‘It may be safely affirmed,’ he says, ‘that the horses, cows, sheep, and goats yearly stolen in that country are in value equal to £5000, and that the expenses lost in the fruitless endeavours to recover them, will not be less than £2000; that the extraordinary expenses of keeping [neat-]herds and servants to look more narrowly after cattle on account of stealing, otherwise not necessary, is £10,000. There is paid in black-mail or watch-money, openly or privately, £5000; and there is a yearly loss, by understocking the grounds, by reason of thefts, of at least £15,000; which is altogether a loss to landlords and farmers in the Highlands of £37,000 a year.
‘... The person chosen to command this watch, as it is called, is commonly one deeply concerned in the thefts himself, or at least that hath been in correspondence with the thieves, and frequently who hath occasioned thefts in order to make this watch, by which he gains considerably, necessary. The people employed travel through the country armed, night and day, under pretence of inquiring after stolen cattle, and by this means know the situation and circumstances of the whole country. And as the people thus employed are the very rogues that do these mischiefs, so one half of them are continued in their former businesses of stealing, that the business of the other half may be necessary in recovering.... Whoever considers the shameful way these watches were managed, particularly by Barrisdale and the Macgregors, in the west ends of Perth and Stirling shires, will easily see into the spirit, nature, and consequences of them.’[[766]]
Pennant informs us that many of the lifters of black-mail ‘were wont to insert an article by which they were to be released from their agreement, in case of any civil commotion; thus, at the breaking out of the last rebellion, a Macgregor (who assumed the name of Graham), who had with the strictest honour till that event preserved his friends’ cattle, immediately sent them word that from that time they were out of his protection, and must now take care of themselves.’
The same author justly remarks the peculiar code of morality which circumstances, partly political, had brought into existence |1745.| in the Highlands, whereby cattle-stealing came to be considered rather as a gallant military enterprise than as theft. He says the young men regarded a proficiency in it as a recommendation to their mistresses. Here, however, it must be admitted, we only find the disastrous results of a general civil disorder arising from political disaffection and antagonisms.
Both Gartmore and Mr Pennant speak of ‘Barrisdale’ as a person who at this time stood in great notoriety as a levier of black-mail, or, as Barrisdale himself might have called it, a protector of the country. Descended from a branch of the Glengarry family, his father had obtained from the contemporary Glengarry, on wadset, permission to occupy a considerable tract of ground named Barrisdale, on the south side of Loch Hourn, and from this he had hereditarily derived the appellative by which he was most generally known, while his real name was Coll MacDonell, and his actual residence was at Inverie, on Loch Nevis. Although the government had kept up a barrack and garrison at Glenelg since 1723, Barrisdale carried on his practice as a cattle-protector undisturbed for a course of years, drawing a revenue of about five hundred a year from a large district, in which there were many persons that might have been expected to give him opposition. According to Pennant, ‘he behaved with genuine honour in restoring, on proper consideration, the stolen cattle of his friends.... He was indefatigable in bringing to justice any rogues that interfered with his own. He was a man of a polished behaviour, fine address, and fine person. He considered himself in a very high light, as a benefactor to the public, and preserver of general tranquillity, for on the silver plates, the ornaments of his baldric, he thus addresses his broadsword:
“Hæ tibi sunt artes, pacis componere mores;
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.”[[767]]
At the breaking out of the rebellion, Barrisdale and his son acted as partisans of the Stuart cause, the latter in an open manner, the consequence of which was his being named in the act of attainder. During the frightful time of vengeance that followed upon Culloden, the father made some sort of submission to the government troops, which raised a rumour that he had undertaken to assist in securing and delivering up the fugitive |1745.| prince. What truth or falsehood there might be in the allegation, no one could now undertake to certify; but certain it is, that, when a party of the Camerons were preparing, in September 1746, to leave the country with Prince Charles in a French vessel, they seized the Barrisdales, father and son, as culprits, and carried them to France, where they underwent imprisonment, first at St Malo, and afterwards at Saumur, for about a year. It was at the same time reported to London that the troops had found, in Barrisdale’s house, ‘a hellish engine for extorting confession, and punishing such thieves as were not in his service. It is all made of iron, and stands upright; the criminal’s neck, hands, and feet are put into it, by which he’s in a sloping posture, and can neither sit, lie, nor stand.’[[768]] This report must also remain in some degree a matter of doubt.
The younger Barrisdale, making his escape from the French prison, returned to the wilds of Inverness-shire, and was there allowed for a time to remain in peace. The father, liberated when Prince Charles was expelled from France, also returned to Scotland; but he had not been more than two days at his house in Knoydart, when a party from Glenelg apprehended him. Being placed as a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, he died there in June 1750, after a confinement of fourteen months. The son was in like manner seized in July 1753, in a wood on Loch-Hourn-side, along with four or five other gentlemen in the same circumstances, and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. He was condemned upon the act of attainder to die in the Grassmarket on the 22d of May 1754, and while he lay under sentence, his wife, who attended him, brought a daughter into the world.[[769]] He was, however, reprieved from time to time, and ultimately, after nine years’ confinement, received a pardon in March 1762, took the oath of allegiance to George III., and was made a captain in Colonel Graeme’s regiment, being the same which was afterwards so noted under the name of the Forty-second. When Mr John Knox made his tour of the West Highlands in 1786, to propagate the faith in herring-curing and other modern arts of peace, he found ‘Barrisdale’—that name so associated with an ancient and ruder state of things—residing at the place from which he was named. ‘He lives,’ says the traveller, ‘in silent retirement upon a slender income, and seems by his appearance, conversation, and deportment, to have merited a better fate. He is about six feet high, |1745.| proportionally made, and was reckoned one of the handsomest men of the age. He is still a prisoner, in a more enlarged sense, and has no society excepting his own family, and that of Mr Macleod of Arnisdale. Living on opposite sides of the loch, their communications are not frequent.’[[770]]
It seems not inappropriate that this record of the old life of Scotland should end with an article in which we find the associations of the lawless times of the Highlands inosculating with the industrial proceedings of a happier age. A further extension of our domestic annals would shew how the good movements of the last fifteen years were now accelerated, and how our northern soil became, in the course of little more than a lifetime, one of the fairest scenes of European civilisation. Fully to describe this period—its magnificent industries, its rapid growth of intelligence, of taste, of luxury, the glories it achieved in literature, science, and art—would form a noble task; but it is one which would need to be worked out on a plan different from the present work, and which I should gladly see undertaken by some son of Caledonia who may have more power than I to do her story justice, though he cannot love or respect her more.