The Cruise of the Betsey: or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of ScotlandMiller, Hugh
Philosophy
The Cruise of the Betsey: or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland
Miller, Hugh
Geology -- Scotland
We had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people; and our
first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
had been sent from the minister's store aboard,--for oatmeal in Eigg is
rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
might have expected from a country bearing such a name,--eggs with the
milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in the
direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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