The Cruise of the Elena: or, Yachting in the Hebrides

CHAPTER VI.
fast day at portree

In rough weather it requires no little courage to make one’s way in a steamer from Tobermory to Portree, the capital of the Isle of Skye. Our noble-hearted owner is very careful on this point. The Elena is a beautiful yacht, and he treats her tenderly. It is true, off Ardanamurchan Point we tumble about on the troubled waves of the Atlantic, and are glad to shelter in the quiet harbour of Oronsay, where we pass the night, after the Doctor’s lady has gone on shore in search of milk, whilst the Doctor smokes his cigar on the top of the highest spot he can find, and I interview the one policeman of the district, who is unable to put on his official costume, as he tells me it rained heavily yesterday, and his clothes are hung by the fire to dry. At Oronsay there are some six houses, including what is called an hotel. Here and there are some old tubs about us which would cause Mr. Plimsoll’s hair to stand on an end, and which seek in this stagnant spot shelter from the gale. Next morning we resume our voyage, leaving Oronsay with a very light heart – to quote a celebrated phrase – and in a few hours are at Portree, after passing the residence of the Macdonald who is a descendant of the Lord of the Isles, and such islands as Rum and Muck, and others with names equally unpoetical in English ears. From afar we watch the giant hills of the Isle of Skye, their summits wreathed in clouds. Mr. Black and Mr. Smith have between them much to answer for. They write of fine weather when the sun shines, when you may see ocean and heaven and earth all alike, serene and beautiful, when the novelty and the beauty of the scene excite wonder and praise and joy. It is then people are glad to come to the Isle of Skye, and find a charm in its lonely and rustic life, in its tranquil lochs and its purple hills; but I fancy in Skye it is as often wet as not; and when we were there the rain was in the ascendant, and one would, except for the name of the thing, have been often just as soon at home. Mr. Spurgeon once said to a Scotchman, as he was pointing out the grandeur of a Highland scene, that it seemed as if God, after He had finished making the world, got together all the spare rubbish, and shot it down there. Apparently something similar has been done with regard to Skye. You are bewildered with their number and variety – rocks to the right, rocks to the left, rocks before, rocks behind, rocks rising steep out of the sea with all sorts of rugged outlines, rocks sloping away into wide moors where no life is to be seen, or into lochs where the fish have it almost all to themselves. It is as well that it should be so. The land does not flow with milk and honey. The hut of a Skye peasant, with its turf walls, its bare and filthy floor, not the sweeter for the fact that the cow – if the owner is rich enough to have one – sleeps behind, its peat fire, with no chimney for the escape of smoke, its bare-legged boys and girls, its sombre men, its gaunt women, seemed to me the climax of human wretchedness.

It is with no common pleasure we get in our boat and are rowed ashore. It is a secular day with us in England. Here, in Portree, it is fast day, and all the shops are closed, and if we had not laid in a stock of mutton at Oronsay, it would have been fast day with us on board the Elena as well as with the pious people ashore. It seems to me there are services in the churches, either in English or in Gaelic, all day long. Of course I attend the Gaelic sermon. It is recorded of an old Duke of Argyll that on one occasion he was heard to declare that if he wanted to court a young lady he would talk French, as that was the language of flattery; that if he wished to curse and swear, he would have recourse to English; but that if he wanted to worship God, he would employ the Gaelic tongue. It may be that I heard a bad specimen, as the sermon or service did not seem to be particularly impressive; and as the preacher took a whole hour in which to expound and amplify his text, it must be admitted that, considering I did not understand a word of it, it was not a little wearying. I must, however, own that the people listened with the utmost attention, and that even such of them as were asleep all the time, slept in a quiet, subdued, and reverential manner. Indeed, they think much of religion in this Isle of Skye, and have a profound respect for the clergy. “Sure,” said an island guide one day, as he was speaking of a distinguished divine, whom he had attended during a summer tour – “sure he’s a verra godly man, he gave me a drink out o’ his ain flask.” And yet Portree is not a drinking place. There are two or three good hotels for the tourists, and little more. I saw no sign of intoxication on the evening of the fast day, but I did see churches filled, and all business suspended, and the sight of the Gaelic congregation was extremely interesting. The men in good warm home-spun frieze, the women with clean faces, and plaid shawls, and white caps, the younger ones with the last new thing in bonnets, looking as unlike the big, bare-footed damsels of the streets, and the old withered women whom you see coming in from the wide and dreary moor, as it is possible to imagine. In London heresy may prevail – sometimes, it is said, it crosses the Scottish border; but here, at any rate, since the Reformation has flourished the sincere milk of the Word. These men and women have their Gaelic Bible, and that they cling to as their guide in life, their comfort in adversity, their stay and support in death, and as the foundation of their hopes of immortal life and joy. An old gossiping writer, who died a year or two since, relates how a Presbyterian clergyman confessed to him that his congregation, who only used the Gaelic, were so well versed in theology, that it was impossible for him to go beyond their reach in the most profound doctrines of Christianity. Perhaps it is as well for some ministers whom I have heard, but should be sorry to name, that they have not Gaelic hearers. They must be terrible fellows to preach to, these men, fed on the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs of Solomon, and the rest of the Old and New Testaments. It is little to them what the philosophers think. Mill, and Spencer, and Tyndall, and Huxley they ignore. Dark-eyed, black-haired, with heads which you might knock against a rock without cracking, and with arms and legs that one would fancy could stop the Flying Dutchman, – evidently these are not the men to be tossed about with every wind of doctrine or cunning craftiness of men who lie in wait to deceive. Little pity would they have for the imperfect, weak-kneed brother, who, in the pulpit or out of it, could presume to doubt what they had learnt at their mothers’ knees. Up here in Skye, the religion known is bright and clear. The shops are of the poorest description, merely one room in a common dwelling, with a stone or earth floor. There is no paper published in all the Isle of Skye, but the people believe. You man of the nineteenth century, the heir of all the ages underneath the sun, would think little of the peasant of that wintry region. I believe he thinks as little of you as you do of him. You mock, and he believes; you scorn, and he worships; you stammer about Protoplasms and Evolutions, he says in his old Gaelic tongue, “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” There are many in London who would give all that they have if they could believe as these men and women of the North.

There were sermons again in the afternoon, sermons at night, sermons again next day, sermons on the coming Sunday, and to them came the fisher from the sea, the little tradesman from his shop, the ploughman from his croft, the milkmaid from her dairy, and the child from school; and it must further be remembered that these fasts are voluntary, and not in accordance with Acts of Parliament. Remember, also, that nothing is done to make the service attractive. It is simply the usual form of Presbyterian worship that is followed. The chapel was as plain as could be, and the singing was almost funereal. But, after all, the chapel was to be preferred to the empty streets, along which the wind raged like a hurricane, or to the contemplation of bleak rocks and angry seas. I can quite believe at Skye it is more comfortable to go to kirk than stay at home. Indeed, more than once on the night after, I felt perhaps my safest place would have been the kirk, as the wind came rushing in through a gully in the mountains, and kept the water in a constant fury. Really, from the deck of the Elena, Portree looked a very comfortable place, with the bay lined with buildings, and conspicuous among them all the Imperial Hotel, where the Empress of the French stayed while travelling in these parts. There is a good deal of excitement here as steamers rush in and out, and yachts lazily drop their anchors. It seems to me that the people quite appreciate the charms of their rocky island. Coming down the cliff, I saw a notice – “Furnished Apartments to Let” – and the price asked was quite conclusive on that head. Down by the harbour an enterprising Scot, who had been a gentleman’s servant in London, had established a store for the sale of bottled beer and such pleasant drinks, and seemed quite satisfied with the result of his experiment. At any rate, he preferred Portree to residence further inland, where he said even the very eggs were uneatable, so strongly did they taste of peat. My lady friend – rather, I should say, “our lady” – is as much affected by the gale that dolorous night as myself, and writes, plaintively begging me to excuse the irregularity of the metre on account of the rolling of the vessel, as follows: —

 
“Here off Skye,
The tide runs high;
Through hill and glen
Wind howls again.
The Coolan hills
No more we see,
Save through the mists
Of memory.
The sea birds float,
And seem to gloat,
With loud, shrill note,
Above our boat;
For they, like us,
Are forced to stay
For shelter in this friendly bay;
And now I seek, in balmy sleep,
Oblivion of the perils of the deep,
And wishing rocks and hills good night,
Let’s hope to-morrow’s log will be more bright.”
 

A cottage in the Hebrides is by no means a cottage ornée. Its walls are made of stone and clay of a tremendous thickness. On this wall, on a framework of old oars or old wood, are laid large turfs and a roof of thatch. In this roof the fowls nestle, and lay an infinite number of eggs; but all things inside and out are tainted with turf in a way to make them disagreeable. There is no chimney, and but one door, and the floor is the bare earth, with a bench for the family formed of earth or peat or stone. Beds and bedding are unknown. If the family keeps a cow, that has the best corner, for it is what the pig is to the Irishman, the gentleman that pays the rent. Small sheep, almost as horned and hardy as goats, may be met with, but never pigs. Pork seems an abomination in the eyes of the natives. Every cotter has a portion of the adjacent moor in which to cut peat sufficient to supply his wants. Out of the homespun wool the women make good warm garments – and they need them. Fish and porridge seem their principal diet, and it agrees with them. The girls are wonderfully fat and healthy; and consumption is utterly unknown. While I was at Stornoway, an old woman had just died in the workhouse considerably over a century old. As to agricultural operations, they are conducted on a most primitive scale. A few potatoes may here and there be seen struggling for dear life; and as the hay is cut when the sun shines, it is often in August or September that the farmer reaps his scanty harvest. You miss the flowers which hide the deformity of the peasant’s cottage in dear old England. It seems altogether in these distant regions, where the wild waves of the Atlantic dash and roar; where the days are dark with cloud; where you see nothing but rock, and glen, and moorland; where forests are an innovation, that man fights with the opposing powers of nature for existence under very great disadvantage.