CANADIAN BOAT SONG

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 291, 7 December 1929, Page 11

CANADIAN BOAT SONG

CONTROVERSY OVER AUTHOR A hundred years ago, says the London Observer, there was printed in Blackwood’s Magazine a poem, entitled “The Boat Song of the Canadian Highlanders.” Because it is, perhaps, more true than any other known composition to the atmosphere of the Highlands and the sentiment of Highland people, it has secured a remarkable plac e in the affections of Highlanders. The song, indeed, has been more widely quoted than possibly an y vcrs e of he kind, particularly the second stanza, which the late Lord Rosebery held to be “one of the most exquisite that has ever been written about the {Scottish exile ’ ’:— “From th e Lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and a waste of seas— Yet the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.” It is remarkable that after the lapse of a century no one has been able to name the author with any degree of certainty. It has been ascribed to at least half a dozen writers. The poem was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine m September, 1829, included in No. 46 of the “Noctes Ambrosianae” series contributed by “Christopher North” '(Professor Wilson), The particular article was written not by the Professor, but, as it happend, by John Gibsun Lockhart, who described the verses as a translation just received from a friend in Upper Canada of a boatman’s song in Gaelic which he had heard on the St, Lawrence.

The first suggestion that the poem had another origin was made in. 1849, when, in an articl e in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine on the prosaic enough subject of “Employment or Emigration,” the writer, Donald Campbell, attributed the authorship of the poem to the twelfth Earl of Eglinton, who had a high opinion of the loyalty and bravery of the Canadian Highlanders, and had left a “translation of one of their boat songs among his papers, set to music by his own hand.’> The Rev. Dr. Norman Macleod, who, perhaps, did most to popularise the poem, although, like Robert Louis Stevenson in “Th 0 Silverado Squatters” and Mr Joseph Chamberlain in his famous Inverness speech, he badly misquoted it, attributed the authorship to Professor Wilson. Authorship has also been attributed to John Gibson Lockhart; John Galt, the Ayrshire novelist and author of “Annals of the Parish”; Jame s Hogg, the “Ettrick Shepherd”; and even Sir Walter Scott. If we accept the views of Gaelic scholars and experts on Highland life and culture, including Dr. Neil Munro, the novelist, the one thing certain about “The Canadian Boat Song,” is that it is no translation from the Gaelic, but English in its thought and origin.