“Ah! minimè refert quid sentiat Anglia! Totam
Mutandis sese mercibus illa dedit.
Pacis amans quovis pretio, maris arbitra quondam
Nunc ipsa externo pendet ab arbitrio—”
and grumble in vain.[298] However, “we have heard about that before.” We have also heard of yon quaint pyramid on the starboard bow, concerning which Mr Henderson says (i. 36), “The term ‘Law’ is still applied to many hills in Scotland, as ‘Largo-Law,’ and so forth.” But the verbal resemblance to the natural Lögbergs (law-mounts) of Iceland,[299] Orkneys, and Shetlands, corresponding with the artificial moot-hills of Scotland, is a trivial accident which has caused a philological stumble. “Law” is simply the Anglo-Saxon Hlæw or Hlaw, primarily a low hill, secondarily a tumulus, cairn, or sepulchral burrow (Bearw or Bearo), heaped over the dead, as Lud-low the Low of Lude. Berwick-Law, though shaped very like a Lögberg, means only Berwick Hill. Farther east is the Bass, “sea-rock immense,” northwards steep-to apparently the rule of the northern coast and the Orkneys, a broad-shouldered and misshapen stack rising, like Ailsa Craig, sheer from the sea, and now very far from being the “terror of navigators.”
During dinner, at the primitive and Viennese hour of four P.M., we had passed Fifeness, alias the East Neuk of Fife, not our “nook,” an indention, but the Norsk Hnjúkr or Hnúkr, a knoll; the high, lone hill, like Arthur’s Seat, occupies a long, blue tongue, which projects a perilous reef some ten miles out to sea. The Firth of Tay—“firth,” from Fjörð, is right; “frith,” from Fretum, is wrong—with its many brethren, are foretastes of Iceland and Norway; the huge gapes of dwarfish bodies, embouchures whose breadth promises a length of many hundred miles, which the shortness of the watershed reduces to scores. Such are the estuaries and giant mouths of the Gaboon, and, indeed, of all the South African rivers save five—the Congo and Zambezi, the Rufiji, the Limpopo, and the Orange; and we need hardly go so far to study the feature, as the Mersey of Mercia is a first-rate specimen. We peer from a distance at the “Geneva of the North” (proh pudor!), the Faridon dé, the Donum Dei, famed in the days of terror as the abode of the “reverend citizen Douglas,” where of late the mob-caps have had a famous bout of “clapper-clawing” with the bonnets of bonnie Dundee; and where, according to its own Advertiser, “there are heathens who read newspapers during the Christmas holidays.”
Broad daylight blazed till ten P.M.; but fog, probably born of smoke, and marring the effect of the pretty sail, obscured the outlines of Fowls’ Heugh, in Kincardineshire. These are cliffs some 300 to 400 feet high, where adventurous cragsmen still risk broken necks to plunder birds’ nests. The Færoese hold that the unfortunates falling from great heights burst in mid air; and it has been remarked by those who have had ample opportunities of induction, that the many who have thrown themselves off the London monument wear placid countenances, showing none of the horrors of agonising death. It is possible, then, that the sudden shock may cause asphyxia and apoplexy—we will hope that it does.
Before “turning in,” as the wheezing of the wind and the pelting showers of blacks suggest, let us shortly survey the ship and our shipmates, a process which travellers apparently despise as unworthy of their high-mightinesses. The “Queen,” Captain William Reid, is a crowded little thing of 280 tons register; a startling contrast to Messrs Papayanni’s large and comfortable “Arkadia,” Captain Peter Blacklock, in which I last sailed as the passenger from Bayrút. She is licensed to carry forty-seven miserables; her old-fashioned engines half-consume twenty-three tons of coal in twenty-four hours; and her horse-power (230) makes her bore through the water at the maximum rate of nine knots. She has no bath; washing is at a discount amongst these northerners; her offices are truly awful; and the berths are apparently built for Arctic exploration, or for the accommodation of General Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt: the close vapours would generate nightmare, but, happily, only the stewards sleep in the main cabin. The food is profuse but primitive—giant tureens of oleaginous soup; fish which cannot be kept quite fresh; huge junks of meat, of course carved at table; mutton chops—not cutlets—all fat, or rather tallow; vast slices of “polonies,” lard-speckled, and very like the puddings of sheep’s blood farther north; marbled potatoes; graveolent cabbages; parsnips and carrots, hateful to Banting; poor bread; good hard biscuit; excellent butter, much enjoyed by Icelanders; rice puddings, and huge pies of rhubarb, locally called overring or southern wood; tea which resembles nothing that fancy can suggest; coffee much resembling a watery decoction of senna; excellent whisky; the usual brandy, not right “Nantz,” and gin clean forgotten.
The passengers are all first-class, and those who should be seconds pay somewhat less than the usual return fare, £6—board not included. In these lands, the three R’s are the great levellers; and for a certain roughness, moral as well as physical, we need hardly visit Canada or the Far West; our Lowlander, emphatically opposed to the Highlander, supplies us with an admirable specimen. Many of the travellers are bound northwards on business, and their “Gentlemen, who says feesh?” reminds us of Mr Punch and his “pudden.” There is a laird of the parts about Aberdeen, accompanied by an intelligent Scotch bailiff; an army man, Major B., and his brother-in-law, Mr S.; a navy man, Captain H., much addicted to fishing; another Piscator, popularly known as Johnny B.; and a missionary, who will not walk the quarter-deck on “the Sabbath.” He offers a tract to our parson—we can longer quote amongst British proverbs, “Coals to Newcastle”—the Rev. R. M. Spence, originally of Kirkwall, Orkneys, and now holding the manse of Arbuthnott. I must name him; his local knowledge was most valuable to all on board; it was given freely and without stint, and after his “parson’s week,” he was kind enough to correspond with me during my stay in Iceland. Kirkwall has produced much “good company,” but none better than the Reverend Spence. There is a stewardess, who stoutly cleared for herself the ladies’ saloon. The steward and his mate are of the type often seen on board the “leather-breeches mob of steamers”—an epithet, mind, which I do not apply to the “Queen.” They are fond of bumping you, of spilling the soup, of putting unclean towels upon your open books, of carrying a host of articles in one hand, of charging the smallest and meanest items, and of being peculiarly civil on the last day. The captain soon merits the general description of a “regular brick;” he has no pilot who knows coast or course, not a soul on board has ever been in Iceland, yet he accepts all responsibility like a man and a seaman; and he will spend on deck two successive nights of fog and wet. Finally, although the “Queen” is not one of the floating coffins which have roused Mr Plimsoll’s just indignation, she was sent out in a peculiarly reckless way,[300] and without so good a sailor as Captain Reid, she—and we—ran the very best chances of coming to a bad end.
June 5.
During the few dark, or rather chiaro-oscuro, hours, we ran along the coast north-east and by east, turning the great shoulder north of Aberdeen. As the raw and rainy morning dawned, high loomed on the port bows Duncansby, popularly written Duncansbay, Head, whose castellated and ruin-shaped rocks of yellow-brown sandstone, streaked with white layers of guano, were new features to us; much resembling in form, though not in formation, what Iceland will show. The steep and frowning headland, sentinelled by needles, the Shetland “drongs,” the Færoese “drengr,” and the Icelandic “drangar,” bluff to the sea, and sloping backwards in long brown-green dorsa, is lit up by a sickly, pallid sun, which picks out of the dark curtain the snowy wings of myriad sea-fowl. The parallel strata supply the celebrated flags of Caithness, and the softer parts are readily hollowed into “Devil’s nostrils,” Helyers,[301] or sea-washed caverns, with pyramidal entrances which cause frequent cliff-falls.
Beyond this point the coast is fretted into shallow bays of good soil, fronted by sandy beaches of dwarf proportions, and here and there by a small scaur; the chord is also pierced by long winding passages, incipient Fjörðs, whose vistas end in yellow shingle. These pasture-lands of Caithness are scattered with cots, “infield” and “outfield,” but we look in vain for copse, wood, or forest. As a northern writer said some hundred years ago, “A single tree does not appear that may afford shelter to friendship and innocence” (why innocence?), and fuel must be supplied by wreck-wood and drift-wood, by peat and wrack, by cattle chips and bones. The cause is one from the Prairies and the Pampas to the Carso of Trieste, and the rich uplands of Spain, Syria, and the Haurán. Be the soil ever so fertile, its growth, without the protection of walls or depressions in the level, is soon blasted by the furious cutting winds. The experiment of planting pitch-pines (Pinus picea and Pinus abies) was tried by Governor Thodal of Iceland, but the trunks never rose above two feet from the ground, and, like Dean Swift, they died at the head. The scene already suggests Thule without its Jökulls; scattered byes, greenish túns (“towns,” or home-fields), brown distances, low stone walls, and big bistre-coloured cliffs, black below where bathed by the flowing tide.
Behind Duncansbay Ness[302] we are shown the site of John o’ Groat’s House; there is no need to walk there, as a stage coach now runs along the fine broad road from the “(ex-) Herring Capital of the North” (Wick). The old “Norwegian,” as some miscall him, left Holland with Malcolm Cavin, and brought to Caithness a Latin letter from James II. of Scotland recommending him to the northern lieges. It is still a disputed point whether the Grotes of the Orkneys are the original stock, or drifted there through Scotland. Strangers are taken to the semi-historical ruin, a one-storied octagon, with its eight windows, which appeased fraternal wrath—if, at least, there were eight, and not two brothers. It is supposed to be a banqueting-hall, as there are no bedrooms, and only the photograph for sale at Wick, probably taken from some apocryphal sketch, caps it with a small look-out. A dull grey barn is here fronted by a dwarf sand-streak, up which fisher boats are drawn, whilst others, with stained sails, scud and toss over the unquiet waters. The colouring matter is peat. In the Bahia de S. Salvador (Brazil) the Piaçaba palm supplies the tannin-dye, while Venice and Dalmatia assert superior claims to art by rough pictures in coloured earths and oil. The object is everywhere the same—to make the canvas last.