COL.
Over this low-lying island the Atlantic blasts swept in all their fury. On Sunday October 10, Boswell recorded:—“There was this day the most terrible storm of wind and rain that I ever remember. It made such an awful impression on us all, as to produce, for some time, a kind of dismal quietness in the house.”
The rough weather spread far. In London, as the old weather tables tell us, it was “a stormy day with heavy rains and with little intermission night and day.”[667] On the previous Friday Horace Walpole had come home in a tempest from Bushey Park. “I hope,” he wrote, “Jupiter Pluvius has not been so constant at Ampthill. I think he ought to be engraved at the top of every map of England.”[668] Happily in the young Laird of Col our travellers had the kindest of hosts. His house “new-built and neat” still stands; Grissipol, which they visited, is in ruins. It was not till the morning of Thursday, the 14th, that they were able to set sail. With a fair breeze they were soon carried over to Tobermory, or Mary’s Well, a beautiful bay in the Isle of Mull.
“There are (writes Boswell) sometimes sixty or seventy sail here: to-day there were twelve or fourteen vessels. To see such a fleet was the next thing to seeing a town. The vessels were from different places; Clyde, Campbeltown, Newcastle, &c. One was returning to Lancaster from Hamburgh. After having been shut up so long in Col, the sight of such an assemblage of moving habitations, containing such a variety of people engaged in different pursuits, gave me much gaiety of spirit. When we had landed, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Boswell is now all alive. He is like Antæus; he gets new vigour whenever he touches the ground.’”
COL: THE LAIRD’S HOUSE.
No such fleet is, I imagine, ever to be seen there at the present day, for one steamer does the work of many small vessels. The beauty of this little haven has been long celebrated. Sacheverell, who visited it two hundred years ago, thus describes it:—
“To the landward it is surrounded with high mountains covered with woods, pleasantly intermixed with rocks, and three or four cascades of water, which throw themselves from the top of the mountain with a pleasure that is astonishing, all which together make one of the oddest and most charming prospects I ever saw. Italy itself, with all the assistance of art, can hardly afford anything more beautiful and diverting.”[669]