At Dunvegan they stayed a week, hearing the traditions of the castle, and seeing its relics, for one that horn of Rorie More, to hold two or three bottles of wine, which every Laird of Macleod must drink at a draught in proof of his manhood; in our degenerate age, it appears, this ceremony has to be performed by help of a false bottom. No doubt they also saw, though neither of them mentions it, another more lordly drinking-cup bearing the date 993, which seems to have been a chalice; also the “fairy flag” of Dunvegan, a faded silk banner from the East, probably a relic of crusading, which may be displayed thrice and thrice only to save the house of Macleod from ruin—as it has done twice, and may do once more. Though the young chief was deep in debt, he let wine flow generously,—there being, indeed, no custom-house in Skye,—“and venison came to the table every day in its various forms.”
Boswell could hardly get his unwieldy companion moved from this Capua; but on September 21 they set out on their way back, travelling from the west coast by Ullinish and Talisker, put up by one Macleod or other as best he could; and it made part of Highland hospitality to convoy the guests on to their next shelter. At Talisker, where their host was a colonel in the Dutch service, they met young Maclean of Coll, who henceforth became their cicerone for the southern isles. This promising laird Johnson compared to Peter the Great. He had apprenticed himself to practical farming in England as a school of improvement for the barren islands, on which he was the first to plant turnips, an innovation pronounced by Highland wise-acres “the idle project of an idle head, heated by English fancies.” His father lived at Aberdeen for education of the family, leaving such full power in the hands of the son that he commonly bore the family title of “Coll,” like the young Lochiel and Glengarry of ’45. To the veriest cit it is hardly needful to explain that a northern laird was known by the name of his property, or a farmer by that of his holding, where indeed certain surnames may be so little distinguishing that in a hive of Campbells, Macleans, or what not, one gets to speak of children as “Johnny Loch so-and-so” or “Jessie Glen this-or-that.”
With young Coll they now travelled back to Sleat, looking out for a chance of leaving Skye, which would not present itself every day in any lull of the equinoctial gales. By this time the townsmen, who had expected to slip from island to island as easily as ordering a postchaise, found it was more a question of going where and when they could. Boswell began to fidget about getting back to Edinburgh in time for the legal session, while Johnson in his whimsical moods now talked gaily of fresh adventures, then again grumbled at not being safe and comfortable on the mainland. At Armadale they were entertained more hospitably by his factor than they had been on landing by the now absent Macdonald chieftain, and the people appeared in no haste to get rid of that “honest man” who had done them the honour of coming so far to lecture them. But the wind suddenly changing, on the morning of Sunday, October 3, they were hurried on board a vessel bound for Mull. Soon a storm came on; both the unseasoned voyagers were sea-sick; Boswell was frightened to his prayers; neither of them had anything to eat; and after being tossed about all day, even the skipper was glad to run before the wind for Coll, where they cast anchor.
Safely landed, young Coll took them over the island to his own house, a new one which was the best they had seen in the Hebrides, but Johnson’s humour was to belittle it as “a tradesman’s box.” Not being occupied by the old laird, it was hardly in a state to entertain distinguished guests, for whose entertainment Coll collected from his kinsfolk such books as Lucas On Happiness, More’s Dialogues, and Gregory’s Geometry, that might pass for light reading beside the pocket volume Johnson had laid in at Inverness—Cocker’s Arithmetic!—Boswell having then equipped himself with Ovid’s Epistles to “solace many a weary hour.” Johnson took interest in the traditions of the family, while his host was forward to show him signs of nascent civilisation, about huts with gardens gathered into a clachan. Coll had a shop and actually a mile of road, not to speak of a school kept in summer by a young man who walked all the way to Aberdeen for the university session. Here the visitors remained imprisoned for a week, then moved down to the harbour to be ready for the sailing of a Campbeltown kelp-ship on which they had engaged passage for Mull. On the morning of the 14th the chance came by a fair breeze, and with Coll in attendance they reached Tobermory at mid-day, just in time to escape the daily gale that kept some dozen ships bound in this harbour.
At Tobermory they found rest in a “tolerable inn,” from which Boswell hints how it was not easy to start his companion, while Johnson admits that the eagerness to see Iona, as bouquet of their tour, was mainly on Boswell’s side. Taking horse, they rode through thick and thin over the northern part of Mull, “a most dolorous country,” where Johnson lost the oak stick which he declared to be a valuable piece of timber in such a wilderness. “Your country consists of two things, stone and water. There is indeed a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.” Such were the complimentary jests by which Boswell reports him earning from the open-mouthed natives so admiring epithets as “a hogshead of sense” and a “dungeon of wit,” where indeed any kind of stranger would be as welcome as a peepshow, and two learned gentlemen from London and Edinburgh made a whole circus.
At night the boat of an Irish vessel obligingly ferried them across to put up with M’Quarrie, “chief of Ulva’s isle,” about to sell his possessions for debt and to enter the army at the age of sixty-two, with forty years of life still before him. A Campbell, of course, was the purchaser. Next day they went on by boat to Inch Kenneth, where in dwindled state lived Sir Allan Maclean, head of another clan whose star paled before the risen sun of the Campbells. On this island Johnson’s heart was cheered by the sight of a cart road, and Boswell’s by a parcel of the Caledonian Mercury, the first newspaper he had seen for many a day. A little later, on the mainland, they found in a Glasgow paper a report that Dr. Johnson was still kept in Skye by bad weather, on which the paragrapher of the period smartly remarked—“Such a philosopher detained on an almost barren island resembles a whale left upon the strand.” Could he have heard Goldsmith’s happy hit at the stylist who “would make little fishes talk like whales”?
After a day’s rest, parting with Coll, they put themselves in charge of his chief, who took them along the coast in an open boat to Iona, till lately his own property, but now sold to the Duke of Argyll. None the less was Maclean welcomed with humble affection by his transferred clansmen, to one of whom, that had offended him by not sending some rum, his bitterest reproach was, “I believe you are a Campbell!” These men belonged to the generation over which their chief had once power of life and death; and to Boswell the culprit protested, “Had he sent his dog for the rum, I would have given it; I would cut my bones for him!” The pilgrims from Fleet Street, who embraced each other on touching this sacred shore, were in too exalted mood to grumble at having to sleep in a barn. In the morning they examined the ruins that stirred Johnson’s famous paragraph—“Far be from me and from my friends such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.” At the time Boswell showed himself the more deeply affected, who left his breakfast to return to the cathedral for solitary meditation. “I hoped that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an exemplary conduct.” Johnson mischievously writes to Mrs. Thrale how at Inch Kenneth his disciple had stolen into the ruins there to pray, but was soon scared out by fear of spectres.
Landed again in Mull, they travelled round its south shore by Loch Buy, and on October 22 were ferried across to Oban. Next day they rode on to Inveraray, in bad weather, which almost for the first time moved Johnson to what our generation finds a becoming sentiment. “The wind was low, the rain was heavy, and the whistling of the blast, the fall of the shower, the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the torrent, made a nobler chorus of the rough music of nature than it had ever been my chance to hear before.” In ten miles they crossed fifty-five streams. He was better pleased to come upon a good road that led them to an inn “not only commodious but magnificent,” at Inveraray, where “the difficulties of peregrination were now at an end.”
The distinguished chiels who had been taking such notes spent nearly two months on a trip done by the live transatlantic tourist in as many days. They had passed through and near some of the scenic wonders of the kingdom, with as little notice as if these had been Primrose Hill or Turnham Green. Wherever they stopped they made a point of civilly visiting what ruins, antiquities, and such like were on show, but it does not appear that they asked for beauty or sublimity, nor did their guides suggest going out of the way for any prospect beyond that of a bed and a dinner. Boswell was the less Cockneyish of the two, who could cry out at sight of an “immense mountain” which Johnson scornfully put in its place as an “immense protuberance”; and we know how he thought one green field as like another as two straws. They did turn aside to see the Falls of Foyers, as to Boswell seems not worth mentioning, while the rough scramble made Johnson wish “that our curiosity might have been gratified with less trouble and danger.”
All travellers of that century, till Gray, were much of the same mind. Pennant has small space to waste on Highland scenery, though he so far comes under the genius loci as to put his very wide-awake view of the people in the form of a fictitious dream. Burt frankly found the mountains ugly, “most disagreeable when the heather is in bloom”—prodigious! On Raasay Boswell was so frisky as to walk over the island and dance at the top of Duncan, but he has not a word to say about the view. For all their interest in Prince Charlie, nobody took the Fleet Street gentlemen to see his cave near Portree; and but for passing by Kingsburgh they left untouched the north-eastern peninsula of Trotternish, tipped by the Macdonald castle of Duntulm and edged by the long line of precipitous faces showing the giant’s teeth of the Storr and such a “nightmare of nature” as the Quiraing. The north-western headland, Vaternish, they skirted to gain the Macleod castle, where Johnson “tasted lotus” at the young chief’s board, but was less concerned about the mighty moor-mounds called “Macleod’s Tables,” and never heard of “Macleod’s Maidens,” those graceful spires rising sheer out of the sea, nor of that dizzy Waterstein cliff that faces the Atlantic near Dunvegan, and is continued by precipitous walls down to Talisker. He could not help hearing Rorie More’s cascade, to which he one day took a toddle between the showers; but neither the bear nor his monkey put himself much about unless to look owlishly at some “Temple of Anaitis,” or some cave recalling that of Virgil’s Sibyl. Boswell just mentions the Coolins, as reminding him of Corsica, but nobody drew their attention to that wild sierra conspicuous from nearly every part of Skye, an eerie chaos of wrinkled, rusted, ruined tops that “resemble the other hills on the earth’s surface as Hindoo deities resemble human beings”; nobody told them of the black lochs and gloomy corries hidden in those storm-breeding recesses; nobody advised them to make the rough tramp up Glen Sligachan or the perilous ascent of Blaaven, or even to look at that highest point whose name titles it Inachievable, as it is not to practised mountaineers of our own time. Two well-to-do gentlemen had not come all the way from London and Edinburgh to distress themselves by going near that “most savage scene of desolation in Britain”—hardly accessible still unless through Loch Scavaig’s brighter anteroom, and then shunned by the Skyemen as goblin-haunted—the naked hollow of Loch Coruisk, whose uncanny solitude a child then in the nursery would bring to fame as a Highland Acheron: