Part 6
We had not time to land, but steaming past its miserable shores, it seemed dreary enough. St. Columba showed what he thought of it when he sent penitents there to test their sincerity. The island of Coll, to which Dr. Johnson and Boswell were carried in a storm, was as flat and stupid and dreary. We had come as far as Coll, partly because of the Doctor's visit. But from this time until we left the Hebrides we were so much taken up with what we saw as scarce to give him another thought. For a while we went many miles astray from his route.
When you steam from Tiree and Coll, a broad stretch of the Atlantic lies between you and the Long Island. If I had my choice, I would rather cross the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe, and that is saying the worst that can be said. The sunshine for the day came to an end. It was cruelly cold. The sportsmen fell prone upon the deck, and the intervals between their now languid shots were long. The man of authority shut himself up in his state-room, the best on the steamer. The card-players sat sad and silent. We, for our part, could only think of our folly in coming, and wonder if we too must be sick. Surely walking could not be greater misery than this. Though in these seas you are never quite out of sight of land, and never clear of the big and little rocks cropping up all around you, it was not until late in the afternoon that we came again close to large islands. They were wild and desolate, with hardly a house and but few cattle and sheep on their rocky shores. One or two boats, with brown sails raised, were jumping and pitching over the waves.
The gray wretchedness of the afternoon was a fit prelude to Barra. When we came to Castle Bay, rain was falling upon its waters, on the battlemented castle perched upon a rocky, sea-weed-covered islet, and on the town, set against a background of high bare hills. But the steamer stopped, and we went ashore to look about us. A few ugly new houses, shops with plate-glass windows, often cited as proofs of the island's prosperity, and then the real Barra: a group of black cottages--compared to which those of Mull were mansions, those of Kilchrennan palaces--running up and down the rocky hill-side. Only by a polite figure of speech can the stone pile in which the Hebridean crofter makes his home be called a cottage. It is, as it was described many years ago, but "a heavy thatched roof thrown over a few rudely put together stones." The long low walls are built of loose stones blackened by constant rain. The thatched roof, almost as black, is held in place without by a net-work of ropes, within by rafters of drift-wood. The crofter has no wood save that which the sea yields, and yet in some districts he must pay for picking up the beams and spars washed up on his wild shores, just as he must for the grass and heather he cuts from the wilder moorland when he makes his roof. Not until you come close to the rough stone heap can you see that it is a house, with an opening for door-way, one tiny hole for window. From a distance there is but its smoke to distinguish it from the rocks strewn around it.
At Castle Bay, where many of these "scenes of misery," as Pennant called them one hundred years ago, were grouped together, there was not even the pretence of a street, but just the rock, rough, ragged, and broken, as God made it. The people who live here are almost all fishermen, and, as if in token of their calling, they have fashioned the thatch of their roofs into the shape of boats; one cottage, indeed, is topped with a genuine boat. There were a few chimneys, but smoke came pouring from the doors, from holes in the thatch and walls. Many of the roofs bore a luxuriant growth of grass, with here and there a clump of daisies or of the yellow flowers which give color to Highland roads. But this was all the green we saw on their hill-side of rock and mud.
Through open door-ways we had glimpses of dark, gloomy interiors, dense with smoke. We did not cross a threshold, however; to seek admittance seemed not unlike making a show of the people's misery. The women and girls who passed in and out, and stood to stare at us, looked strong and healthy. Theirs is a life which must either kill or harden. Many were handsome, with strangely foreign, gypsy-like faces, and so were the bonneted men at work on the pier. It may be that there is truth in the story which gives a touch of Spanish blood to the people of the Outer Hebrides. If the ships of the Armada went down with all their treasure, it is said that their crews survived, and lived and took unto themselves wives in the islands, from which chance of deliverance was small. We heard only Gaelic spoken while we were at Castle Bay. The people of Great Britain need not go abroad in search of foreign parts; but an Englishman who only wants to see the misery and wrongs of nations foreign in name as well as in reality, would find little pleasure in Barra.
When we left the steamer the four sportsmen were getting off with their baggage, of which there was no small quantity. When we returned, hours later, they were getting in again. The one hotel in Barra was full. For consolation, I suppose, they shut themselves up in their state-room, and changed their trousers for the third time that day.
Their return brought to an end our bargaining for their state-room. The night in the ladies' cabin was one long nightmare. The steamer pitched and tossed as if she were still crossing the open Atlantic. At the many stopping-places there was a great noise of loading and unloading. At midnight a mother, with her two babies and nurse, came to fill the unoccupied berths.
J----, in the saloon, fared little better. But the advantage of the restless night was that it sent us up on deck in time to see the eastern hills grow purple against the golden light of coming day. As in the evening, there was still land on either side. All the morning we went in and out of lochs and bays, and through sounds, and between islands. Indeed, I know of no better description of the Outer Hebrides than the quotation given in the guide-book: "The sea here is all islands and the land all lakes." And the farther north we went, the drearier seemed this land--a fitting scene for the tragedy enacted on it, which, though now many years old, is ever young in the memory of the people; for it was here in Uist that, in 1851, men and women were hunted like beasts, tracked by dogs to the caves and wilds where they lay in hiding, bound hand and foot, and cast upon ships waiting to carry them against their will across the Atlantic. We might have thought that no life had been left upon the islands but for an occasional wire fence, a sprinkling of sheep on the greener hill-sides, and lonely cottages, with thin clouds of blue peat-smoke hovering over them to show that they were not mere rocks. Once, stretching across the wilderness we saw telegraph poles following the coast-line. It is wise to let them make the best showing possible. Some of the islands are cut off telegraphically from the rest of the world.
We stopped often. At many of the landings not a house was to be seen. As a rule, there was no pier. The steamer would give her shrill whistle, and as it was re-echoed from the dreary hills huge black boats came sailing out to meet us. Instead of boats waiting for the steamer, as in the Mississippi, here she waited for them. And when they had dropped their sails, and rounded her bows and brought up alongside her lower deck, there tumbled into them men and women, and loaves, and old newspapers, and ham bones, and bits of meat, for in the islands there are always people on the verge of starvation.
At Loch Maddy, in North Uist, the brave warriors left us, and other sportsmen in ulsters and knickerbockers, and with many fishing-rods, came to take their place. On shore stood a man in plain, unassuming kilt, in which he looked at home. We liked to fancy him a laird of Uist in ancestral dress, and not like the youth at Oban, a mere masquerader. We asked the purser who he was.
"Oh, that is Mr. O'Brien, of Liverpool," was his answer.
Everybody had come up on deck, for the day was comparatively fine. It kept clearing and clouding, the sun now shining on the far hills and the rain pouring upon us; but again the showers were swept landward, and we were in sunshine. As we neared
HARRIS,
a little old lady came bustling up. When the steamer stopped in the Sound the men in the boats all touched their bonnets to her, a few even got on board to speak to her. She was better than a guide-book, and told the passengers near her all about Harris. She explained the difficulties of the channel through the Sound, which, like all Hebridean waters, is full of islands and rocks hidden at high tide, and is unprotected by lights. She pointed out Rodil Church, whose gray tower just showed above the green hills. She always called this bit of Harris the Switzerland of the Hebrides, she said. And with its checker-board-like patches of green and yellowing grain between the hills and the water, and lying, while we were there, in sunshine, it might have looked bright and even happy, but for the wretched cottages, of which there were more in this one place than we had seen on all the journey from Iona.
Once, as we watched the boats rounding the steamer's bows, we found ourselves next to this old lady. She seemed so glad to talk that we asked her could she perhaps tell us if the people of Harris were as miserable as their cottages.
"Oh," she said, "their condition is hopeless!" And then she went on to tell us that she lived only for Harris, and that there was no one who knew better than she its poverty. She was, we learned afterwards, Mrs.--or Mistress, as Lowlanders on board called her--Thomas. Her husband had been a Government surveyor in the island, and since his death she had interested herself in the people, among whom, for many years, she made her home.
The story of Harris, as she told it and as we have since read it in the report of the Commission of 1883, is in the main that of all the Islands and Highlands. It is the story of men toiling on land and sea, that by the sweat of their brow they may make, not their own bread, but the venison and game of others. Thousands starve that two or three may have their sport. The land in the Hebrides is barren, it is argued in behalf of the sportsmen. Harris is the barrenest of all, Mrs. Thomas declared. We could see this for ourselves; after the Switzerland of the Hebrides, the mountains rose a solid mass of black rock with scarce a trace of vegetation. But even Harris once supported its people. That was before they were made to share the land with the deer. To-day a few valleys and hill-sides are overcrowded, crofts divided and subdivided; while others once as green are now purple with heather, and silent save for the guns of sportsmen. Deer forests and large farms grow larger and larger; crofts shrink, until from the little patch of ground, long since overworked, the crofter can no longer reap even that which he sows. And yet he sees better land, where perhaps once grew his potatoes and grain, swallowed up in the cruel moors. While his harvest is starvation, deer and grouse live and multiply.
Many villages were cleared when the great deer forest of Harris was extended, not so many years ago. The people were turned from homes where they had always lived, the old with the young, and women about to become mothers. Highlanders love their land. Many went back again and again, even after their cottages were but black piles of ruin. Because he evicts tenants who will not pay their rent, the Irish landlord is called cruel. The evicted in the Hebrides have hitherto been those who interfere with the landlord's convenience or amusement. The rent has had nothing to do with it. And yet of Scotch evictions but comparatively little has been heard. Journalists skilled in their trade have published abroad, from one end of the land to the other, the tale of Irish wrongs. But who knows the injustice that has been done in Scotland in order to lay waste broad tracts of good ground? "I will tell you how Rodil was cleared," said John McDiarmid, of Scalpa, to the Commissioners. "There were one hundred and fifty hearths in Rodil. Forty of these paid rent. When young Macleod (the landlord) came home with his newly married wife to Rodil, he went away to show his wife the place, and twenty of the women of Rodil came and met them, and danced a reel before them, so glad were they to see them. By the time the year was out--twelve months from that day--these twenty women were weeping and wailing, their houses being unroofed and their fires quenched by the orders of the estate. I could not say who was to blame, but before the year was out one hundred and fifty fires were quenched."
As in Rodil, so it was where now stretches the deer forest of Harris--wherever, indeed, deer are hunted in the Highlands. Whoever wants to learn the nature of some of the blessings which come to the many from the proprietary power and right of the few--a right and power to which the Duke of Argyll refers all advance in the Highlands--let him read the "History of the Highland Clearances" as told by Alexander Mackenzie, the "Gloomy Memories of the Highlands," by Donald Macleod, himself one of the evicted. Their story is too cruel for me to tell again. Their country was desolate; their cities were burned with fire; their land, strangers devoured it in their presence, and it was desolate. Never did negro slaves in the South fare as did the Highland men and women cleared from the glens and valleys of Sutherland. Slaves at least represented so much money; but the crofter was and _is_ less valuable to the laird than his sheep and his deer. Slaves could be sold. This was the one thing which the landlord, despite all his rights, could not do with his crofters. He could burn their cottages, starve them and their families, turn them adrift, and chase them over seas, there perhaps to meet anew starvation, disease, and death. From every part of the Highlands and Islands, from Ross and Argyllshire, as from Sutherland, hundreds and thousands were forced to fly, whether they would or not.
And with those who stayed at home, how fared it? The evicted squatted, we would call it, on the crofts of friends and relations in other parts of the estate. There was no place else for them to go. When there, they sought to solve the bitterest problem of life--how to make that which is but enough for one serve for two--and therein were unsuccessful. The landlord washed his hands of them and their poverty. They had brought it upon themselves, he reasoned; if crofts were overcrowded, the fault was theirs. You might as well force a man into the jungle or swamp reeking with malaria, and then when he is stricken upbraid him for living in such a hot-bed of fever. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace does not exaggerate when he says, "For a parallel to this monstrous power of the land-owner, under which life and property are entirely at his mercy, we must go back to mediæval, or to the days when, serfdom not having been abolished, the Russian noble was armed with despotic authority, while the more pitiful results of this landlord tyranny, the wide devastation of cultivated lands, the heartless burning of houses, the reckless creation of pauperism and misery out of well-being and contentment, could only be expected under the rule of Turkish sultans or greedy and cruel pashas."
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.
[G] I have just heard that Americans are about to send fishing-vessels over to these waters.
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.