an Excise man who was used to boats, and who was able to take the helm. We had six heavy oars and men enough to man them, as some natives of Berneray were on board. I took one of the stroke oars and my servant, Maclachlan, who was a capable boatman and spoke Gaelic, took one of the bow oars, and whilst we rowed the remaining two men bailed. But they were in such a panic and rowed so badly that, if my man had not threatened them in Gaelic and enforced his threats by knocking one of them senseless into the bottom of the boat, where he was nearly drowned before we had time to notice him, I firmly believe they would have stopped rowing and the boat would have been swamped. As it was, after four hours of the hardest labour I ever endured, we succeeded in getting safe to land on the beach of Berneray, where the lighthouse keeper, who came down to meet us, was waiting. It blew so hard that I had to stay four days at the lighthouse, and the lighthouse keeper was so uneasy about the threats which the islanders had made in his presence to have revenge for the way we had treated them in the boat, that he would not let me or Sandy go out of his sight on the island. Two years afterwards I saw in the Inverness Courier a notice headed "Loss of a boat with all hands in the Hebrides,” and on reading it I found that it was the very same boat making the very same passage.
The cliffs which form the south coast of the island culminate in a point at the south-west, on the extreme edge of which is built the lighthouse, at an elevation of nearly 700 feet. On both sides of the lighthouse is a deep chasm, reaching down to the sea; and the whole of these rocks, for more than a mile, are as thickly crowded with sea-birds as they can well be.
It was the grandest sight I ever saw to look out of the window of the lighthouse on a very stormy day and see oneself hanging, as it were, over the ocean, surrounded on three sides by a fearful chasm, in which the air was so thickly crowded with birds as to produce the appearance of a heavy snowstorm; whilst the cries of these myriads, mingled with the roar of the ocean and the howling of the tremendous gusts of wind coming up from below as if forced through a blast-pipe, made it almost impossible to hear a person speak.
The most abundant species were the Puffin, Razorbill, Guillemot, and Kittiwake, which I have named in the order in which they tenanted the rocks; the puffins making their burrows from the top to about halfway down, whilst the guillemots and kittiwakes crowded on ledges almost within reach of the spray. There are only three families on Berneray besides the lighthouse keepers; and though they do not look on birds with the same interest as the St. Kildans do, yet they kill a great number as food for themselves and the crews of the boats which come from Islay to fish for cod and ling.
Their favourite method of fowling is quite different from that pursued anywhere else, and is highly successful, as I have known a man get 600 sea-birds in six or eight hours. On a very windy day he climbs about halfway down the cliff, and seats himself firmly on a projecting point of rock, armed with a pole resting, end downwards, across the thigh. As the birds fly backwards and forwards they are driven by the wind within a few feet of his seat, and are knocked off their balance by an upward
