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The Modern Middle East A Political History since the
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THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
The Modern Middle East

A Political History since the First World War

MEHRAN KAMRAVA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2005 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kamrava, Mehran, 1964–.

The modern Middle East : a political history since the First World
War / Mehran Kamrava.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–520-24149-5 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0–520-24150-9 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Middle East—History—20th century. I. Title.
DS62.8.K365 2005
956.04—dc22 2004008821

Manufactured in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 
To Melisa and Dilara
Contents

List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

PART I. A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST 7

1. From Islam to the Great War 9

2. From Territories to Independent States 35

3. The Age of Nationalism 67

4. The Arab-Israeli Wars 107

5. The Iranian Revolution 138

6. The Gulf Wars and Beyond 169

PART II. ISSUES IN MIDDLE EASTERN POLITICS 213

7. The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 215

8. The Challenge of Economic Development 257

9. States and Their Opponents 283

10. The Question of Democracy 331

11. Challenges Facing the Middle East 359

Notes 377
Bibliography 429
Index 457
Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Turkish women in a late nineteenth-century harem 25

2. Women in Algiers in the 1880s 48
3. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Reza Shah Pahlavi confer 59
4. Female members of the Iraqi Home Guard march
in Baghdad, 1959 71
5. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the state of Israel 77
6. Tel Aviv, 1948, Israeli women take an oath to join the Haganah 78
7. Egyptian women celebrate Nasser’s announcement
of women’s right to vote, 1956 93
8. Egyptian boys and girls receive military training during the
Suez Canal crisis, 1956 95
9. Israeli soldiers celebrate capturing Jerusalem in the 1967 War 120
10. Egyptian soldiers celebrate crossing the Suez Canal
in the 1973 War 130
11. Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s Islamic revolution 153
12. Ten years after Khomeini’s death, his legacy remains strong in Iran 165
13. President Saddam Hussein 175
14. Female Iraqi soldiers express support for the occupation of Kuwait 184
15. Iraqi forces on the “highway of death” 190
16. Shi‘ite Iraqi women mourn after the Gulf War in 1991 192
17. Osama bin Laden’s videotaped messages were broadcast
on Al-Jazeera 203
18. Taliban rule brought ruin to Afghan lives and cities 204
19. U.S. forces invade Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime 206
20. Saddam Hussein’s statue is toppled in Baghdad 209
21. British occupation forces search Iraqi women for weapons 210
22. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and president of the PNA 228
23. Palestinian women argue with an Israeli soldier
during the first intifada 229
24. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat sign the Oslo Accords 244
25. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with a photo of Theodor Herzl
in the background 250
26. Women march in support of Hamas 252

MAPS

1. The modern Middle East xiv

2. The Sykes-Picot Agreement 41
3. French and British Mandates after World War I 44
4. The United Nations Partition Plan 80
5. Territories captured by Israel in 1967 119
Tables

1. Jewish Immigration in Each Aliya 76

2. Phases in Palestinian Nationalism 85
3. Palestinian Refugees of the 1948 War 88
4. Troop and Tank Strength in the Second Gulf War (January 1991) 187
5. Palestinian Population by Place of Residence 225
6. Post-1967 Settlements in the Occupied Territories 236
7. GNP Growth Rate in Selected Developing Countries, 1970–95 262
8. Growth of GDP in Selected Middle Eastern Countries, 1980–2001 263
9. Ideal State Types in the Middle East 284
10. Population Characteristics in the Middle East 361
11. Fertility Rates in the Middle East 362
12. Determinants of Fertility in Islamic Countries 363
13. Foreign Labor Force in the Oil Monarchies 364
14. Citizen and Noncitizen Population in the Oil Monarchies 365
15. Age Structure in the Middle East, 2002 366
16. Per Capita Water Availability and the Ratio of
Supply and Demand in the Middle East 370

xi
Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book would not have been possible with-
out the kindness and generosity of a number of individuals. I greatly ben-
efited from the research assistance of Annmarie Hunter and Emily
Smurthwaite. I am most grateful for their diligence and their enthusiasm
for this project from start to finish. Terrence Thorpe, another outstanding
student, also read several chapters and gave valuable suggestions. Bradford
Dillman, Manochehr Dorraj, Nader Entessar, Mark Gasiorowski, Nikki
Keddie, and Mahmood Monshipouri kindly read all or some of the chapters
and gave invaluable and insightful advice. Of course, any omissions or
shortcomings remain entirely my fault. Work on Chapter 8 was partly
funded by a generous grant from the College of Social and Behavioral Sci-
ences at California State University, Northridge.
This book is the outgrowth of more than a decade of teaching and lec-
turing on the politics and history of the Middle East. In the process, I have
learned a great deal from the innumerable students who have shared with
me their insights, experiences, criticisms, and comments. Both directly and
indirectly, their input is no doubt reflected here. For that, I am grateful.
Chapter 9 is an expanded, much revised version of an article that origi-
nally appeared in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1998, pp. 63–85.
I am grateful to TWQ’s editor, Shahid Qadir, for permission to quote
extensively from the article here.
My wife, Melisa Çanli, deserves special thanks. Over the nearly five
years that it took to write this book, she put up with my many solitary
hours behind the computer, my frequent mood swings, and my far-too-
often frowns. All along, she never wavered in her loving support for my
work. As I was in the final stages of preparing the book, she gave birth to
our beautiful daughter, Dilara. As a meager token of my love and gratitude,
I dedicate this book to them both.
 TURKEY

TUNISIA SYRIA IRAN

MOROCCO LEBANON IRAQ
ISRAEL KUWAIT

JORDAN BAHRAIN

ALGERIA QATAR
LIBYA
EGYPT
SAUDI UAE
OMAN
ARABIA
MAURITANIA

YEMEN

SUDAN

0 200 400 600 800 miles

Map 1. The modern Middle East.

Introduction

This book examines the political history of the contemporary Middle East.
Although it focuses primarily on the period since the demise of the
Ottoman Empire, shortly after World War I, it includes some discussion of
pre-Ottoman and Ottoman histories to better clarify the background and
the context in which modern Middle Eastern political history has taken
shape. The book uses a broad conception of the “Middle East” as a geo-
graphic area that extends from Iran in the east to Turkey, Iraq, the Arabian
peninsula, the Levant (Lebanon and Syria), and North Africa, including the
Maghreb, in the west. Maghreb is the Arabic word for “occident” and has
historically been used to describe areas west of Egypt. In modern times, it
has come to refer to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Libya is also sometimes
included as part of the Maghreb, but it is more commonly grouped with
Egypt as belonging to North Africa.
Although there are vast differences between and within the histories,
cultures, traditions, and politics of each of these regions within the Middle
East, equally important and compelling shared characteristics unify the
region. By far the most important of these are language, ethnicity, and reli-
gion. Much of Middle Eastern identity is wrapped around the Arabic lan-
guage. Poetry and storytelling have historically been viewed as elevated art
forms. As the gifted Fouad Ajami has observed, “[P]oetry, it has been said,
was (and is) to the Arabs what philosophy was to the Greeks, law to the
Romans, and art to the Persians: the repository and purest expression of
their distinctive spirit.”1 Even in places where it is not the national language
and is not widely spoken, as in Iran and in Turkey, Arabic, the language of
the Quran, permeates life with its many expressions and phrases.
Another common bond in the Middle East is Arab ethnic identity. From
Iraq in the north down to the Arabian peninsula and west all the way to
1
2 / INTRODUCTION

Morocco, ethnic Arabs predominate. There are, of course, significant clus-

ters of other ethnic groups. A majority of Iranians are Persians, and Turks
are predominant in Turkey. Apart from the so-called “Arab-Israelis”—
Palestinians who found themselves in Israel’s borders when the country
was born in 1948—Jews are the dominant group in Israel. As Chapter 7
discusses, however, there is a debate as to whether Jews are members of an
ethnic group or believers in a religious faith. Additionally, there are sev-
eral “stateless” ethnic groups, by far the largest being the Kurds, who are
mostly in southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq, and north-
eastern Syria. There are also sizable Berber communities throughout the
Maghreb. But despite these diverse ethnic communities, much of the Arab
world remains ethnically homogenous and strongly identifies with its
ethnicity.
An even stronger bond uniting the region is religion, with some 97 per-
cent of Middle Easterners identifying themselves as Muslim. That Islam is
a whole way of life and not just a religion is a cliché. But regardless of their
ethnicity, where they live, and what language they speak, the faithful share
a compelling set of beliefs and rituals that transcend national boundaries
with remarkable ease. At its strictest, Islam is austere and exacting. But even
in its most liberal settings and interpretations, it permeates the life of the
Middle East in ways few other phenomena do. Its relentless emphasis on
community, its injunctions on the one billion faithful to all face Mecca in
prayer and to fast together in the same month, its deep penetration of lan-
guages far removed from Arabic, its reverence for the Prophet Muhammad,
who called for submission (Islam) to God (Allah)—all of these reinforce
the sense of belonging to a whole far bigger than its individual, national
components. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, Islam
as a source of cross-national unity has steadily lost ground to state-
specific nationalism, but it remains a powerful source of common
identification among fellow Muslims around the world, especially in
the Middle East.
In addition to the important, uniting phenomena of ethnicity, language,
and religion are the curse and the blessings of a common historical her-
itage. Much of the Middle East, with the exceptions of Iran and Morocco,
experienced centuries of Ottoman rule, generally from the mid–sixteenth
century up until the waning years of the nineteenth century. The
Ottomans’ hold on the Middle East was often tenuous and frequently
interrupted. Over the centuries, however, for better or for worse, from
their capital in Istanbul they managed to leave their mark on such far-off
places as Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis. Once the Ottomans were gone, the
 INTRODUCTION / 3

British and the French took their place, leaving on their colonial posses-
sions their own distinctive marks. Perhaps the biggest relic of British rule,
aside from the drawing of artificial national borders, was the institution of
monarchy, which they secured in almost all the lands they ruled, from
Egypt to Jordan, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula. The French colonial
inheritance was less political and more cultural, although in the Levant
they left behind republican systems that mimicked their own. For the
French what mattered most was the superiority of their civilization,
and they ensured its posterity by making French the lingua franca of
the Maghreb. Today, urban Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians speak
and study in French with as much ease as they converse in Arabic. This,
of course, is the case with millions of others in Francophone Africa
as well.
Nevertheless, the powerful forces uniting the Middle East—religion,
ethnicity, and language—have at times also been sources of division and
conflict. In many historical episodes subtle differences in dialect or ethnic
identity have served as powerful catalysts for the articulation of national
or subnational loyalties and even political mobilization. The Middle East, it
must be remembered, is far from monolithic and homogenous. Its differ-
ences have been a source of both strength and inspiration and, at times,
violent bloodletting; witness the tragedy of Lebanon or the torment meted
out to the Kurds.
In studying the Middle East, it is often tempting to overlook the
region’s rich diversity in geography, politics, and culture. Any book pur-
porting to examine the political history of the modern Middle East is
bound to remain at a certain level of generalization and not pay the neces-
sary attention to the many, multifaceted differences within the various
Middle Eastern countries and communities. This book, I am afraid, is no
exception. I have taken care throughout to highlight the existence of dif-
ferences, both between and within the countries and the peoples discussed,
and I hope that the reader remains mindful of them as well. Nevertheless,
I feel compelled to apologize to those groups whose identities or destinies
may not be as thoroughly covered here as they should have been.
When the “modern” era of the Middle East begins is a matter of some
debate. For our purposes here, I have taken it to be in the 1920s, after the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when state systems as we have come to
know them today began to be established throughout the region. But the
political and historic phenomena that the Ottomans represented had roots
far deeper in Middle Eastern and Islamic history than the early decades of
the twentieth century. I decided, therefore, to go further back, much
4 / INTRODUCTION

further back, and briefly retell the story of the Middle East since the
appearance of Islam and how it shaped subsequent historical events in
the region. Islam dramatically altered the life and historic evolution of the
Middle East, but its appearance by no means marks the beginning of Mid-
dle Eastern history. As Chapter 1 makes clear, this was an arbitrary starting
date, for I had to draw the line somewhere, and I chose to do so with Islam’s
beginning. Had this been a work on the complete political history of the
Middle East, it would have had to start with the earliest days of human
civilization, along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates in modern-
day Iraq.
In addition to simple convenience and an arbitrary starting date, a
deeper logic guides the choice of the chapters that follow and the topics
they discuss. Politics and history are both dynamic and changeable
processes. Thus the examination of either one in a snapshot is incomplete
without attention to successive past developments. Contemporary political
issues in the Middle East are deeply rooted in past historic and political
events: consider, for example, three of the most central issues, the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict, economic development, and the nature of prevailing state-
society relations within each country. The present manifestation of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict resulted from the outcome of the Arab-Israeli
wars, which were a product of competing varieties of nationalism, shaped
by the machinations of Western colonial powers, who had gone to the Mid-
dle East once the Ottomans collapsed, and so on. The same line of inquiry
could be applied to current state-society relations in the Middle East or to
each country’s level of economic development.
On the basis of this logic, the book is divided into two parts, one focus-
ing on political history and the other on some key issues that resonate
throughout the region. Part I lays out the historical context for the Middle
East. It begins with a sweeping chapter on the history of the Middle East
from the earliest days, when geographic considerations and military con-
quests led to the establishment first of cities and then of civilizations
around them, up until the demise of the region’s last major imperial power,
the Ottomans. Chapter 2 continues the historical narrative, concentrating
on the period between the two world wars and looking at the nature and
trials of independence and state building. The emergence and rapid spread
of nationalism throughout the Middle East is discussed in Chapter 3,
and the two resulting Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, each spectacular
in its own way, are examined in Chapter 4. Nationalism, state building, and
political consolidation (or lack thereof) led to one of the most dramatic
developments in contemporary Middle East, the Iranian revolution of
Other documents randomly have
different content
of what the race may grow to in its new home, when Old Scotland
has been given up to American millionaires, English tourists, and
German waiters. Of such tuneful transatlantic Scotians one need not
inquire too curiously whether “Annie Laurie” or “Robin Adair” would
find themselves at home in kilts; but they ought to know what a blot
on their fame is the tartan of the Gordons, my hereditary enemies,
whose flagrant stripes brand them as no better, in their beginning,
than Lowland evictors. One thinks twice about pursuing an ancestral
feud against foemen seven feet high; but I must say that if these
minstrels were real Gordons, they might well chant masses for the
souls of many a Celt who never had the chance to sing:

From the lone shieling on the misty island,

Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
 CHAPTER VIII
THE OUTER HEBRIDES
Skye is now the “show island” of the west coast, easily invaded by its
ferries, at one being only a musket-shot’s distance from the
mainland. But comparatively few tourists trust themselves across the
stormy Minches, Great and Little, to visit the Long Island, more
foreign to thriving Scotland than Jersey to England. One used to be
told that the Minch was La Manche, the Highland Channel, as the
Kyles so frequent here called cousins with straits of Calais; but a
pundit of the Oxford Dictionary shakes his head at these as at most
popular interpretations of place-names. The 120-mile chain of
islands making a breakwater for north-western Scotland, with the
Sunday name of the Outer Hebrides, is commonly spoken of as the
Long Island, that once indeed formed one stretch of land, and still at
some parts is cut only by fords passable at low tide. The name Long
Island should perhaps be restricted to the northern mass of Lewis
and Harris, below which, across the Sound of Harris, the smaller
separate isles taper out southwards like the tail of a kite, tipped by
the lighthouse on Bernera shining thirty miles across the Atlantic, the
Beersheba of this archipelago whose Dan is the Butt of Lewis.
 THE STANDING STONES OF CALLERNISH, ISLAND OF LEWIS

It is no wonder if tourists do not often get so far, when till our

own day the law had to make a long arm to reach the Hebrides, and
the Protestant Reformation only begins to set foot on some of those
remote strongholds of old ways and thoughts. Nine tourists out of
ten, indeed, would find little to repay them for the tossing of the
Minch. The archæologist may wander his difficult way among
monuments of the past, standing stones, “doons,” “tullochs,” “Picts’
houses,” crosses, and shrines whose site is often marked only by a
gathering of lonely graves, for even of the chapels and hermitages
recorded in print but a small proportion can now be traced in the
Western Islands. The rich stranger encloses these poor islands for
his deer, narrowing and debasing the hard life of the people. Here
and there snug inns invite anglers to sport such as Izaak Walton
never dreamt of. Some parts, as Harris, show oases of real Highland
scenery. But more often the Outer Hebrides present a bleak and
monotonous aspect of rock, water, sand, and bog, where “the sea is
all islands, and the land is all lakes.” Their common features on half
the days of the week are thus described by Robert Buchanan, who
was no bookworm to be afraid of a wet jacket. “A dreary sky, a
dreary fall of rain. Long low flats covered with their own damp
breath, through which the miserable cattle loomed like shadows.
Everywhere lakes and pools, as thickly sown among the land as
islands amid the Pacific waters. Huts wretched and chilly, scarcely
distinguishable from the rock-strewn marshes surrounding them. To
the east the Minch rolling dismal waters towards the far-off heads of
Skye; to the west the ocean, foaming at the lips and stretching
barren and desolate into the rain-charged clouds.”
The Long Island has cheerfuller prospects in its blinks of sunshine,
and moments of loveliness caught by William Black, who is its Turner
in words, while he seems to have a little distorted the human figures
he sets against such effective backgrounds. One who has his eye for
the scenery of sea and sky will not call these shores dismal. Another
Scottish novelist tells us of the barest southern heath:

Yet shall your ragged moor receive

The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn.

But on windy Hebrides there is hardly a tree to shiver, where

docken, broom, or thistle may be the best substitute for a switch,
and every drifting log or plank of shipwreck washed up from the
Atlantic is treasured to make the rafters of a human nest. A woman
brought to the mainland had no conception for trees but giant
cabbages; and when a basket of tomatoes came on shore an old
Highlander was excited to see “apples” for once in his life. The wild
carrot is the finest fruit that grows here naturally among the scent of
the heather. Spring coming so “slowly up this way,” some writers
have said in their haste that flowers are rare in the Hebrides; but
more patient observers like Miss Gordon Cumming and Miss
Goodrich Freer give a long list of humble blooms spangling the
ground in their season, among them the sort of convolvulus found
only on Eriskay, said to have been planted by Charles Edward, who
on that rocky islet made his first landing, lodged in a house that
stood till the other day. The damp hollows nurse luxuriant ferns; the
rushy lochans show often dappled with water-lilies and fringed with
gay weeds. The Western Isles are better off for curling-ponds than
for ice. The winter climate is chilly and damp rather than cold; and
the rainfall of course varies with the height of the islands, the flat
marshy moors being spared by overcast skies that burst more freely
on mountainous shores.
The cliffs and the waters—salt, fresh, and brackish—are haunts of
innumerable wild-fowl and sea-birds. The cheery solo of lark or
lapwing may be drowned by noisy concerts in which MacCulloch
could distinguish “the short shrill treble of the Puffins and Auks, the
melodious and varied notes of the different Gulls, the tenors of the
Divers and Guillemots, and the croaking basses of the Cormorants.”
On the west coast a frequent feature is dunes of white sand piled up
by the Atlantic waves, pleasing to the eye but destructive as those of
the Gascon Landes, for if not anchored down by bent grass or other
hardy vegetation they are apt to drift over the interior, devastating
whole districts like the Culbin sand fringe of fertile Moray, said to
have been let loose through the poor people stripping off such weak
fetters for fuel.
Passionately as the islanders love their homes, they owe little to a
thankless soil. The bulk of them are half croft-farmers, half fishers,
the petty agricultural labours falling chiefly to the women’s share,
while the men alternate between spells of nautical adventure and
lazy weather-watching. The wives and daughters have the worst of
it, who in their hard daily tasks soon grow haggard, their bright eyes
bleared by the smoke of the beehive huts in which they literally
gather round the fire, amid furniture and utensils that often would
not seem fit for a gipsy camp. In these hovels, hardly to be
distinguished from the peat-stacks that shelter them, may still be
found the crooked spade, the quern mill, the cruisie lamp, and other
time-honoured implements; and in some parts rough home-made
pottery is but slowly displaced. The condition of such dwellings is
deplorable from a sanitarian’s point of view. In spite of the fresh air
in which alone they are rich, whole families are often swept away by
consumption. Their food is mainly potatoes and oatmeal, fish and
unfermented bread, with milk and eggs as luxuries. Meat they know
only in the windfall of “braxy,” unless a sheep be killed for a rare
treat at Christmas or New Year. What did they do before potatoes
were planted in the islands, much against the people’s will; and what
do they do in seasons when both the potatoes and the fishing fail
them, as happens now and then? No wonder that they are pitied or
abused as indolent, languid, listless, shiftless, downcast. In other
climes, when well fed, they may be found working hard enough and
speaking their minds only too hotly; but the lotus-eating of these
mild-eyed, melancholy islanders does not put much heart into them.
Peat is their only fuel, dug from the shallow mines that chequer their
moors; and even for that they may have to reckon closely with the
landlord.
In Tiree—which indeed does not belong to the Outer Hebrides,
lying close to Johnson’s Coll—peat fails as well as wood, so coal has
to be expensively imported; but there, as compensation, the flat
ground is less poor, and the people can take livelier joy in their toil.
This island makes a contrast with South Uist, described as the most
miserable of all by Miss Goodrich Freer, the latest and not the least
sympathetic explorer of the Isles, who on Tiree found hopefuller
colouring of life on a soil lying so low that it has been threatened
with inundation by the waves as well as by the sand:—
The very existence of the island of South Uist is itself a tragedy
which shames our civilisation. Nowhere in our proud Empire is
there a spot more desolate, grim, hopelessly poverty-stricken. It is
a wilderness of rocks and of standing water, on which, in the
summer, golden lichen and spreading water-lilies mock the ghastly
secrets of starvation and disease that they conceal. The water is
constantly utterly unfit for drinking purposes. There is not a tree
on the island, and one wonders how the miserable cattle and
sheep contrive to live on the scant grey herbage. The land of the
poor is not enclosed; and to preserve the tiny crops from the
hungry wandering cows and horses they have to be continually
watched, and as half an acre of bere may be distributed over five
acres of bog and rock, the waste of human labour is considerable.
The potatoes often rot in the wet ground, and I have seen the
grain and hay lying out as late as October from the impossibility
of getting it dried. Excellent and abundant freshwater trout there
is, but that is not for the poor; nor the rabbits, nor the game; and
even the sea-wrack, formerly a means of living, is now hardly
worth the getting. Nevertheless, when the “tangle” comes on the
beach—provided the factor gives them leave to get it at all, which
by no means necessarily follows—men, women, and children
crowd down with earliest daylight, and work on by moonlight or
starlight, with the hideous intensity of starvation. The houses of
the poor, especially of the cottars, are inconceivably wretched.
They are of undressed stone, piled together without mortar, and
thatched with turf. Often they have no chimney, sometimes no
window; the floor is a bog, and a few boxes, with a plank
supported by stones for a seat, is all the furniture except the
unwholesome shut-in beds. Cleanliness is impossible, with soot
coating the roof overhead, wet mud for floor, and, except in the
very rare fine days, chickens, and perhaps a sick sheep or even a
cow or horse, for fellow-occupants. To the old Boisdale and
Clanranald chiefs with all their faults the people were ready to
forgive much; but the Highlander, at best conservative, exclusive,
distrustful of strangers, becomes when oppressed, starving,
terror-stricken, unreasonable in prejudice, intolerant of change,
perverse it may be in refusing to do his part in establishing
mutual understanding. Only those who have sojourned among
them, not in the cosy fishing hotel at Loch Boisdale far away from
the villages, but who have established personal relations with the
people in their own homes, can even guess at the utter hopeless
dreariness of their lives. The chronic dyspepsia which
accompanies the ever-present teapot, the wan anæmic faces of
women and children, the continual absence from the island of all
able-bodied men, make the human element almost as depressing
as the flat, grey, glimmering, wet landscape.
 A HEBRIDEAN CROFTER’S HOUSE

The seaweeds, that here make submarine gardens reminding Miss

Gordon Cumming of her wanderings among islands of coral and
palm, count not a little among the harvests of the Hebrides. Several
kinds eke out the people’s food, and are freely given as fodder or
medicine to starveling cattle, which have to be fed up on richer
pastures before coming into Lowland markets. This crop of the sea
goes to manure the thin soil, for which purpose also are used fish
bones, and the smoke-soaked thatch of the houses; and even the
drifting sands in the long run, like far-blighting lava, may help to
fresh fertility through the lime of powdered shells. Seaweed is the
abundant raw material of an industry that for a time brought money
and population to the West Highlands, the manufacture of kelp, chief
supply of soda till Le Blanc’s chemical process showed how it could
be made out of salt; then Free Trade opened our markets to a
ruinous competition of barilla and other foreign supplies, so that in
the first generation of last century the price of kelp had fallen from
£22 to £2 a ton. Again its value was enhanced through the making
of iodine used in aniline dyes; but again chemistry and foreign
competition conspired to beat down the Highland product, in spite of
the gallant struggle of a Sassenach, Mr. E. C. Stanford, who for a
generation laboured to show what various benefits might be won
from the “flowers of the sea.” On Tiree and elsewhere another
attempt is being made to revive this once thriving industry, too often
represented by deserted kelp kilns along the shore, which future
antiquaries may associate with the worship of a pagan deity whose
mysterious symbols were £ s. d. I leave to such puzzled scholars the
excursus on the Fiscal Question suggested at this point.
Donald does not take kindly to handicrafts. The only manufacture
of the Hebrides now is the so-called Harris tweedings and stockings,
made all over these islands, both for home use and for a sale much
fostered of late by aristocratic patronage. The genuine article is
imitated by machine-woven cloth of inferior texture; and aniline dyes
too much come into use in place of those cunningly extracted from
roots, bark, heather, and seaweed. But in humble homes wool is still
spun, woven, and dressed with songs and ceremonies handed down
through many generations. Miss Goodrich Freer gives a pretty
picture of a fulling “bee,” where some ten women handle the web to
the accelerated rhythm of the same choruses as an older traveller
heard rising in excitement “till you would imagine a troop of female
demoniacs to have been assembled,” a scene that again has
suggested the Fates weaving their strands of human destiny. The
house is crammed with spectators; and in the reek of peat, paraffin,
and tobacco smoke the cloth takes on fresh odours to overcome the
original perfume of fish oil, tallow, and other dressings. But the
London doctors who would frighten us with the bogey of microbes
from these distant homes might be glad to inoculate their patients
with the bloom of some ill-fed Highland lasses. The composition of
wedding cake, it is said, should not be examined into too curiously;
and perhaps we can wear the waterproof tweed of the Isles more at
ease for not having been present at its preparation.
The trade of the islanders is fishing, to which most of them are
bound from boyhood, many wandering into far seas like their Viking
forefathers; and the girls, too, make long excursions to serve as fish
gutters and curers for the season in eastern ports, even as far as
Norfolk Yarmouth. Ling, cod, and lobsters yield a valuable harvest;
mussels and cockles are sent to metropolitan markets as relishes, on
which the island folk will sometimes be reduced to live. Prince
Charlie’s first meal on Scottish ground was off such vulgar shell-fish.
He was to fare worse before all was done; and perhaps he might
agree with one of his chroniclers—“Give me nettles and shell-fish in
the North before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.”
 SHELLING MUSSELS, CROMARTY

The chief game of their seas is, of course, the herring, which
appear off the Hebridean coasts early in the season; and there may
be an aftermath in autumn, the more enterprising fishers in summer
following the shoals round to the east coast. I have played the
amateur herring-fisher on the warmer west side; then I no longer
wondered why these men armour themselves in such thick clothing
that once overboard they would have little chance of escaping Davy
Jones, even had they learned to swim. That, I fancy, is an art not
much cultivated in the Hebrides. Once a crony of mine and I got
ourselves rowed off an island shore for a dive into deep water; and
over forty years I remember how the boatman’s boy stared at our
throwing off jackets and kilts, and the excited cry with which he
jumped up, exclaiming in Gaelic, “They will be drowned!” To
youngsters a night in a fishing-boat makes a pleasing taste of
adventure, if the waves leave them appetite for coffee sweetened by
treacle, and mackerel caught and cooked off-hand to be eaten with
the hard biscuits that serve also for plates; but the close air of the
“den” may be a trying experience for unseasoned landlubbers. Then
it is a fine sight in the chill dawn, when the phosphorescent glow of
floats and cordage pales before the sheen of the fish hauled up in
wave after wave of silver; and one can catch the melancholy cheep
of herrings as they flop out of the meshes of the net to swell a
glittering, wriggling pile among which the men move like mermaids,
their legs and arms encrusted with a gleam of scales. MacCulloch
noted the phosphorescence of summer nights in these seas, offering
splendid phenomena to eyes more often keen for their profits than
their wonders:—
A stream of fire ran off on each side from the bows, and the
ripple of the wake was spangled with the glow-worms of the
deep. Every oar dropped diamonds, every fishing line was a line
of light, the iron cable went down a torrent of flame, and the
plunge of the anchor resembled an explosion of lightning. When it
blew a gale the appearance was sometimes terrific, and the whole
atmosphere was illuminated, as if the moon had been at the full.
 In calms, nothing could exceed the loveliness of the night, thus
enlightened by thousands of lamps, which, as they sailed slowly
by, twinkled and were again extinguished at intervals, on the
glassy and silent surface of the water.
Miss Goodrich Freer gives a picturesque scene of Roman Catholic
islanders gathering at their little chapel to consecrate the going forth
from which some of them may never return. Protestant fishermen
will be not less earnest in their prayers; but their services want the
sense of intimate relation between heaven and earth that adorns a
more childlike faith. Religion is with them too apt to take the form of
bitter bigotry on the score of the Sabbatarian observance which they
have turned into a sacrament, though on some coasts of Scotland
ministers have still to wink at the time-honoured notion that Sunday
is a lucky day for setting sail. Miss Gordon Cumming tells the story of
an angry gathering of West Highlanders at Strome Ferry to hinder
east coast fishermen from despatching a glut of herring by special
Sunday train, when a couple of hundred policemen had to be
brought from all parts of Scotland to protect the Sabbath-breaking
railway against the Sabbath-breaking rioters. But if she meant to
point a moral of Highland orthodoxy, I can remember a similar
display of violence at an east coast harbour about the same time. A
profane boat having broken the Sabbath by salting her Saturday
catch within sacred hours, she was assaulted and wrecked at the
quay in the light of day, before the eyes of half the town. The
ringleaders being brought to trial, the authorities were in some
quandary as to what might follow their punishment; but this anxiety
proved quite superfluous, for on the clearest evidence, the facts
being of public fame and the criminals as notable as the provost and
bailies, a pious or prudent jury brought in a verdict of not guilty.
Early summer is the busy time of the Long Island, when
Stornoway, Loch Boisdale, the Castle Bay of Barra, and other havens
make rendezvous for hundreds of boats of various rigs, and the
population is increased by dealers from foreign shores, with many
thousands of fish curers and gutters, who, encamped in huts and
bothies, are the followers of this fleet, attended also by mobs of
greedy sea-gulls, where the waters will for once be smoothed by a
scum of oily fish refuse. The shoals of herring are preyed on by
hateful dog-fish and other shark-like creatures; also by whales,
which sometimes fall a fat prize to the fishermen. Indeed, there has
lately been an attempt to carry on a regular whale fishery from
Harris, causing a stench vigorously assailed as a nuisance; and at a
former time it appears that whales bulked largely in Long Island
fare.
The cream of the herring fishing goes to trawlers and other well-
found craft from richer shores of our islands. The fish-curing
business, too, like everything that needs capital, is much in the
hands of strangers, the export being largely to the Baltic. The
Hebridean boatmen live from hand to mouth, setting draughts of
luck against blank days and weeks for which their competitors are
better provided. The worst of it is, if all observers may be trusted,
that being brought into touch with these rivals has a demoralising
effect on the Celt, even as the trousers or houses of civilisation are
apt to spread dirt and disease among African savages. The native
Highland virtues seem to flourish best in spots secluded from contact
with the prosperous Sassenach, whose wholesale commercialism
sets a copy for retail cheatery, when the islander who would share
his last crust with a neighbour learns to look on gain won,
quocumque modo, from the masterful intruder as nought but
“retribution due.”
Smaller satellites left out of account, the southernmost of the
Outer Isles is Barra, whose seven miles’ length of rocky shore opens
into the harbour of Castle Bay. Here, covering an islet, stand the
sturdy ruins of Kisimul Castle, pronounced by Miss Gordon Cumming
the most picturesque thing in the Hebrides, that recalls Chillon by
the way it rises out of the water against a hilly background. This was
an old fastness of the M’Neills, supplanted by other lords who have
never been able to wean the people from their clannishness, nor
from their Roman Catholic faith, though they have long ceased to
play the pirate and the wrecker. The spoil of wrecking, here once as
welcome as in the Orkneys, was lost when the Hebrides came to be
studded with lighthouses, like that on Barra Head, which is a
separate islet, alias Bernera, and that upon the perilous reef of
Skerryvore towards Tiree, the masterpiece of Alan Stevenson, uncle
to a writer whose name would shine far out into the world.
The larger South Uist shares also the poverty and the faith of
Barra, its most prosperous spot being the fishing station of Loch
Boisdale in the south-east corner. The east coast is cut by other
deep inlets, over which Ben More and Hekla rise to a height of about
2000 feet, names making monuments of the rival races of Gael and
Norseman. Among these wild Highlands, the early home of Flora
Macdonald, Prince Charlie found one of his cave refuges, still hard to
seek out; and Miss Goodrich Freer reports a lonely loch in Glen
Uisnish as rivalling the now famous Coruisk of Skye.
A link between North and South Uist, accessible from either at low
water, is the island of Benbecula, “Hill of the Ford,” divided between
Protestants and Catholics. North Uist is Protestant, and travellers
who lean to the picturesque view of religion have to admit that it
looks rather more prosperous than its Catholic neighbour. The chief
place here is Loch Maddy, a commodious harbour on which stands
the hamlet capital of the island. Its chief interest seems the
extraordinary reticulation of the inlets, Loch Maddy, a sheet of ten
square miles, being said to have a coastline of 300 miles; but its
bens are only benjies, no higher than some hills in sight of Plymouth
Sound. Its shores are much broken into peninsulas and satellite
islets that might be let out to would-be Robinson Crusoes.
Across the strait of Harris is reached the Long Island proper,
commonly conceived as two islands, Harris and Lewis—the Lews in
the vernacular—but the smaller southern projection is joined on to
the main mass by a narrow Tarbert. This isthmus does not quite
mark the bounds of Harris, which like the other islands belongs to
Inverness-shire, while Lewis makes part of Ross. Nature has set
another distinction, the south part being boldly and barely
mountainous, a forest of granite and gneiss peaks, amid which shy
deer enjoy the beauties of this Hebridean Switzerland, while the
north rather shows brown flats of moorland, rimmed with cliffs,
streaked with green, dotted with patches of struggling culture and
pitted with lochans. All round, the shores are deeply cut by fiords,
the largest being Loch Seaforth on the east side, and on the west
island-choked Loch Roag, home of that “Princess of Thule” whose
begetter takes a more highly coloured view of this scenery than is
revealed to most observers. Mr. John Sinclair is another writer who
has an artistic good word to say for the Lewis:—
The shores are everywhere rugged and rocky, save where, at
wide intervals, they are interrupted by broad bays or narrow sea
lochs, which terminate in green glens among the hills. The middle
and northern districts are for the most part great stretches of flat
or undulating moorland, dotted all over with hundreds of little
lochs and tarns, into which no burns tumble and out of which no
rivers flow. Yet how pretty these flat saucers of rain-water are—
scores and scores of them glistening in the sunshine like silver
ornaments laid out to view upon a russet ground. In the south
and south-west the mountains are thickly studded and lofty, but
long twisting arms of the sea boldly creep in between them and
almost meet from opposite sides of the island. Many of these
inlets taper away to narrow points, which are hidden in deep
valleys eight or ten miles from the open sea. So many are the
freshwater lochs and the insinuating arms of the ocean, that in
bird’s-eye view the whole island must resemble a diamond
window with its countless raindrops darting one into another at
the beginning of a shower. The hill tops are singularly wild and
bare, scarcely a tinge of green relieving the yellow masses of rock
and stone, but in the valleys there are many choice spots of
sweet verdure and beauty.
On the neck of an eastern peninsula of Lewis stands Stornoway,
which to the islanders appears a capital of dazzling luxury, and even
strangers are struck by the gardens nursed into exotic luxuriance
about its castle, home of a family who have sown a fortune in
improving their poor lordship without reaping much gratitude in
return. In Harris the most notable spot is Rodill at the south end,
where the restoration of a cruciform church best represents the
many monastic and eremitic shrines once dotting these isles “set far
among the melancholy main.” Still less can one enumerate the traces
of more hoary antiquity, over which Mr. David MacRitchie exclaims,
“It is enough to break the heart of an antiquary to wander about the
Hebrides and see again and again the site of what once were doons
now represented by a tumbled heap of stones, and sometimes not
even by that.”
On the west side of Lewis, near the fishing inn of Garrynahine,
stands the most celebrated and the least destructible of ancient
monuments, the Stones of Callernish, which used to pass for a Druid
temple, when there was as much reason for entitling them a Druid
theatre, town-hall, or house of parliament, if not the tomb of some
once towering hero long gone to Valhalla. The figure of a cross has
been traced in their position, on which account they have been
credited to St. Columba, the truth being that their origin is as
mysterious as that of Stonehenge. Not far off are the ruins of the
Doon of Carloway, one of the best specimens of this kind of
fortification, often dubbed a Pictish tower. Then, towards the Butt of
Lewis, in the wildest and most primitive part of the island, the
“Troosel Stone,” tallest monolith in Scotland, may from its name be a
record of obscene rites, though it also is claimed as an heroic
tombstone.
 THE HERRING FLEET IN STORNOWAY BAY, ISLAND OF LEWIS

At this north end the features of the people, Gaelic-speaking as

they are, most clearly betray the Norse settlement, indicated
throughout by many of the place-names, as the recurring Fladdas,
Berneras, and Scalpas. The Macleods, once predominant here, till
the Mackenzies overlaid them in the Lewis as the Macdonalds in
Skye, are believed to have been of this foreign origin. At the end of
the sixteenth century an attempt was made to introduce another
stock, when a number of Lowland gentlemen, chiefly from Fife,
formed themselves into a Chartered Company of the period, to
which the savage Lewis was granted by James VI. as area for such a
“plantation” as Elizabeth charily patronised in Virginia. These
“Adventurers” or “Undertakers” enlisted a little army, armed with
tools as well as weapons; but three attempts at settlement
disastrously failed, and the work of civilisation was left to be carried
out by nearer neighbours.
Lewis and Harris have in our day been conquered by the Free
Church, that puts its ban on the old customs and revels and would
weed out the old superstitions, though still kirk-goers will fear to jest
of the water-horse mounted by mortal men to their swift
destruction, or the water-bull that haunts lonely lochs to snap at
bathing boys, or swallow up sheep whose owner brought back from
market a head not clear for counting. Such uncanny beasts can be
shot only with silver: perhaps the origin of “Bang went sixpence!” Of
late years the bitterness of controversy between the United Free and
the “Wee Free” divisions of their Church has set congregations by
the ears, while the decision of the Lords should breathe a new
sentiment of imperial loyalty into the triumphant party, hitherto
disposed to Home Rule heresies. Out of Stornoway, there is not a
licensed public-house on the Lewis, a fact that makes for peace.
Crime is hardly known here, but for a land league agitation that has
prompted incendiary fires and brutal mutilation of cattle as well as
refusal to pay rent, along with a general sore-headedness that was
poulticed for a time by the Crofters’ Commission, but may show
signs of breaking out again when freshly recurring arrears come to
be demanded.
Over the island can be traced broken fold-dykes and patches of rig
and furrow lost among the heather, which are taken as signs of a
once more extended cultivation of this poor soil, reported by Martin,
two centuries ago, as fruitful in corn up till a then recent period.
However this may be, a century ago the Rev. James Hall declared
that the “scallags” (labouring class) of the Hebrides were practically
slaves, treated by their masters worse than negroes. But at that time
they seem to have been more patient, not yet having found out how
they were ill off. They can hardly expect to be over well off, when, in
spite of emigration, a century has raised the population of Lewis
from about 9000 to 29,000, an increase unparalleled in the
Highlands. Yet what with one help and another, the people of this
congested area seem not so poverty-stricken as on islands that have
been more depleted of their natural increase.
Forty miles above the Butt of Lewis, on an ocean-washed rock one
of the old hermit saints built his chapel. Then far out to the west,
beyond the uninhabited Flannan Isles or Seven Hunters, lies—

Utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race

Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds.

This remote isle, its celebrity depending on its insignificance, is

about three miles by two, a jagged mass of steep crags, which on
one side are said to present the loftiest sea-face in Britain, about
1300 feet. The climate is mild and damp, muggy and windy, the
clouds of the Atlantic being caught on those tall crags, less familiar
with snow than with a white coating of countless sea-fowl, which,
with their eggs, make the chief fare of the inhabitants. Before the
days of steam St. Kilda was cut off from intercourse with the world,
except through supply expeditions sent from Skye by its Macleod
landlords, or through chance visits, when the rare stranger would be
warmly welcomed and attended by all the male population, as
MacCulloch was, like “a Jack Pudding at a country fair followed by a
mob of boys.” Nature, it is said, serves them as a leisurely postman,
when a letter sealed in a bottle will drift on to the mainland in time;
but the winds and waves can seldom bring an answer by return. The
story goes that the islanders heard nothing of Prince Charlie’s
enterprise till it was all over, nor of Waterloo and the Hundred Days,
and that William the Fourth was prayed for three years after his
death, as is by no means according to Presbyterian orthodoxy. Even
now, long dark winter months may pass without news whether
Scotland stands as it did. But Miss Goodrich Freer laments that only
too many tourists reach this remote isle in summer to corrupt a
primitive community which, with scant aid from books and teachers,
has evolved a high standard of morals and mutual helpfulness, if not
of that virtue that proverbially comes next to godliness.
 Two centuries ago St. Kilda even came near to adopt a religion of
its own through the doctrine of an illiterate youth named Roderick,
who, professing to have received a revelation from John the Baptist,
imposed fasts, penances, sacrifices, and forms of prayer upon the
superstitious islanders, mixing “the laudable customs of the Church
with his own diabolical inventions.” For years he played his prophetic
part, till it became manifest that St. John’s oracle had a very human
side, when Cæsar, in the person of Macleod’s steward, persecuted
him into silence; and an orthodox minister came over to exorcise his
heresies. In those days the people seem to have been little better
than pagans with a varnish of Catholicism; but now they have a Free
Church, whose pastor was once the only inhabitant that could speak
English, as all the school children can do now.
The population numbers some few score, Gaelic speaking, though
they make no show of tartan, and, except in English pictures, kilts
were never adapted to their amphibious and crag-scrambling
industries. The oft-told tale of a severe cold breaking out among
them on the arrival of a stranger seems to relate to the sharp wind
which brought a ship, with its invisible freight of alien microbes, to
their slippery landing-place. Nature has placed them in quarantine
from many ills flesh is heir to on the mainland, yet once an infection
of smallpox had nearly exterminated the islanders; and if former
statistics be accurate, their numbers have decreased within a
century or so. There is a very high death-rate among newly born
children; and the old people are apt to be crippled by rheumatism;
but in middle life they thrive on what should be a dyspeptic diet of
oily sea-birds; and consumption is unknown in this natural Nordrach
sanitorium. They have fields of oats and potatoes, also cattle and
sheep, from which they can clothe themselves. Their landlord has
provided them with a street of good stone houses, far superior to
the ordinary crofter’s home; and their old haystack hovels are chiefly
used as stores or outhouses; but their zinc roofs cover true Highland
untidiness. “Milk dishes, ropes, tarry nets, wool, cooking pots, and
fishing tackle are strewn haphazard over the broken earthen floors;
from the smoke-blackened rafters hang a winter store of dried sea-
fowl, fish, and bladders containing oil for use in the long winter
nights.” And everywhere are in evidence the feathers that make St.
Kilda’s best merchandise, as birds are its chief stock, from the great
northern diver to the so-called St. Kilda wren, lately protected by law
against extermination. “The air is full of feathered animals, the sea is
covered with them, the houses are ornamented by them, the ground
is speckled by them like a flowery meadow in May. The town is
paved with feathers; the very dunghills are made of feathers; the
ploughed land seems as if it had been sown with feathers; and the
inhabitants look as if they had been all tarred and feathered, for
their hair is full of feathers, and their clothes are covered with
feathers.”
A romance of St. Kilda is the mysterious story of Lady Grange,
imprisoned here under circumstances which have not been made
very clear. She was the daughter of a gentleman who shot the Lord
President for deciding a suit against him, so that she might seem to
have hereditarily forfeited a right to the protection of law. Married to
Erskine of Grange, a brother of the Jacobite Earl of Mar, after a
quarter of a century’s wedded life she became such a peril or a
nuisance to her husband that, himself a judge of the Court of
Session, he planned or abetted a scheme for keeping her in life-long
confinement as a madwoman. One story is that she knew of
traitorous dealings on his part with the king over the water.
Kidnapped from her lodging in Edinburgh by a party of Highlanders,
she was violently dragged across Scotland on byways and highways,
apparently without any interference at her successive places of
detention, the journeys usually being made by night, and the poor
lady gagged when she would have cried out for rescue. From
Glengarry’s country she was shipped into the western islands, and in
time to St. Kilda, where she spent some eight years, in vain trying to
communicate with her friends, if she had any friends disposed to
serve her, as her own sons and her kinsfolk appear not to have
stirred in the matter. She is said to have been taken over to
Sutherland, then to Skye, where she died after years of illegal
durance. Her story seems almost incredible; but even in the
nineteenth century an ex-army officer, no doubt not very strong in
his wits, was kept imprisoned upon one of the Shetlands for twenty
years or so, till quite romantically rescued by the agency of a female
missionary.
 CHAPTER IX
THULE
William Black went about to dub the Hebrides our Thule; but that
title better belongs to the islands of fellow-countrymen—

Who dwell beyond the Pentland’s roar

And watch dim skerries white with drowning seas;
And hear Æolian moanings of the breeze
Wandering ever about a surf-strewn shore;
Beneath broad skies with billowy mist-wreaths hoar;
Through winter days that gloom but never freeze
Nor chill the Northern heart’s devotion.

The Orkney and Shetland Isles, whoever were their original

inhabitants, became restocked from the kingdom that figures in
legendary history as “Lochlin,” and still plainly keep much of the
Scandinavian character, on other coasts of Britain appearing only in
patches and strains, or, as in the Southern Hebrides, overlaid by
Celtic features. These “Nordereys” had early been known to Gothic
pirates, crushing the nascent Christianity believed to have been
planted by Cormac and other disciples of St. Columba, ghostly
fathers whose memory seems to survive in the Papas of the
archipelago. The Norwegian kingdom, converted in turn, established
its power more or less firmly all over the Hebrides, with occasional
assaults on Ireland and Scotland; and for three centuries the
Orkneys made a Jarldom dependent on Norway. The Icelandic sagas
throw a weird light on their confused history of feuds, treacheries,
fire and sword, bouts of drinking and devotion, from which, as the
kingdom of Scotland took shape, begins to emerge a contention
between relationships of kindred and of vicinity. The quasi-
independent Jarls of Orkney fitfully recognised a suzerain in Scotland
as well as in Norway. At one time we find this Norwegian Nizam
seated across the Pentland as Thane of Caithness; then again a
Scottish earl is imposed on the Orkneys. The position of Shetland is
more obscure at this period, but till well on in the middle ages all the
Hebrides belonged to the archiepiscopal diocese of Trondhjem.

CARTING PEAT, ORKNEY

When the last Norwegian invasion of Scotland had been defeated

on the Clyde, Haco retired to Kirkwall, there dying in 1263. The
winds warred against that armada, whose failure was not so much a
decisive blow as one strain in a gradual loosening of Norse authority
over the isles. Soon afterwards, Haco’s son formally resigned to
Alexander III. all dominion of the Hebrides, except in the Orkneys
and Shetlands, which were specially reserved to the Norwegian
crown, by and by absorbed in that of Denmark. But two centuries
later, when certain differences between these thrones came to be
adjusted by the marriage of James III. to Margaret of Denmark, her
father pledged the islands to Scotland for the bulk of her stipulated
dowry, 60,000 florins, that have never been paid; and so we hold
this part of our kingdom on a pawnbroker’s title, as to which
international lawyers might cover acres of foolscap, if Denmark were
disposed to clear off the mortgage.
Even earlier, Sinclairs and other lords from the mainland had
pushed on to the Orkneys, which afterwards became so oppressively
exploited by esurient Scots that theirs was no beloved name here;
and the islanders, even now that old resentments are forgot, decline
to look on themselves as Scotsmen. The mass of the population are
of Norse stock, whose language died out here as slowly as Cornish
at the other end of the kingdom; and still it colours the local dialect,
that kept a quaint Quakerism of thee and thou, with a continental
slurring of the h in such words. The islands are reckoned as a
Scottish county, but their particularismus considers itself rather as a
boat towed in the wake of Great Britain; and they speak of going to
Scotland as Cornishmen of crossing the Tamar into England. Another
correspondence with Cornwall is in the prevalence here of dissenting
forms of Evangelical doctrine. Then, like the Cornish moors and
cliffs, those of Thule are dotted with grey monuments of forgotten
faith and bloodshed, long washed out of memory.
Except by isolated incidents, the islands enter little into the history
of Scotland, since the days when it was alternately a refuge and a
raiding ground for their Viking chiefs. Kirkcaldy of Grange was
shipwrecked here in pursuit of Bothwell. Montrose pressed some of
the islanders into his service, else they took slight interest in the
wars of Whig and Tory. More than one stirring naval engagement
came off at this northern end of the kingdom, long exposed to raids
from French and Dutch cruisers, against which, indeed, most of the
islands were well defended by their perilous reefs and currents.
Their latest appearance in history was a hoax that deceived
newspaper readers of 1866 into believing the account of a Fenian
raid on Unst, with such details as a forced ransom, the taking of
hostages, the minister hanged by his own bell-rope, all set forth so
seriously that a man-of-war is said to have got as far as Aberdeen on
its way to the rescue.
The two groups number some eight score islands and islets, not
half of them inhabited. Lying in the Gulf Stream, they have a wet
and windy climate, variable rather than severe, often cool in
summer, raw and rheumatic in winter, when a truly dark December
affords little chance for skating or curling. That many-weathered
March of our islands usually brings the sharpest cold to this end of
them. The whole archipelago is so broken into holms and indented
by voes, that on the largest islands one will never be more than a
few miles from the sea; nor is it easy to take a mile’s walk without
coming on a reed-fringed, foam-edged basin of fresh water, over
which salt spray blows into one’s face across the rough cliff-bound
flats that swell up into waves of moor, but seldom into imposing hills.
Except in a few favoured spots, where thin clumps of stunted wood
are nursed like gardens, a telegraph post is the only kind of tree
breaking the bleak horizon above heath and bog, with a lonely farm-
house, a huddlement of cottages, a patch of fields now and then to
remind us that this is no wilderness. Seen under its too frequent
shade of sullen sky or drizzling showers, such a landscape strikes the
lover of lush nature as dismal, yet it has its bright moments,
sometimes its halcyon seasons in the long days of the far northern
summers, and at all times taking features of its own. “The scene,
which on a sunless day seems hard and cold, with occasional gleams
of sunlight, becomes a perfect kaleidoscope of varying colours.” So
writes Mr. J. R. Tudor in his excellent book on the islands, which also
tells us of “vivid greens” in early summer, of glorious shows of red
clover to relieve the prevalent dulness, and of a rich spangling of
spring flowerets that here linger into June and July. The little
purplish Primula Scotica has been called the queen of Orkney
blooms, among them some rare in the North, and some that seem
dying out in a hard struggle for existence. The writer who thinly
disguised himself as “Shirley,” thus sums up our Thule’s finest
features:—
For the artist there are vast spaces of sea and sky; the shining
sands; the glories of the sunset; and above and beyond all the
pageantry of the storm. For each day a fresh drama is transacted
upon the heavens. The morning hours are often brilliantly bright;
but ere mid-day the sun is suddenly obscured; the storm-cloud
rises out of the Atlantic; sometimes the wind and rain lash the
panes for hours; sometimes the cloud breaks upon the hills of
Hoy, and passes away like a dream. The dénoûment of the drama
is always obscure; you cannot predict what the end will be, and
so the interest never flags. And among the land-locked bays and
through the narrow channels there is excellent boating for those
who can circumvent the tides. Unless, indeed, you know
something of the obscure laws which govern the ebb and flow of
the ocean in this network of islands, you are pretty sure to come
to grief. For round many of them it runs like a mill-race. Between
Hoy and Stennis, for instance, the ebb is simply a foaming and
swirling torrent, against which sail and even steam are powerless.
That vast body of water pouring into the Atlantic is as irresistible
as a Canadian rapid. But if you study the tides, you can seek out
secluded nooks, where the seals are basking on the tangle, and
the wild duck are wheeling round the bay, and the blue rocks are
darting out of the caves, and the grouse are crowing among the
heather, and where for ten months out of the twelve the peace is
absolute, and silence unbroken save by the shepherd’s dog.
 AN ORCADIAN FIREPLACE

It has been remarked how the very superstitions of such a land

run naturally to fishiness, as indeed all over the Hebrides uncouth
leviathans haunt the fog banks, dragons lurk in the hollowed cliffs,
sea-serpents in the voes as water-bulls in the lochans, and
treacherously smiling mermaids, more to be shunned than all these
monsters, delude men to their doom among slippery reefs. The
mermaid legends may well have been suggested by half-human
glimpses of seals. Our critical age is also disposed to relate them to
occasional visits of Eskimo or Lapp adventurers, seen only to the
waist in their skin canoes. Not so long ago there were people in the
islands who boasted descent from “Finn” strangers, very possibly
kinsmen of an aboriginal pigmy race, Picts, “Pechts,” or what not,
that may here have left their memory in the “Trows” or “Trolls” of
land mythology, and their name in the Pentland (Pechtland) Firth.
Fishing and fowling, as well as antiquarian puzzles, have long
been attractions to these rocks and waters, that begin to be more
visited for their own sake, now that our generation develops a taste
in out-of-the-way aspects of nature. It was a lucky hit for the
archipelago when in 1814 Walter Scott accompanied the Northern
Lights Commissioners on their jovial tour of office, at Stromness
picking up from a toothless Norna that story of the pirate Gow which
he so well dressed up in the contents of his note-book. One admires
his dexterity in conducting the plot so as to bring in the lions of a
trip, his companions on which could have no doubt of the
authorship. Gow was a real character, whose name, to be translated
Smith, pairs with Paul Jones, another eighteenth-century corsair, of
whom it is told that he was scared away from Lerwick by the red
flannel petticoats of women marching to market, as the French
invaders of Pembrokeshire were by red-cloaked Welshwomen,
mistaken for an army of soldiers. It seems strange to remember how
Scott’s fellow-tourists were kept on the alert by the fear of American
privateers.
From the Orkneys Byron also took an authentic hero for his Island
in George Stewart, midshipman of the Bounty, “tempest-born in
body and in mind,” whose Otaheitean child was living here in the
middle of last century. Then Orkney has poets of her own, such as
John Malcolm, the soldier; David Vedder, the sailor; and Mr. T. S.
Omond, known as a writer on as in metre, from whom I have quoted
at the beginning of this chapter. Professor Aytoun, whose lyre had
such a range of strings, was connected with the islands as their
Sheriff, while one of his Christian names hints at kindred with the
Shetland Edmonstons distinguished in natural history. Clouston is the
name of another “family-pen” here; and that of Moodie, husband
and wife, was transplanted to Canadian authorship. Rae the Arctic,
and Baikie the African explorer set out from so far north. From
Orkney came a whole galaxy of Traill writers. The three Laings, all
notable in literature, were of an Orkney family. So was Washington
Irving, who indeed narrowly escaped being born on Shapinshay, as
our American cousins will be interested to know. J. R. Lowell was of
Orkney blood by the spindle side; he could remember his maternal
grandmother as dressing in black on Independence Day and
lamenting “His Majesty’s unhappy differences with his colonists.” By
the way, in Bonnie Scotland, while explaining how, spite of such
names as Munroe, Buchanan, Grant, Arthur, McKinley, no born
Scotsman has yet been President of the United States, I forgot to
mention that President Polk (Pollock) boasted lineal descent from
John Knox. It may be added that President Roosevelt is certainly of
Scottish stock on one side, even if his paternal line be not connected
with some John o’ Groat or Dirk Hatteraick.
In Scott’s day the islands were backward in cultivation, though
what with fishing, wrecks, smuggling, and kelp-burning, the people
seemed uncommonly well supplied with luxuries. Poverty may have
originally prompted that strange superstition as to the danger of
saving lives from the sea, which lingered in Cornwall, too, almost up
to our own day. The islanders counted on what they could make out
of “God-sends” such as helped to furnish Magnus Troil’s house and
the pack of Bryce Snailsfoot; and it was a serious loss to them when
the beaconing of their stormy waters diminished the harvest of
flotsam and jetsam. Scott tells how an Orcadian answered Mr.
Stevenson remarking on the bad sails of his boat: “If it had been His
will that you hadna built sae many lighthouses hereabout, I would
have had new sails last winter.”
The ground was much divided among small proprietors, as it still
is to a less degree, and small holdings are common, so that the
islands were, quite needlessly as regards the Orkneys, some think,
put under the Crofters Commission. The people of the southern
group are more thriftily prosperous than in the Hebrides. They had
their fit of standing out obstinately against “improvements”; then
they suffered from the set-back of the kelp industry, here very
profitable for a time, but its failure proved a blessing in disguise as
turning their attention to agriculture; and they seem too well off now
to trouble about kelp, on which the landlords would still set them
working at “orra” times. In the last half-century tenants and “peerie”
lairds showed the sense to follow enterprising landlords like Balfour
of Shapinshay, so that now many of the farms compare with those
on the mainland. There is a flourishing export of cattle, much
improved by the introduction of good stock. Along with their ponies
and hairy sheep, almost as wild as goats, the islands had a breed of
small cows, from whose milk was made their peculiar drink bland,
resembling the koumiss of the Tartars. Some quarter of a century
ago an effort was made to push this beverage in London, where,
however, it seems not to have “caught on.” Then living in Kensington
lodgings, I patriotically ordered a case of it, which, as the weather
was hot and the liquor “up,” I put under my bed, taking this for the
coolest spot at my command, but ignorant that it was over the
kitchen fire. I had hardly got into bed when, one by one, the bottles
began to explode, till the whole battery had fired itself away. Above
me slept no less a fellow-lodger than General Gordon, not yet of
Khartoum; and I wondered whether my bombardment might have
brought China into his dreams.
The Shetlands, for their part, are grander, wilder, rougher, poorer,
colder, wetter, less “improved,” in general, more Norse and primitive.
Their industry is rather at sea than on land. Mr. Tudor quotes an apt
saying as to the difference between the people: “The Shetlander is a
fisherman who has a farm; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat.”
Through the fisheries the Shetlanders were long in closer touch with
Holland and Scandinavia than with Scotland, which for centuries has
been spreading her tentacles over the adjacent Orkneys. A century
ago Dutch and Danish coins were more familiar at Lerwick than the
head of George III.; and up to a later time, Norwegian weights and
measures were used all over the islands. The Orkneys are, or were,
well stocked with grouse and snipe; sea-fowl are the game of the
Shetlands, not that they lack in the southern group, among which
the great auk was killed off three-quarters of a century ago. Straw-
plaiting was once a resource of the Orkneys. They are rich in cattle,
the Shetlands rather in sheep, where the chief home industry is the
hosiery knitting that keeps women’s fingers busy even when their
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