Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

One wonders what his first sensations will be when he approaches the mother continent. Some, with keen olfactories, in a seaward breeze, smell the burning turf, which tells of homes and firesides and human companionship. We looked for the land birds. Blown out over the waves, these feathered messengers find shelter in the ship’s rigging and welcome from sea-weary passengers.

To us, they were our first visitors. A terrific storm had for a day and night lashed the ocean into fury, split one of our booms and stove in a lifeboat, only to be succeeded by a morning of sunny splendor. Then both ocean and sky seemed like twin sapphires. The tossing spray, which in the sunbeams showered dust of rainbows, gradually gave way to calm. Toward noon we welcomed two little feathered messengers. They were made happy by finding rest aloft in the shrouds. A third, too exhausted to guide its course, fell upon deck. We kept our eyes aloft, waiting for news from the crow’s nest. Yet while we, with the old sea dogs, captain and crew, were looking alternately forward and upward, as yet discerning nothing, a sailor, born in Michigan, who was the lookout for the day, called out “Land ho!”

For the next few minutes we were contestants in a game of rivalry, as to which eyes should see first and best. Not many minutes sped, however, before most of us had discerned a long, low, cloudlike line, which, instead of shifting its form, like its sister apparitions of the air, loomed on the horizon in fixed defiance of change.

As if to tantalize us, fresh breezes soon condensed new vapors and the land disappeared from view. Again, for hours, we were in mist and fog, but at high noon, the veil was lifted suddenly. There before us, rising sheer out of the ocean and apparently but a mile or two away, was the great green glory of Ireland. Like a mountain of emerald rising out of a sapphire sea, stood the land whose name and color, in sentiment and in reality, is Nature’s favorite, earth’s best counterpart to the sky.

After seeing the Giant’s Causeway, meeting the paddle-wheel steamer from Londonderry, and passing Rathlin Island,—refuge once of Robert the Bruce,—we sight the real land of our quest when we discern the larger isle of Arran, which rises like a minaret out of the sea. In law and geography, as well as the outpost of history, it is recognized as an integral part of Scotland. Still alertly peering eastward, we behold in the thickening dusk the mainland, whereupon our hats rise in salute to Bonnie Scotland. The sun here does not set till nine o’clock in the evening and sinks to-night amid clouds which break into spires and turrets. These, in the crimson glow, look like some sea-girt castle in flames.

We are on the lookout for anything and everything that may remind us of Robert the Bruce, for in the history of Arran the chief name is that of Scotland’s heroic king. On its western coast he found shelter in what are still called the “King’s Caves.” Of a trio of these he made a regular apartment house; for one bears the name of his kitchen, another of his cellar, a third of his stable. On the land higher up is the “King’s Hill,” and from a point called the “King’s Cross,” he crossed over to Carrick, when the long-awaited signal told him that the moment for the liberation of his country had come. In Glen Cloy, near by, his trusty followers lay concealed, and the picturesque ruins still bear the name of “Bruce’s Castle.” Other masses of ruins on Loch Ranza are pointed out as representing what was his hunting-seat. Are the Scots of Arran as greedy to boast of as many places made famous by Bruce as are Americans of Washington’s headquarters?

The name of Bruce is not the only one in the long and glorious annals of Scotland that clings to Arran. The earls of this insular domain were nearly all members of the famous Hamilton family which gave so many eminent men and women to Scotland and England. How many more of their shining names are as stars in the firmament of our national history! The champion of free speech, who owned the land which is now Independence Square in Philadelphia, and whose eloquence in New York city acquitted the German editor Zenger in the great trial which inaugurated and perpetuated free speech in America, was a Hamilton. As the greatest constructive political genius known to our country, the virtual father of the United States Government, the name of Alexander Hamilton is an inspiration to the Unionists of Great Britain to-day.

Back of the pear-shaped island of Pladda—which we passed and whose telegraph station notified Greenock and Glasgow of our arrival in the Clyde—are ancient standing stones, or cairns, and many a memorial of remote antiquity which witness to very early habitation by man on this outpost island.

In the eyes of those to whom the past furnishes a perspective more fascinating even than the promise of the future, the little isle adjacent, which is itself a finely marked basaltic cone, rising over a thousand feet high and well called “Holy Island,” is even more worthy of the visits of the reflecting scholar. It holds an attraction even greater, in human interest, at least, than the wonders of geology, or the numerous witnesses to antiquity in the form of upreared stones. Here St. Molios, a disciple of St. Columba, founded a church. In the Saint’s Cave, on the shore, may still be seen the rocky shelf on which he made his bed. Like the outraying sparkles of light from a gem, the lines of influence from this saint’s memory have flashed down the ages. To-day from sections of the Christian Church, “high” or “low,” and from Christian “bodies” with sectarian names, as many as the letters of the alphabet, come visiting pilgrims or happy tourists to pay their debt of admiration, or to refresh for a moment their traditional faith. In that wonderful sixth Christian century—as remarkable in Asian and Buddhist, as in European and Christian history—Ireland (not then known by that name, but the old “Land of the Scots”) was a shining centre of gospel light and truth. Moreover, it was a hive of missionary activities, sending off swarms of “apostles.” Happily, this word means missionaries and nothing else, connoting spiritual activities and not questions of authority, over which paid ecclesiastics will ever and in all lands wrangle lustily.

In modern days, the whole island is peaceful. So far has the old Gaelic speech passed into “innocuous desuetude,” that at the opening of this century only nine persons were left who could use but this one speech, though over a thousand natives could speak both English and Gaelic. Instead of the tranquil calm of to-day, however, few islands have been oftener stained with the blood of warriors and quarrelling clansmen. We who imagine that only the dark-skinned nations were savages must remember how recently both Englishmen and Scotsmen emerged from barbarism. It was but in the yesterday of historic time that Christians burned one another alive, in the same spirit that worshippers of Moloch cast their children into the red-hot stomach of their brazen idol, or Hindu mothers fed their babies to the crocodiles. How numerous were the Scottish assassins and victors who carried the heads of their enemies as trophies on the top of pikes, like the Indians and Pilgrims of colonial days! Yet no literature excels that of the Scots, in the perfect frankness with which the sons of the soil confess their recent emergence from barbarism into the admired civilization of to-day.