WICK AND ITS HERRING FISHERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1942, 7 February 1889, Page 32

WICK AND ITS HERRING FISHERS.

You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, tho wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires. Only as you approached the coast was there anything to stir the heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were overbrimmed with clamorous froth, the sea birds screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's edge; here and there it was possible to dip into A DELL OF SHELTER, where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin pods bursting in the afternoon sun, and (further off) the murmur of the turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man's towns, aud situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays. It lives for herrings, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a city crowds to a review —or, as when bees have swarmed .the ground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a beautiful one, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disc. This mass of fishers, this GBEAT FLEET OF BOATS, is out of all proportion to the town itself; and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the Outer Hebrides), who come for that season only and depart again, if " the take " be poor, leaving debts behind them. In a bad year the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a child's hand was once the signal for something like a war, and even when I was there a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To contrary interests it should be observed, THE OURSE OF BABEL is here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by descent. I remember seeing one of tbe strongest instances of this division ; a thing like a Pnnch and Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium —I know not what to ' call it—an eldritch looking preacher laying \ down the law in Gaelic about some one of the name of " Powl," whom I at last divined to be THE APOSTLE OF THE GENTILES ; a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely playing tigg. The same descent, the same country, the same narrow sect of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect I—ll. L. Stevenson, in 11 Scrbner's."

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