Hugh Miller

CHAPTER I. Early Days--in Cromarty

EARLY DAYS--IN CROMARTY

'A wet sheet and a flowing sea, A wind that follows fast.'

ALLAN CUNNINGHAM

The little town of Cromarty lies perched on the southern shore of the entrance to the Firth of that name, and derives its name from the Cromachty, the crook or winding of the magnificent stretch of water known to Buchanan and the ancient geographers as the Ecclesiastical History, 'in which the very greatest navies may rest secure from storms.' In the history of Scotland the place is scarcely mentioned; and, indeed, in literary matters is known only from its association with the names of Hugh Miller and the rare figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, who had followed Charles II. to the 'crowning mercy' of Worcester fight, to land at last in the Tower. But for the silence of history the imagination or the credulity of the knight has atoned, by the production of a chronicle which rivals fairly the Ecclesiastical History of the old wandering Scottish scholar Dempster, who had in Italy patriotically found the Maccabees to be but an ancient Highland family. According to Urquhart, whose translation of Rabelais has survived his eccentric disquisitions in genealogy and history, Alypos, the forty-third lineal descendant of Japhet, was the first to discover Cromarty, and, when the Scythians under Ethus pitched on the moor bounding the parish on the north, they had been opposed by the grandson of Alcibiades; in proof of which Sir Thomas could triumphantly point to remaining signs of 'trenches and castrametation' with a confidence which would have won the heart of Jonathan Monkbarns in The Antiquary.

The population of the district is essentially a mixed one, and strongly retains the distinctive features of the Scandinavian and the Gael. From Shetland to the Ord of Caithness, the population of the coast is generally, if not wholly, of the former type. Beyond the Ord to the north of the Firth of Cromarty, we find a wedge of Celtic origin, while from the southern shore to the Bay of Munlochy the Scandinavian element again asserts itself. Thus, as Carlyle escaped being born an Englishman by but a few miles, the separation from the Celtic stratum was, in Miller's case, effected by the narrow single line of the one-mile ferry. In later years, at all events, he would refer with evident satisfaction to his Teutonic origin. There was, as we shall have occasion to notice, a certain Celtic lobe of imagination on the mother's side, but in his mental and political character the great leading features of the other race were undoubtedly predominant.

Whence Buchanan drew the possibilities of great fleets in the Firth of Cromarty is unknown unless he had in his memory some of the vessels of the old mariners, such as Sir Andrew Wood and the bold Bartons, or even the 'verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael' that 'cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea.' Certain it is that for many a day its position had marked out the town as the natural centre of a coasting trade, though shortly after the Union the commerce of the place which had been considerable had declined. The real commencement of the prosperity of the place was due to the energy of a native, William Forsyth, whose life Miller has sketched in a little memoir originally drawn up for the family, and subsequently republished in his Tales and Sketches under the title of 'A Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth century.' Forsyth had been appointed by the British Linen Company, established about 1746 in Edinburgh to promote the linen trade, its agent in the North throughout the whole district extending from Beauly to the Pentland Firth. The flax which was brought in vessels from Holland was prepared for use in Cromarty, and distributed by boats along the coast to Wick and Thurso. In the early days of the trade the distaff and the spindle were in general use; but Forsyth's efforts were successful in the introduction of the spinning-wheel, though the older means of production lasted far into this century in the west of Ross and in the Hebrides. The coasting schooners of the agent were the means of introducing into the town teas and wines, cloth, glass, Flemish tiles, Swedish iron, and Norwegian tar and spars. The rents of the landed proprietors were still largely paid in kind, or in the feudal labour by which the Baron of Bradwardine managed to eke out a rather scanty rent roll. In this way the mains or the demesnes of the laird were tilled and worked, and the Martinmas corn rents were stocked in a barn or 'girnal,' like that of the Antiquary's famous John of legend, often to cause a surplus to hang on the hands of the proprietor, until the idea was fortunately devised of exporting it to England or to Flanders for conversion into malt.

Ship-carpentry or boat-building upon a humble scale had been long established, and the coasting trade lay between the North, Leith, Newcastle, and London. The Scottish sailors then on the eastern coast enjoyed a strong reputation for piety, such as, we fear, their descendants have not maintained. John Gibb of Borrowstouness, the antiquary may remember as the founder of the now forgotten sect of Gibbites or 'sweet singers,' who denounced all tolls and statutory impositions, abolished the use of tobacco and all excisable articles, and finally made a pilgrimage to the Pentland Hills to see the smoke and the desolation of Edinburgh as foretold by their founder. The wardrobes and scrutoires of the local cabinet-maker, Donald Sandison, enjoyed a reputation through the North, and were, far into this century, found in the houses of Ross, together with the old eight-day clocks made in Kilwinning. But the great founder of its modern prosperity was George Ross, the son of a small proprietor in Easter Ross, who, after amassing a fortune as an army-agent as the friend of Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Grafton, had in 1772 purchased the estate of Cromarty. When he started his improvements in his native district, there was not a wheeled-cart in all the parish, and the knowledge of agriculture was rude. Green cropping and the rotation of crops were unknown, and in autumn the long irregular patches of arable land were intersected by stretches of moorland that wound deviously into the land, like the reaches of the Cromarty and the Beauly Firths. Though long opposed by tenacious local prejudices, he at length triumphed over the backward habits of the people, who yoked their oxen and their horses by the tail, and who justified their action by an appeal to the argument from design, and by a query as to what other end in creation such tails had been provided? Ross also established in the town a manufactory for hempen cloth, and erected what at the time was the largest ale-brewery in the North. A harbour was built at his own expense, and a pork trade of a thriving nature set on foot, wheat reared, the rotation of crops introduced, a nail and spade manufactory set up, and lace manufactures brought from England. Such, then, was the condition of Cromarty at the beginning of the present century.

Far different was that of the surrounding Highlands. Protestantism had been at an early period introduced into Ross and Sutherland by its Earls and by Lord Reay. The Earl of Sutherland had been the first to subscribe the National Covenant in Greyfriars; and, after the suppression of the first Jacobite rising, Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, as commissioner of the confiscated estates, had set himself to the creation of parishes and presbyteries in remote districts, where the Church of Scotland before had been unknown. In the better class of houses the old Highland fireplace, like a millstone, still occupied its place in the centre, with no corresponding aperture in the roof for the smoke. In the Western districts the greatest distress prevailed, for the country was at the parting of the ways in a time of transition. About the beginning of the present century the results of the French Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. The Sutherland clearances forced the ejected Highlanders to Canada and the United States, while the poorer classes drifted down from the interior to the already overpopulated shore-line, where they eked out, as crofters or as fishermen, a precarious existence without capital or the acquired experience of either occupation, and laid the seeds of the future crofter question. The manufacture of kelp, which for a time rendered profitable to many a Highland proprietor his barren acres on a rocky shore, was not destined to long survive the introduction of the principles of Free Trade. The potato blight succeeded finally in reducing the once fairly prosperous native of the interior to chronic poverty and distress.

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