[Corrichatachin to Tobermorie (September 25-October 16).]
RETURN TO CORRICHATACHIN
At Sconser our travellers took boat for Strolimus, on their way to the friendly farmhouse at Corrichatachin, where they had been so hospitably received nearly three weeks earlier. Their horses they sent round a point of land to meet them further down the coast.
“It was seven o’clock,” writes Boswell, “when we got into our boat. We had many showers, and it soon grew pretty dark. Dr. Johnson sat silent and patient. Once he said, as he looked on the black coast of Skye—black, as being composed of rocks seen in the dusk—‘This is very solemn.’ Our boatmen were rude singers, and seemed so like wild Indians, that a very little imagination was necessary to give one an impression of being upon an American river. We landed at Strolimus, from whence we got a guide to walk before us, for two miles, to Corrichatachin. Not being able to procure a horse for our baggage, I took one portmanteau before me, and Joseph another. We had but a single star to light us on our way. It was about eleven when we arrived. We were most hospitably received by the master and mistress, who were just going to bed, but, with unaffected ready kindness, made a good fire, and at twelve o’clock at night had supper on the table.”
SAILING PAST THE ISLE OF RUM.
WEATHER-BOUND AT OSTIG.
Here, as I have already described, they rested that twentieth Sunday after Trinity, when Boswell, recovering from his drinking bout, “by divine interposition, as some would have taken it,” opened his Prayer Book at the Apostles’ injunction against drunkenness contained in the Epistle for that day. Here, too, the Highlanders, drinking their toasts over the punch, won by Johnson’s easy and social manners, “vied with each other in crying out, with a strong Celtic pronunciation, ‘Toctor Shonson, Toctor Shonson, your health!’” The weather was so stormy that it was not till the afternoon of Tuesday, September 28, that they were able to continue their journey. That night they arrived at Ostig, on the north-western side of the promontory of Slate, and found a hospitable reception at the Manse. Here, too, they were kept prisoners by wind and rain. “I am,” writes Johnson, “still confined in Skye. We were unskilful travellers, and imagined that the sea was an open road which we could pass at pleasure; but we have now learned with some pain that we may still wait for a long time the caprices of the equinoctial winds, and sit reading or writing, as I now do, while the tempest is rolling the sea or roaring in the mountains.” Nevertheless, so good was the entertainment which they received that, as Boswell tells us, “the hours slipped along imperceptibly.” They had books, and company, and conversation. In strange contrast to the wildness of the scenery and the roughness of the weather was their talk one day about Shenstone and his Love Pastorals. It was surely not among the stormy Hebrides that the poet of the Leasowes, whose “ambition was rural elegance,” would have expected to be quoted. Yet here it was, in the midst of beating winds and dashing showers, with the storm-tossed sea in view of the windows, that Boswell repeated the pretty stanza:
“She gazed as I slowly withdrew;