And give to joy alone the view
Of victory at Waterloo.
WILLIAM FORSYTH.
About the time of the Rebellion, or a little after, the trade of the place began to recover itself much through the influence of a vigorous-minded man, a merchant of the period. Urquhart of Greenhill had sunk with the sinking trade of the country; his townsman, William Forsyth, enjoyed the advantage of being born at least forty years later, and rose as it revived. The nature of the business which the latter pursued may be regarded as illustrating, not inaptly, the condition of society in the north of Scotland at the time. It was of a miscellaneous character, as became the state of a country so poor and so thinly peopled, and in which, as there was scarce any division of labour, one merchant had to perform the part of many. He supplied the proprietors with teas, wines, and spiceries; with broad-cloths, glass, Delft ware, Flemish tiles, and pieces of japanned cabinet-work; he furnished the blacksmith with iron from Sweden, the carpenter with tar and spars from Norway, and the farmer with flax-seed from Holland. He found, too, in other countries, markets for the produce of our own. The exports of the north of Scotland, at this period, were mostly malt, wool, and salmon. Almost all rents were paid in kind or in labour—the proprietors retaining in their hands a portion of their estates, termed demesnes or mains, which was cultivated mostly by their tacksmen or feuars as part of their proper service. Each proprietor, too, had his storehouse or girnal—a tall narrow building, the strong-box of the time—which, at the Martinmas of every year, used to be filled from gable to gable with the grain-rents paid him by his tenants, and the produce of his own farm. His surplus cattle found their way south under charge of the drovers of the period; but it proved a more difficult matter to dispose to advantage of his surplus corn, mostly barley, until some one, more fertile in speculation than the others, originated the scheme of converting it into malt, and exporting it into England and Flanders. And to so great an extent was this trade carried on about the middle of the last century, that in the town of Inverness the English under Cumberland found almost every second building a malt-barn.
It is quite according to the nature of the herrings to resume their visits as suddenly and unexpectedly as they have broken them off, though not until after a lapse of so many seasons, that the fishermen have ceased to watch for their appearance in their old haunts, or to provide the tackle necessary for their capture; and in this way a number of years are sometimes suffered to pass after the return of the fish, ere the old trade is re-established. It was a main object with William Forsyth to guard against any such waste of opportunity on the part of his town’s-people; and representing the case to the more intelligent gentlemen of the district, and some of the wealthier merchants of Inverness, he succeeded in forming them, for the encouragement of the herring fishery, into a society, which provided a yearly premium of twenty merks Scots for the first barrel of herrings caught every season in the Moray Firth. The sum was small; but as money at the time was greatly more valuable than now, it proved a sufficient inducement to the fishermen and tradespeople of the place to fit out, about the beginning of autumn every year, a few boats that swept over the various fishing banks for the herrings; and there were not many seasons in which some one crew or other did not catch enough to entitle them to the premium. At length, however, their tackle wore out, and Mr. Forsyth, in pursuance of his scheme, provided himself, at some little expense, with a complete drift of nets, which were carried to sea each season by a crew of boatmen, and the search kept up. His exertions, however, could only merit success, without securing it. The fish returned for a few seasons in considerable bodies, and the fishermen procuring nets, several thousand barrels were caught; but they soon deserted the Firth as entirely as before. It was at the period of this second return that the “Herring Fishery,” according to Goldsmith, “employed all Grub Street;” and “formed the topic of every coffee-house, and the burden of every ballad.” The sober English of the times of George II. had got sanguine on the subject, and hope had broken out into poetry. They were “to drag up oceans of gold from the bottom of the sea, and to supply all Europe with herrings on their own terms;” but their expectations outran the capabilities of the speculation; “they fished up very little gold” that the essayist “ever heard of, nor did they furnish the world with herrings.” Their herring fishery turned out in short to be a mere herring fishery, and not even that for any considerable length of time.
THE CAITHNESS-MAN’S LEAP.
Sir John Sinclair marks the autumn of the year 1770 as a season in which the herring fishery of Caithness suddenly doubled its amount. “From that time,” he adds, “the fishery gradually increased for a few years, but afterwards fell off again, and did not revive with spirit until the year 1788.” During the short period in which it was plied with success, it was prosecuted by several crews of Cromarty fishermen; and their first visit to the coast of this northern county, I find connected with a curious anecdote of the class whose extreme singularity gives in some measure evidence of their truth. Invention generally loves a beaten track—it has its rules and its formulas, beyond which it rarely ventures to expatiate; but the course of real events is narrowed by no such contracting barrier; the range of possibility is by far too extensive to be fully occupied by the anticipative powers of imagination; and hence it is that true stories are often stranger than fictions, and that their very strangeness, and their dissimilarity from all the models of literary plot and fable, guarantee in some measure their character as authentic.
The hill of Cromarty is skirted, as I have said, by dizzy precipices, some of them more than a hundred yards in height; and one of these, for the last hundred and fifty years, has borne the name of the Caithness-man’s Leap. The sheer descent is broken by projecting shelves, covered with a rank vegetation, and furrowed by deep sloping hollows, filled at the bottom with long strips of loose débris, which, when set in motion by the light foot of the goat, falls rattling in continuous streams on the beach. The upper part of the precipice is scooped out by a narrow and perilous pathway, which, rising slantways from the shore, along the face of the neighbouring precipices, makes an abrupt turn on the upper edge of the “leap,” and then gains the top. Immediately above, on a sloping acclivity, covered for the last century by a thick wood, there was a little field, the furrows of which can still be distinctly traced among the trees, and which, about the time of the Revolution, was tenanted by a wild young fellow, quite as conversant with his fowling-piece as with his plough. He was no favourite with such of the neighbouring proprietors as most resembled himself; the game-laws in Scotland were not quite so stringent at that period as they are now, but game had its value; and sheriffs and barons, addicted to hunting and the chase, who had dungeons in their castles, and gibbets on their Gallow Hills, neither lacked the will nor the power to protect it. And so the tacksman of the the little field found poaching no safe employment; but the dangers he incurred had only the effect common in such cases, of imparting to his character a sort of Irish-like recklessness—a carelessness both of his own life and the lives of others. He had laid down his little field with peas, and was seriously annoyed, when they began to ripen, by the town’s boys—mischievous little fellows—who, when on their fishing excursions, would land in a little rocky bay, immediately below the pathway, and ascending the cliffs, carry away his property by armfuls at a time. The old northern pirates were scarcely more obnoxious to the early inhabitants of Scotland than the embryo fishermen to the man of the gun: nay, the man of the gun was himself scarcely more obnoxious to the proprietors. There was no possibility of laying hold of the intruders; a few minutes were sufficient on the first alarm, to bring them from the top to the bottom of the cliffs—a few strokes of the oar set them beyond all reach of pursuit—and he saw that, unless he succeeded in terrifying them into honesty with his gun, they might go on robbing him with impunity until they had left nothing behind them to rob. Matters were in this state when a Caithness boat, laden with timber, moored one morning in the bay below, and one of the crew, a young fellow of eighteen, after climbing the pathway on an excursion of discovery, found out the field of peas. The farmer, on this unlucky morning, had been rated and collared by the laird for shooting a hare, and, very angry, and armed with the gun as usual, he came up to his field, and found the Caithness-man employed in leisurely filling his pockets. He presented his piece and drew the trigger, but the powder flashed in the pan. “The circumstance of being shot,” says the ingenious author of Cyril Thornton, “produces a considerable confusion in a man’s ideas.” The ideas of the Caithness-man became confused in circumstances one degree less trying; for starting away with the headlong speed of a hare roused out of her form, instead of following the windings of the path, he shot right over the precipice at the abrupt angle. Downwards he went from shelf to shelf—now tearing away with him a huge bush of ivy—now darting along a stream of débris—now making somersets in mid-air over the perpendicular walls of rock which alternate with the shelving terraces. The fear of the gun precluded every other fear; he reached the beach unharmed, except by a few slight sprains and a few scratches, and bolting up, tumbled himself into the boat, and dived for shelter under the folds of the sail. The farmer had pursued him to the top of the rock, and had turned the angle just in time to see him dash over; when, horror-struck at so terrible an accident, for he had intended only to shoot the man, he flung away his gun and ran home. Years and generations passed away; the good King William was succeeded by the good Queen Anne, and Anne by the three Georges, successively; the farmer and all his contemporaries passed to the churchyard—his very fields were lost in the thickets of a deep wood;—the story of the Caithness-man had become traditional—elderly men said it had happened in their grandfather’s days, and pointing out to the “leap,” they adverted to the name which the rock still continued to bear, as proofs that the incident had really occurred—incredible as it might seem that a human creature could possibly have survived such a fall. Ninety years had elapsed from the time, ere the Cromarty fishermen set out on their Caithness expedition. In the first year of the enterprise one of their fleet was storm-bound in a rocky bay, and the crew found shelter in a neighbouring cottage. There was a spectral-looking old man seated in a corner beside the fire. On learning they had come from Cromarty, he seemed to shake off the apathy of extreme age, and began to converse with them; and they were astonished to learn from his narrative that they had before them the hero of the “leap,” at that time in his hundred and eighth year.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“He whom my restless gratitude has sought