Fishing and fowling, as well as antiquarian puzzles, have long been attractions to these rocks and waters, that begin to be more visited for their own sake, now that our generation develops a taste in out-of-the-way aspects of nature. It was a lucky hit for the archipelago when in 1814 Walter Scott accompanied the Northern Lights Commissioners on their jovial tour of office, at Stromness picking up from a toothless Norna that story of the pirate Gow which he so well dressed up in the contents of his note-book. One admires his dexterity in conducting the plot so as to bring in the lions of a trip, his companions on which could have no doubt of the authorship. Gow was a real character, whose name, to be translated Smith, pairs with Paul Jones, another eighteenth-century corsair, of whom it is told that he was scared away from Lerwick by the red flannel petticoats of women marching to market, as the French invaders of Pembrokeshire were by red-cloaked Welshwomen, mistaken for an army of soldiers. It seems strange to remember how Scott’s fellow-tourists were kept on the alert by the fear of American privateers.
From the Orkneys Byron also took an authentic hero for his Island in George Stewart, midshipman of the Bounty, “tempest-born in body and in mind,” whose Otaheitean child was living here in the middle of last century. Then Orkney has poets of her own, such as John Malcolm, the soldier; David Vedder, the sailor; and Mr. T. S. Omond, known as a writer on as in metre, from whom I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Professor Aytoun, whose lyre had such a range of strings, was connected with the islands as their Sheriff, while one of his Christian names hints at kindred with the Shetland Edmonstons distinguished in natural history. Clouston is the name of another “family-pen” here; and that of Moodie, husband and wife, was transplanted to Canadian authorship. Rae the Arctic, and Baikie the African explorer set out from so far north. From Orkney came a whole galaxy of Traill writers. The three Laings, all notable in literature, were of an Orkney family. So was Washington Irving, who indeed narrowly escaped being born on Shapinshay, as our American cousins will be interested to know. J. R. Lowell was of Orkney blood by the spindle side; he could remember his maternal grandmother as dressing in black on Independence Day and lamenting “His Majesty’s unhappy differences with his colonists.” By the way, in Bonnie Scotland, while explaining how, spite of such names as Munroe, Buchanan, Grant, Arthur, McKinley, no born Scotsman has yet been President of the United States, I forgot to mention that President Polk (Pollock) boasted lineal descent from John Knox. It may be added that President Roosevelt is certainly of Scottish stock on one side, even if his paternal line be not connected with some John o’ Groat or Dirk Hatteraick.
In Scott’s day the islands were backward in cultivation, though what with fishing, wrecks, smuggling, and kelp-burning, the people seemed uncommonly well supplied with luxuries. Poverty may have originally prompted that strange superstition as to the danger of saving lives from the sea, which lingered in Cornwall, too, almost up to our own day. The islanders counted on what they could make out of “God-sends” such as helped to furnish Magnus Troil’s house and the pack of Bryce Snailsfoot; and it was a serious loss to them when the beaconing of their stormy waters diminished the harvest of flotsam and jetsam. Scott tells how an Orcadian answered Mr. Stevenson remarking on the bad sails of his boat: “If it had been His will that you hadna built sae many lighthouses hereabout, I would have had new sails last winter.”
The ground was much divided among small proprietors, as it still is to a less degree, and small holdings are common, so that the islands were, quite needlessly as regards the Orkneys, some think, put under the Crofters Commission. The people of the southern group are more thriftily prosperous than in the Hebrides. They had their fit of standing out obstinately against “improvements”; then they suffered from the set-back of the kelp industry, here very profitable for a time, but its failure proved a blessing in disguise as turning their attention to agriculture; and they seem too well off now to trouble about kelp, on which the landlords would still set them working at “orra” times. In the last half-century tenants and “peerie” lairds showed the sense to follow enterprising landlords like Balfour of Shapinshay, so that now many of the farms compare with those on the mainland. There is a flourishing export of cattle, much improved by the introduction of good stock. Along with their ponies and hairy sheep, almost as wild as goats, the islands had a breed of small cows, from whose milk was made their peculiar drink bland, resembling the koumiss of the Tartars. Some quarter of a century ago an effort was made to push this beverage in London, where, however, it seems not to have “caught on.” Then living in Kensington lodgings, I patriotically ordered a case of it, which, as the weather was hot and the liquor “up,” I put under my bed, taking this for the coolest spot at my command, but ignorant that it was over the kitchen fire. I had hardly got into bed when, one by one, the bottles began to explode, till the whole battery had fired itself away. Above me slept no less a fellow-lodger than General Gordon, not yet of Khartoum; and I wondered whether my bombardment might have brought China into his dreams.
The Shetlands, for their part, are grander, wilder, rougher, poorer, colder, wetter, less “improved,” in general, more Norse and primitive. Their industry is rather at sea than on land. Mr. Tudor quotes an apt saying as to the difference between the people: “The Shetlander is a fisherman who has a farm; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat.” Through the fisheries the Shetlanders were long in closer touch with Holland and Scandinavia than with Scotland, which for centuries has been spreading her tentacles over the adjacent Orkneys. A century ago Dutch and Danish coins were more familiar at Lerwick than the head of George III.; and up to a later time, Norwegian weights and measures were used all over the islands. The Orkneys are, or were, well stocked with grouse and snipe; sea-fowl are the game of the Shetlands, not that they lack in the southern group, among which the great auk was killed off three-quarters of a century ago. Straw-plaiting was once a resource of the Orkneys. They are rich in cattle, the Shetlands rather in sheep, where the chief home industry is the hosiery knitting that keeps women’s fingers busy even when their backs are bowed under peat creels. The Shetlands, in short, bear much the same relation to the Orkneys as the Highlands to the Lowlands, though the old name Hialtland seems not so fitting as Sea-land, the former spelling of which is preserved in the Earl of Zetland’s title. Till lately the Shetlands were less visited by strangers; but now a tide of tourist-travel seems to be setting strongly to the northern isles, that offer such a change of air for southrons able to put up with somewhat scrimp accommodation, while hospitable goodwill as yet must take the place of hotel luxury.
The tourist’s easiest goal is Kirkwall, capital of the Mainland, alias Pomona, central mass of the Orkneys. The old grey town, cramped into narrow ways, stands at the head of its “Church Bay,” about the towering Cathedral founded by Jarl Ronald in memory of his uncle, murdered St. Magnus. This is one of the few noble Scottish fanes that came almost unhurt through the Reformation, though mutilated by tempest and by neglect, and only in part still used as a church. It rivals Glasgow as the finest of northern Cathedrals, its special character being a height and narrowness that give imposing effect, and some of the architectural ornaments are of striking beauty, as the east rose-window and the carved doorways in which different colours of stone were well combined. By the will of a late eccentric Sheriff, a considerable sum becomes available for the restoration or decoration of this ancient fabric.
KIRKWALL CATHEDRAL, ORKNEY
Beside the Cathedral stand the ruins of two palaces: the Bishop’s, in which King Haco died, and the later Earl’s, built by Patrick Stewart, tyrant of the Islands, as was his father before him, a left-handed son of James V., set up in life with this misused dominion. Patrick’s oppressions were so scandalous that he came to execution, as did his son Robert Stewart, for rebellion, so, like the Dukedom of Orkney conferred by Mary on Bothwell, who never got the length of admission into Kirkwall, the Stewarts’ Earldom passed away, belying its boastful motto, Sic fuit, est, et erit. These offshoots of royalty seem unlucky in their intromissions with Latin, for one of the charges against them was Earl Robert having described himself as “Filius Jacobi Quinti Rex Scotorum,” a slip in grammar that came to be judged treasonable, as indeed did Wolsey’s good Latinity, “Ego et rex meus.”
The royal castle has disappeared, its site commemorated by the name of an hotel; but Kirkwall has still several quaint and venerable mansions, once inhabited by the island aristocracy, behind which are hidden gardens that in this climate seem more precious than palaces. In short, Kirkwall is quite a place to “delay the tourist,” whose visit will probably not coincide with the New Year football Saturnalia, kept up here as on Shrove Tuesday in some English towns; but he may come in for the dwindled delights of the Lammas Fair, described by Scott in all its glory.