The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

360
THE BEITISH ISLES.
The soldiers, in their strange and showy garb, have so frequently won distinc-
tion upon the field of battle that all their. panegyrists said about their native
virtues was implicitly believed ; and on the faith of poets we admired their
pipers, the successors of the ancient bards, who accompanied their melancholy
chants on the harp. In reality, however, the Highlanders, until recently, were
warlike herdsmen, as the Montenegrins, Mirdits, and Albanians are even now,
always at enmity with their neighbours. It was only after forts had been built at
the mouths of the valleys, and military roads constructed through their territories,
that they were reduced to submission. The members of each family were closely
united, and, like American Redskins, they had their war-cries, badges, and distinctly
patterned tartans. The people were thus split up into about forty clans, or,
including the Lowland families, into about one hundred, and several of these
clans consisted of more than 10,000 individuals.* The members of each clan,
though sometimes only cousins a hundred times removed, all bore the same
name, and they fought and worked together. The land was originally held in
common, being periodically divided amongst the clan. The honour of the
tribe was dear to every one of its individual members, and an injury done to
one amongst them was avenged by the entire community. When the Kings
of Scotland had to complain of a Highland chief, they attacked his clan, for they
well knew that every member of it would embrace the cause of the chief. There
existed no courts of justice in the Highlands, but blood was spilt for blood.
Various monuments recall such acts of savage vengeance, and as recently as 1812
a Highland family set up seven grinning heads as a trophy to commemorate a
sevenfold murder committed by its ancestors. A cavern on Eigg Island is
strewn with human bones, the relics of the ancient inhabitants of the island,
200 in number, who are said to have been suffocated within the cavern by a neigh-
bouring chief, MacLeod, in retaliation for some private injury.f
As long as every member of the community possessed a share in the land
Scotland was spared the struggle between rich and poor. But by the close of
the eighteenth century the poorer members of the clan, though still claiming
cousinship with their chiefs, had lost all proprietary rights in the land, and the
lairds, when remonstrated with by the clan, responded in the words of the device
adopted by the Earls of Orkney, "Sic fuit, est, et erit !
" They were even then able
to drive away the ancient inhabitants from the plots of land they occupied, in order
that they might transform them into pasturing or shooting grounds. Several
landlords even burnt down the cabins of their poor " cousins," thus compelling
them to leave the country. Between 1811 and 1820, 15,000 tenants were thus
chased from the estates of the Duchess of Stafford. Entire villages were given up
to the flames, and on a single night 300 houses might have been seen afire.
Nearly the whole population of four parishes was in this way driven from its
homes. Since the middle of the century about 1,000,000 acres in the Highlands
have been cleared of human beings and sheep to be converted into shooting
• Principal Highland clans in 1863 :—MacGregors, 36,000; MacKenzies, 21,000; MacLeans,
16,000; MacLeods, 14,000; Macintoshes, 11,000; MacDonalds, 10,000.
t Hugh Miller, " Cruise of the Betsy."
.