It was the Macleans of Mull who slaughtered their MacIan guests at the wedding feast of their chief’s daughter. On the same shore, Bloody Bay is named from a fierce battle between father and son. On another side of the island is shown the cliff over which a vindictively smarting clansman leaped with the infant son of his chief, who had caused him to be scourged. On Eigg may be visited the cave where the whole population of Macdonalds were suffocated by the Macleods of Skye, in revenge for their having set some Lotharios of the latter clan adrift, bound and starving, in an open boat. Another atrocity of the Macleods turned out less successful, when they sought to burn a shipwrecked Macdonald crew in the barn that offered false hospitality; but the intended victims got warning in time through one of those love intrigues that so often laughed at hereditary feuds. Of different castle dungeons the story is told how a prisoner here was fed on salt beef, then left to agonising thirst, as many another captive has starved to death, gnawing his own flesh in solitary despair. The annals of more than one clan give it as exterminated in a day of slaughter, but for posthumous sons borne by defenceless widows. Adamnan, the ninth abbot after Columba, is credited with a humane law against women being exposed to death in battle; but long after his time innocent children were not spared by Highlander nor by Lowlander in the glut of vengeance. The severance of creed at the Reformation seems to have whetted those bloodthirsty lusts. The more famous massacre of Glencoe is outdone by one of Covenanting times, when hundreds of Macdonald prisoners, Cavalier partisans and “Amalekites,” were in cold blood dashed from the rocks of Cantyre by Presbyterian soldiers of Argyll.
Tradition, be thou mute! Oblivion, throw
Thy veil, in mercy, o’er the records hung
Round strath and mountain, stamped by the ancient tongue
On rock and ruin darkening as we go—
Spots where a word, ghost-like, survives to show
What crimes from hate or desperate love have sprung;
From honour misconceived, or fancied wrong,
What feuds, not quenched, but fed by mutual woe.
