May.
‘About this time there was a great earthquake in the town of Montrose and thereabouts, to the great terror of the inhabitants, so that many fled out of the town. Some was slain with the thunder there.’—Cal.
June.
Some foreign vessels trading for coal and salt having been shipwrecked, during the severe storms of the past winter, on the ‘blind craigs’ (that is, concealed rocks) in the Firth of Forth, it was proposed, by the enterprising coal and salt proprietor, Sir George Bruce, that he should be allowed to erect beacons at those dangerous spots, and reimburse himself by a small tax on the foreign vessels frequenting the Firth during the ensuing year. Hearing of this proposal, the other coal-proprietors in Fife and the Lothians felt that they were much concerned, seeing that ‘no stranger-ships come that way but either for coal or salt,’ and they considered that ‘the payment of this duty wald carry with it a very great reproach and scandal to the country, as if such a small piece of work in the most eminent river in the kingdom could not be gotten done without the contribution and help of strangers.’ For these reasons, they themselves undertook to set up the required beacons.—M. S. P.
1621.
This movement may be regarded as another mark of the enlightened attention now beginning to be paid to things in which the material interests of the people were concerned. How far the proposal of Sir George Bruce was carried out we do not learn; but the probability is that he did not allow his plan to fall asleep. It bears out our view of the spirit beginning to manifest itself in Scotland, that the royal burghs, a few years later (September 1631), contemplated having lights erected on the Isle of May in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, and on ‘the Skairheids’ (P. C. R.), and soon after one was actually put upon the May, being the first known to have been formed in connection with the Scottish coasts, and for generations a solitary example on those of the island generally. A Fife laird, Alexander Cunningham of Barns—a relative, it would appear, of the wife of the poet Drummond—had the merit of establishing this useful protection for shipping. Obtaining the proper authority from Charles I., he, in 1635, erected on the isle ‘a tower forty feet high, vaulted to the top, and covered with flag-stones, whereon all the year over,’ says Sir Robert Sibbald, writing in the reign of Charles II., ‘there burns in the night-time a fire of coals for a light; for which the masters of ships are obliged to pay for each ton two shillings [twopence sterling]. This sheweth light,’ he adds, ‘to all the ships coming out of the Firths of Forth and Tay, and to all places between St Abb’s Head and Redcastle near Montrose.’
Through a natural antagonism, we may suppose, between the powers of darkness and the interest here concerned, the architect of the May light-tower was drowned on his return from the isle in a storm believed to have been raised by witches, who were in consequence burnt.[399] The fire was duly kept burning by the successors of Cunningham till the erection of a regular light-house on modern principles by the Commissioners of Northern Lights. It required three hundred and eighty tons of Wemyss coal annually, that kind being selected on account of the clearness of its flame. In 1790, the tack or lease of this privileged light, with its tax of three-halfpence a ton on Scottish, and threepence on foreign shipping, rose from £280 to £960, and in 1800 it was let at £1500, ‘a striking proof,’ as Mr Adamson justly remarks, ‘of the increase of the trade of this country’ during the period.