he so desired in organising a marauding expedition into the territories of those whom he considered a likely prey for his rapacious villains. These were always ready, and waited only for the signal to start upon any cruise that promised them booty. Donald Cam[1] (Donald the one-eyed), the son of Dougall, who is so intimately associated in Lewis traditions with the strong old fort or Dùn of Carloway, near the famous ‘Druidical temple’ at Callernish, affords a notorious instance of this class of genius; and the well-known ‘Britheamh Leoghasach’ (Lewis Brieve or Judge) himself could not always boast of going about in the world with clean hands. It is alleged of him that he had a finger in many a dirty pie. The name of the others of the same class is legion. Expert at sea, fearless and bold, the Lewismen possessed great advantages over their neighbours of the Long Island, who, brought up as they were to the more peaceful occupation of cultivating the soil, were, comparatively speaking, but mere ‘land-loupers,’ with the exception of the Barra men at the other extreme of the Long Island. The want of good harbours on the west coast of the two Uists, along which, as affording the only soil suitable for crops, the inhabitants were scattered, may account to some extent at least for their disregard for that ‘unstable element the sea.’ Not that they were altogether unaccustomed to boating upon a small scale, but they have always fallen vastly behind their neighbours farther north in everything that appertains to seamanship. Bolder or better seamen than the Lewismen could not be found in this country or perhaps in any other.
Upon one occasion a party of these gentlemen concocted an expedition of the kind above referred to, and fixed upon
- ↑ Donald Cam was as brave as he was turbulent and cruel. He carried the blood of many a hero on the blade of his sword. The writer who was so much struck by ‘the unaccountable sport of nature in forming such numbers of dwarfs,’ might have observed another sport of nature, namely, the number of one-eyed people, who, from the days of Polyphemus to those of Archibald the Grim, from the days of one-eyed Odin, to those of his country-woman, the Muirchertach, are reputed to have been of a similar temperament—cruel, turbulent, and wicked in disposition.
