Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  3 As a Friend I have no interest in novels, and naturally I take no pride in any connection with works of idle fancy, but I have been told that Mr Scott made use of what I told him in a publication he named Redgauntlet. Of course I have not read the work, but privately I was not as ill-pleased as perhaps I ought to have been.

  4 John Bristo and I see each other still. He has been out of our Meeting now for thirty-five years. I've had elders speak to me more than once about my continued close acquaintance with one who is no longer in unity with us. I heed them not. John is my cousin and one of my first friends. I would not bring up my sons in a family divided against itself. These days I have the reward of my persistence. I have not changed, but the Society of Friends grows year by year more tolerant of intercourse between Members and those not in unity with us. More and more do Members of our Society take our place in the great world, and indeed concern ourselves with matters that would never have been allowed to impinge upon our Meeting when I was a lad. As the world changes the rights of men are too often eroded, and their grievances grow proportionately greater. Friends’ recent concerns about the just needs of men are entirely to be welcomed. There is no place on earth where a people may truly be set apart. Nor do I think the God of all Mercies intended it: for is not that of God in every man, Friend or not, so how then should we not concern ourselves with worldly matters?

  5 There was one man in particular who first hired me to take him up Skiddaw. He came again, and paid me double to take him over the Scafells. He had some notion that Scafell was higher than Skiddaw, and insisted that we carry sextants and other instruments by which to prove it. I asked him why it mattered, and he told me about some old fellow in Switzerland who had in his youth climbed to the very summit of Mont Blanc (this being the highest mountain in those parts, apparently), in order to take similar readings, and who thereby set quite a fashion for mountain-climbing in that country. Since then I have taken many such eccentrics into our hills. They are harmless, on the whole.

  CHAPTER 23

  ALAN CLEARED HIS THROAT. I WAS BORN . . . WHAT a tedious beginning . . . I was conceived . . . I have no memory of it. Have you read Tristram Shandy? Of course you haven't. Never mind.’

  He was silent for a bit, collecting his thoughts. Then he began his story, just as Loic had done, in a surprisingly formal manner, as if storytelling were something set apart: something, moreover, that Alan was well used to.

  ‘I came into the world on the night of the Lammas full moon, in the year 1787, in my grandfather's house at Craig in Lochalsh on the west coast of Scotland. My father had been a soldier, and so was my grandfather before him. I was seven when my grandfather died, but I remember him very well. I have his name. My father went into the 72nd Regiment of Foot – you don't know what that is? – the 72nd is a Highland regiment founded by the chief of Clan Mackenzie. The old chief died a few years before I was born, on his way out to India, and the cousin who inherited – well, he was worse than no good to any of us, as it turned out. My father came out of the army when my grandfather was too old to look after his land. He then married, late in life, my mother Helen Mathieson, who came from over the hill, on the south side of Lochalsh.

  ‘I was the youngest of seven. I have three brothers, three sisters. James followed in my father's footsteps, and became an officer in the 72nd. The old chief had promised him a commission, but he was dead, and his heir wasn't the man to honour an old promise: he honoured naught but what was written down, and my grandfather, and my father too, always held that it was more honourable to trust a man's word than written letters, which could too easily be twisted about and proved false. So the money for James’ commission was raised off the estate, and when my father died none of it had been paid off; in fact there were treble the debts to go with it. That's why there was no money for Simon to go into the army, so he went to America instead. And, ça va sans dire, when the time came, Tomas and I followed him. But that comes later. Sim went away when I was eleven; I remember my mother weeping as he walked away over the hill. Later, when it came to us younger ones, so much had happened I think all her tears were gone. She lives with my sister Helen now, the one who married back into the Mathiesons and stayed at Ardelve in Lochalsh – at least, I had a letter about a year since, and I suppose they're all there still.

  ‘My father thought of his inheritance in the old way. He held his lands by what we call duthchas, which is the bond between a man and his chief, a matter of loyalty which it would be dishonourable to write down. A man's word is sacred; a written paper would be an offence among kin. My grandfather's father fought for his chief in two campaigns, and after the rebellion in 1715 he, along with all our kin, refused rent to the Government. They fought off the soldiers who were sent to make them pay. They paid their rents as usual to Mr Murchison the factor, and he took them every year, for ten years, to the exiled chief in Spain. It was the same after ‘19: the Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates couldn't sell the Seaforth lands, because they had to admit they couldn't get possession of them. We fought them off each time.

  ‘My father fought for his chief too, only in his day it was a matter of joining the Mackenzie regiment and fighting for pay abroad. My father knew the young chief wasn't like his father. He knew the rents from the land were being used to pay debts far off in England, but he couldn't know until it happened to him – he had no way of knowing – that the bonds of kin, and of service in battle, could ever be betrayed.

  ‘People were leaving our land, and the lands all round about us. Bound for America, mostly, or the big cities in the south if they couldn't afford the passage. It was bad losing tenants, because no tenants means no rents. My grandfather was a tacksman. That means our land – and our holding was smaller than Michael Dousman's place on Mackinac – was divided between all our tenants, who looked to my grandfather for their living, as he looked to them for ours. We never had more than sixty guineas a year from rents, and it was always getting less. The wealth of a nation is in its people: I didn't need to study my book to find out that, for I knew it all too well from my first years, when I watched our wealth, our folk, draining away from us like the tide out of the loch after its turning.

  ‘Our people were our kin. We bore the same name. We never forced anyone to leave Lochalsh. We heard, though, that elsewhere folk were being evicted. They'd burn the roofs over their heads to stop them coming back. Our own chief was doing this, on his island estates. We knew he was head over ears in debt. Even when he inherited, the estate was encumbered. Our turn had to come.

  ‘And yet, when I remember my first days, they're so untouched by shadow that the sun nearly always shines. The hills are clear in the distance, even though the fact is that on most days everything's wet and grey, and the hills are hidden. For a child all things are ordinary; the world is as it is. I didn't know what it was like to have money, or enough to eat in springtime, or not to hear low voices through the cracks in the floor under our mattress, whenever a traveller sat in by the fire below and told the news. It troubled me not at all, though it troubled my mother, that though we were gentlemen's sons we must go barefoot; I'd never tasted fine wines or foreign fruits or sugarplums; why would I feel the want of them? Beef or herring was enough of a treat; most days it was just oatmeal and potatoes and buttermilk, but always, when I was very small, served to us at the oak dining table with a damask cloth laid over it, and set with silver spoons and forks. The silver was gone, though, before I could well wield it. I learned to eat my porridge with a horn spoon.

  ‘My grandfather taught me to read, in English of course, and why would I wish for schooling, when there were books in the house that I might read at will, and stories told by the fire in winter? What else would I wish to know? I was thought to be the bookish one of the family. I was the youngest. I used to get left behind with my sisters when my brothers were out. My grandfather taught me to like books. He used to sit in the sun in the parlour window, looking out over the loch, and I used to climb up on to the win
dowsill and gaze out at the Applecross hills while he read to me. He left a small library when he died; I don't suppose anyone looks at it now. The books were mostly English, and those I grew to know nearly by heart. Robinson Crusoe was my favourite. I had to read it covertly, for although my grandfather purchased it (he had written on the flyleaf Alan Mackenzie, bought at the recommendation of Peter Hill, Creech's bookshop, Edinburgh, March 1777), my father would have none of it, declaring that the author was a treacherous southron, whose machinations had been the first cause of the evils which would yet be the ruin of us all.

  ‘My father gave my other favourite short shrift too. It was called The Pilgrim's Progress, and although it had overmuch preaching in it, there were also the monsters, travels and adventures, in which I delighted, but my father said the writer was as fanatical as a Galloway Covenanter, and I would do better to leave him on the shelf where he would get the dusty ending he deserved. The last books my grandfather ever bought were sent up from Edinburgh the very week he died. They lay in a pile on the end of a shelf until, years later, I took them down and dusted them. I cut the pages of Buchanan's Travels in the Western Hebrides and read it aloud to my family, until my father seized the book from my hand and hurled it out of the window. Mr Buchanan hated tacksmen, that was for sure. I heard later that the man was much given to fornication, and the tacksmen of Harris dealt with him accordingly. But it seemed wrong that such baseless calumnies should be set in print and published for all the world to read. Later I retrieved the book from the mud, wiped it clean, and pressed it flat again under Mr Johnson's dictionary, because however misguided the content, a book is a precious object and should not be mistreated.

  ‘The French books, of which there were half a dozen, were more of a struggle, but Tomas used to make me translate Rabelais in the privacy of our bedchamber. Some of the Latin and Greek might have served his purpose better, but they were beyond my comprehension. There aren't any books in our language. We did have Macpherson's lay of Ossian, but my grandfather had written in his own hand upon the title page that he doubted the veracity of the translations.

  ‘There's an island below our house where herons nest in the pine trees. I remember the sound the herons make at nesting time. In our language we call them skriagh – like the sound they make. We used to set otter traps on the island. That's how I first learned to dress pelts, but little did I think then that pelts were to make my fortune, as they will – not yet, brother Mark, I grant you – but as they will.

  ‘I never saw your country, Mark, so I don't know what comparisons you're making. You said there are no roads here. If your idea of a road is the Wade road to Edinburgh, or Yonge Street perhaps, then we had none either. And yet there are broad highways through every glen, the ways the cattle go down to Crieff. If those aren't roads, I don't know what a road is.

  ‘Sometimes le pays d'en haut looks to me like home. It has lakes and islands and rocks. Michigan is just sand. My country was – is – full of rocky hills with lochans in between. You have to get up high to see where you are. Eagles nest on the crags. We used to climb up and throw down their nests: they prey on the young stock. There's a path round to the west, and that's the way the ponies come up to the peats, and the cattle too – we put them on the hill in spring, so we can use the fields for crops. Even now I could name all the places to you, but it wouldn't mean anything; you don't know.

  ‘I left home at midsummer, when the sun was setting behind the Applecross hills. I saw that gold light again, with the long shadows stretched across the rocks, when I got to le pays d'en haut. There are no real evenings as far south as this. Anyway, I walked along the path by the loch. I looked at the heron island a long time, until the midges sent me running. I headed for the crags and climbed up fast, up on to the ridge.

  ‘If you stand on the edge of the crags you see our stone house right below. It looks across Loch Carron. Our boats are on the beach. It's too shallow for anything big, but just round the headland there's one of the best harbours on the west coast. Ships moor there sometimes. You see the infield dotted with tenants’ cabins, just like wigwams only made with stone and turf. You see cattle and crops, and all the little holdings sewn together by stone dykes. The line of the infield sweeps across the hillside like the cut of a knife, dividing green fields from crags and heather.

  ‘The highest hill on our land is called Beinn Raimh. That last day I ran all the way around the lochans and over the crags to the top. There was still snow on the far mountains, but where I was the ground was bright with little flowers; you could smell the grass and hear the pipits whistling. The lochans were blue in the sun, except for Loch a’ Ghlinne Dhuirch in the shadow of the hill, which was the colour of slate. I could see the cattle grazing on Carn na Sean-chreag. You can't see our land from Beinn Raimh, it's hidden below the crags.

  ‘The sea lies to the west of us, and a big island. The island of Skye is all Macleods and Macdonalds. I never went there but once, when I went with Simon to Kylerhea about some cattle. The cattle from Skye come across to Glenelg at droving time. There are other islands too. My grandfather taught me their names, and after he died I had Tomas to remind me. From our crags you can see the Black Cuillin on Skye, and a little to the right of it, the smooth curves of the Red Cuillin. The Cuillin is sharp and sheer like no ridge you ever saw – it looks uncanny, when you can see it at all: blue under a summer sky, or a dark outline against the setting sun. I wanted to go there. I wanted to touch the rock and feel that it was real. But I never did.

  ‘We used to fish on summer evenings, especially at mackerel time. The islands at the mouth of Loch Carron are summer grazing. You can get plenty of fish round there with a handline. I could tell you the names of every family on the shores of Loch Carron, and how we were related to each one. But I'll spare you that, brother Mark.

  ‘I was afraid of my father. He had enough to be angry about. All that he had was slipping away like the tide, and there was nothing he could do to hold it back. When he came home from the wars, everything cost money, where no money had been needed before. The year I turned four the harvest failed. We couldn't sell our cattle. The tenants were starving, and no rents came in. My father took his sword to Edinburgh and sold it, along with the candlesticks and my grandmother's silver teapot, just to buy meal for ourselves and the indoor servants. There was none to spare for the tenantry, barring the widows and orphans who could not be forgot. We ate nettle broth and limpets from the shore that year, but the shellfish made me sick. I've never eaten them again. Once a shoal of herring came right into the loch. I remember – it's one of the first memories I have – how the men took out all the boats and filled them to the gunwales. No one need have been hungry again, except that we had no salt – there was never enough salt, because of the tax – and so the fish rotted and had to be thrown back to the sea for the stink they made, so after just a few days we were all as hungry as before.

  ‘Then came the war with France. Prices began to go up. We had butter and eggs and herring to sell. There was the fair at Ardelve twice a year, and sometimes we went to the fairs at Glenelg as well. I remember the music and dancing at the fairs; it wasn't all bad, not at all. We were sending cattle down to Crieff again, and that was good, but we lost too many men off the land when the recruiting sergeant came up from Bernera. Whenever we made a recover, we were always struck down again. My father was an obstinate man; he was determined to hold on.

  ‘People were leaving the country too fast. The government was trying to stop it by getting folk off their farms and making them work for money. It was a bad business, though, because the money went into the hands of those who never laboured for it, and to work like a slave at the kelp or the fish is not the same as holding your own bit land from a man of your own name that you can trust. My father thought of his chief as kin, right to the end, but my brothers never did. They were right, because kin was no longer honoured above money, and money was honoured above all.

  ‘When I was nine or ten a Mr Knox
came to our house to talk to my father about the good anchorage in the next bay. He came from the Society for the Recovery of Fisheries. He wanted to build a fishing station, with a built town like ones he told us about down south. My mother and Sim wanted it; my father wouldn't listen. After Mr Knox had gone my parents quarrelled. That was when I first heard my mother say out loud that we could not stay on our land, and live. She said my father should buy into the new fishing town for the children's sake. She meant us: Sim, Tomas, my sisters, and me, James being away at the wars, but always sending his pay back home.

  ‘We were always afraid, long before Mr Knox came, that the chief would have the land cleared for sheep in Lochalsh; after all, he'd done it elsewhere. He didn't though, because the news came – I was big enough by then to mind it well – that Lochalsh was sold to an Elgin man, a Mr Innes – who'd bought on the expectation of clearing the glens for sheep. He started right away, as soon as he'd got the papers for the land. Sim was away by then, gone to America. My sister Helen was married to our second cousin on my mother's side, and gone to Balmacara, but when they were thrown out they came back to the new fishing town for a bit. Now they live in Ardelve. Mary married a MacRae from Glenshiel. When they were moved away they went to Glasgow, which is a city as big as Montreal, so I've heard. I don't know what family Mary has. But back then my sisters were only just wed, and it was just Ann and Tomas and I left living at home.

  ‘When the new century came in we had a bonfire on the shore, and another on the crags above, and there were fires lit on the Applecross hills. My cousin Rob the fiddler came over, and we had a – a party, you would call it – the way I never saw again until I reached Kamanistiquia – they call it Fort William now – on Lake Superior. If I try I can see each face in my mind now, as clear as if it were this very night gone, our tenants and neighbours and family and all of us. All gone now, all scattered.