Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

THE QUARANTINE.

In the spring of 1831 the disease entered the Russian dominions, and in a few brief months, after devastating the inland provinces, began to ravage the shores of the Baltic. The harbours, as is usual in the summer season, were crowded with vessels from every port of Britain: and the infection spread among the seamen. To guard against its introduction into this country, a rigid system of quarantine was established by the Government; and the Bay of Cromarty was one of the places appointed for the reception of vessels until their term of restriction should have expired. The whole eastern coast of Britain could not have afforded a better station; as, from the security and great extent of the bay, entire fleets can lie in it safe from every tempest, and at a distance of more than two miles from any shore.

On a calm and beautiful evening in the month of July 1831, a little fleet of square-rigged vessels were espied in the offing, slowly advancing towards the bay. They were borne onwards by the tide, which, when flowing, rushes with much impetuosity through the narrow opening, and, as they passed under the northern Sutor, there was seen from the shore, relieved by the dark cliffs which frowned over them, a pale yellow flag dropping from the mast-head of each. As they advanced farther on, the tide began to recede. The foremost was towed by her boats to the common anchoring-ground; and the burden of a Danish song, in which all the rowers joined, was heard echoing over the waves with a cadence so melancholy, that, associating in the minds of the town’s-people with ideas of death and disease, it seemed a coronach of lamentation poured out over the dead and the expiring. The other vessels threw out their anchors opposite the town;—groups of people, their countenances shaded by anxiety, sauntered along the beach; and children ran about, shouting at the full pitch of their voices that the ships of the plague had got up as far as the ferry. As the evening darkened, little glimmering lights, like stars of the third magnitude, twinkled on the mast-heads from whence the yellow flags had lately depended; and never did astrologer experience greater dismay when gazing at the two comets, the fiery and the pale, which preceded those years of pestilence and conflagration that wasted the capital of England, than did some of the people of Cromarty when gazing at these lights.

Day after day vessels from the Baltic came sailing up the bay, and the fears of the people, exposed to so continual a friction, began to wear out. The first terror, however, had been communicated to the nearer parishes, and from them to the more remote; and so on it went, escorted by a train of vagabond stories, that, like felons flying from justice, assumed new aspects at every stage. The whole country talked of nothing but Cholera and the Quarantine port. Such of the shopkeepers of Cromarty as were most in the good graces of the countrywomen who came to town laden with the produce of the dairy and hen-cot, and return with their little parcels of the luxuries of the grocer, experienced a marked falling away in their trade. Occasionally, however, a few of the more courageous housewives might be seen creeping warily along our streets; but, in coming in by the road which passes along the edge of the bay, they invariably struck up the hill if the wind blew from off the quarantine vessels, and, winding by a circuitous route among the fields and cottages, entered the town on the opposite side. A lad who ran errands to a neighbouring burgh, found that few of the inhabitants were so desperately devoted to business as to incur the risk of receiving the messages he brought them; and, from the inconvenient distance at which he was held by even the less cautious, he entertained serious thoughts of providing himself with a speaking-trumpet. Our poor fishermen, too, fared but badly in the little villages of the Firth where they went to sell their fish. It was asserted on the very best authority, by the villagers, that dead bodies were flung out every day over the sides of the quarantine vessels, and might be seen, bloated by the water and tanned yellow by disease, drifting along the surface of the bay. Who could eat fish in such circumstances? There was one person, indeed, who remarked to them, that he might perhaps venture on eating a haddock or whiting; but no man in his senses, he said, would venture on eating a cod. He himself had once found a bunch of furze in the stomach of a fish of this species, and what might not that throat contrive to swallow that had swallowed a bunch of furze? The very fishermen themselves added to the general terror by their wild stories. They were rowing homewards one morning, they said, in the grey uncertain light which precedes sunrise, along the rough edge of the northern Sutor, when, after doubling one of the rocky promontories which jut into the sea from beneath the crags of the hill, they saw a gigantic figure, wholly attired in white, winding slowly along the beach. It was much taller than any man, or as Cowley would perhaps have described it, than the shadow of any man in the evening; and at intervals, after gliding round the base of some inaccessible cliff, it would remain stationary for a few seconds, as if gazing wistfully upon the sea. No one who believed this apparition to be other than a wreath of vapour, entertained at the time the slightest doubt of its portending the visitation of some terrible pestilence, which was to desolate the country.

About eighty or a hundred years ago the port of Cromarty was occupied, as in 1831, by a fleet performing quarantine. Of course none of the town’s-people recollected the circumstance; but a whole host of traditions connected with it, which had been imparted to them by their fathers, and had lain asleep in the recesses of some of their memories for a full half century, were awakened at this time, and sent wandering over the town, like so many ghosts. Some one had heard it told that a crew of Cromarty fishermen had, either in ignorance or contempt of the quarantine laws, boarded one of the vessels on this occasion; and that aboard they were compelled to remain for six tedious weeks, exposed to the double, but very unequally appreciated hardship of getting a great deal to drink and very little to eat. Another vessel had, it was said, entered the bay deeply laden; but every morning, for the time she remained there, she was seen to sit lighter on the water, and when she quitted it on her return to Flushing, she had scarcely ballast enough aboard to render the voyage practicable. Gin and tobacco were rife in Cromarty for twelve months thereafter. A third vessel carried with her into the bay the disease to guard against which the quarantine had been established; and opposite the place where the fleet lately lay, there are a few little mounds on a patch of level sward, still known to children of the town as the Dutchmen’s graves. About fifty years ago, when the present harbour of Cromarty was in building, a poor half-witted man, one of the labourers employed in quarrying stone, was told one day by some of his companions, that a considerable sum of money had been deposited in this place with the bodies. In the evening he stayed on some pretext in the quarry until the other workmen had gone home, and then repairing to the graves, with his shovel and pickaxe he laid one of them open; but, instead of the expected treasure, he found only human bones and wasted fragments of woollen cloth. Next morning he was seized by a putrid fever, and died a few days after. Miss Seward tells a similar story in one of her letters; but in the case of the Cromarty labourer no person suffered from his imprudence except himself; whereas, in the one narrated by Miss Seward, a malignant disease was introduced into a village near which the graves were opened, which swept away seventy of the inhabitants.

THE CHOLERA.

In a central part of the churchyard of Nigg there is a rude undressed stone, near which the sexton never ventures to open a grave. A wild apocryphal tradition connects the erection of this stone with the times of the quarantine fleet. The plague, as the story goes, was brought to the place by one of the vessels, and was slowly flying along the ground, disengaged from every vehicle of infection, in the shape of a little yellow cloud. The whole country was alarmed, and groups of people were to be seen on every eminence, watching with anxious horror the progress of the little cloud. They were relieved, however, from their fears and the plague by an ingenious man of Nigg, who, having provided himself with an immense bag of linen, fashioned somewhat in the manner of a fowler’s net, cautiously approached the yellow cloud, and, with a skill which could have owed nothing to previous practice, succeeded in enclosing the whole of it in the bag. He then secured it by wrapping it up carefully, fold after fold, and fastening it down with pin after pin; and as the linen was gradually changing, as if under the hands of the dyer, from white to yellow, he consigned it to the churchyard, where it has slept ever since. But to our narrative.

The cholera was at length introduced into Britain, and shortly after into Ireland; not, however, at any of the quarantine ports, but at places where scarcely any precautions had been taken to exclude it, or any danger apprehended; much in the manner that a beleaguered garrison is sometimes surprised at some unnoticed bastion, or untented angle, after the main points of attack have withstood the utmost efforts of the besiegers. It had previously been remarked that the disease traversed the various countries which it visited, at nearly the same pace with the inhabitants. In Persia, where there is little trade, and neither roads nor canals to facilitate intercourse, it was a whole year in passing over a distance of somewhat less than three hundred leagues; while among the more active people of Russia, it performed a journey of seven hundred in less than six months. In Britain it travelled through the interior with the celerity of the mail, and voyaged along the coasts with the speed of the trading vessels; and in a few weeks after its first appearance, it was ravaging the metropolis of England, and the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It was introduced by some south country fishermen into the town of Wick, and a village of Sutherlandshire, in the month of July 1832; and from the latter place in the following August, into the fishing villages of the peninsula of Easter Ross. It visited Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, Urquhart, and Rosemarkie, a few weeks after.

I shall pass hurriedly over the sad story of its ravages. Were I to dwell on it to the extent of my information, and I know only a little of the whole, the reader might think I was misanthropically accumulating into one gloomy heap all that is terrible in the judgments of God, and all that is mean and feeble in the character of man. The pangs of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew—all that the Dominican or the savage has inflicted on the heretic or the white man, were realized in the tortures of this dreadful disease. Utter debility, intense thirst, excruciating cramps of the limbs, and an unimpaired intellect, were its chief characteristics. And the last was not the least terrible. Amid the ruins of the body, from which it was so soon to part, the melancholy spirit looked back upon the past with regret, and on the future with terror. Or even if the sufferer amid his fierce pain “laid hold on the hope that faileth not;” with what feelings must he have looked around the deserted cottage, when the friends in whom he had trusted proved unfaithful—or, more melancholy still, on the affectionate wife or the dutiful child struck down by the bedside in agonies as mortal as his own.

In the villages of Ross the disease assumed a more terrible aspect than it had yet presented in any other part of Britain. In the little village of Portmahomack one-fifth of the inhabitants were swept away; in the still smaller village of Inver, one-half. So abject was the poverty of the people, that in some instances there was not a candle in any house in a whole village; and when the disease seized on the inmates in the night-time, they had to grapple in darkness with its fierce agonies and mortal terrors, and their friends, in the vain attempt to assist them, had to grope round their beds. The infection spread with frightful rapidity. At Inver, though the population did not much exceed a hundred persons, eleven bodies were committed to the earth, without shroud or coffin, in one day; in two days after they had buried nineteen more. Many of the survivors fled from the village, and took shelter, some in the woods, some among the hollows of an extensive tract of sandhills. But the pest followed them to their hiding-places, and they expired in the open air. Whole families were found lying dead on their cottage floor. In one instance, an infant, the only survivor, lay grovelling on the body of its mother—the sole mourner in a charnel-house of the pestilence. Rows of cottages, entirely divested of their inhabitants, were set on fire and burned to the ground. The horrors of the times of Peter Walker were more than realized. Two young persons, a lad and his sister, were seen digging a grave for their father in the churchyard of Nigg; and then carrying the corpse to it on a cart, no one venturing to assist them. The body of a man who died in a cottage beside the ferry of Cromarty, was borne to a hole, hurriedly scooped out of a neighbouring sand-bank, by his brother and his wife. During the whole of the preceding day, the unfortunate woman had been seen from the opposite shore, flitting around the cottage like an unhappy ghost; during the whole of the preceding night had she watched alone by the dead. The coffin lay beside the door; the corpse in the middle of the apartment.—Never shall I forget the scene which I witnessed from the old chapel of St. Regulus on the evening of the following Sabbath.