With the Highland Smugglers

by J. M. Barrie

 

WITH THE HIGHLAND SMUGGLERS

BY J. M. BARRIE

LOOKING around him from a ramshackle, ungainly fishing boat off Shieldaig, in Ross-shire, one cannot avoid the feeling (unless he belongs to the preventive staff) that, so long as there are Loch Torridons, it is fit and proper that there should be smugglers. They are complement and supplement. The loch, as easily roused to violence as a passionate man, lies dark and threatening between ragged shores, the ground around being appropriately wet and boggy. Every facility for distillation, with the exception of the utensils themselves, abounds in the district—from bothies in a wilderness of marsh to streams and springs—and there has never been a lack of smugglers. The ghosts of the fraternity are said to come from all quarters to haunt the gloomy loch.

There was much talk of an expected raid by the Jeantown "gaugers" the day we touched at Deabeag and Torridon; and on the steamer we were unanimous that the smuggler's chief difficulties in so bleak a district would be in getting his malt and barley and disposing of the surplus whisky. It had not struck us that we had the malt and barley with us in the vessel when we entered the loch, and that the whisky would probably be on board when we steamed out of it.

It was a cold, calm night when the search party—consisting of the officers and myself, a ready volunteer-crowed out cautiously, but with vigour, from near Shieldaig, to make a scrutiny of the northern side of the loch. The secrecy with which I had expected the expedition to be conducted was altogether wanting, many of the natives sharing my expectation of a sensational adventure, and a few genially accompanying us to the place of embarkation. Such publicity was apparently unavoidable, owing to the familiarity of the people with the faces of the officers, and the fact that the latter had to borrow or take forcible possession of whatever boats they used. It is a far cry—as the Government will perhaps in time discover—from Loch Torridon to Gairloch and Jeantown, the nearest stations.

A little labour would convert some of the wave-washed jutties of Loch Torridon into very passable piers for small boats; but the men of Ross launch their clumsy cockleshells from the most inconvenient places, and when one is a gauger in the Highlands he finds it advisable to conform to Highland customs. The officers waded through the shallow water to the boat, rather than waste a few minutes in bringing it up to the rocks; and, with a dubious glance at my elegant knickerbockers, I prepared to follow them. Suddenly a strong arm pressed my waist, and the next moment I was flung heavily rather than carried into the boat.

The officers pushed off without a word, but there was a laugh from the shore, where I saw the strong man the centre of an admiring group. I subsequently learned that this slovenly, hulking giant was one of the most notorious poachers in the district (albeit a native of Skye), and consequently presume that he was on this occasion striking at his natural enemies through their friend.

Mooring our boat at a point where the loch takes a sudden and (from the seaman's point view) ugly turn, we struck off from it at right angles, and fought our way briskly up a barn side. No other word would sufficiently suggest the difficulties in our path, for at first the war was barred by jagged rocks—most deceptive of objects on a moonlight night—over which we stumbled and fell; and we only left these behind us to plunge recklessly into a soaking morass. From the first it was a night of disappointments. So long as we believed ourselves on the smugglers' track, a scratched knee or a tumble into a bog was borne cheerily; but the moment the gaugers began to feel that they had fallen into a trap, our wet boots grew heavy as lead, and stuck, clammy and sodden, in the yielding marsh.

The officers had received apparently valuable information to the effect that a bothy was in active work on the opposite shore; but though we had no difficulty in discovering the bothy, which was already known to the gaugers by repute, a cursory examination showed plainly that distillation there was a thing of the remote past. Once again the natives, though reputed honest enough folk themselves, had proved their sympathy with the smugglers by purposely misleading the gauger. My companions grumbled and ground their teeth with vexation.

During the greater part of the day they had been engaged in an unsuccessful search over the famous smuggling ground around Shieldaig; and it was gall and wormwood to think that they had now fallen into a trap on the one side of the island while the process of distillation was doubtless in full swing on the other. There was a stampede to the place where we had disembarked, and a roar of mingled rage and anguish when we found that the boat had been removed. Even the Mark Tapley of the party hung his head, and all that I could suggest was that we might yet lay hold of another boat.

"Yes," a gauger growled, sulkily seating himself on a stone, "if you can run across for it to Shieldaig."

No certain lights were visible in the distant hamlets, but the stars were out and the placid loch regarded us with a thousand alluring eyes. All else was black and indistinct, the further side of the loch swallowed up in the rocky coast that loomed in strong shadow straight in front now almost overhanging us till we shrank back in dread, the next moment but a dim cloud joining earth with heaven.

Strange were the tricks imagination played even the practical officers of the preventive staff. In the eerie stillness of the night one of them maintained that the jeering laugh of the smugglers was carried to him across the loch; and the lights of heaven were taken for candles burning in the bothy. But by the footsore and weary gauger, depressed with much tramping, a hard stone tends to become a pillow, and to sleep by the edge of Loch Torridon through a cold night, is more perilous than a brush with smugglers. We rose wearily, and set out for a cluster of houses, supposed to lie on the shore of the loch a few miles further inland. There was just a possibility of our contriving to seize a boat there and recross the loch, otherwise our search was over for the night.

So quiet was the neighbourhood when we left the shore to thread our way along the drier knolls of the boggy ground, that the winding up of my watch caused the ganger in advance to call a stop, and such the nervous state into which the unusual circumstances had flung me, that with the others I stood for a moment on the defensive. A scowl passed from one face to another as the cause of alarm was made known, after which we resumed our journey.

The district is strongly Free Kirk, and my friends, except in the matter of illicit distillation, were imbued with local sympathies. Though all hope of effecting a seizure had gone from us, habit made them drop their voices, when they favoured me with reminiscences of their smartness, to a whisper, and nothing short of the name of Robertson Smith could electrify them into fervent ejaculations and stormy action. But the Robertson Smith heresy case had pursued me since I crossed the border, and firmly but calmly I turned the conversation into a less worn channel.

Smuggling, I learned, was still a favourite pursuit in the north-west highlands, and the night's experience no bad sample of the trials and disappointments with which the ganger had to contend, seizures are not infrequent; but a lonely loch like Torridon, with its marshes, burns, and crevices, all difficult of access, will never be swept clear of smugglers so long as the nearest stations are at Jeantown and Gairloch (as is still the case). A ganger settled at Shieldaig would doubtless be able to crush the trade underfoot; but at present the authorities are satisfied when their knives cut the nettle level with the ground. No attempt has as yet been made to root it up. But although illicit distillation is still carried on briskly, and there are shebeens in the district, it is in but a small way. The glory of the trade departed with the opening up of the Highlands; and the impecunious, slovenly smuggler of to-day, running from his squalid shieling with a whisky cask in his band, the ganger at his uncovered heels, resembles as little the armed hordes of powerful Highlanders that used contemptuously to hustle the representatives of the law out of their way, as the whining Scotch tinker recalls the Eddie Ochiltrees of the gaberlunzie period.

Hie stones of still-heads found buried in marshes, and artful passages beneath apparently disused bothies, were well enough; but it was a dismal, fatiguing trudge nevertheless—our earlier experience of the bog ten times intensified. Thinly-shod for such delving, I had been specially glad to leave the rocks and stones; but my boots "cheeped" and clung to the softer soil like a boy's sucker. Part of our route lay through a moss than can be best described as an expanse of shallow black water, dotted with tiny tufts of grass; and it was along the latter that we had to jump rather than stride our way. A more tiresome journey could not be imagined, our feet every other minute slipping into the water, whence they were not always withdrawn without a muttered oath, and firm ground was not reached before I had left my pipe behind me in the bog as a trifling and much regretted souvenir. Before we arrived at the nearest shieling, where we were welcomed with true Highland hospitality, we noted without complacency our boat riding quietly at anchor in the loch, bereft, of course, of its oars. The sight was not a pleasant one for my companions, who were sensitive to ridicule; but they slept, nevertheless, the sound sleep of the weary baffled.

Next day I struck Torridon and departed overland for Auchnasheen, leaving the officers to try their luck on the other side of the loch alone. Curiously enough, I afterwards heard that their only important seizure was made unusually far inland, on the north side after all.