Читать книгу Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed - David Crane - Страница 15

A Dying World

The short midsummer night was over on the tiny Isle of Scalpaigh. From the highest point on the island, Skye and the dark line of the Ross-shire hills would have been visible in the distance, but if anyone was stirring down by the shoreline they had not yet seen, lying beside a cairn on the rough track that led from the MacLennans’ stone house to the family well, a torn and bloodied bundle that contained the remains of a newborn child.

It was the Sabbath with all that meant in the Scottish islands, and if the star that the young William Hazlitt saw over a Shropshire cottage had ever shone above the heather thatch of the thin scattering of croft houses that lined the narrow sound separating Scalpaigh from Harris, it had long since set. Thirty-odd years before, the retired captain of an East Indiaman from Berneray had bought Harris from his MacLeod cousin and settled crofters here, glimpsing in the sheltered, rocky inlets of its eastern coastline with its infinite supply of kelp and teeming abundance of fish – cod from November to June, ling from June through to September, dog fish during the calm summer months, skate and eel, oysters, herring and salmon in every bay and loch – a Hebridean cornucopia that need never fail.

Captain Alexander MacLeod of Berneray was a landlord and innovator in the great tradition of doomed philanthropists and improvers who over the next 150 years would bedevil the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. He had originally made his fortune as captain of the Mansfield and in his late fifties established himself at Rodel at the southern tip of Harris, where he built a large, handsome house and set about improving a wonderful natural harbour with everything needed for a year-round fishing industry. ‘Within the bay of Rowdill, on the north side, there is an opening, through a channel of only 30 yards wide to one of the best sheltered little bays in the Highlands,’ reported the elderly John Knox, another philanthropic improving Scot, after visiting Rodel in 1786, ‘from which, on the opposite side, there is an opening of the same dimensions to the sea. This has water for vessels to enter or depart at any time of the tide, and Captain MacLeod had deepened the south passage to fifteen feet at common spring tides. The circumference of the little harbour or bason is nearly an English mile, and here the ships lie always afloat, and as safe as in Greenock dock. Here the Captain has made an excellent graving bank, and formed two keys … where ships may load or discharge afloat, at all times of the tide.’

This is the voice of a pragmatist and surveyor talking – Knox was reporting on the west coast for the British Society for Extending the Fisheries, part of that earnest eighteenth-century effort to claim the Scottish Highlands for civilisation – but for all his commercial instincts, MacLeod was a romantic and Rodel a place to dream. On the hill above the harbour a sixteenth-century MacLeod had rebuilt the church of St Clement’s, and in some crucial sense Alexander was as much a throwback as a sign of things to come, a relic of an idealised world of ‘Charity, Piety, integrity of life’ and social responsibility that if it had ever existed had been dealt its death blow at Culloden.

And yet if there can be few more beautiful places in Britain than Rodel on a June morning, with a view stretching away southwards down the long line of islands towards Barra, and eastwards to Skye and the distant mainland, Harris was as much a place of blighted hopes as it was of dreams. Forty years earlier the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, had sought refuge on Scalpaigh during his flight into exile after Culloden, and in the decades since the failure of the ’45, Harris had struggled to come to terms with the shifting, harder, commercialised relationship of owner and tenant and the vanguard of the sheep that would signal the end of the old Highland order.

There were the mainland canals to navvy on and there was still the army – there were women on the island this Sunday morning who did not yet know they were widows of Quatre Bras – but even in the good years it was a harsh life for the crofter. ‘All the bread is generally consumed by the end of June,’ the Reverend John MacLeod had recorded in 1792, ‘and such as then cannot afford to purchase imported meal, subsist chiefly on the milk of their cows and sheep, with what fish they may chance to catch, till their wants are relieved by the first fruits of their potato crop early in harvest.’

It is a tragic irony that of all the measures Captain Alexander MacLeod introduced to improve these lives – the house, the school, the better tracks, the fishing stations, the boat yard, the Orkney yawls, the restored church of St Clement’s – his abiding legacy to them was one of bitter hardship and failure. In the early days of his ownership there had been some spectacular success with commercial fishing, but when he died in 1790 it was not the ‘silver darlings’ of the herring trade or a balanced island economy that interested his absentee son and grandson but the easy fortunes to be had out of the inexhaustible supply of kelp in the myriad bays and inlets of Harris’s rocky eastern coastline.

It would prove a dangerous dependency for the islanders but for an absentee landlord only concerned with the short-term the profits were immense – landlords would go to court to dispute possession of an outcrop of useless rocks – and the young Alexander MacLeod had been lucky in his timing. In the years before the outbreak of war with France the seaweed had principally been used in the islands to fertilise the soil, but with the disruption of trade and the end of crucial and cheaper imports from Napoleonic Europe the mineral-rich kelp ash used in the glass and soap industries suddenly soared in value.

Along the exposed western side of the island, where the Atlantic winter storms threw up vast dumps of kelp down its long line of white, shell-sand beaches, the harvesting was a simple if occasional business, but on the eastern ‘bays’ it was another matter. In the past these inhospitable inlets had only been used for summer grazing, but the fortunes to be made in kelp shifted the whole focus of the economy from west to east, from the sporadic collection of sea-ware for manuring the crofters’ fields to its systematic farming for the precious ash.

It was a brutally harsh and primitive life for the crofters who had been resettled along the northern shore of East Loch Tarbert, but as long as the war had continued they had at least been able to survive. The huge bulk of the profits inevitably disappeared off the island to line the pockets of MacLeod’s absentee heirs, and yet if the work was grim and unhealthy – backbreaking hours spent thigh-deep in the cold sea felling the kelp or tending the pits that burned along this shoreline with their sullen, acrid, blinding smoke – kelp offered the only way, short of emigration, or Quatre Bras, out of the inflationary Malthusian spiral of mounting rents, higher food prices and rising population of which the crofters were the helpless, inarticulate victims.

It was to one of these small isolated settlements on the shore of East Loch Tarbert, perched precariously between the sea and the stark lunar interior of North Harris, that some ten years earlier a young girl from the other side of the island called Eury MacLeod had come to work. There had almost certainly been the odd hovel on this site before old Alexander MacLeod’s days, but like Urgha and Carriegrich to the west of it, Caolas Scalpaigh survived as a reminder of those heady days of the captain’s fisheries projects, when it seemed that the silver darlings could never fail and that Harris was set to harvest its own improbable bonanza of war.

There were twenty crofting lots at Caolas Scalpaigh when war had ended in 1814, with their rental fixed to the stretch of shore rather than to the size of the holding, and it is likely that the Malcolm MacLeod, for whom Eury had come to work, was her relative. The MacLeods held crofts No 2 and 3 at this time, and if that might have made them marginally better off than the rest of Caolas Scalpaigh, an exorbitant rent of £9 a year – by far the highest in the whole settlement – still left them tottering on the edge of a disaster that only the kelp could keep at bay.

For more than ten years Caolas Scalpaigh had been Eury MacLeod’s whole world, the view through the smoke of the kelp pits over the narrow sound to the Isle of Scalpaigh the limits of her horizon, when sometime in the early summer of 1815 she discovered that she was pregnant. She had a vague sense that she had not conceived before the previous Martinmas, 11 November, but beyond that and the name of the father – Roderick Macaskill, a twenty-five-year-old crofter’s son from Caolas Scalpaigh who had since left the island to find work as a labourer on the construction of the Caledonian canal – she could not even have told anyone how old she was.

She was never able to say when she first realised her condition, and she had certainly told no one when on the 14 May 1815 – Whitsun – she had left the house of Malcolm and Marion MacLeod and crossed the narrow sound to live with her sister and her brother-in-law on the Isle of Scalpaigh. It is just possible that she hoped that somehow she could have the child undetected on the near-empty island, but there seems something so dumbly and hopelessly passive about Eury MacLeod’s whole story that it is hard to imagine that calculation ever entered into it.

There was only one house of any size on Scalpaigh, the MacLennans’ house – where in the days when Donald Cameron had been tacksman, the Young Pretender had hidden for four days during his flight into exile – and it was near here, on either Friday 16th or the Friday before, that Eury MacLeod had crawled out of her brother-in-law’s house in the middle of the night and given birth to a stillborn baby boy. By the time the scattered remains were found on the 19th it was impossible to know how long they had been lying there, and long before Eury would be well enough to give any coherent account, exhaustion and fever had reduced her recollections to a blur from which only the barest facts ever emerged.

‘At the time the Declarant came to … her sister’s house,’ read the official statement taken down in English from Eury’s confession by the Rodel schoolmaster for the Sub-Sheriff, and read back to her in her native Gaelic, ‘her sister’s children [she said] were ill of a fever and that her sister attended them, that about twenty days after her going to her sister’s house the Declarant was herself attacked by the fever, which confined her to her bed.’ For four or five days Eury had been too ill to move, but ‘on a Friday evening’ – which Friday she could not say – she had ‘found herself very much pained’, and putting on her ‘cloaths’ and letting herself out of her sister’s house, had followed the track to near the MacLennans’ store house ‘where she was delivered of a male child’.

The boy was stillborn, ‘not having come into its full time’, and ‘finding the child dead … and being unable to bring it home’, Eury had wrapped her petticoat about the body tying the string about the middle. ‘She had laid the child by the side of a stone on the road to the MacLennans’ well, and had then gone back to her sister’s, intending, she told the schoolmaster, to come back for the child’s body the next morning ‘but she was too ill to do so’.

In these early hours of 18 June, as she lay beneath the heather thatch of her sister’s house, still too weak to recover her dead child, she will have known little of this. Nor would she know the charge hanging over her: ‘That albeit, by the laws of this and every other well governed Realm,’ read the preamble, ‘Murder, and more especially the Murder of a child by its own mother, is a Crime of an heinous nature, and severely punishable … the said Aurora MacLeod did in a field near to the stone house occupied by Murdoch MacLennan, Tacksman of Scalpay … and at or near to a cairn of stones in said field, bring forth a living and full term male child, and she did there immediately after the birth, wickedly and feloniously bereave of life and Murder the said child, by the Strangulation, or bruising the head and body thereof, or by other means … unknown, and she did thereafter expose the body of the said child … where it was afterwards found, much mangled and mutilated by dogs or other animals.’

Already her distinct Gaelic identity, and even her name, were dissolving in the maw of British justice. The small child who had come down to Caolas Scalpaigh to carry peat and draw water for Malcolm MacLeod was now the declarant ‘Aurora’ MacLeod. She would never see either Caolas Scalpaigh or her Lewis birthplace of Balincoll again. In front of her lay the short boat ride to Rodel, the schoolmaster and Sheriff-Substitute, Stornoway, the Tolbooth gaol at Inverness and the September assizes. Even the concealment of a pregnancy was a crime in itself, and when her trial finally came round – a young, sick girl, saddled with a name that would have meant nothing to her, in a court whose language she did not speak and where her only Tolbooth companion was another Lewis girl who had strangled her baby and thrown it in a loch – all that remained was the sentencing. And even that she did not get. There is no record, in fact, of what happened to Eury – Aurora – MacLeod. For some reason Aurora’s sentencing was reserved to the High Court of Judiciary at Edinburgh. There seems no obvious explanation for this postponement, and somewhere between Inverness and Edinburgh – a final, gratuitously appropriate touch – she would simply disappear, leaving only an entry in the Discharge Book of the Inverness Tolbooth and a cancelled minute in the records of the Edinburgh High Court of Judiciary to mark the obscure end of her short, invisible life.

All that, though, was still ahead of her. Behind her she would be leaving a dying world, caught up in its own inexorable, resistless tragedy of the Clearances, the death of the kelp trade, and emigrations. And beside the track up to the MacLennans’ well, this Sunday morning – tragedy and symbol rolled into one – lay the stillborn body of her child.1