter,’ by which title, as the reader knows, is meant that distinctively modern personage—the world-tourist. He is the creation of the steamboat and the rail, and of all the Ariel-like capabilities due to recent discoveries and improvements in locomotion by land and sea. The term globe-trotter is suggestive. One conjures up a traveller, knapsack on back, poking his nose into the Himalayas, sauntering across Sahara, brushing past the Pyramids, leaving his card at Calcutta, scampering over the American prairie, lunching at Rome, and dropping in to see the Seven Churches of Asia. The voyager of to-day can buttonhole Old Father Time, and be on familiar terms with his primal relative Space. It was thus that in the course of two or three years I was fortunate enough to visit most of the embryo kingdoms which make up our colonial empire, as well as Britain’s great dependency in the East. As need scarcely be said, I boasted a note-book, for what traveller of this era is without one, wherewith on his return to publish Passages, Reminiscences, Fly-leaves, or Jottings of his unique wanderings? From the memoranda made during this tour round the world, I have compiled several incidents connected with the Scot abroad. These pretend to be nothing more than ripples on the current of colonial life, giving slight hints as to moods and bearing of the Scot abroad, in the varying scenes of his exile.
It is a truism to say that Scotsmen are to be found in every corner of the habitable globe. As I once heard a Melbourne Englishman remark: ‘If there were no Scotchmen, what would the world do for bank-managers?’ They have been noted as enterprising emigrants, and, in a large number of cases, successful colonists. I met with few instances of Scotchmen complaining in respect of their material welfare. One man in Queensland had a somewhat unique grievance, which, however, he set forth with a twinkle in the eye: ‘There’s the government spendin’ pounds upon pounds in bringin’ oot folk to this country, while here’s me wi’ fifteen bairns, maistly a’ born here, an’ I’ve never got a penny for ony o’ them!’
Otago is perhaps the most Scottish of any portion of the colonial empire, though Ontario runs it very close. Dunedin is almost undiluted in its Scottish nationality, and is a city of considerable stir. Sabbatarian questions, as well as the question of instrumental music in the church, are warmly discussed in Otago. At a certain gathering of Presbyterian clergymen, one of them urged that organs should be introduced in order to draw more young people to the church; upon which an old minister remarked that this was acting on the principle of ‘O whistle, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad!’ The Scot abroad has a great love for the institutions of his native country, and endeavours to transplant as many of them as circumstances will allow. Even the winter weather of Scotland induces kindly recollections in the breasts of old settlers. I remember, after a phenomenal fall of snow in Dunedin, the like of which had not been seen for twenty years, an elder of the kirk exclaiming, as he rubbed his hands: ‘Sic glorious snaw-ba’ fechts we had—it mindit me o’ langsyne! Man, I was sorry when the thaw cam’ on.’ Caledonian Societies flourish all over New Zealand as much as does the thistle itself. On the Thames gold-field, in the province of Auckland, there was a corps of Highland Volunteers. Whenever they marched through the town, they were invariably followed by numbers of Maories, who tied blankets round their waists, like kilts, and no doubt imagined themselves sufficiently Celtic.
The national dishes are much in vogue in New Zealand. An English lady in Wellington, the capital of that colony, on one occasion detailed how she had tried to make a haggis in order to please her husband, who hailed from north of the Tweed. With the help of a cookery-book, the numerous ingredients were collected and prepared, and at last inserted in a big pot. Alas! the haggis would not sink, despite renewed efforts. The lady, in despair, called in an experienced neighbour, who pierced the haggis with a fork, and successfully ‘scuttled’ it. I am sorry to add that after all the wife’s trouble and anxiety, the dish proved a total failure. It is to be hoped that her husband was not so difficult to please as the well-to-do tradesman in Auckland, who grumbled sorely as to New Zealand ‘not being fit for a Scotsman to live in.’ ‘How’s that?’ ‘Weel, the fact is I—I—canna get my parritch made to please me!’ Talking of porridge, the dish was a favourite in the Christchurch Hotel, province of Canterbury, where it was cooked by a Frenchman who now and again actually spoke broken Scotch with a Parisian accent; while at Wanganui, in the North Island, the ‘parritch’ was prepared by a Chinese cook.
To say that Scotsmen abroad are still fond of their national music is simply to say that they do not cease to be Scotsmen. If anything, the fondness becomes intensified. I once heard an enthusiast in South Africa observe: ‘My Ain Fireside—Ye Banks and Braes—The Land o’ the Leal—eh! a body could be fit to gang to heaven hearing thae sangs sung!’ At a mission-school connected with the Scotch Church in Cape Town I once listened to Weel may the Boatie row, sung as a duet by a Dutch girl and a Malay, a result attained by the enthusiasm of the Scottish schoolmaster. It seemed to me as incongruous as hearing the Old Hundred in the ‘Scots Kirk’ of Calcutta, unwittingly accompanied by the tom-toms of a Hindu festival transpiring in the street. Now that I have taken the reader so far as India, let me note also that in the Church of Scotland College at Calcutta I saw an advanced class of Bengali youths reading Scott’s Lady of the Lake and making marginal notes. Returning to Australia, a pleasant memory is that of an afternoon spent in a school at Sandhurst, the aforetime ‘Bendigo.’ Here, after the ordinary class-duties had been performed, the scholars were initiated into the mysteries of Highland reels and strathspeys, under the tutorship of an Aberdonian dame, the Aberdonian schoolmaster accompanying on the fiddle. I recollect, too, how an Irish grocer in Adelaide, South Australia, was moved to stand outside his door in the bright moonlight evenings and play Monymusk on a tin whistle. A vision of Canada now rises before me, with its host of local bards, each with his wallet of poems on his back, trudging from village to village—the troubadours of the backwoods. Their warblings were not of the snow-laden forest, the subdued glory of the Indian summer, the autumn-gilded maple, or the swift, miraculous dawn of the Columbian spring. Their strains were those of exile; strains of Scotia, of ‘hame,’ of rippling burnies, of the purple heather, of the thousand-and-one historic and sympathetic memories of the dear old land. But hark! what sounds do we hear echoing from a Sabbath school in Sacramento, California? Scottish tunes, but linked to religious words, the children singing a hymn of the church militant to the melody of Scots wha hae; while Ye Banks and Braes served as the tender medium for stanzas of a more devotional character.
The farmer is a notable figure in one’s Canadian remembrances, the agricultural class comprising about half the population. In Ontario you will find many old Scotch settlers, and much could be written upon their present and past experiences. The times are considerably altered from the days when the rough pioneering work had to be done. I once met two aged farmers, one of whom had seen eighty-three winters, who had emigrated to Canada together about forty years ago, and might have been taken for typical old settlers. In telling their primitive toils and privations, their weather-beaten faces were lit up with an animation that was almost joyous in its character. One related, as if it were some rare humour, that his first log-hut in the backwoods was at many places open to the heavens, and that frequently he had to dust the snow off his blankets before he went to bed. The wintry theme suggests the story of a Scottish Canadian who, on a voyage to the mother-country, was one day found sleeping on deck, when the captain roused him with a natural caution against sunstroke. ‘Sunstroke!’ scornfully replied the awakened one. ‘It wad tak’ a’ the sun atween here an’ Greenock to thaw the Canada frost oot o’ my head.’
In Salt Lake City there are not a few Scottish Mormons. I chanced to have a brief conversation there with a middle-aged Scotchwoman, who was a follower of Brigham Young, and who did not hesitate to magnify the virtues of polygamy. It turned out, however, that her zeal was largely of a theoretical nature, as the good lady did not seem to believe in the system so far as it might entail any discomfort upon herself. At Omaha I was acquainted with a Highlander who in the first days of Mormonism became converted to polygamy, but who ultimately abjured the faith. Many a time and oft, in Celtic daring, had he stood on the banks of the Missouri River, lifting up his voice in the wilderness like the Baptist of old, denouncing Mormonism to the bands of converts as they passed over the stream to the ostensible Land of Canaan. His life was in daily peril, but he escaped scathless from his self-imposed mission. In San Francisco I saw Elder Stenhouse, who had been until lately a chief among the Utah Saints. He and his wife, both Scotch people, had dedicated themselves honestly to the new faith, but finding out its hollowness, they shook off the dust of the desert—there is plenty of it—from their shoes, and took farewell of Salt Lake.
In travelling about from place to place you make acquaintance with a most interesting type of character—that of the veteran Scotchman. In Christchurch, New Zealand, I met a Waterloo veteran, eighty-four years of age, yet with erect, military carriage. With vivacious garrulity he told that he was born in Fife; that he had lodged at the house of Mrs Grant of Laggan; that he knew ‘Jamie Hogg’ and Nathaniel Gow; that he had been all through the Peninsular War, had fought at Waterloo, and had been on half-pay since 1817. A companion-figure was that of the venerable Highlander of King William’s Town, Cape Colony—a genial-hearted man, of stern brow and with war-worn features—whose talk was a strange blending of pleasant Scottish reminiscence and weird stories of Kaffir campaigns in which he had taken part. Again, while sailing up the Suez Canal, on the voyage home from India, one of my fellow-passengers was an old Scotsman who had fought at Waterloo, and was then engaged making a tour of the world. As he said, with pleasant pathos: ‘I want to see all that’s to be seen before I’m happit up in the mools’—a phrase that can only be inadequately rendered in English as ‘lying snug beneath the sod.’ He left the steamer at Port Saïd, as he was bound on an excursion to the Holy Land, and as the quarter-master offered to carry his portmanteau, the old fellow elbowed him aside, exclaiming: ‘Pooh, pooh; I’m a young man yet!’ Last and not least notable of this class was an old and well-preserved gentleman I met at Wellington, New Zealand. He was an Edinburgh man, and had been educated at the university there. He had been acquainted with friends of Burns, had known the poet’s ‘Chloris’ and ‘Clarinda,’ and in speaking of the Potterrow always seemed to regard it as still a fashionable street. To gossip with him was like shaking hands with the past.
In going round the world, one is sure to find relatives and souvenirs of famous men and women. At Hobart-Town, Tasmania, there resided, when I visited the town, the granddaughter of Neil Gow and daughter of Nathaniel Gow, the composer of Caller Herrin’. In the Waikato district of the North Island of New Zealand, about a hundred miles from the city of Auckland, lives, I still trust, old Mrs Nicol, mother of the late Robert Nicol, the celebrated Perthshire poet. During a stormy passage in a small steamer on the New Zealand coast, I had some interesting chats with an Irish gentleman who had met and talked with Sir Walter Scott in a chapel in Italy, during the closing scenes of that busy life. I may add also that at Listowel, in Ontario, I was privileged to meet the brother of Dr Livingstone, and was much struck with the facial resemblance between him and the great traveller. In the University of Dunedin the visitor can see, in a gilt frame, a lock of Burns’s hair, labelled ‘A genuine relic of the Poet, and modicum of a larger lock owned by Jean Armour.’ A certain country hotel in Tasmania lives in my memory from its having distributed through its rooms an extraordinary number of pictures of John Knox, the religious character of the house being increased by the fact that one of the apartments was used as the ‘study’ of the Presbyterian clergyman of the village. The name of John Knox, by association, recalls to my mind the incident of the eccentric Scot of Kaffraria, South Africa, who had a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots hung in his bedroom, and who, every morning on rising, stretched his hands towards it, crying: ‘O my poor murdered queen!’
The visitor fresh from home is certain of meeting with a kind welcome from his countrymen abroad. The welcome need not be on personal grounds. An Edinburgh man in Canada once shook my hand warmly, saying: ‘I dinna ken ye; I never met ye before; but I just want to see a man that’s seen Arthur Seat since I saw it.’ The love of home sometimes reaches an intense pitch, as in the case of the Scotsman at Fort Beaufort, in Cape Colony, who ejaculated: ‘I’d rather gang hame and be hanged, than dee here a natural death!’ Again, an old man in New Zealand remarked: ‘I doot I’ll no get hame to Scotland again; but if onybody said: “Ye shall not go,” I’d be off the morn’s mornin’!’ With which forcible yet touching deliverance let these glimpses conclude.
I am afraid that during our brief bird’s-eye view of colonial life, the reader has been dragged hither and thither in a somewhat erratic course. The irregularity, however, has been more apparent than real. Whether amid Canadian snows, New Zealand mountains, Australian bush, or South African veldt, you meet with the same shrewd, persevering Scotsman, steadily moving in his colonial orbit, and moving none the less regularly because of the tender gravitation of his heart towards the central sphere of patriotic affection—dear though distant Scotland.