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Transcriber’s note:

[oe] represents the oe-ligature.

THE PIRATE.

Nothing in him—-
But doth suffer a sea-change.

_Tempest._

Bibliophile Edition

This Edition of the Works of Sir Walter Scott,
Bart, is limited to One Thousand Numbered and
Signed Sets, of which this is

Number …

University Library Association

Bibliophile Edition

The Waverley Novels

With New Introductions, Notes and Glossaries by Andrew Lang

THE PIRATE

SIR WALTER SCOTT, Bart.

Illustrated

University Library Association
Philadelphia

Andrew Lang Edition.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE PIRATE.

VOLUME I.
PAGE
MORDAUNT IN YELLOWLEY’S COTTAGE. _Frontispiece_
THE SWORD DANCE 234

VOLUME II.

MINNA ON THE CLIFF 103
THE PIRATE’S COUNCIL 208
MINNA TAKING THE PISTOL 250

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THE PIRATE.

The circumstances in which “The Pirate” was composed have for the Editor
a peculiar interest. He has many times scribbled at the old bureau in
Chiefswood whereon Sir Walter worked at his novel, and sat in summer
weather beneath the great tree on the lawn where Erskine used to read
the fresh chapters to Lockhart and his wife, while the burn murmured by
from the Rhymer’s Glen. So little altered is the cottage of Chiefswood
by the addition of a gabled wing in the same red stone as the older
portion, so charmed a quiet has the place, in the shelter of Eildon
Hill, that there one can readily beget the golden time again, and think
oneself back into the day when Mustard and Spice, running down the shady
glen, might herald the coming of the Sheriff himself. Happy hours and
gone: like that summer of 1821, whereof Lockhart speaks with an emotion
the more touching because it is so rare,–

the first of several seasons, which will ever dwell on my memory
as the happiest of my life. We were near enough Abbotsford to
partake as often as we liked of its brilliant society; yet could
do so without being exposed to the worry and exhaustion of spirit
which the daily reception of new visitors entailed upon all the
society except Sir Walter himself. But, in truth, even he was not
always proof against the annoyances connected with such a style of
open-house-keeping. Even his temper sank sometimes under the
solemn applause of learned dulness, the vapid raptures of painted
and periwigged dowagers the horse-leech avidity with which
underbred foreigners urged their questions, and the pompous
simpers of condescending magnates. When sore beset in this way, he
would every now and then discover that he had some very particular
business to attend to on an outlying part of his estate, and,
craving the indulgence of his guests overnight, appear at the
cabin in the glen before its inhabitants were astir in the
morning. The clatter of Sibyl Grey’s hoofs, the yelping of Mustard
and Spice, and his own joyous shout of _reveillée_ under our
window, were the signal that he had burst his bonds, and meant for
that day to take his ease in his inn…. After breakfast he would
take possession of a dressing-room upstairs, and write a chapter
of “The Pirate”; and then, having made up and dispatched his
parcel for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join Purdie where the foresters
were at work….

The constant and eager delight with which Erskine watched the
progress of the tale has left a deep impression on my memory: and
indeed I heard so many of its chapters first read from the MS. by
him, that I can never open the book now without thinking I hear
his voice. Sir Walter used to give him at breakfast the pages he
had written that morning, and very commonly, while he was again at
work in his study, Erskine would walk over to Chiefswood, that he
might have the pleasure of reading them aloud to my wife and me
under our favourite tree.[1]

“The tree is living yet!” This long quotation from a book but too little
read in general may be excused for its interest, as bearing on the
composition of “The Pirate,” in the early autumn of 1821. In “The
Pirate” Scott fell back on his recollections of the Orcades, as seen by
him in a tour with the Commissioners of Light Houses, in August 1814,
immediately after the publication of “Waverley.” They were accompanied
by Mr. Stevenson, the celebrated engineer, “a most gentlemanlike and
modest man, and well known by his scientific skill.”[2] It is understood
that Mr. Stevenson also kept a diary, and that it is to be published by
the care of his distinguished grandson, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson,
author of “Kidnapped,” “The Master of Ballantrae,” and other novels in
which Scott would have recognised a not alien genius.

Sir Walter’s Diary, read in company with “The Pirate,” offers a most
curious study of his art in composition. It may be said that he scarcely
noted a natural feature, a monument, a custom, a superstition, or a
legend in Zetland and Orkney which he did not weave into the magic web
of his romance. In the Diary all those matters appear as very ordinary;
in “The Pirate” they are transfigured in the light of fancy. History
gives Scott the career of Gow and his betrothal to an island lady:
observation gives him a few headlands, Picts’ houses, ruined towers, and
old stone monuments, and his characters gather about these, in rhythmic
array, like the dancers in the sword-dance. We may conceive that
Cleveland, like Gow, was originally meant to die, and that Minna, like
Margaret in the ballad of Clerk Saunders, was to recover her troth from
the hand of her dead lover. But, if Scott intended this, he was
good-natured, and relented.

Taking the incidents in the Diary in company with the novel, we find, in
the very first page of “The Pirate,” mention of the roost, or rost, of
Sumburgh, the running current of tidal water, which he hated so, because
it made him so sea-sick. “All the landsmen sicker than sick, and our
Viceroy, Stevenson, qualmish. It is proposed to have a light on Sumburgh
Head. Fitful Head is higher, but is to the west, from which quarter few
vessels come.” As for Sumburgh Head, Scott climbed it, rolled down a
rock from the summit, and found it “a fine situation to compose an ode
to the Genius of Sumburgh Head, or an Elegy upon a Cormorant–or to have
written or spoken madness of any kind in prose or poetry. But I gave
vent to my excited feelings in a more simple way, and, sitting gently
down on the steep green slope which led to the beach, I e’en slid down a
few hundred feet, and found the exercise quite an adequate vent to my
enthusiasm.”

Sir Walter was certainly not what he found Mrs. Hemans, “too poetical.”

In the first chapter, his Giffords, Scotts (of Scotstarvet, the
Fifeshire house, not of the Border clan), and Mouats are the very gentry
who entertained him on his tour. His “plantie cruives,” in the novel,
had been noted in the Diary (Lockhart, iv. 193). “Pate Stewart,” the
oppressive Earl, is chronicled at length in “the Diary.” “His huge tower
remains wild and desolate–its chambers filled with sand, and its rifted
walls and dismantled battlements giving unrestrained access to the
roaring sea-blast.” So Scott wrote in his last review for the
“Quarterly,” a criticism of Pitcairn’s “Scotch Criminal Trials” (1831).
The Trows, or Drows, the fairy dwarfs he studied on the spot, and
connects the name with Dwerg, though _Trolls_ seem rather to be their
spiritual and linguistic ancestors. The affair of the clergyman who was
taken for a Pecht, or Pict, actually occurred during the tour, and Mr.
Stevenson, who had met the poor Pecht before, was able to clear his
character.[3] In the same place the Kraken is mentioned: he had been
visible for nearly a fortnight, but no sailor dared go near him.

He lay in the offing a fortnight or more,
But the devil a Zetlander put from the shore.
If your Grace thinks I’m writing the thing that is not,
You may ask at a namesake of ours, Mr. Scott,

Sir Walter wrote to the Duke of Buccleugh. He paid a visit to an old
lady, who, like Norna, and Æolus in the Odyssey, kept the winds in a
bag, and could sell a fair breeze. “She was a miserable figure, upwards
of ninety, she told me, and dried up like a mummy. A sort of
clay-coloured cloak, folded over her head, corresponded in colour to her
corpse-like complexion. Fine light-blue eyes, and nose and chin that
almost met, and a ghastly expression of cunning gave her quite the
effect of Hecate. She told us she remembered _Gow the Pirate_, betrothed
to a Miss Gordon,”–so here are the germs of Norna, Cleveland, and
Minna, all sown in good ground, to bear fruit in seven years
(1814-1821). Triptolemus Yellowley is entirely derived from the Diary,
and is an anachronism. The Lowland Scots factors and ploughs were only
coming in while Scott was in the isles. He himself saw the absurd little
mills (vol. i. ch. xi.), and the one stilted plough which needed two
women to open the furrows, a feebler plough than the Virgilian specimens
which one still remarks in Tuscany. “When this precious machine was in
motion, it was dragged by four little bullocks, yoked abreast, and as
many ponies harnessed, or rather strung, to the plough by ropes and
thongs of raw hide…. An antiquary might be of opinion that this was
the very model of the original plough invented by Triptolemus,” son of
the Eleusinian king, who sheltered Demeter in her wanderings. The
sword-dance was not danced for Scott’s entertainment, but he heard of
the Pupa dancers, and got a copy of the accompanying chant, and was
presented with examples of the flint and bronze Celts which Norna
treasured. All over the world, as in Zetland, they were regarded as
“thunder stones.” (Diary; Lockhart, iv. 220.) The bridal of Norna, by
clasping of hands through Odin’s stone ring, was still practised as a
form of betrothal. (Lockhart, iv. 252.) Some island people were
despised, as by Magnus Troil, as “poor sneaks” who ate limpets, “the
last of human meannesses.” The “wells,” or smooth wave-currents, were
also noted, and the _Garland_ of the whalers often alluded to in the
tale. The Stones of Stennis were visited, and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy,
where Norna, like some Eskimo Angekok, met her familiar demon. Scott
held that the stone “probably was meant as the temple of some northern
edition of the _dii Manes_. They conceive that the dwarf may be seen
sometimes sitting at the door of his abode, but he vanishes on a nearer
approach.” The dwelling of Norna, a Pict’s house, with an overhanging
story, “shaped like a dice-box,” is the ancient Castle of Mousa.[4] The
strange incantation of Norna, the dropping of molten lead into water, is
also described. Usually the lead was poured through the wards of a key.
In affections of the heart, like Minna’s, a triangular stone, probably a
neolithic arrow-head, was usually employed as an amulet. (Lockhart, iv.
208.) Even the story of the pirate’s insolent answer to the Provost is
adapted from a recent occurrence. Two whalers were accused of stealing a
sheep. The first denied the charge, but said he had seen the animal
carried off by “a fellow with a red nose and a black wig. Don’t you
think he was like his honour, Tom?” “By God, Jack, I believe it was the
very man.” (Diary; Lockhart, iv. 222; “The Pirate,” vol. ii. ch. xiv.)
The goldless Northern Ophir was also visited–in brief, Scott scarcely
made a remark on his tour which he did not manage to transmute into the
rare metal of his romance. It is no wonder that the Orcadians at once
detected his authorship. A trifling anecdote of the cruise has recently
been published. Scott presented a lady in the isles with a piano, which,
it seems, is still capable of producing a melancholy jingling tune.[5]

Lockhart says, as to the reception of “The Pirate” (Dec. 1821): “The
wild freshness of the atmosphere of this splendid romance, the beautiful
contrast of Minna and Brenda, and the exquisitely drawn character of
Captain Cleveland, found the reception which they deserved.” “The wild
freshness of the atmosphere” is indeed magically transfused, and
breathes across the pages as it blows over the Fitful Head, the
skerries, the desolate moors, the plain of the Standing Stones of
Stennis. The air is keen and salt and fragrant of the sea. Yet Sydney
Smith was greatly disappointed. “I am afraid this novel will depend upon
the former reputation of the author, and will add nothing to it. It may
sell, and another may half sell, but that is all, unless he comes out
with something vigorous, and redeems himself. I do not blame him for
writing himself out, if he knows he is doing so, and has done his
_best_, and his _all_. If the native land of Scotland will supply no
more scenes and characters, for he is always best in Scotland, though he
was very good in England the (time) he was there; but pray, wherever the
scene is laid, no more Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampsons–very good the
first and second times, but now quite worn out, and always recurring.”
(“Archibald Constable,” iii. 69.)

It was Smith’s grammar that gave out, and produced no apodosis to his
phrase. Scott could not write himself out, before his brain was affected
by disease. Had his age been miraculously prolonged, with health, it
could never be said that “all the stories have been told,” and he would
have delighted mankind unceasingly.

Scott himself was a little nettled by the criticisms of Norna as a
replica of Meg Merrilies. She is, indeed, “something distinct from the
Dumfriesshire gipsy”–in truth, she rather resembles the Ulrica of
“Ivanhoe.” Like her, she is haunted by the memory of an awful crime, an
insane version of a mere accident; like her, she is a votaress of the
dead gods of the older world, Thor and Odin, and the spirits of the
tempest. Scott’s imagination lived so much in the past that the ancient
creeds never ceased to allure him: like Heine, he felt the fascination
of the banished deities, not of Greece, but of the North. Thus Norna,
crazed by her terrible mischance, dwells among them, worships the Red
Beard, as outlying descendants of the Aztecs yet retain some faith in
their old monstrous Pantheon. Even Minna keeps, in her girlish
enthusiasm, some touch of Freydis in the saga of Eric the Red: for her
the old gods and the old years are not wholly exiled and impotent. All
this is most characteristic of the antiquary and the poet in Scott, who
lingers fondly over what has been, and stirs the last faint embers of
fallen fires. It is of a piece with the harmless Jacobitism of his
festivals, when they sang

Here’s to the King, boys!
Ye ken wha I mean, boys.

In the singularly feeble and provincial vulgarities which Borrow
launches, in the appendix to “Lavengro,” against the memory of Scott,
the charge of reviving Catholicism is the most bitter. That rowdy
evangelist might as well have charged Scott with a desire to restore the
worship of Odin, and to sacrifice human victims on the stone altar of
Stennis. He saw in Orkney the ruined fanes of the Norse deities, as at
Melrose of the Virgin, and his loyal heart could feel for all that was
old and lost, for all into which men had put their hearts and faiths,
had made, and had unmade, in the secular quest for the divine. Like a
later poet, he might have said:–

Not as their friend or child I speak,
But as on some far Northern strand,
Thinking of his own gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Beside some fallen Runic stone,
For both were gods, and both are gone.

And surely no creed is more savage, cruel, and worthy of death than
Borrow’s belief in a God who “knew where to strike,” and deliberately
struck Scott by inducing Robinson to speculate in hops, and so bring
down his Edinburgh associate, Constable, and with him Sir Walter! Such
was the religion which Borrow expressed in the style of a writer in a
fourth-rate country newspaper. We might prefer the frank Heathenism of
the Red Beard to the religion of the author of “The Bible in Spain.”

There is no denying that Scott had in his imagination a certain mould of
romance, into which his ideas, when he wrote most naturally, and most
for his own pleasure, were apt to run. It is one of the charms of “The
Pirate” that here he is manifestly writing for his own pleasure, with a
certain boyish eagerness. Had we but the plot of one of the tales which
he told, as a lad, to his friend Irving, we might find that it turned on
a romantic mystery, a clue in the hands of some witch or wise woman, of
some one who was always appearing in the nick of time, was always round
the corner when anything was to be heard. This is a standing
characteristic of the tales: now it is Edie Ochiltree, now
Flibbertigibbet, now Meg Merrilies, now Norna, who holds the thread of
the plot, but these characters are all well differentiated. Again, he
had types, especially the pedantic type, which attracted him, but they
vary as much as Yellowley and Dugald Dalgetty, the Antiquary, and
Dominie Sampson. Yellowley is rather more repressed than some of Scott’s
bores; but then he is not the only bore, for Claud Halcro, with all his
merits, is a professed proser. Swift had exactly described the
character, the episodical narrator, in a passage parallel to one in
Theophrastus. In writing to Morritt, Scott says (November 1818): “I
sympathise with you for the _dole_ you are _dreeing_ under the
inflictions of your honest proser. Of all the boring machines ever
devised, your regular and determined story-teller is the most peremptory
and powerful in his operations.”

“With what perfect placidity he submitted to be bored even by bores of
the first water!” says Lockhart. The species is one which we all have
many opportunities of studying, but it may be admitted that Scott
produced his studies of bores with a certain complacency. Yet they are
all different bores, and the gay, kind _scald_ Halcro is very unlike
Master Mumblasen or Dominie Sampson.

For a hero Mordaunt may be called almost sprightly and individual. His
mysterious father occasionally suggests the influence of Byron,
occasionally of Mrs. Radcliffe. The Udaller is as individual and genial
as Dandie Dinmont himself; or, again, he is the Cedric of Thule, though
much more sympathetic than Cedric to most readers. His affection for his
daughters is characteristic and deserved. Many a pair of sisters, blonde
and brune, have we met in fiction since Minna and Brenda, but none have
been their peers, and, like Mordaunt in early years, we know not to
which of them our hearts are given. They are “L’Allegro” and “Il
Penseroso” of the North, and it is probable that all men would fall in
love with Minna if they had the chance, and marry Brenda, if they could.
Minna is, indeed, the ideal youth of poetry, and Brenda of the practical
life. The innocent illusions of Minna, her love of all that is old, her
championship of the forlorn cause, her beauty, her tenderness, her
truth, her passionate waywardness of sorrow, make her one of Scott’s
most original and delightful heroines. She believes and trembles not,
like Bertram in “Rokeby.” Brenda trembles, but does not believe in
Norna’s magic, and in the spirits of ancient saga. As for Cleveland,
Scott managed to avoid Byron’s Lara-like pirates, and produced a
freebooter as sympathetic as any _hostis humani generis_ can be, while
“Frederick Altamont” (Thackeray borrowed the name for his romantic
crossing-sweeper) has a place among the Marischals and Bucklaws of
romance. Scott’s minute studies in Dryden come to the aid of his local
observations, and so, out of not very promising materials, and out of
the contrast of Lowland Scot and Orcadian, the romance is spun. Probably
the “psychological analysis” which most interested the author is the
double consciousness of Norna, the occasional intrusions of the rational
self on her dreams of supernatural powers. That double consciousness,
indeed, exists in all of us: occasionally the self in which we believe
has a vision of the real underlying self, and shudders from the sight,
like the pair “who met themselves” in the celebrated drawing.

“The Pirate” can scarcely be placed in the front rank of Scott’s novels,
but it has a high and peculiar place in the second, and probably will
always be among the special favourites of those who, being young, are
fortunate enough not to be critical.

Scott’s novels at this time came forth so frequently that the lumbering
“Quarterlies” toiled after them in vain. They adopted the plan of
reviewing them in batches, and the “Quarterly” may be said to have
omitted “The Pirate” altogether. About this time Gifford began to find
that the person who spoke of a “dark dialect of Anglified Erse” was not
a competent critic, and Mr. Senior noticed several of the tales in a
more judicious manner. As to “The Pirate,” the “Edinburgh Review”
found “the character and story of Mertoun at once commonplace and
extravagant.” Cleveland disappoints “by turning out so much better
than we had expected, and yet substantially so ill.” “Nothing can
be more beautiful than the description of the sisters.” “Norna is
a new incarnation of Meg Merrilies, and palpably the same in the
spirit … but far above the rank of a mere imitated or borrowed
character.” “The work, on the whole, opens up a new world to our
curiosity, and affords another proof of the extreme pliability,
as well as vigour, of the author’s genius.”

ANDREW LANG.
_August 1893._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lockhart, vi. 388-393. Erskine died before Scott, slain by a silly
piece of gossip, and Mr. Skene says: “I never saw Sir Walter so much
affected by any event, and at the funeral, which he attended, he was
quite unable to suppress his feelings, but wept like a child.” His
correspondence with Scott fell into the hands of a lady, who, seeing
that it revealed the secret of Scott’s authorship, most unfortunately
burned all the letters. (Journal, i. 416.)

[2] Scott’s Diary, July 29, 1814. Lockhart, vi. 183.

[3] See Author’s Note No. I.

[4] Diary; Lockhart, iv. 223.

[5] “Atalanta,” December 1892.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PIRATE.

“Quoth he, there was a ship.”

This brief preface may begin like the tale of the Ancient Mariner, since
it was on shipboard that the author acquired the very moderate degree of
local knowledge and information, both of people and scenery, which he
has endeavoured to embody in the romance of the Pirate.

In the summer and autumn of 1814, the author was invited to join a party
of Commissioners for the Northern Light-House Service, who proposed
making a voyage round the coast of Scotland, and through its various
groups of islands, chiefly for the purpose of seeing the condition of
the many lighthouses under their direction,–edifices so important,
whether regarding them as benevolent or political institutions. Among
the commissioners who manage this important public concern, the sheriff
of each county of Scotland which borders on the sea, holds ex-officio a
place at the Board. These gentlemen act in every respect gratuitously,
but have the use of an armed yacht, well found and fitted up, when they
choose to visit the lighthouses. An excellent engineer, Mr. Robert
Stevenson, is attached to the Board, to afford the benefit of his
professional advice. The author accompanied this expedition as a guest;
for Selkirkshire, though it calls him Sheriff, has not, like the kingdom
of Bohemia in Corporal Trim’s story, a seaport in its circuit, nor its
magistrate, of course, any place at the Board of Commissioners,–a
circumstance of little consequence where all were old and intimate
friends, bred to the same profession, and disposed to accommodate each
other in every possible manner.

The nature of the important business which was the principal purpose of
the voyage, was connected with the amusement of visiting the leading
objects of a traveller’s curiosity; for the wild cape, or formidable
shelve, which requires to be marked out by a lighthouse, is generally at
no great distance from the most magnificent scenery of rocks, caves, and
billows. Our time, too, was at our own disposal, and, as most of us were
freshwater sailors, we could at any time make a fair wind out of a foul
one, and run before the gale in quest of some object of curiosity which
lay under our lee.

With these purposes of public utility and some personal amusement in
view, we left the port of Leith on the 26th July, 1814, ran along the
east coast of Scotland, viewing its different curiosities, stood over to
Zetland and Orkney, where we were some time detained by the wonders of a
country which displayed so much that was new to us; and having seen what
was curious in the Ultima Thule of the ancients, where the sun hardly
thought it worth while to go to bed, since his rising was at this season
so early, we doubled the extreme northern termination of Scotland, and
took a rapid survey of the Hebrides, where we found many kind friends.
There, that our little expedition might not want the dignity of danger,
we were favoured with a distant glimpse of what was said to be an
American cruiser, and had opportunity to consider what a pretty figure
we should have made had the voyage ended in our being carried captive
to the United States. After visiting the romantic shores of Morven, and
the vicinity of Oban, we made a run to the coast of Ireland, and visited
the Giant’s Causeway, that we might compare it with Staffa, which we had
surveyed in our course. At length, about the middle of September, we
ended our voyage in the Clyde, at the port of Greenock.

And thus terminated our pleasant tour, to which our equipment gave
unusual facilities, as the ship’s company could form a strong boat’s
crew, independent of those who might be left on board the vessel, which
permitted us the freedom to land wherever our curiosity carried us. Let
me add, while reviewing for a moment a sunny portion of my life, that
among the six or seven friends who performed this voyage together, some
of them doubtless of different tastes and pursuits, and remaining for
several weeks on board a small vessel, there never occurred the
slightest dispute or disagreement, each seeming anxious to submit his
own particular wishes to those of his friends. By this mutual
accommodation all the purposes of our little expedition were obtained,
while for a time we might have adopted the lines of Allan Cunningham’s
fine sea-song,

“The world of waters was our home,
And merry men were we!”

But sorrow mixes her memorials with the purest remembrances of pleasure.
On returning from the voyage which had proved so satisfactory, I found
that fate had deprived her country most unexpectedly of a lady,
qualified to adorn the high rank which she held, and who had long
admitted me to a share of her friendship. The subsequent loss of one of
those comrades who made up the party, and he the most intimate friend I
had in the world, casts also its shade on recollections which, but for
these embitterments, would be otherwise so pleasing.

I may here briefly observe, that my business in this voyage, so far as I
could be said to have any, was to endeavour to discover some localities
which might be useful in the “Lord of the Isles,” a poem with which I
was then threatening the public, and was afterwards printed without
attaining remarkable success. But as at the same time the anonymous
novel of “Waverley” was making its way to popularity, I already augured
the possibility of a second effort in this department of literature, and
I saw much in the wild islands of the Orkneys and Zetland, which I
judged might be made in the highest degree interesting, should these
isles ever become the scene of a narrative of fictitious events. I
learned the history of Gow the pirate from an old sibyl, (the subject of
a note, p. 326 of this volume,) whose principal subsistence was by a
trade in favourable winds, which she sold to mariners at Stromness.
Nothing could be more interesting than the kindness and hospitality of
the gentlemen of Zetland, which was to me the more affecting, as several
of them had been friends and correspondents of my father.

I was induced to go a generation or two farther back, to find materials
from which I might trace the features of the old Norwegian Udaller, the
Scottish gentry having in general occupied the place of that primitive
race, and their language and peculiarities of manner having entirely
disappeared. The only difference now to be observed betwixt the gentry
of these islands, and those of Scotland in general, is, that the wealth
and property is more equally divided among our more northern countrymen,
and that there exists among the resident proprietors no men of very
great wealth, whose display of its luxuries might render the others
discontented with their own lot. From the same cause of general
equality of fortunes, and the cheapness of living, which is its natural
consequence, I found the officers of a veteran regiment who had
maintained the garrison at Fort Charlotte, in Lerwick, discomposed at
the idea of being recalled from a country where their pay, however
inadequate to the expenses of a capital, was fully adequate to their
wants, and it was singular to hear natives of merry England herself
regretting their approaching departure from the melancholy isles of the
Ultima Thule.

Such are the trivial particulars attending the origin of that
publication, which took place several years later than the agreeable
journey from which it took its rise.

The state of manners which I have introduced in the romance, was
necessarily in a great degree imaginary, though founded in some measure
on slight hints, which, showing what was, seemed to give reasonable
indication of what must once have been, the tone of the society in these
sequestered but interesting islands.

In one respect I was judged somewhat hastily, perhaps, when the
character of Norna was pronounced by the critics a mere copy of Meg
Merrilees. That I had fallen short of what I wished and desired to
express is unquestionable, otherwise my object could not have been so
widely mistaken; nor can I yet think that any person who will take the
trouble of reading the Pirate with some attention, can fail to trace in
Norna,–the victim of remorse and insanity, and the dupe of her own
imposture, her mind, too, flooded with all the wild literature and
extravagant superstitions of the north,–something distinct from the
Dumfries-shire gipsy, whose pretensions to supernatural powers are not
beyond those of a Norwood prophetess. The foundations of such a
character may be perhaps traced, though it be too true that the
necessary superstructure cannot have been raised upon them, otherwise
these remarks would have been unnecessary. There is also great
improbability in the statement of Norna’s possessing power and
opportunity to impress on others that belief in her supernatural gifts
which distracted her own mind. Yet, amid a very credulous and ignorant
population, it is astonishing what success may be attained by an
impostor, who is, at the same time, an enthusiast. It is such as to
remind us of the couplet which assures us that

“The pleasure is as great
In being cheated as to cheat.”

Indeed, as I have observed elsewhere, the professed explanation of a
tale, where appearances or incidents of a supernatural character are
referred to natural causes, has often, in the winding up of the story, a
degree of improbability almost equal to an absolute goblin narrative.
Even the genius of Mrs. Radcliffe could not always surmount this
difficulty.

ABBOTSFORD,
_1st May, 1831._

ADVERTISEMENT.

The purpose of the following Narrative is to give a detailed and
accurate account of certain remarkable incidents which took place in the
Orkney Islands, concerning which the more imperfect traditions and
mutilated records of the country only tell us the following erroneous
particulars:–

In the month of January, 1724-5, a vessel, called the Revenge, bearing
twenty large guns, and six smaller, commanded by JOHN GOW, or GOFFE, or
SMITH, came to the Orkney Islands, and was discovered to be a pirate, by
various acts of insolence and villainy committed by the crew. These were
for some time submitted to, the inhabitants of these remote islands not
possessing arms nor means of resistance; and so bold was the Captain of
these banditti, that he not only came ashore, and gave dancing parties
in the village of Stromness, but before his real character was
discovered, engaged the affections, and received the troth-plight, of a
young lady possessed of some property. A patriotic individual, JAMES
FEA, younger of Clestron, formed the plan of securing the buccanier,
which he effected by a mixture of courage and address, in consequence
chiefly of Gow’s vessel having gone on shore near the harbour of
Calfsound, on the Island of Eda, not far distant from a house then
inhabited by Mr. FEA. In the various stratagems by which Mr. FEA
contrived finally, at the peril of his life, (they being well armed and
desperate,) to make the whole pirates his prisoners, he was much aided
by Mr. JAMES LAING, the grandfather of the late MALCOLM LAING, Esq., the
acute and ingenious historian of Scotland during the 17th century.

Gow, and others of his crew, suffered, by sentence of the High Court of
Admiralty, the punishment their crimes had long deserved. He conducted
himself with great audacity when before the Court; and, from an account
of the matter by an eye-witness, seems to have been subjected to some
unusual severities, in order to compel him to plead. The words are
these: “JOHN GOW would not plead, for which he was brought to the bar,
and the Judge ordered that his thumbs should be squeezed by two men,
with a whip-cord, till it did break; and then it should be doubled, till
it did again break, and then laid threefold, and that the executioners
should pull with their whole strength; which sentence Gow endured with a
great deal of boldness.” The next morning, (27th May, 1725,) when he had
seen the terrible preparations for pressing him to death, his courage
gave way, and he told the Marshal of Court, that he would not have given
so much trouble, had he been assured of not being hanged in chains. He
was then tried, condemned, and executed, with others of his crew.

It is said, that the lady whose affections GOW had engaged, went up to
London to see him before his death, and that, arriving too late, she had
the courage to request a sight of his dead body; and then, touching the
hand of the corpse, she formally resumed the troth-plight which she had
bestowed. Without going through this ceremony, she could not, according
to the superstition of the country, have escaped a visit from the ghost
of her departed lover, in the event of her bestowing upon any living
suitor the faith which she had plighted to the dead. This part of the
legend may serve as a curious commentary on the fine Scottish ballad,
which begins,

“There came a ghost to Margaret’s door,” &c.(_a_)[6]

The common account of this incident farther bears, that Mr. FEA, the
spirited individual by whose exertions GOW’S career of iniquity was cut
short, was so far from receiving any reward from Government, that he
could not obtain even countenance enough to protect him against a
variety of sham suits, raised against him by Newgate solicitors, who
acted in the name of GOW, and others of the pirate crew; and the various
expenses, vexatious prosecutions, and other legal consequences, in which
his gallant exploit involved him, utterly ruined his fortune, and his
family; making his memory a notable example to all who shall in future
take pirates on their own authority.

It is to be supposed, for the honour of GEORGE the First’s Government,
that the last circumstance, as well as the dates, and other particulars
of the commonly received story, are inaccurate, since they will be found
totally irreconcilable with the following veracious narrative, compiled
from materials to which he himself alone has had access, by

THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] See Editor’s Notes at the end of the Volume. Wherever a similar
reference occurs, the reader will understand that the same direction
applies.

THE PIRATE.