Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654
Name: | Blaeu, Joan, 1596-1673 |
Title: | Descriptio Insvlarvm Circa Scotiam |
Pagination: | 152-153 |
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Translation of text:
As for their customs, culture and language, they do not differ in the slightest from those wild Irish, whom we have discussed, so that we easily perceive that they are one and the same race. The families who hold sway among them are MacConnell, MacAlen alias Maclean, MacLeod of Lewis and MacLeod of Harris. By far the most powerful is that of MacConnells, who boast of descent from Donald, who in the reign of James III declared himself King of the Isles, and ravaged fiercely into Scotland with every kind of cruelty; yet his proscribed son John paid for this, being compelled to yield all his possessions to the will of the King, from whom he received estates in Kintyre. In the century after them Donald Gormey MacConnell flourished, that is ‘Blue’, nicknamed perhaps from his dress. His sons were Angus MacConnell, and Alexander, who left the sterile and barren Kintyre and invaded the Glens in Ireland. Angus MacConnell was father of James MacConnell, who was slain by Shane O Neal, and of Sorley Boy, who received lands in the Route in Ireland by the kindness of Queen Elizabeth. To James MacConnell was born Angus MacConnell, concerning whom we have previously spoken; between him and MacLean a dreadful hatred was so deeply implanted, that it was not possible to extinguish it by the force of common blood without contaminating themselves foully with related blood.
ORKNEYS
and
SHETLAND (Section Note)
From the Hebrides to the north east, if you follow the coast, you will at length see the Orcades, now Orkneys, more or less 30 islands spread out over the intervening Ocean. An old parchment so calls them as if ‘Argat’, that is, as it understands, above the Getae: I should prefer, above Cat, for they lie opposite the Cath region of Scotland, which because of the promontory they now call Caith-ness; its inhabitants (24) seem to be wrongly named by Ptolemy Carini instead of Catini. At the time of Solinus they were uninhabited and bristled with rush-like grasses; now however they have been cultivated, but without woods, and are sufficiently productive of barley and wheat, but totally lacking in trees. Pomonia, famous for the episcopal cathedral, is the principal among them; called by Solinus ‘long Pomona’ because of the long extent of daylight, today it is Mainland to the inhabitants, as if it were a continent, with the episcopal seat in the small town of Kirkwall; it is adorned with two castles. It produces tin and lead. Ocetis is also counted among them by Ptolemy, which we conjecture is now called Eday. But whether I should say that Hoy is Pliny’s Dumna which is counted among them, I have not decided. Certainly if it is not, I should prefer to think that Dumna is Fair Isle, that is beautiful island, in which the only town is called Dumo[?], than with Becan[?] to think of Wardhuys in Lappland[?]. Julius Agricola, the first to circumnavigate Britain with his fleet, discovered the hitherto unknown Orkneys, and tamed them; far from Claudius having conquered them (as is stated in Jerome’s Chronicles), in Hadrian’s time Juvenal wrote (25):
Why have we moved armies
Beyond the shores of Ireland and the recently taken
Orkneys and the Britons content with minimal night?
And later when the Roman Empire in Britain was falling, they were the home of the Picts, and Claudian said poetically in jest (26):
Drenched with routed Saxon were
The Orkneys.
Nennius also relates that the Saxons Octha and Ebissus, who served the Britons, sailed round the Picts with 45 ‘cyuli’, that is light vessels, and sacked the Orkneys. Afterwards they came into the power of the Norwegians (hence the inhabitants speak Gothic) by cession from Donald Ban (who, after the death of his brother Malcolm Canmore, King of Scots, usurped the kingdom to the exclusion of his nephews), so that with their aid he might be assisted in the crime he had conceived; and the Norwegians held them until A.D. 1266; for then Magnus IV, King of Norway, worn down by wars from the Scot, returned them by agreement to Alexander III King of Scots, and they were confirmed to King Robert Bruce in the year 1312 by Haakon King of the Norwegians. Finally in the year 1468 Christian I King of Norway and Denmark for himself and his successors renounced all his right when he was giving his daughter in marriage to James III, King of Scots, and tranferred all his right to his son-in-law and his successors; for a still more secure basis the confirmation of the Roman Pontiff was added.
To say nothing of the older Earls of Orkney, who had also by hereditary right acquired the Earldoms of Caithness and Strathearn, at length by a female heir the title of Orkney came down to William St Clair or Sinclair, and William the 4th Earl of this family called the Wastrel, who lost his patrimony, was the last Earl of this family. His descendants however have flourished with the honour of Barons Sinclair down to these times. And the title of Caithness even now remains with the descendants of his brother. In our lifetime this honorable title of Earl of Orkney and Lord of Shetland was given to Robert the natural son of King James V, and his son Patrick Stewart today enjoys the same.
Beyond the Orkneys and above Britain, the ancient commentator on Horace, Fortunatus, locates the islands where the Greeks wrote that none live except the pious and just and in their poems celebrate the beauty and fertility of the place, calling them the Elysian fields. But on these Isles of the Blessed, hear, if you will, a different tale of the fabulous Greekling Isaac Tzetzes from his notes on Lycophron (27). ‘In the Ocean is the island of Britain, between western Britain and east-facing Thule, thither they say that the souls of the dead are transported, for on the shore of the Ocean, in which the island of Britain is, live fishermen, subjects of the French, but not paying taxes to them, for the reason that they send on the souls of the dead, as they say. For they, departing, sleep at home about the evening, but shortly after perceive some persons pushing at the door and hear a voice calling them to work. Rising at once, they go to the shore, not knowing what necessity drives them, and see ships prepared, but not their own, and empty of men; going on board, they move the oars and feel the weight of the ships, as if they were laden with men, but they see no-one. Then with one strike they reach the island of Britain, although, when at other times they use their own ships, they scarcely reach it in a voyage of one night and day. But when they reach the island, again they see no-one, but they hear the voice of those receiving the ones who are in the ships, and counting them by the race of their father and mother, and further calling individuals in accordance with their class, skill and name. But the ship being unloaded, again with one strike they return home. Hence many think that the isles of the Blessed are there.’ Of the same nature might seem to be that poetical geographer mentioned by Muretus in his Variae Lectiones, who narrates that Julius Caesar was once carried there with one trireme and a hundred men; taken with the incredible beauty of the place, he wished to set up home there, but was against his will and reluctantly driven out by those ‘formless’, that is invisible, inhabitants.
Thule is placed by Solinus a voyage of five days and nights from the Orkneys. This island is more than any other celebrated by the poets, since they hint at something most distant, as if the most remote of the whole world; hence Virgil, ‘May farthest Thule serve you.’ Seneca, ‘Farthest of lands, Thule.’ (28) Juvenal, ‘Thule now talks of hiring an advocate.’ (29) Claudian, ‘Remote Thule far from the pole,’ and elsewhere ‘Thule inaccessible to ships.’ (30) Statius, ‘to conquer unknown Thule.’ And Ammianus Marcellinus uses it as proverbial, ‘Even if he delayed in Thule’ (to omit the rest). One may however be allowed to note that Thule is used for Britain by Statius in these verses:
No differently when the blue native of Thule fights,
He surrounds the armies driven by scythed chariot.
And, it seems, in a passage of the Silvae (31),
Thule resounding with receding waters.
Suidas writes that the name was taken from Thules an Egyptian King, Isidore from the Sun, Reiner Reineck from the Saxon word ‘tell’, that is boundary, as if it was the boundary of the north and west. However whether there ever was a Thule is doubted by Sinesius, and our Gerald writes that it appears nowhere, and the learned are divided in ambiguous opinion on it. Most have claimed that Iceland, condemned to a frozen climate and perpetual winter, was once called Thule; they however are opposed by Saxo Grammaticus, Crantz, Milius, Jovius and Peucer. Nor does it escape me that the huge region Scandia is described by Procopius under the name of Thule. But if what the learned Gaspar Peucer relates in his book on the Dimension of the Earth is true, that Shetland was called by sailors Thilensell (and I should not dare to diminish his credibility), certainly Thule has been found and the matter now at last settled. For this Shetland is an island, with other small ones, encompassed under the rule of the Scots, stiff with cold and exposed on all sides to storms, to whose inhabitants, as in Iceland, dried and crushed fish serves as meal. And although the North Pole is not so raised up here that it has perpetual day for six months, as Pytheas of Marseilles, justly censured by Strabo, imagined of Thule, for this is not contiguous with Iceland itself, where there is perpetual winter and almost intolerable cold is established: yet the first argument for anyone to think that Shetland was Thule is its position in Ptolemy: for it is defined as 63 degrees from the equator, as is Thule in him; then that it lies between Norway and Scotland, where Saxo Grammaticus places Thule; next that it is two days’ sail from the promontory of Scotland or Caithness, at which distance Solinus puts Thule, and Tacitus says that Thule was discerned by the Romans when sailing round Britain through the Orkneys. Finally because it is opposite Bergen on the coast of Norway, in which place Mela put Thule; in his text ‘coast of Belgium’ is corruptly read for ‘Bergen’. For Bergen, a city of Norway, lies opposite Shetland, and Pliny names this area Bergs; I do not doubt that this is that small region in which Bergen flourishes, just as no-one will deny that Pliny’s ‘Nerigon’ is Norway. But enough about this Thule, which snow and winter hid from the ancients (as he says), and indeed from us; nor will any of them have stated clearly which of the Northern Isles they intended when they so celebrated Thule. Concerning the length of the days in that unknown island, when he was discussing Britain, Festus Avienus translated these verses from Dionysius:
If anyone were to run long miles hence in a swift bark
He will find Thule rising in a vast swell;
Here when Phoebus’ fire touches the Wain of the Pole,
Under shining night the Sun’s wheel burns
With continuous tinder, and emulous night leads bright day.
Pomponius Mela also noted this. ‘Thule, opposite the coast of Belgium, is celebrated in Greek and Roman poetry, because in it the Sun, for long about to set, rises up, and so the nights are short, but in winter as elsewhere dark, in summer light, because at that time now raising himself higher, although he himself is not seen, yet he illuminates the closest areas with neighbouring splendour; but at the solstice there are none, because then he is more manifest and shows not only the glow but also the greatest part of himself.’
Beyond these island the sea is called sluggish, solid, and glacial, because it is rough through masses of ice and scarcely penetrable by ships.