Recovered Health—Journey to the Orkneys—Aboard the Steamer at Wick—Mr. Bremner—Masonry of the Harbor of Wick—The greatest Blunders result from good Rules misapplied—Mr. Bremner's Theory about sea-washed Masonry—Singular Fracture of the Rock near Wick—The Author's mode of accounting for it—"Simple but not obvious" Thinking—Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections under Water—His exploits in raising foundered Vessels—Aspect of the Orkneys—- The ungracious Schoolmaster—In the Frith of Kirkwall—Cathedral of St. Magnus—Appearance of Kirkwall—Its "perished suppers"—Its ancient Palaces—Blunder of the Scotch Aristocracy—The patronate Wedge—Breaking Ground in Orkney—Minute gregarious Coccosteus—True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes—Ruins of one of Cromwell's Forts—Antiquities of Orkney—The Cathedral—Its Sculptures—The Mysterious Cell—Prospect from the Tower—Its Chimes—Ruins of Castle Patrick.
A twelvemonth had gone by since a lingering indisposition, which bore heavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone a long-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead, rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, along which the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had now got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years before, I was at least vigorous enough to enjoy a middling long walk, and to breast a tolerably steep hill. And so I resolved on at least glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations mainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amends for seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach at Invergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a weary ride, in a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirling about the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides," with whom I had taken my chance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clock in the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumbling sea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling into the bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some five hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkened and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage from the south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking out upon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through the dimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozen other passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of being transferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the open bay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tall elderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in his appearance,—the steam company's agent for this part of the country.
"That," said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a very extraordinary man,—in his own special walk, one of the most original-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, you perhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all over Britain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every one else gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcoming the vis inertiæ of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr. Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest in your peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings."
I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his company the half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish the time doubled. I had been struck by the peculiar style of masonry employed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray ponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, instead of being placed on their flatter beds, like common ashlar in a building, or horizontal strata in a quarry, are raised on end, like staves in a pail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as if formed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learned that Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarity of his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to your strata," I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position. It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my old profession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should be always laid 'below.'" "A good rule for the land," replied Mr. Bremner, "but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost always perpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast like ours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every storm like pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term their best beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by the gales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice," continued Mr. Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry land is also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasoned thus:—The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, and that forms the enemy with which I have to contend, is not simply water, with an onward impetus communicated to it by the wind and tide, and a reäctive impetus in the opposite direction,—the effect of the backward rebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forces above its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is also something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtile mixture of water and air, with a powerful upward action,—a consequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upward action must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly as the other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against a piece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the interstices into the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, has by its upward action, a tendency to set the work afloat. And the broader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are the surfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet by four, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, if placed on end, a superficies of but four square feet; whereas, if placed on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of forty square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this aërial upheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which no precautions are usually adopted to bind it fast,—for the existence of the force itself is not taken into account,—the greater bed of the stone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; and on a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aërial upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,—on what was deemed their worst, not their best beds,—wedging them all fast together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.
Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular appearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the town of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great. Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other, as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay. "I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied, "the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to the very edge of the land;—your coast-line must have resembled the side of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs, icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, in this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though made somewhat in the dark,—for I had no opportunity of seeing the broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,—seemed to satisfy Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.
With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a character which equally applies to all good thinking, whatever its special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged mode of thinking,—the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical poets,—and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the representations of him which I have yet seen, is the broad Hercules. I was greatly struck by some of Mr. Bremner's views on deep-sea founding. He showed me how, by a series of simple, but certainly not obvious contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb line, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms water, where, on a bottom previously prepared for it by the diving-bell, he had means to make it take the ground exactly at the required line. The difficulty and vast expense of building altogether by the bell would be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,—"a large collier, chock-full of coal,—which an English projector had actually engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst; and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland, he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least one special department,—a feat generally recognized and appreciated as the most herculean of its kind ever performed,—the raising and warping off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could have performed as well. Napoleon,—himself possessed of great genius,—could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport town.
The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and the Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray, that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level Orkney Islands, impressed everywhere, on at least their eastern coasts, by the comparatively tame character borne by the Old Red flagstones, when undisturbed by trap or the primary rocks, demand the full-dress auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent. Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for centuries after their first discovery, I would rather have been disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an unintermittent hot-water douche of queries, the patient courtesy of a Member of Parliament on a visit to his constituency. At length, however, the troubler quitted him, and took his stand immediately beside me; and, too sanguinely concluding that I might take the same kind of liberty with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met with a prompt rebuff, that at once set me down. I was evidently a big, forward lad, who had taken a liberty with the master. It is, I suspect, scarce possible for a man, unless naturally very superior, to live among boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while a despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character which the master-spirits,—our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,—have embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have hitherto militated against the practical realization of those unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run every scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.
We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,—for its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,—that many of the older houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their fronts,—and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained, but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height, which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were in Orkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of public thoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made in other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,—remnants of a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's society their dreary winters,—reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketch of the Borough,"—a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to have sat,—and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when "tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in." But the churchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmering with all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained to represent those "great men of the burgh," who, according to the poet, used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventh hour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests," or of its "suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids," who kept all their neighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in a mood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering of regret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described in the "Sketch,"—suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smothered in cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes of dog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted by copious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by gigantic bowls of rum punch." But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, can recall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup of tea, I found I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, the perished suppers of Kirkwall.
I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of an hour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, sauntered up the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomy weather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyed Sabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quite unprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage of ancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, when viewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to the uplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from one special point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city in ruins,—some such city though in a widely different style of architecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus rises on the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, the bishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites so contiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreast gives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I know no such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgow are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against the blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we have here a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a nobler church, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more. And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of the palaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. The castle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James the Sixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after his defeat at Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army, and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, his body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The church and palace belong to the obscure dawn of the national history, and were Norwegian for centuries before they were Scotch.
As I was coming down the hill at a snail's pace, I was overtaken by a countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing me, "wi' the great man last night?" "I came in the steamer," I replied, "with your Member, Mr. Dundas." "O, aye," rejoined the man; "but I'm no sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see," jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secession chapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the Free Kirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to the Establishment; and I side wi' Dundas." The aristocracy of Scotland committed, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengthening their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages. They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seeking to appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves; and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain landing before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of the kingdom,—its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its Free Church denomination,—comprising in their aggregate amount a great and influential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters,—a circumstance inevitable to their position as such,—have been thrown into the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transition state, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country; but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; and already, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatly less political influence in the kingdom of which they own almost all the soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and English aristocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were the representation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland, and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the passing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for evermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally so Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriated by Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them the great benefits of a religious Establishment, and very great these are; but it threatens, as in the case of the sons of Carmi of old, to work more serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted,—"evil to themselves and all their house." As I approached the Free Church, a squat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie," who seemed passing towards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at my gray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than a Southland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Will ye be wantin' a coo?" I replied in the negative; and the wee wifie, after casting a jealous glance at a group of grave-featured Free Church folk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have tolerated Sabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over her head, and hied away to the chapel.