Our Journey to the Hebrides

by Joseph Pennell; Elizabeth Robins Pennell

Emigration is the principal remedy suggested. The landlords of old enforced it, and now, for very shame, are content to commend it. It is the remedy most to their taste. It would leave them alone with their sheep and their game. If the only Highlanders were the gillies and shepherds, there would be an end of bothersome tales of wrongs, rousing the sympathy of the public. The real reason for emigration is that "any remedies which might be expected from land law reform or land acts will be and are likely to be long deferred, while in the mean time the people are dying like dogs from starvation." It has been urged that it would be better if many of the Islanders, like men of the east coast, became fishermen altogether and gave up their land. But if they did, the gain would not be theirs. In many lochs and bays the people are not allowed to fish for food because gentlemen must fish for pleasure. Few have boats for deep-sea fishing; none have money to buy them. As it is, in the Long Island they must compete with well-equipped fishing-smacks sent into northern seas from Billingsgate markets.[G] Not only this, but in both Harris and Lewis, piers and harbors are few, and fishing-boats must be light that fishermen may pull them up on shore beyond reach of the tide. In parts of the northern Highlands people have been removed from the glens to the shores in hopes that they would become fishermen; but they were given no boats, no harbors.

For Skye and the Long Island, the nearest way to the main-land is by Strome Ferry, where the entrance to the harbor is intricate, and so poorly lighted that once the short winter days set in, as its passage cannot be attempted after dark, traffic between the islands and the main-land is seriously interrupted. But indeed one can but wonder at the few light-houses on this dangerous west coast. Here and there one erected on a lonely rock far out at sea is a triumph of engineering skill. But the most difficult channels, the wildest coasts, are left without a light. In the course of our long journey in Hebridean waters I think we saw but half a dozen. The life-boat institution in British islands is now supported by charity. It seems as if the light-house service as well must fall to the benevolence of advertisers and city corporations.

It is well to say what the people ought to do; it is better to explain what they cannot do. They are hampered and held back on every side, and then the stranger is told that he need not pity them, they are so lazy. They are thriftless and good-for-nothing, Lowlanders on the steamer assured us. When you first go among them you believe in their laziness. Their little patches of potatoes and grain are full of weeds, and their ditches are choked; broken windows are mended with rags or heather, dirt and rubbish lie waiting to be cleared away. From their doors they step into the mud. A very little industry is needed to set these things right. You wonder if, after all, it may not be their own fault that they are so poor. But this is what a doctor of Raasay told the Commissioners, "The prevailing disease is poverty, and the chief remedy is food." The people have not enough to eat; that is why they do not work hard. You have but to look into their faces to know that they are starving. Hardly a winter passes that food has not to be begged for them. Even as I write, petitions come from a school-master in Lewis. Unless money and meal are sent to them, the people in his district cannot live through the winter. But until two years ago had they not been from morning to night, from night to morning, weak from hunger; if fields had been made to yield a richer harvest; if crofts and houses had been kept neat and pretty, the profit would have been the landlords'. The greater the people's industry, the higher the rent they paid. If they made improvements, the rent was raised. Nor did they know at what moment the fruits of their labor might be swept away. The landlord had but to say, "I want my land, you must go," and their work of years had come to naught. No matter how long the crofter lived in the cottage where dwelt his father and grandfather before him, the day never came when he could say of a surety, "To-morrow this roof will be over my head, these fields and pastures will be mine to care for."

In the Hebrides, the landlord has always had rights; the crofter, until the passing of the Crofters' Bill of 1886, had none. I remember that on that day on the boat, with the shores of hopeless Harris in sight, Mrs. Thomas said to me, "There are two sides to the question, of course. The landlord has a right to do as he chooses with his own land." This is the argument of the landlords. They can quote Scripture in its support. "A man may do as he likes with his own," an Irish land-owner reminded his tenants the other day when he threatened to sweep them off the face of his estates. It is an old, well-worn argument; to answer it French revolutions and American civil wars have been fought. Englishmen have been ever ready to dispute it abroad; at home they are its advocates.

Probably we ought to have seen this other side; I admit that it would have been far pleasanter. A few letters of introduction—at that time, at any rate, not impossible to obtain—would have opened the doors of many of the big houses on our route, would have furnished J—— with a gun and me with days of boredom, would have introduced us to the natives in another fashion; for, according to all accounts, they would then have greeted us as if they were slaves, and not the most fearless and independent people in Great Britain. Of course we understand that strangers in the islands who do see this side of island life, find it as delightful as strangers in the South at home once found that of the old Southern gentleman. But we defy any one who visits the islands after our manner, not to be filled as we were with the thought of the people's misery; for the bondage in which they are held to-day is more cruel than was that of slaves in the slave States of America or of serfs in Russia.

GATHERING PEAT.

There are good landlords in the Highlands, just as there were bad slave-owners in the South—men who give the half-starved, half-frozen crofter the blankets and meal which, if he were emancipated, he could provide for himself; for the crofter is no better, but indeed worse than a slave, since he must bear the burdens both of freedom and of slavery. He is free to pay more for land than it is worth, to be taxed for roads which are never built, and for schools where his language is scorned, and, in some islands, his religion dishonored; and, moreover, in proportion to his means, to be taxed more heavily than men in any other part of Scotland; in some districts he is free to cut from the moorland peat for fuel, to gather from the shore sea-weed for manure, to take from waste lands heather or grass to thatch his roof, only if he pays for the privilege. Here his freedom ends. In his house—the Englishman's castle—he is so little his own master that he cannot keep a sheep or a pig or a dog, unless it be the will of his laird. If he asks to lay his grievances before the factor he is called a rebel, and warned not to dare speak in such fashion; and this by a landlord praised by the great world because of the winter distribution of blankets and meal. If his complaints should be listened to, there is little chance of redress from men who value rabbits and grouse more highly than they do their tenants. He is wholly at the mercy of the factor, who usually holds all the highest offices on the estate, and has the power, as at Barra, to disenfranchise an entire island. This is the account of his position given by a minister in Skye: "The crofter has no protection from the large tacksmen; if he makes a complaint he can get no redress. There is no law in Skye. Might is the only right, and that, too, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. One great evil which sadly needs reform is the state of terrorism under which the small tenantry live through the insolent threats of subordinate officials, whose impudence increases in proportion to the smallness of their authority." It was time, indeed, when the Royal Commission was sent to the Highlands; and yet, though the Commission has reduced rents and cancelled arrears, it has not struck at the root of the evil—the existing relations between landlord and crofter.

The crofter's representative in Parliament is often, fortunately not always, a stranger who comes just before or after his election—as a candidate for Skye came to that island while we were there—and tells the people he has never been there before, they do not know him as yet, but he hopes they may later; and then he steams away in his yacht. Whether elected or not, we may feel sure he will never come again. But what is to be hoped for from Parliament? "They are all landlords in the House of Commons: what will they do for us?" the crofters and cotters of Lewis asked the other day. That is why they are taking matters into their own hands. They know there is no one else to help them. In a body they marched upon deer forest and sheep farm, and scattered over the island or drove into the sea sheep and deer. When there were no more sheep and deer, the landlord would be glad enough to give them back land which in days of old was green with their crops. And now, in further proof of the justice done to crofters, the leaders of these raids await trial in Edinburgh, to which town they cannot afford to bring their witnesses, and where no lawyers of note will defend them.[H]