The gentry of the island, lairds, “tacksmen,” i.e. the higher class of tenants, and ministers, lived with more or less show of comfort in decent houses of two storeys, where, indeed, the parlours had often to do double duty as bedrooms, and the floors were not always clean or dry. The gentlemen, Johnson asserts, were inclined to the Episcopal Church; but could not afford any services beyond those of the parish ministers, who might have to preach in a room, at intervals of two or three weeks, beside the ruined chapels “which now stand faithful witnesses of the triumph of the Reformation.” Of these pastors were “found several with whom I could not converse, without wishing, as my respect increased, that they had not been Presbyterians.” He rather exaggerates in giving them the credit of having exterminated the popular superstitions, that would still take a good deal of extermination. He tells the story of Maclean caning the people of Rum away from mass, a high-handed conversion that in the neighbouring Catholic islands earned for Protestantism the nickname “religion of the yellow stick.” He shows how schools were at work for enlightenment, where a century would yet pass before the three R’s came within reach of every bare-trotting Gael. In Skye he heard of two grammar schools, at which boys boarded for three or four pounds a year, but only during the summer months, “for in winter provision cannot be made for any considerable number in one place.”
Even in the better-class houses wheaten bread was exceptional, oaten and barley cakes being the staff of life, with meat, game, fish, cheese, and preparations of milk. The cottars’ fare was chiefly some kind of brose. Their poor crops went largely in making whisky, like that “Talisker,” now renowned, which is said to owe its excellence to the water coming over some dozens of falls; but an English distillery has made in vain the expensive experiment of importing this charmed water. Only in Iona did Johnson hear of beer being brewed. Though every man took his “morning” as a matter of course, he did not see “much intemperance,” convivial gentlemen being perhaps a little shy before the philosopher, who tasted whisky only once out of curiosity (“Let me know what it is that makes a Scotchman happy!”); but he cared not to inquire as to the process of distilling, “nor do I wish to improve the art of making poison pleasant.” He certainly saw one “drunken dog” in the person of Boswell, who on a certain occasion sat up over a punch-bowl till 5 A.M., to be satirically rebuked by his monitor: “It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Boswell took special care to have this teetotaler provided with water at dinner, who was also well supplied with his beloved tea, and with the honey and preserves he admired on a northern breakfast table, “polluted as it was with slices of strong cheese.” The main deficiency was in fruit and vegetables, chiefly represented by barley broth. Punch, made for dinner and supper, which etymologically should have five ingredients, here wanted one, for Sydney Smith was never so far from a lemon. “Under such skies can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation,” indeed, and “few vows are made to Flora in the Hebrides.” Some of the lairds were trying to cultivate orchards about their houses. Others were zealously introducing turnips and potatoes, that have made such a difference to the Highlands but for years were banned by the stubborn conservatism of their people, as in other parts of Europe. What late hay they gathered “by most English farmers would be thrown away.”
Their stock consisted chiefly of the small cattle, in which a Highland maiden’s dowry would formerly be paid, like the price of a Kaffir bride. They had also ponies, an inferior breed of sheep, many goats, with fowls and half-wild geese. The Highland prejudice against pigs was still so strong that Johnson saw only one in the Hebrides;[4] and a like scunner, older than their knowledge of the Bible, kept the people from eating hares, eels, and scaleless fish such as turbot. Hares and rabbits had no chance against the big foxes, on whose head was set a guinea blood-money. Rats and mice were strangers to Skye, but the Hanover rat now began to invade some of the islands. The place of these vermin was taken by weasels, which infested even the houses.
[4]It is a question whether the Celtic aversion to pork had not its origin in some such reverence as the cow bears among the Hindoos. The Gaelic for pig, which to Saxon ears sounds so fitting, Muck, has honour in place-names, as that of the great Ben Muich Dhu himself, not to speak of the “Boar” of Badenoch, the “Sow” of Athole, and frequent names of lochs and islands. In older days the Highlanders appear to have abstained from eating all fish; so at least some antiquaries assert.
In this land of “little sun and no shade,” so deeply fretted by inlets that no part of it lies more than a few miles from the sea, where “every step is on rock or mire,” Johnson missed villages and enclosures. “The traveller,” he laments to Mrs. Thrale, “wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain.” These “its” were often half starved, so could not but excite a mixture of contempt and pity in the well-fed English visitor. Pennant, with his practical eye, speaks of the people as torpid from idleness, only bestirring themselves at the pinch of famine; but he does not want sympathy for them in the almost chronic famines due to improvidence under a miserable climate, where hundreds “annually drag through the season a wretched life; and numbers unknown, in all parts of the western isles, fall beneath the pressure, some of hunger and some of the putrid fever, the epidemic of the coasts, originating from unwholesome food.”
Leaving the comparatively green promontory of Sleat, Johnson’s party rode over moors and bogs to Corriechatachin, near Broadford, where bad weather kept them a couple of days till Macleod of Raasay sent his “carriage” for them, and as conductor a gentleman of the clan who had done the same service to Prince Charlie in his wanderings. The carriage turned out to be an open boat, in which four half-naked men, chorusing Gaelic songs, rowed them through the Sound of Scalpa, and across a rough open sea to the island of Raasay, Dr. Johnson sitting high on the stern “like a magnificent Triton.” In the new mansion-house, to which the Laird had removed from his tumbledown castle, they found a whole troop of Macleods, who every night danced and sang in honour of their guests; but where they all slept was not so evident, some forty persons in eleven rooms. Among the rest was the Macleod of Dunvegan, a young man fresh from Oxford, who invited the strangers to his castle, for which they set out, not without scruple, on a fine Sunday. Landed at the harbour of Portree, then not even a village, where an emigrant ship was lying as hint of new times for the Highlands, they went round by Kingsburgh, that Johnson might have the satisfaction of making Flora Macdonald’s acquaintance and of occupying the very bed in which the Wanderer had slept; but the royal sheets had been devoted as shroud for the hostess. “These are not Whigs.”
So little had they prospered on princely gratitude that Flora and her husband were on the point of emigrating to America, from which she eventually returned to be buried at Kilmuir in a grave left for our time to honour. From the heroine’s own mouth, with ekings-out of other information, Boswell compiled an account of Charles Edward’s escape, which could now be safely published: even when she had been brought a prisoner to London, the authorities seemed not very eager to convict a fair traitor whose case excited much sympathy; and perhaps the prince owed not more to her courage than to other half-loyal Macs who, in command of the local militia, winked hard at the tricks of their kinsfolk, and did not very keenly play the bloodhound upon the fugitive’s doublings. Macdonalds, Macleods, and Mackinnons all were willing to help him away, though not many of them had turned out to take risks in his rash enterprise; and the poorest cottar despised that price set on his head, while one of the men who would not earn £30,000 by betraying him came afterwards to be hanged for stealing a cow. The most zealous agents of the Government in this matter seem to have been Presbyterian ministers, Lord Macaulay’s grandfather for one: this might be quoted as a case of ascending heredity.
GLEN SLIGACHAN, SKYE
Dunvegan, to Boswell’s delight, was a real old castle, romantically placed on a rock, and his companion rejoiced to find that its châtelaine, having lived in London, “knew all the arts of southern elegance and all the modes of English economy.” Pennant gives the prosaic detail that there was a post-office here, in something like a village, whence a packet sailed once a fortnight for the Long Island. “We came in at the wrong end of the island!” Johnson exclaimed, in no hurry to leave such good quarters. The old gentleman was suffering from a cold, having “very strangely slept without a nightcap,” but one of the ladies of this hospitable family made him a large flannel one. As to that “strange” habit of sleeping bare-headed but for a handkerchief, Boswell very ingenuously owns that if his oracle had always worn a nightcap, and found the Highlanders not doing so, “he would have wondered at their barbarity.” We may remember how in 1746 it was one of the royal fugitive’s hardships to part with his wig. Now the well-nightcapped Doctor settled down in clover, dropping pearls of gruff wisdom eagerly picked up by Boswell, who for his part chuckled to be the keeper of such a treasure, comparing himself to “a dog who has got hold of a large piece of meat, and runs away with it to a corner, where he may devour it in peace.” But if he had no longer to share Johnson’s talk with the members of the Club, he had a rival satellite in the Rev. Donald Macqueen, minister of Snizort, who “adhered to” them on most of their journeys in Skye, and so well pleased the great man as only now and then to get a taste of his rough tongue, while his book duly compliments this gentleman on account “of our intelligence facilitated and our conversation enlarged.”