Part 5

Such were the cottages in the eighteenth century. In the first quarter of the nineteenth, the cottages were arranged upon the four sides of squares, with a large open space in the centre; and outside every cottage, upon the walls, hung fish-hakes or wooden triangles for drying haddock. Inside the cottages the walls were occasionally whitewashed; and there was fixed against the wall a series of wooden shelves for the preservation and display of delft and earthenware crockery. There were tea-cups in the cupboard in the corner. The little round table was of pine-deal, but scrubbed into a whiteness by a truly Dutch cleanliness, which made it rival tables covered with a fair white linen cloth. The cruisie, an iron lamp of simple structure, consisting of one cup or ladle, with a narrow lip for the whale-oil and wick, and another cup of broader and larger dimensions, to receive the droppings, hangs in the nineteenth, as in many centuries previously, near the chimney, and produces, Rembrandt-like, lights and shades well worthy of the study of an artist who should wish to rival the Dutch painters of the present day, in the pictures they paint to show the effects of a lamp.

The costumes of the fishers were, and continue to be, peculiar. The elderly men wore broad blue woollen bonnets, coarse blue jackets, and canvass kilts or short trousers. The younger men were rather good-looking, had good-humoured faces, and were smarter in their dress. The women wore caps, the original patterns of which still abound upon the Continent, which did not prevent their features being injured by the weather, and their skins being tanned by the sun. The middle-aged women wore stuff gowns, with large flowered calico wrappers or short gowns, over them. The young girls wore stuff wrappers and petticoats, with their hair either drawn back with a large comb, which reached from ear to ear, or fastened up in a very slovenly and unbecoming manner with a head-dress of red worsted tape. The boys under fifteen were the worst clad. They ran about in tattered old garments of their fathers’, a world too wide, and remained in this condition until they were able to earn a more decent covering for themselves. The little children of both sexes were comfortably clad in a simple dress of white plaiding, called a walliecoat, which, with their fair curly heads and rosy cheeks, made them look very pretty, as they paddled in the pools of water, and played with their tiny boats.

In the last century, the fishermen were mostly ignorant of everything unconnected with their own business. Few of them could read, and none of the grown-up people could write. Some of the lads could read and write a little; but as they went to sea in the night, and took their repose in the day, they were not placed in favourable circumstances for the development of the social faculties. No instance of intellectual talent--no single person displaying a tendency towards any art or science--occurred among them. Music and song, no doubt, contributed to the enjoyment of their merry meetings; but the music was confined to a fiddle, and their collection of songs scarcely extended beyond The Praise of Paul Jones, The Waefu’ Ballad of Captain Glen, and the Christmas carol of By Southend. As for the women--toiling, as they were, incessantly--they had no time for mental improvement. But as they grew old they gained practical knowledge and experience. Many of them had a knowledge of simple remedies for curing diseases, which obtained for their prescriptions a preference to those of medical men. Some of them were supposed to be invested with supernatural powers, which made it dangerous to offend them.

I may interpose here a general remark. The superstitions which were sweepingly condemned by the philosophy of the eighteenth century as falsehood and imposture, the philosophy of the nineteenth finds to be true in a sense. Instead of rejecting it in a heap, the student of the present day shakes and washes the rubbish, and separates the grains of truth from it. What, I may be asked, was it true that old fish-crones possessed the powers of witchcraft? I have not a doubt of it. The word witchcraft comes from wiccian, whence witchery, wickedness. It means evil influence. Gifted with the power of reading characters and actions, of seeing consequences and calculating results, and capable of imparting a bias, laying a snare, adapting a temptation, planning a vengeance, or instilling a physical or moral poison; and years give all these powers to malignant intelligence.

Anything may be twisted into stupid or incredible shapes. When affairs did not prosper among the Footdee folk, it was attributed to an evil foot, an “ill fit.” Prior to setting out upon any expedition or enterprise, they were careful and particular about the first “fit” they met in the morning. The Scum of the Well was an object of rivalry every New Year’s Day morning, Old Style. As the midnight hour approached, and the last moments of the year came on, the women assembled in a solemn group, around the large old draw-well, and scolded and scuffled to decide whose pan or bucket should carry off the first fraught (or first freight). The superstition of the first foot may afford some explanation of the phrase Putting his foot into it. Prior to commencing anything, is it not well to note carefully who may be taking the initiative for evil in it? Is not the first evil foot astir in it a serious thing for any enterprise? As for the scum of the well, is not the energetic housewife who obtains the first supply of the first necessary of life,--water--likely to surpass all rivals in providing for her household? I opine it is only a sort of piety due to our forefathers to guess they were shrewder fellows than we might suppose from our views of their superstition, witchcraft, and sorcery.

Indeed there is something small in the minds which study superstitions only to find in them occasions for indulging the sudden elation of self-glory which Hobbes says is the cause of laughter. Our forefathers inherited a spirit-world of personifications; and we have inherited a mass of philosophical abstractions. Our forefathers inherited a poetical and popular nomenclature, and we express our scientific generalisations in crack-jaw words of Greek and Latin derivation. Ghosts, wraiths, witches, fairies, mermaids and water-kelpies, are personifications which have been covered with ridicule, and undoubtedly there have been an abundance of ridiculous stories told respecting them; but I suspect there is philosophy in them after all. The minds of Coast Folk are peopled from early childhood with spectres belonging to the land, sea, and sky; and no wonder, since, during long centuries, catastrophes have desolated the homes of Coast Folk which have issued mysteriously and terribly from land, sea, and sky. Seven miles from Aberdeen there is a fishing-village which was buried in a sand-storm in one night. Almost every soul of the inhabitants was smothered in the sand-drift, and for many years the spire of the village church alone marked the spot in the hollow treacherous sand-hills. When a boy I was warned by words and looks of horror from approaching the fatal locality where it was thought the wrath of the Almighty had displayed itself so awfully. Several instances have occurred in which all the men of a village have gone to sea, and perished in one night. A boat or a corpse heard of as having been cast ashore on a distant beach, was sometimes the only tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have frightened many a brave man; and, in several of the monthly magazines published in the last century their existence was as seriously discussed as apparitions of sea-serpents have been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw one. “I recollect Andrew perfectly well. He was a stout man, with a broad good-humoured face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet upon the back of his head.” Occasionally employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked more like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman. One summer day Andrew was found lying insensible on the hill of Torry which faces the sea upon the side of the river Dee, opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke confusedly and incoherently. He was thought to be deranged. He was carried to the ferry and rowed home. After several weeks of delirious fever he became low and melancholy, and declined to give any account of his illness. Under medical treatment he recovered, although reduced to a skeleton. The fearful belief spread through the village that Andrew Brands had seen something. When questioned after his recovery, he said in substance: “I was upon the outlook lying upon my breast, and looking over the top of the rocks, when I saw a creature like a woman sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have something like a white sheet, or grave-clothes wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed her hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms in the air. All her ways were fearsome, and at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished beneath the waves. My heart lap (leapt), I grew blind, and I remember nothing more until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the men lifting me up.” The medical theory of his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was, that he had gone out with incipient fever upon him, had fallen asleep in an exposed situation, and the hallucinations of delirium had done all the rest. My informant who remembered him well, maintained he had been unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing Diana at a time when ladies rarely bathed in Scotland, and had been punished by the vengeance of the goddess. Probably, however, an accumulation of foam among the stones of the beach had taken the flickering form of a woman. The white scum would seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and Andrew Brands was frightened by a mermaid because he had never been taught the effects of perspective. Was it in some such way as this that Cytherea herself was seen by the poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing from the froth of the sea until she was wafted in a shell to the shore by Zephyrus, where the Graces received and adorned her for presentation to the celestials of Olympus?

Extraordinary physical phenomena generally precede extraordinary catastrophes. Everybody has heard of the warning blue lights. During the night which preceded a storm, in which seven men of a seaside village were lost, an aged man, I have been assured, saw seven blue lights passing in solemn procession from the roofs of their cottages towards their grave-yard. He entreated the men to stay at home, and not to go to sea. But they were obstinate, and went. He told some old and some young people, who would listen to him, what he had seen, and had scarcely finished his vaticination when the lightning leaped high into the sky, the thunder pealed, and a hurricane lashed the sea into furious madness. The boats were not far from the shore, but before they could reach it a boat capsized, and seven men were lost within sight of their families. A week afterwards, at the very hour of the day corresponding to the hour of the night of the procession of the blue lights, the funeral procession of the seven fishermen was seen going from their cottages by the very way the lights had gone; and beneath the very spots where the lights stood in the churchyard the corpses rested for evermore. The law of the elders in these villages is, that no boats ought to go to sea when the old men say they have seen the blue lights. The blue lights are possibly electrical facts. The traditions respecting their direction are as variable as the winds. The guess is not a very hazardous one, that science would agree with the old men in warning the fishers against going to sea when the air was charged with electricity after midnight, in the coldest hours of the twenty-four.

When the Footdee fishers were found in the last century to be no more scrupulous than other people respecting custom-house oaths, an oath was framed for them, founded upon their superstitious fears, which proved to be far more effectual than the ordinary one. It concluded with these words: “If I do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, may my boat be a bonnet to me.”

Of course the fishers leaned to the side of the smugglers against the excise and customs officers. Almost everybody did, in the last century except the lawyers, something of a legal education being necessary to see the propriety of establishing what Adam Smith, while himself a Commissioner of the Board of Customs, denounced as the outposts of Pandemonium. When examined before the courts in smuggling cases, the fishermen contrived occasionally, under an appearance of simplicity, to baffle with considerable cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in those days on the side of the smugglers, who called themselves free-traders, a designation which has since attained universal honour. The principle of obedience to law, the sine quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned upon uneducated consciences than the principle of buying cheap and selling dear. Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore, all admired the cool duplicity with which the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when under cross-examinations. Some of them were once witnesses in a case of deforcement. The counsel for the prosecution asked a fisherman,--“While the men were struggling in the water, did you not hear the prisoner call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”

“We saw nae dogs there, sir,” was the demure and composed reply.

“I do not ask you what you saw; but, on your oath, did you not hear him call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”

“There was nae ony dogs there, sir,” was again the obstinate answer.

Although no man of distinction in science or letters has ever arisen in any of these villages, it cannot be doubted they have produced many men whom Poodle or Doodle might have safely trusted upon his legs on the floor of the House of Commons to answer the questions of honourable and independent members.

A century ago the fishers, who were hardy, industrious, decorous, and honest, were nevertheless inveterate swearers--a fault which I did not observe among them in an offensive degree in the nineteenth century. Indeed, I have heard more swearing from two admirals in a London club than I ever heard in fishing villages. In the last century, however, the fishers would use the most tremendous oaths upon the most trivial occasions. Anger was not necessary to provoke them; the oaths seeming to be as necessary to the hauling up of a lugger, or the pushing out of a boat, as the cries of “Yo-hee O!” Persons unaccustomed to hear the strong phrases of swearing, feel their minds shocked by the ideas conveyed by them, being ignorant that they have ceased to convey ideas to the persons who use them. When a lady rebuked one of them for using the word deil (devil), he said,

“Eh! mem, I didna think it meant ony ill. Does it mean ony ill? I thocht it was just a word to dad” (knock) “aboot.”

The wrath of these good-natured and kind-hearted people was notoriously harmless. Stabs were unknown, and blows rare among them, but the language of their vituperation was expressive and opprobrious. My informant has seen a woman in a passion take up a handful of burning coals, and lay them down without seeming to feel pain. Ladies drilled in the control of their gestures, if not of their feelings, in boarding-schools, witnessed, with great astonishment, the violence with which the women expressed grief and lamentation. The boats were frequently in great danger in crossing the bar, and on these occasions the women assembled upon the beach would tear their hair, clap their hands, and utter piercing cries and shrieks. The simple and natural principles upon which their marriages were formed, the chastity and honour in which the married fishers lived, and the connubial and family happiness of their homes, may explain, in part, the violence of the emotions and the exuberance of the gestures of the wives when their husbands were in danger. A fashionable dame of London related sarcastically that she had known a fisherwoman of the Scotch east coast who required four men to keep her from throwing herself over the rocks when her drowned husband was carried into her cottage, become calm in a fortnight, recommence work in a month, and marry again in a twelvemonth. The poor child of nature had no sentiment!

The marriages of the fishers were as natural and simple as the unions of Isaac with Rebekah and Boaz with Ruth. Perversions about dowries, pin-money, establishments, and settlements, did not interfere with the natural action of mutual interest and honest preference. They married young. The young man and young woman had probably played together in childhood. Running, leaping, tumbling, paddling, laughing, the children of the fishers are as joyous as their fathers are serious; and if their mothers could not match them against the children of the Tuileries’ Gardens, or of St. James’s Park, in point of pretty costumes, they could challenge the world for them in regard to the healthiness of their respiratory organs and the glee of their animal spirits. The boys and girls soon become useful, the elder children being early employed to nurse the younger. Both boys and girls thus grow up in systematic training for the performance of the duties of their lives.

The boy or lad went out to sea with the men, and worked at the oar until he got enough of money to buy a share of a boat--and a boat with its nets costs from a hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds. When he had a share of a boat, he required some one to bait his lines and sell his fish. Among the girls he knew, and whose tempers he had tested in play, he naturally selected the girl he liked best, and asked her first; and then, perhaps, like Kepler, the great astronomer, he had a list in his mind, and asked one girl after another until he was accepted. On the other hand, it is probable the principles of affinity may sometimes have been in operation for years, and the boat may have been a greater difficulty than the wife. As soon as they were betrothed by the consent and blessings of the old folks, the young woman went to live with her future father and mother-in-law for a week or two, and in the house with the young man. No doubt she had been taught by her own mother to search for bait, to tip and bait the lines, and do all manner of household work; but the fisher-people judged wisely she would be all the better for knowing all her mother-in-law could teach her; and her husband would be likely to think all the more of her for being as clever as his own mother could make her. A few days prior to the marriage, she returned to her father’s roof, and the ceremony took place in the house of her childhood. After the ceremony, the young couple went to a house of their own. They went in procession from the paternal to the connubial home. A fiddler playing merry strains, headed the procession, and he was followed by a boat-mate of the bridegroom, carrying the flag of the boat. When the bride arrived before the door of the home of her husband, his boat-mates rolled their flag around her. The spectators witnessed the ceremony in silence until she was enveloped in the folds, and then they applauded the actors in it with loud and long cheers. The ceremony seemed to be a public intimation that the young wife was henceforth placed within the sanctuary of the honour of the crew, who engaged themselves solemnly to protect her from insult and injury, as brave men defend their flag.

When a young couple had not money enough to pay for the share of the boat, the furnishing of the house, and the expenses of the wedding, they had what was called a penny-wedding. There was nothing royal or aristocratic in a penny-wedding, to which any one might come who chose to pay a shilling. The significance and rationale of the penny-wedding was this: “We are a couple of young people who think it better to marry than to do worse, and we deem it foolish and wicked to begin the world with debt. We therefore invite you, good neighbours, to amuse yourselves by dancing at our marriage, and, by paying as generously as may be convenient for the amusement, help us to begin the world with a fair chance of making both ends meet.” A common argument in favour of the penny-wedding was: the young man wants ten pounds of his share of the boat, and many persons gave their money who never went to the dances. The canvas for the penny-wedding took place among the carpenters, coopers, and sailors of the port; and employers, shopkeepers, ship-owners, and captains had generally a half-crown to spare for the young couple. The dinner at a penny-wedding consisted of abundance of meat and Scotch broth, served in broad pewter dishes. After dinner, the party adjourned to the links or downs, to dance “the shame dance;” and then they danced until they were tired. Known bad characters were inexorably excluded, decorum rigorously maintained, and “liberties” would have been indeed dangerous in a community in which every woman lived under the protection of a flag and at least half-a-score of hard fists. A severe critic of propriety would not probably have approved the amount of public kissing at a penny-wedding. Indeed, in this respect, Footdee resembled more the Court of the Neva than the Courts of the Thames or of the Seine; but in regard to the moral essentials of the problem of life, if there be a word of truth in court chronicles, the courtiers and courted of all the three royal rivers might have learned lessons from the Coast Folk of Footdee.

CHIP.

THE CONGRESSIONAL PRIZE-RING.

The forcible mode in which debates are conducted in the parliament of the United States, and the personal encounters which sometimes follow them, are believed by the present generation, to be novelties and only recently brought to a culminating point by the Honourable Preston S. Brooks’s life-preserver, upon the head, face, eyes, and body of Senator Charles Sumner. This is a mistake. Fifty years ago, exciting debates often ended in a regular stand-up fight in the lobby of the House of Representatives. The combatants stripped, a ring was formed, bottle-holders appointed, and the battle fought and reported quite in the style of Moulsey Hurst and Bell’s Life in London.

In corroboration of this statement we present to our readers the following paragraph copied from the New York Evening Post of December the thirteenth, eighteen hundred and five, into the Annual Register for eighteen hundred and six:--