The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island," one of the younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of these northern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an island of the Pacific, as
"The blue-eyed northern child,
Of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild,—
The fair-haired offspring of the Orcades,
Where roars the Pentland with his whirling seas,—
Rocked in his cradle by the roaring wind,
The tempest-born in body and in mind,—
His young eyes, opening on the ocean foam,—
Had from that moment deemed the deep his home."
Judging from what I learned of his real history, which is well known in Stromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless young man, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against than sinning," in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is now associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried and unconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors of a shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day to his sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form and handsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should be an attached member of the Free Church.
On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German of some one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, had extended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun to accumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted his notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but not fluently,—in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read than to converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of our great British authors,—Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott,—as most of the better-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions of Sir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. He had already visited the Cathedral of St. Magnus and the Stones of Stennis; and on the morrow he intended visiting the Dwarfie Stone; though I ventured to suggest that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and as the morrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty in doing that. His circle of acquirement was, I found, rather literary than scientific. It seemed, however, to be that of a really accomplished young man, greatly better founded in his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen on quitting the national universities; and I felt, as we conversed together, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how much poorer a figure I would have cut in his country than he cut in mine. I found, on coming down from my room next morning to a rather late breakfast, that he had been out among the Stromness fishermen, and had returned somewhat chafed. Not a single boatman could he find in a populous seaport town that would undertake to carry him to the Dwarfie Stone on the Sabbath,—a fact, to their credit, which it is but simple justice to state. I saw him afterwards in the Free Church, listening attentively to a thoroughly earnest and excellent discourse, by the Disruption minister of the parish, Mr. Learmonth; and in the course of the evening he dropped in for a short time to the Free Church Sabbath-school, where he took his seat beside one of the teachers, as if curious to ascertain more in detail the character of the instruction which had operated so influentially on the boatmen, and which he had seen telling from the pulpit with such evident effect. What would not his country now give,—now, while drifting loose from all its old moorings, full on the perils of a lee shore,—for the anchor of a faith equally steadfast! He was a Lutheran, he told me; but, as is too common in Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very considerably at variance with his hereditary creed. The creed was a tolerably sound one, but the living belief regarding it seemed to do little more than take cognizance of what he deemed the fact of its death.
I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr. William Watt, to whom I have already had occasion to refer as an intelligent geologist; but the letter I had no opportunity of delivering. Mr. Watt had learned, however, of my being in the neighborhood, and kindly walked into Stromness, some six or eight miles, on the morning of Monday, to meet with me, bringing me a few of his rarer specimens. One of the number,—a minute ichthyolite, about three inches in length,—I was at first disposed to set down as new, but I have since come to regard it as simply an imperfectly-preserved specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshire species,—the Glyptolepis microlepidotus; though its state of keeping is such as to render either conclusion an uncertainty. Another of the specimens was that of a fish, still comparatively rare, first figured in the first edition of my little volume on the "Old Red Sandstone," from the earliest found specimen, at a time while it was yet unfurnished with a name, but which has since had a place assigned to it in the genus Diplacanthus, as the species longispinus. The scales, when examined by the glass, remind one, from their pectinated character, of shells covering the walls of a grotto,—a peculiarity to which, when showing my specimen to Agassiz, while it had yet no duplicate, I directed his attention, and which led him to extemporize for it, on the spot, the generic name Ostralepis, or shell-scale. On studying it more leisurely, however, in the process of assigning to it a place in his great work, where the reader may now find it figured (Table XIV., fig. 8), the naturalist found reason to rank it among the Diplacanthi. Mr. Watt's specimen exhibited the outline of the head more completely than mine; but the Orkney ichthyolites rarely present the microscopic minutiæ; and the shell-like aspect of the scales was shown in but one little patch, where they had left their impressions on the stone. His other specimens consisted of single plates of a variety of Coccosteus, undistinguishable in their form and proportions from those of the Coccosteus decipiens, but which exceeded by about one-third the average size of the corresponding parts in that species; and of a rib-like bone, that belonged apparently to what few of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red seem to have possessed,—an osseous internal skeleton. This last organism was the only one I saw in Orkney with which I had not been previously acquainted, or which I could regard as new, though possibly enough it may have formed part, not of an undiscovered genus, but of the known genus Asterolepis, of whose inner framework, judging from the Russian specimens at least, portions must have been bony. After parting from Mr. Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurely journey, I reached late in the evening, and on the following morning took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rare specimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasing recollections of an interesting country and a hospitable people. In the previous chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availing myself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which he portrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of his nativity may be best recognized and most characteristically remembered.
TO ORKNEY.
Land of the whirlpool,—torrent,—foam,
Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock;
The beetling cliff,—the shelving holm,—
The dark insidious rock.
Land of the bleak, the treeless moor,—
The sterile mountain, sered and riven,—
The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower,
Scathed by the bolts of heaven,—
The yawning gulf,—the treacherous sand,—
love thee still, MY NATIVE LAND.
Land of the dark, the Runic rhyme,—
The mystic ring,—the cavern hoar,—
The Scandinavian seer, sublime
In legendary lore.
Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves,—
Those tameless spirits of the past,
Fierce as their subject arctic waves,
Or hyperborean blast,—
Though polar billows round thee foam,
I love thee!—thou wert once my home.
With glowing heart and island lyre,
Ah! would some native bard arise
To sing, with all a poet's fire,
Thy stern sublimities,—
The roaring flood,—the rushing stream,—
The promontory wild and bare,—
The pyramid, where sea-birds scream,
Aloft in middle air,—
The Druid temple on the heath,
Old even beyond tradition's birth.
Though I have roamed through verdant glades,
In cloudless climes, 'neath azure skies,
Or plucked from beauteous orient meads,
Flowers of celestial dies,—
Though I have laved in limpid streams,
That murmur over golden sands,
Or basked amid the fulgid beams
That flame o'er fairer lands,
Or stretched me in the sparry grot,—
My country! THOU wert ne'er forgot.
THE END.