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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
ANIMAL ETHICS SERIES

Creative Compassion,
Literature and
Animal Welfare
Michael J. Gilmour
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

Series Editors
Andrew Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK

Clair Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges
that Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional
understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will:

• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accom-
plished, scholars;
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14421
 Michael J. Gilmour

Creative Compassion,
Literature and
Animal Welfare
Michael J. Gilmour
Providence University College
Otterburne, MB, Canada

ISSN 2634-6672       ISSN 2634-6680 (electronic)

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
ISBN 978-3-030-55429-3    ISBN 978-3-030-55430-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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 Series Editors’ Preface

This is a new book series for a new field of inquiry: Animal Ethics.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry.
In addition, a rethink of the status of animals has been fuelled by a
range of scientific investigations which have revealed the complexity of
animal sentiency, cognition and awareness. The ethical implications of
this new knowledge have yet to be properly evaluated, but it is becoming
clear that the old view that animals are mere things, tools, machines or
commodities cannot be sustained ethically.
But it is not only philosophy and science that are putting animals on
the agenda. Increasingly, in Europe and the United States, animals are
becoming a political issue as political parties vie for the “green” and “ani-
mal” vote. In turn, political scientists are beginning to look again at the
history of political thought in relation to animals, and historians are
beginning to revisit the political history of animal protection.
As animals grow as an issue of importance, so there have been more
collaborative academic ventures leading to conference volumes, special
journal issues, indeed new academic animal journals as well. Moreover,

v
vi Series Editors’ Preface

we have witnessed the growth of academic courses, as well as university

posts, in Animal Ethics, Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, Animal Law,
Animals and Philosophy, Human–Animal Studies, Critical Animal
Studies, Animals and Society, Animals in Literature, Animals and
Religion—tangible signs that a new academic discipline is emerging.
“Animal Ethics” is the new term for the academic exploration of the
moral status of the non-human—an exploration that explicitly involves a
focus on what we owe animals morally and which also helps us to under-
stand the influences (social, legal, cultural, religious and political) that
legitimate animal abuse. This series explores the challenges that Animal
Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional under-
standings of human–animal relations.
The series is needed for three reasons: (1) to provide the texts that will
service the new university courses on animals, (2) to support the increas-
ing number of students studying and academics researching in animal-
related fields and (3) because there is currently no book series that is a
focus for multidisciplinary research in the field.
Specifically, this series will

• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals;
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished,
scholars and
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.

The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a

unique partnership between Palgrave Macmillan and the Ferrater Mora
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. The series is an integral part of the mis-
sion of the Centre to put animals on the intellectual agenda by facilitat-
ing academic research and publication. The series is also a natural
complement to one of the Centre’s other major projects, the Journal of
Animal Ethics. The Centre is an independent “think tank” for the advance-
ment of progressive thought about animals and is the first Centre of its
 Series Editors’ Preface vii

kind in the world. It aims to demonstrate rigorous intellectual enquiry

and the highest standards of scholarship. It strives to be a world-class
centre of academic excellence in its field.
We invite academics to visit the Centre’s website www.oxfordani-
malethics.com and to contact us with new book proposals for the series.

Oxford, UK Andrew Linzey

Oxford, UK Clair Linzey
 Preface

Sitting proudly on my bookshelf is an early edition of Anna Sewell’s 1877

novel Black Beauty bearing the inscription, “To Michael from Grandma
[Ethel] Stanley, 1974.” It was first presented to her, according to an earlier
inscription, on September 30, 1917. She would have been eleven at the
time, just a generation removed from Sewell. I wasn’t much of a reader in
1974 so this book collected far more dust than dogears for many years to
come but, though Grandma Stanley could not have known it, in time
Sewell’s autobiography of a horse proved transformative. Stories change
us. To read them is to see the world with new eyes. Sewell’s Black Beauty
awakened a sensitivity to animal suffering that is never far from my mind.
Along with literature, direct encounters also inform our views about
animals and their wellbeing. One incident stands out in memory. It was
a long low barn, dimly lit, the air thick with dust. Having never been on
a farm this was all new to me. I was nineteen at the time, in the fall of
1986, and in my first year of university at a small rural campus on the
Canadian prairies. An area farmer needed able-bodied workers for a few
hours and offered each of us $25 to do some ‘chicken catching.’ Coming
from the city I had no idea what that meant but money was in short sup-
ply and that was incentive enough to go along. This was more than thirty
years ago but I recall certain details. We arrived after dark. Chickens cov-
ered the entire floor of the enormous barn, sitting or standing listlessly.
Our job for the next few hours was to reach under the birds and quickly
ix
x Preface

grab their legs before they fully woke up, then lift them so they were
upside down. They start flapping their wings immediately so it’s physi-
cally taxing––my arms, shoulders and back ached for days afterwards.
The more experienced and stronger ‘catchers’ managed two birds in each
hand. Once we had our chickens, we took them outside to waiting trucks
and lifted them to others who stuffed the startled birds into small cages.
After each delivery we returned to the barn for more, repeating the pro-
cess until the floor was empty of living birds. The process was not smooth.
A bird might slip away at some point and have to be wrestled down. The
lids on the cages were shut quickly and often caught a wing or a foot or a
head. And worst of all was the feeling of occasional breaking bones when
grabbing or carrying the startled birds. Their bodies seemed brittle.
I now regret my participation in that ‘chicken catch,’ and having since
learned more about the factory farming of chickens for meat and eggs,
I’m left with three lasting impressions. The first is the brutal force of
human domination of some animals. Those birds––manipulated into
docility by the lighting––were completely powerless against the muscle
and machinery driving that business. The second is the unnaturalness of
that low, dark, stinking place. Chemicals, overcrowding, body manipula-
tion (through selective breeding, beak cutting), shortened lives. Third, it
made me realize the enormous distance between the barn and the dinner
plate. At that time, I had no idea what meat and dairy production
involved. Not really.
Literary horses like Black Beauty and his friends, and real, frightened,
fragile chickens. The ones products of the imagination, the others actual,
vulnerable, sentient beings. And all of them, in their own way, whisper-
ing a compelling challenge to my then habitual indifference to animals as
neighbours deserving moral consideration. Stories do not always remain
between the covers of books. They linger, sometimes attach, unbidden, to
the stuff of our lives. To meet and enjoy fictional animals is to risk meet-
ing them again in unexpected ways. I cannot hear a toad without smiling,
as the sound brings Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)
to mind. Am I less likely to throw a stone at one for having read that book?
Another encounter. The punchline of the Good Samaritan parable
comes at the beginning of that famous story rather than the end, and it is
not Jesus who delivers it but instead a nameless onlooker. When Jesus
 Preface xi

asks what is required of people to inherit eternal life, that onlooker cites
Torah: love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27; cf.
Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:5). Jesus agrees with him, but the man
presses further, asking, Who is my neighbour? Jesus’s story about an
assault and robbery, and the unlikely hero who comes to the victim’s aid
is both commentary on the portion of Torah recited, and an answer to
the man’s question. As the parable illustrates, love is owed to a stranger
left for dead on the side of the road. Your neighbour is the one in need.
Your neighbour is the one in need, even when they are not part of your
community. We are to love across boundaries. Love not only family and
tribe, or those of our race and nation, or gender and religion, or sexual
orientation and socio-economic status. Love not only the citizen but also
the refugee. Simply love your neighbour as yourself, says Jesus. Love the
one in need as you love yourself. That’s all it says. My neighbour does not
always look like me or believe like me but that’s no matter. Jesus collapses
the two great commandments of Torah. If we love God, we love our
neighbours, whoever they are. We love our neighbours because we
love God.
Animals are neighbours too. There’s nothing in the story limiting this
boundary-defying love to bipedal types. If this sounds odd, note the
vague kinship between the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus’s
remarks about an animal fallen into a pit (Matthew 12:11): “Suppose one
of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you
not lay hold of it and lift it out?” Of course you will. Yes, this is self-­
serving to a degree (sheep have economic value) but it remains aiding a
distressed animal for its own sake is a religiously sanctioned response. You
are not to pass by one in its moment of need any more than you pass by
the human victim of a robbery laying in a ditch at the side of a road. You
help, and you do so even if it is the Sabbath. Humans extending kindness
to nonhumans––Jesus expects it of the God-fearing. And perhaps it
deserves notice it works both ways in the parable. The Samaritan is not
the only one who helps the injured man because he places the stranger
“on his own animal” to get him to an inn for care (10:34). A brief hint of
cross-species compassion?
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a work of fiction. Jesus often told
stories as a way to teach. For me, just as Grahame’s The Wind in the
xii Preface

Willows enriches my experience of the croaking toads I hear, Jesus’s par-

able now attaches to a real-world encounter with a real-world animal. A
few years back a student contacted me about a stray dog she found injured
at the side of the road after being hit by a car. She stopped to help, taking
the puppy she named Daisy to a nearby veterinary clinic even when
unsure how to fund the expensive surgery/amputation needed to save
her. This was a costly act of kindness. Costly just like the kindness shown
by the Samaritan (“he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper,
and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you what-
ever more you spend’” [Luke 10:35]). She met one of God’s creatures in
need––like a sheep fallen in a pit, like an injured man on the side of the
road––and ignoring the species divide offered a boundary-transgressing
act of mercy. The tripod Daisy now lives with me, forever in my mind
intertwined with Jesus’s parable and this student’s enactment of its ethical
mandate. Story meets reality, fiction meets fur.
This book considers that step. How do works of the imagination shape
our attitudes and behaviors toward actual animals, and what do they con-
tribute to debates about ethics? Through consideration of a very small
sampling of representative works, I suggest authors (1) educate by reveal-
ing otherwise hidden worlds; (2) empathize with the vulnerable, inviting
and urging readers to do the same; and (3) envision new possibilities for
human-nonhuman interactions.
In the 1923 publication translated as Civilization and Ethics, Albert
Schweitzer insists a person is truly ethical, “only when he obeys the com-
pulsion to help all life that he is able to assist and shrinks from injuring
anything that lives.” Such a person does not ask whether and to what
extent this or that life deserves sympathy. Leaf or flower, worm or insect,
all life is sacred. Ridicule for being sentimental is sure to follow but such
an individual is undeterred. A time will indeed come, Schweitzer pre-
dicts, when people will recognize thoughtless injury to life is incompati-
ble with ethics. “Ethics is responsibility without limit toward all that lives.”
The year 1923 also witnessed the publication of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor
Dolittle’s Post Office. In it he writes of a paradisal island called No Man’s
Land where animals have (note the vaguely biblical phrasing), “lived at
peace for a thousand years.” Dolittle is indeed “the first human in a thou-
sand years that has set foot” there. He alone among people, the island’s
 Preface xiii

residents recognize, presents no threat. He alone, to borrow Schweitzer’s

description, responds to the compulsion to “help all life that he is able to
assist.” Indeed, the Doctor spends “several days” offering the animals
advice and tending to their various ailments.
The simultaneous publication of these very different books offers a
convenient segue into our subject. At the risk of being overly fanciful,
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a playful, top-hatted version of Schweitzer’s
“truly ethical” person. The two writers envision a kinder, enchanted world
where there is reverence for all life and a willingness to care. The one
travelled there by means of rigorous theological and philosophical inquiry,
the other by means of highly imaginative storytelling. Our concern is
with the second path.

Otterburne, MB, Canada Michael J. Gilmour

 Contents

1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal

Welfare Movements and a Literature of Compassion  1

2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental

Literature 45

3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery 77

4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat 99

5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence123

6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature157

7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators191

8 Animals, Mourning, and Cat-lovin’ Bastards225

Index251

xv
 About the Author

Michael J. Gilmour is Associate Professor of English and biblical litera-

ture at Providence University College, Canada. He is a Fellow of the
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the author of Eden’s Other Residents:
The Bible and Animals and Animals in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.

xvii
 1
Introduction: The Parallel Voices
of Modern Animal Welfare Movements
and a Literature of Compassion

My father recited poems out loud at home. I have vivid memories of him
reading “The Bells Of Heaven” (Ralph Hodgson), “Snake” (D. H. Lawrence),
and a poem I have never been able to relocate about a fox caught in a trap
with young in the den. The innocence of anymals and the cruel power of
humanity was manifest in sorrow, anger, even bitterness in my father’s soft
voice. Already then, his sentiments echoed my own experiences with humanity
and anymals in rural America. I also recall my mother singing the folksong,
“The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night,” and how my father would say, “The
fox has to eat, too.” I realize now that the poems themselves might never have
reached me if my parents had not read and sung to us when we were young.
Through their voices—through this shared experience of literature—I gained
more than what was written on those dog-eared pages.
—Lisa Kemmerer, Montana State University Billings, philosopher-activist

Personal correspondence. On her use of the term anymal, see Prof. Kemmerer’s “Verbal Activism:
‘Anymals’,” Society and Animals 14.1 (May 2006): 9–14. It is a contraction of any and animal,
which indicates all individuals of any species other than the speaker/author. She prefers it to the
regular spelling because it avoids the suggestion humans are not themselves animals, as well as the
dualism and alienation implied by the prefixed term nonhumans or the qualifier other animals.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave
Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_1
2 M. J. Gilmour

Animal stories are metonymic. Esther is perhaps the most famous pig in
the world as I type this, and the accounts of her adventures, beautifully
and humorously reported by her caregivers Steve Jenkins and Derek
Walter, belie the idea of pigs as mindless automata. They give her a voice,
they tell her story.1 She is a personality, complete with an emotional range
and a capacity for pleasure and pain. She is mischievous, and able to bond
with humans and other nonhumans. Though anthropomorphism and
sentimentalism invite the ridicule and censure of some, such stories, fic-
tional and nonfictional, are persistently popular and effective tools for
promoting kindness to animals. Jenkins and Walter persuade their read-
ers to see more than meat the next time a livestock truck passes on the
highway. The nameless pigs on that truck are just like Esther. They too
have personalities. They too have a capacity for pleasure and pain.
Though it took me many years to realize the potential of literature to
further the efforts of animal compassion agendas––the long-neglected
copy of Black Beauty mentioned in the Preface left closed and unheeded––
other readers and writers long before and since Anna Sewell credit stories
for awakening an affection for nature and the desire to care for it. Jane
Goodall, for one, identifies fiction as a formative influence:

As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature,
animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was
filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it
was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in
other worlds. My very favourite books at the time were The Story of Dr.
Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan books.2

1
Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with Caprice Crane, Esther the Wonder Pig: Changing the World
One Heart at a Time (New York: Grand Central, 2017); and Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with
Caprice Crane, Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, A Wonder Pig, and Their Life-Changing Mission to
Give Animals a Home (New York: Grand Central, 2018).
2
Jane Goodall, with Phillip Berman, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (New York: Warner,
1999), 11.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 3

As she puts it elsewhere, “I learned from nature. … I also learned from

the books that my mother found for me about animals. I read and read
about animals. Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan and Mowgli.”3
This book approaches storytelling as a form of animal advocacy and
considers the contributions of literature toward a widened circle of care.
With Jane Goodall, I include Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle novels
among my favorites in the category and refer to them throughout. There
are a few reasons for this. Not only does the central character model kind-
ness to animals and confront forms of cruelty, but the stories also illus-
trate a useful way to approach conversations about welfare. Many find
the objectives of advocates to be extreme, unrealistic, and divorced from
all that is familiar. Meals without meat? Clothes without leather? Science
without laboratory rats? Circuses without elephants? Impossible. This is
the way we live and the way it’s always been. In many contexts, to suggest
we do without such uses of animals is to shut down the conversation even
before it begins. But literature often succeeds where communication in
other forums breaks down. When couched in a compelling story, we tend
to be more amenable to new ideas.
Consider Lofting’s opposition to fox hunting. Allyson May’s study of
this English pastime observes how soldiers returning from the Great War
viewed it in different ways. For some, their experiences on the battlefield
provoked “nostalgia, affection for the pre-War, comparatively innocent
world of the hunting field,” but for others, Lofting among them, the War
resulted in “a heightened compassion for the suffering of animals as well
as men.” Fox hunting was no longer an innocent distraction. Indeed, it
was during Lofting’s time as a soldier in Flanders and France that his
Dolittle stories first appeared.4 According to Gary D. Schmidt, “None of
the novels can ever be read outside the context of … the trenches of the

3
Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 69. In Reason for Hope, she also writes appreciatively of The
Wind in the Willows and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), both of which
involve, in very different ways, highly imaginative depictions of animals (11–12).
4
Allyson N. May, The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781–2004: Class and Cruelty (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 74. See too chap. 6 of May’s book, “The Flight from Modernity: Nostalgia and
the Hunt.” She closes that chapter observing that fox-hunting’s survival “past the Great War and the
Second World War into the twenty-first century in many ways can be explained by the very fact
that it is not modern” (184). Italics original.
4 M. J. Gilmour

First World War, where horses, unprotected against the green billows of
gas that belched across the fields and cascaded into the trenches, died
screaming out of burning lungs.”5 This is where Lofting’s longing for a
kinder relationship with nature begins:

While he could somehow avoid despair and place the war in the context of
a reasonable explanation––these were apparently rational creatures who
had consciously decided to commit atrocity––he could not accept the
destruction of horses. While the troops could protect themselves against
the green gas that poured into the trenches and coated the landscape, the
horses could not. It sprang into their lungs, blistered their tissues, and
led to agonizing death.6

The Dolittle stories, Lofting explains, began life as letters home to his
children during the War, and the idea of a medical person caring for ani-
mals has direct connection to what he saw:

One thing … that kept forcing itself more and more on my attention was
the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and
that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists. They took their
chances with the rest of us. But their fate was far different from the men’s.
However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all
the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his
aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.7

There is even evidence his tenderness toward animals extended beyond

the battlefield. The usually placid Lofting once attacked three men, one
armed with a knife, who had hobbled some wild horses. Having dis-
patched the three, he cut loose the horses, emptied the rifles, and, wiping
the blood from his cheek, sauntered back to his camp, unruffled, to read
a story to his son.8

5
Gary D. Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496 (New York: Twayne,
1992), 51.
6
Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 13.
7
As cited in Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 6.
8
Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 2. Schmidt here relates the anecdote as told by Lofting’s son, in Colin
Lofting, “Mortifying Visit from a Dude Dad,” Life 30 (September 1966), 128–30.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 5

The result of those wartime experiences was a fictional world depicting

an alternative vision of human-animal relations, with deep criticisms of
many entrenched attitudes and activities, fox hunting among them:
“‘What a childish sport!’ [Doctor John Dolittle] murmured. ‘I can’t
understand what they see in it. Really, I can’t. Grown men rushing about
the landscape on horseback, caterwauling and blowing tin horns––all
after one poor little wild animal! Perfectly childish!’”9 But his response
involves more than ridicule and disdain. Dolittle inevitably comes to the
aid of animals in distress in all the stories. On one occasion during his
travels, he meets a mother fox named Nightshade, and she asks him to
look at one of her pups who has something wrong with his paw. While
attending to the cub, they suddenly hear the approach of hunters.10 The
account of the vixen’s terror––the despair of a mother helpless to protect
her children––highlights the brutality of the sport. The same pack and
the same hunters killed Nightshade’s sister the week before.11 Dolittle
hides the mother and babies in his pockets before the dogs arrive, and
once they do, tells them to lead the horse-riding men in another
direction.12
Having addressed the immediate threat, Dolittle then listens to
Nightshade as she relates at length another occasion when fox hunters
threatened her life. The first-person, point-of-view description is
unsettling.

Nightshade, the vixen, paused in her story a moment, her ears laid back,
her dainty mouth slightly open, her eyes staring fixedly. She looked as
though she saw that dreadful day all over again, that long terrible chase, at
the end of which, with a safe refuge in sight, she felt her strength giving out
as the dogs of Death drew close upon her heels.13

9
Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924;
New York: Aladdin, 2019), 173. He describes fox hunting as “childish” again on p. 170.
10
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 166–68.
11
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168. Dolittle’s opposition to sport hunting is longstanding. The
sound of the horses, dogs, and hunters’ shouts reminds him of an earlier experience that “made him
an enemy of fox hunting for life––when he had met an old fox one evening lying half dead with
exhaustion under a tangle of blackberries” (168).
12
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168–71. Dolittle, of course, speaks animal languages.
13
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 176. Full account, 174–77.
6 M. J. Gilmour

As readers of these stories come to expect, the good Doctor comes up

with a solution for her and her family. Because dogs rely on scent, he
recommends spirits of camphor and eucalyptus as a way to mask their
smell and throw pursuing dogs off the trail. He wraps vials of these medi-
cines in handkerchiefs. Nightshade is to carry them and when dogs give
chase, drop a rock on one of them to break the glass and role on the
damp, smelling cloth. It proves so effective foxes all over the region
request their own so-called Dolittle Safety Packs.14 The result is far reach-
ing: “‘It’s no use,’ Sir William [Peabody] said [to a companion], ‘we can’t
hunt foxes in this district unless we can breed and train a pack of eucalyp-
tus hounds. And I’ll bet my last penny it’s Dolittle’s doing. He always said
he’d like to stop the sport altogether. And, by George! so far as this county
is concerned, he’s done it!’”15 Within this imaginative space, Lofting
brings a fox hunt to an end. He enacts a welfare fantasy. As the child nar-
rator of the earlier book The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle puts it, being part
of the great man’s animal-filled, animal-friendly household is “like living
in a new world.”16
In this episode, Lofting educates readers by showing them what this
past time actually involves, awakens empathy through a sympathetic por-
trait of a terrified, desperate mother, and in highly imaginative fashion
envisions the possibility of an end to senseless bloodshed. Such fanta-
sies––maybe, just maybe––lead us to wonder what we might do for ani-
mals in our own ‘county,’ how we too might create a “new world.” Art
precedes reform. A visit to Toad Hall is incentive enough to stop throw-
ing stones.
Some theorists recognize literature’s potential to disrupt prior under-
standings, to render strange the otherwise ordinary. Terry Eagleton, for
one, writes of Bertolt Brecht’s ability “to unsettle [audiences’] convic-
tions, dismantle and refashion their received identities, and expose the
unity of this selfhood as an ideological illusion.”17 He “uses certain

14
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 177–84.
15
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 184.
16
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1
(1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 60.
17
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 162.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 7

dramatic techniques (the so-called ‘estrangement effect’) to render the

most taken-for-granted aspects of social reality shockingly unfamiliar,
and so to rouse the audience to a new critical awareness of them.”18 To
adapt the concept to the present issue, welfare-leaning animal writing has
a defamiliarizing, estranging effect. By questioning and often refashion-
ing received behaviors, unconventional possibilities present themselves
(Dolittle’s “new world”). And so it is we have a substantial number of
writers who imagine life without fox hunts, or meals without meat, or
clothes without leather, or science without vivisection.
Writers sometimes acknowledge this capacity of storytelling to unset-
tle the taken-for-granted and spark a realignment of priorities. When
discussing the stories read to him when a boy, Richard Adams, one-time
president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
and the author of Watership Down mentions the Lofting series with par-
ticular fondness, and credits them for his turn toward advocacy. Hugh
Lofting “wrote with warmth and humor, and again, the characters are
likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is
powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for ani-
mals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr.
Dolittle must answer for it.”19 He develops this point again later: “there is
nothing amiss with the Doctor’s passionate concern about the abuse of
animals. He turned me against circuses, fur coats and other such evil
things––for life.”20 Taking my cue from Jane Goodall and Richard Adams,
I also look to Lofting for wisdom in the pages that follow. This is not,
therefore, a work of traditional literary criticism. I write with advocates in
mind, aiming to persuade them that the arts bring much to the forma-
tion of humane values. It is a potential resource for reform efforts. As
much as possible I allow the novels and poems introduced to speak for
themselves, with only minimal interaction with scholarly analyses of

18
Eagleton, Literary Theory, 162.
19
Richard Adams, The Day Gone By: An Autobiography (1990; London: Penguin, 1991), 22.
20
Adams, Day Gone By, 106. If Lofting was progressive in his thinking about animal welfare, he was
also mired in some of the worst prejudices of his historical moment. As often noted in the critical
literature, early editions of the stories include some egregious racist remarks. Later editions of the
books remove offensive passages.
8 M. J. Gilmour

them. What the book contributes, I hope, is a way of reading that brings
the welfare interests of creative writers to the forefront.

Welfarist Reading
From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan to the work of primatologist Jane
Goodall; from gassed horses on the battlefields of World War I to Hugh
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle; from The Wind in the Willows to the sound of
croaking toads I hear. The boundaries between real and imagined animals
are often porous, and the potential for the experience of one to shape our
experience of the other, in both directions, is ever present. Writers help us
see animals we might otherwise overlook. To meet Esther the pig in print
is to view those inside the livestock trucks we pass with new eyes, and our
interactions with real animals intrude on our experience of fiction, the
way Daisy the tripod is for me a marginal gloss to the parable told in
Luke 10:25–37. Readers’ propensity for mingling the imagined with the
real and vice versa makes animal literature a rich resource for the promo-
tion of humane themes. As C. S. Lewis puts it, in verse, our “love” for
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle or Nutkin in the Beatrix Potter tales “no doubt––
splashes over on the / Actual archtypes,” by which he means the real
hedgehogs and squirrels that lie behind those artistic representations.21
Literature helps us “love” the animals we meet after closing our books.
Those who advocate for animals bring a different set of concerns and
questions to literature than those typical of other critical approaches. A
welfarist perspective, for lack of a better term, is attentive to ways animals
appear in fiction and verse. It considers what this novel or that poem
teaches us about animals and our interactions with them. It looks at ways
art surfaces ethical questions by critiquing cruelty or exhibiting models of
compassion, both of which invite a reassessment of our own actions. Use
of the term welfarist criticism is idiosyncratic so perhaps an analogy helps
to clarify my objectives. This reading strategy employs a hermeneutic of
suspicion like that found in Marxist literary criticism, which maintains

21
C. S. Lewis, “Impenitence,” in Poems (1964; New York: HarperOne, 2017), 5–6. Lewis first
published this poem in 1953.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 9

works of fiction do not exist independently of historical contexts.

Literature is ideological and individual works expressions of class conflict.
Ideology, according to Michael Ryan, refers to “the beliefs, attitudes, and
habits of feeling which a society inculcates in order to generate an auto-
matic reproduction of its structuring premises. Ideology is what preserves
social power in the absence of direct coercion.”22 Literature potentially
perpetuates and legitimizes the dominant, structuring premises. If there
is a hidden subtext below the surface that perpetuates power structures
serving the interest of some, while oppressing many more, the critic’s role
is to expose those potentially damaging biases.
If we examine the law, politics, religion, education and culture of class-­
societies, writes Terry Eagleton, “we find that most of what they do lends
support to the prevailing social order. And this, indeed, is no more than
we should expect. There is no capitalist civilisation in which the law for-
bids private property, or in which children are regularly instructed in the
evils of economic competition.” Art and literature often contribute to
this bolstering of the status quo. While it is true there “is no sense in
which Shelley, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Brontë, Dickens,
George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence were all shamelessly pumping out
propaganda on behalf of the ruling class,” if we consider “English litera-
ture as a whole, we find that its critique of the social order rarely extends
to questioning the property system.”23
Welfare-inclined animal literature and criticism reveal hidden ideolo-
gies. Most works of fiction reinforce a worldview that privileges people
over other animals, maintaining might is right, that human reason is the
measure of all things, and that the exercise of “dominion” over the earth
and its creatures is a God-given privilege. Such assumptions are often
implied when not stated directly, a habitual default insisting, That’s just
the way it is. In addition to explicit arguments asserting humanity’s right
to rule, there are also ‘gaps’ in the vast majority of stories where animals
are present. Think of stories about pre-mechanistic warfare with armies
on horseback, where nothing is said of the injuries from spears or bullets
22
Michael Ryan, “Political Criticism,” Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and
Laura Morrow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 203.
23
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2011), 153–54.
10 M. J. Gilmour

or green gases those horses sustain. Think of meals around the campfire
or dinner table that say nothing of the sacrificed animals supplying the
meat. Think of the leather and fur characters wear. Think of the animal
labour supplying the muscle for travel and construction in historical fic-
tion. All are untold stories. The unacknowledged animal is everywhere in
fiction. But when writers shift focus, when they privilege animal wellbe-
ing and tell their stories, ‘the way it is’ is suddenly open to scrutiny.

Telling Their Own Stories

Isa Leshko admits the early stages of work photographing elderly animals
for a book involved a degree of self-interest. It offered a way to confront
her own fears about aging and decline. But she and the project trans-
formed after spending time with her subjects and learning their stories: “I
became a passionate advocate for these animals, and I wanted my images
to speak on their behalf. It seemed selfish to photograph rescued animals
for any other reason. From that point on, I approached these images as
portraits in earnest, and I endeavored to reveal something unique about
each animal I photographed.”24 Some creative writers think of their art in
similar terms. Katherine Applegate says this about writing the children’s
novel The One and Only Ivan: “I wanted to give [the gorilla] Ivan (even
while captive behind the walls of his tiny cage) a voice of his own and a
story to tell.”25 And indeed, Ivan and his friends have stories to tell, and
they are not all pleasant. They include acts of human kindness but also
cruelties. The novel presents the good and the bad, and because of this
has a pedagogical function. It is a work of the imagination but also an
education in what human interactions with animals––at their best, at
their worse––look like. The story is a peek behind the surface veneer and
carnival atmosphere of a cheap shopping mall zoo attraction. Veneers
hide something less appealing underneath. What goes on after closing
hours at this particular mall?
24
Isa Leshko, Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2019), 11.
25
Katherine Applegate, “Author’s Note,” in The One and Only Ivan (New York: HarperCollins,
2012), 308.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 11

There is a substantial library of animal stories of the last two hundred

or so years, roughly the period of modern animal welfare movements,
doing the same thing. These stories take readers to places they do not
usually go and show them things they do not usually see. They offer
glimpses of torments animals endure at human hands. What might a
once-free-roaming gorilla think after years of confinement in small quar-
ters? We do not know all there is to know about the cognitive processes
and the emotional lives of other species but that there are cognitive pro-
cesses and emotions in nonhumans is plain to see. Though a highly imag-
inative fantasy, the exercise of exploring how animals perceive human
behaviors is a valuable one, as is the ability of storytellers to show us a
broad spectrum of human-animal interactions. Between the lines of such
stories are ethical questions. Is it possible a caged animal is unfulfilled?
Are the entertainments gained by circuslike spectacles really worth the
pain and distress inflicted by trainers on those required to perform?
This desire to give suffering animals a platform to tell their stories puts
Katherine Applegate in good company. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is
justly celebrated as the template for welfare-oriented animal autobiogra-
phies, and as Jane Smiley observes, its author’s “motive for giving voice to
a horse was not entertainment, but moral teaching.” Her self-appointed
task as an author, “was to propose ways for equine mistreatment to be
mitigated.”26 To read Black Beauty is to experience something of what it
is like to have an uncomfortable bit in the mouth, to be worked to exhaus-
tion, to be left in the cold, to be whipped, abused, underfed, and
neglected. For many readers, then and now, consideration of ways our
actions help or harm animals is not reflex. Sewell understood this, and
like Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, the objective is welfare reform.
Black Beauty is a work of fiction, but Sewell expects the story to detach
from its ink and paper to persuade readers who interact with actual horses
to be kind. In that way, it is a confrontational book, challenging such

26
Jane Smiley, “Foreword,” to Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877; New York: Penguin, 2011), ix.
Many note the contributions of Sewell’s Black Beauty toward greater awareness of animal suffering.
“The novel had a very powerful impact on the public,” writes Paul Waldau, “and it, along with
much other literature modeled on it, increased concern greatly for not only the welfare of work
animals but for dogs as well” (Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011], 42).
12 M. J. Gilmour

things as fashion as it concerns horse-drawn carriages, and economic

expediency in businesses relying on animal labour. Ethical arguments in
animal literature are always Davids facing any number of self-concerned
Goliaths.

Questioning Authority
“Do not accept injustice even if you hear it in my name.”27 This, Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks argues, is the import of the strange story related in Genesis
18 about God’s plan to destroy the cities of the plain. When God
announces it, Abraham questions the justice of the intended action: “Will
you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? … Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (18:23, 25).28 It is an extraordinary
scene and an unexpected question to ask. Does Abraham really think he
is more righteous than God? If we go back a few verses, Sacks suggests,
there is an important clue putting the exchange in context:

The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, see-
ing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the
nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that
he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of
the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may
bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” (Genesis 18:17–19)

That initial question, which Abraham overhears, is an invitation for him

to act, and it sets the terms of the challenge. “God is inviting Abraham to
respond,” according to Sacks. God chose Abraham to keep the way of the
Lord, to do what is right and just. By not hiding plans to destroy the cit-
ies on the plain, Sacks notes, God puts Abraham in a position to respond
using those very terms.

27
Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York:
Schocken, 2011), 243. Italics original.
28
Here and throughout I use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, unless otherwise
indicated.
 1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 13

Abraham is to be the voice of the right (tzedakah) and the just (mishpat).
These then become precisely the words he uses in his challenge: ‘righteous’
(tzadikim) and ‘Judge/justice’ (ha-shofet/mishpat). Abraham challenges
God because God invites him to challenge God.

The story contrasts with that of Noah who, while making the ark, does
not protest God’s announced plan to destroy the world. “That is what
made Abraham, not Noah, the hero of faith,” Sacks continues. “Noah
accepted. Abraham protested. The religion of Abraham is a religion of
protest against evil, in the name of God.”29
My interest in this biblical commentary is more rhetorical than theo-
logical. Though hardly an exact analogy with the Abraham story, the lit-
erature discussed in this book is in most cases a literature of protest. What
interests me about this reading of Genesis 18 is the questioning of moral
authority, the challenge of what is otherwise sacrosanct, which in
Abraham’s case would be any and all acts of God. To question this author-
ity, according to Sacks’s reading, is appropriate. Genesis affirms Abraham’s
willingness to protest and question.30
Conventional thinking places humanity at the centre of all things and
there is a tendency to recoil from the idea of any debt of moral consider-
ation owed to nonhuman life. Humans hunt, eat, sacrifice, and vivisect
animals. We use them for entertainment and labour. It is in our interest
to do so. If indeed humans are the measure of all things, an instrumental
use of animals––they are here for our use, to do with as we please––is the
de facto good. To challenge such presumption is akin to Abraham chal-
lenging God but that is, at least in the opinion of many authors, what
righteousness and justice demand. Many creative writers of the last two
hundred years––again, roughly the time of modern welfare reform
efforts––challenge the ‘god’ of anthropocentrism, the elevation of human-
ity above all else. Animal literature is often a literature of protest, putting
before readers human acts toward animals deemed absurd or abhorrent.
Ideal readers of this literature choose not to accept (as Noah does) but
rather to question, protest, and resist (as Abraham does). They creatively

29
Sacks, Great Partnership, 243, 244.
30
Sacks, Great Partnership, 244.
14 M. J. Gilmour

reject cruelty and invoke alternatives to entrenched self-interested behav-

iors. The imagined spaces such authors put before us are sites of moral
response, of attempts to realize dreams of peace.
During a brief stop in the little town of Monteverde, in the Capa
Blanca Islands, Doctor John Dolittle engages in a form of protest against
bullfighting, which occurred there every Sunday, and resulted in the
death of six bulls and many horses each time. (After teasing and angering
the bulls, each one “was allowed to tire himself out by tossing and killing
a lot of poor, old, broken-down horses who couldn’t defend themselves …
[then] a man came out with a sword and killed the bull”).31 The Doctor
is rarely angry in these stories, but becomes so on this occasion. He
despises the bullfights, which he describes as “a cruel, disgusting busi-
ness.” They are in his view ridiculous, “cruel, cowardly shows.”32 When he
says this to the wealthy Don Enrique Cardenas, a very powerful and
influential person on these islands, Dolittle finds himself voicing an
unpopular, contrarian view. Said differently, he questions an accepted
good, he challenges authority, he confronts a cultural norm. When Don
Enrique takes offense, Dolittle sees an opportunity. He insists he can
outperform the best matador in the ring, and puts the following proposal
to the incredulous Don Enrique: “‘If I can do more with angry bulls than
can [the matador] Pepito de Malaga, you are to promise me that there
shall never be another bullfight in the Capa Blancas so long as you are
alive to stop it. Is it a bargain?’”33 Dolittle succeeds, of course. He first
speaks to the bulls who are only too glad to play along if it ends the
weekly slaughter. When the big day comes, Dolittle has the bulls per-
forming various tricks before the mostly delighted crowd, and those same
bulls run the celebrated Pepito de Malaga out of the ring.
Some are angry because Dolittle’s performance threatens their way of
life, which to them is a long-established good. When Dolittle calls for the
release of five bulls at once during the fight, Pepito the matador objects,
demanding Don Enrique not allow it because “it was against all the rules
31
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156–57.
32
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156, 157. It surprises the narrator Tommy Stubbins to see
the usually mild-mannered Dolittle “red in the face with anger” and it reminds him of the Doctor’s
similar reaction when speaking about zoos keeping tigers and lions in captivity (156; cf. 57–58).
33
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 159.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
superabundance of song which had only worldly associations and
was linked with the lower pleasures made them put superfine value
on the Hebrew Psalms as being most fit for the soul’s utterance
before the Infinite.
 CHAPTER XII
SCOTLAND’S ISLAND WORLD: IONA AND
STAFFA

While Scotland is, by its definition, a “pene-insula,” or

“peninsula,” that is, “almost an island,” it has, out in the Atlantic
Ocean, an archipelago of five hundred islands. Of these about one
fifth are inhabited, and of these one third have each a population of
only ten or even fewer souls. This great group lies wholly to the
westward, for the east coast of Scotland is singularly free from
islands, the number on this side being very much like that of angels’
visits, which are spoken of as few and far between.
These islands are all situated within three degrees of latitude.
Another name for them is the “Hebrides,” which term was formerly
held to embrace all the Scottish western islands, including also the
peninsula of Kintyre and islets in the Firth of Clyde, as well as the
Isle of Man and the Isle of Rathlin.
In discriminating between the Outer and the Inner Hebrides as
many do, this differentiation has a geological basis, for the Outer
Hebrides have a foundation of gneiss, while the more northerly at
least of the Inner Hebrides are of trap rock. Broadly speaking, in
popular usage the term is “Western Islands,” while in literature
“Hebrides” is used. This seems all the more appropriate, because it
was the accident of a misplaced or added letter that gave the islands
their literary cognomen.
As in the case of our own country, which has profited so richly
through Scottish emigration from those islands, some of the most
delightfully sounding names, in their present form, have come to us
through the mistake of a transcriber; as, for example, the romantic
name, Horicon, with which tourists on Lake George as well as
readers of Cooper’s novels are familiar. The real word intended for
the map is “Iroquois,” but as a Frenchman wrote it “Horicou,” which
was further altered by a misprint, which made it “Horicon,” it has so
remained. So also the “Hebudes” of Pliny, spelled by a misprint
“Hebrides,” has held its own. Sir Walter Scott adheres to the form
“Hebudes.” “Grampian,” which sounds so pleasant to the ear, is
another instance of a false reading or misprint, which improves the
original form and sound.
The total area of these Western Islands is 2812 square miles, or
a fourth larger than Delaware. Only one ninth of the soil is cultivated,
for most of the surface consists of moors and mountains. This region
being at the terminal of the Gulf Stream, the climate is mild, though
so humid that mists are almost perpetual. The drizzling rains are so
common that the mountains are hidden from view or shrouded in fog
or cloud most of the time. The rainfall is heavy. In one place forty-two
inches is the average. Potatoes and turnips, barley and oats form the
staple crops, though with sheep-farming, cattle-raising, fishing,
distilling, slate-quarrying, and the making of tweeds, tartans, and
woollen cloth, with assistance from the patronage of summer
tourists, the people are able to get a living. In religious “persuasion”
most of the inhabitants belong to the United Free Church, though on
some of the islands the people adhere to the forms of religion
cherished in the Roman Catholic Church.
From the earliest centuries the Scandinavian pagans poured into
the islands and among the Celts, to rob and burn, but also to settle
down and be decent. When satiated with robbery and slaughter, they
became peaceful, married the daughters of the land, and adopted
the language and faith of the islanders. The vikings and the
immigrants multiplied in the Hebrides, especially when tyrants in
Norway became unusually active and severe. Battles and fighting
between the islanders and the Norwegians kept the region in turmoil
for centuries. Not a few attempts were made by the Scottish kings to
displace the Norsemen. One of these, John Macdonald, adopted the
title of “Lord of the Isles.” He married the daughter of the earl, who
afterwards became Robert II. Battles, treaties, and alliances
followed, but insular sovereignty was abolished in the reign of James
V. Bloody feuds continued, through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, among the rival clans and their dependent tribes.
Even the subsidies granted by William III to the chiefs could not
preserve order. Peace dawned only when the tribal system was
broken up. Then, through the abolition of hereditary jurisdiction,
through inheritance, and the appointments in the different districts of
sheriffs who held the writ of the king, peace was secured.
Nevertheless, in the new system of management the rents being
made too high, there began an emigration to America that continued
for many years, threatening at one time to depopulate the islands.
Dr. Johnson, who, with Boswell, made what was virtually an
exploration and published the classic, entitled “A Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland,” in 1773, tells of the ships waiting in the
harbors ready to take on their human cargo for the continent of
promise. Thousands crossed the ocean to Canada or into those
Atlantic colonies which became the United States.
Following the loss of so many able-bodied men and women, the
standard of civilization in these islands began to sink, even though
the population, which subsisted almost wholly on potatoes and
herring, kept multiplying. When in 1846 the potato blight reduced the
masses, both in Ireland and in western Scotland, to the verge of
starvation, another large emigration of thousands to Australia and
America took place. Had Carlyle’s advice been followed, Canada
would have forty million and South Africa ten million loyal British
subjects. This sage wanted the Government to turn men-of-war into
emigrant ships, in order to give free transport of people to waste
lands beyond sea. A royal commission, appointed by Parliament,
later secured legislation which has made life for the crofters in the
island more tolerable.
Steering south from Oban, we passed some rocky isles, one of
which is called, from its shape, the Dutchman’s Cap. When in front of
Fingal’s Cave, we are awed by its imposing entrance which is
formed by a series of basaltic columns from twenty to forty feet high,
which sustain an arch sixty feet above the sea. We land in a boat
amid the fuming waves and climb into the cave, which for a distance
of about two hundred feet has a sort of rather rough natural sidewalk
made of fallen columns. The waves beneath us are continually
surging and the thunderous echoes resound continually. The island,
of volcanic origin, is nothing more or less than the fragment of an
ancient stream of lava. In Fingal’s Cave there is first a basement of
tufa, from which rise colonnades of basalt in pillars which form the
walls and faces of the grotto, the roof of which consists of
amorphous basalt.
Fingal’s Cave was first noted and described by Sir Joseph Banks
in 1773. The grotto is two hundred and twenty-seven feet long, forty-
two feet wide, and sixty-six feet high. But the height of the pillars is
irregular, being thirty-six feet on one side and but eighteen on the
other. Its waters are the haunts of seals and of sea-birds.
Happily for us, instead of seeing nothing but the sombre gray, in
an atmosphere of fog or cloud, or storm-tossed waves, which on
occasions do not allow passengers to disembark, the bursts of
sunlight made unique beauty, both in atmospheric conditions and in
an exquisite play of colors. The basalt appeared to combine every
tint of warm red, brown, and rich maroon, while the seaweed and
lichen of green and gold seemed like the upholstery of a palace.
Through the percolation of the limestone water, the walls were in
places of a snow-white tint. Looking upward we could see yellow,
crimson, and white stalactites. When we examined the columns they
appeared to possess a regularity so perfect as to suggest the work
of a Greek sculptor rather than the play of Nature’s forces in her
moods of agony. The Gaelic form of the name is taken from the
murmuring of the sea, meaning the “Cave of Music.” In times of
storm the compressed air rushes out producing a sound as of
thunder.
“Fingal” is the name of the hero in the poems of Ossian, which
are based on the ancient traditions of the Gaelic people of Scotland
and Ireland, still known and told among the people, so many of
whom in the outer islands use this ancient tongue. The Finn in these
old stories was the Rig or King of the Fenians of Leinster, Ireland,
who lived at a “du” or fort in the County of Kildare, and who was
killed on the Boyne by a fisherman, a.d. 283. As for the name
“Fingal,” it is thought to mean a “fair foreigner,” or Norwegian; the
word “Dubgal,” meaning a “dark foreigner” or invader; the blond
pirates or intruders being the Norwegians and the swarthy ones
coming from Denmark. Both varieties of these unscientific
marauders ravaged Ireland in the ninth century.
Only the chief caves have names. On the south-east coast is the
Clam Shell, or Scallop Cave. It is thirty feet high, eighteen feet wide,
and about one hundred and thirty feet long, one side of it consisting
of ridges of basalt which stand out like the ribs of a ship. Near by is
the Rock of the Herdsmen, from a supposed likeness to a
shepherd’s cap. The Isle of Columns can be fully seen only at low
water.
No human habitations were noted on the Island of Staffa by us,
during our short stay. We got on board the steamer again and
proceeded to Iona, that is, “the island”; for Columkill, or the Island of
Columba, from time unrecorded has had a fertile soil. This fertility,
supposed to be in the dark ages miraculous, led probably to its early
occupation.
Iona’s history begins in the year 563 when St. Columba, from
Ireland, landed on its shores with twelve apostles. By his life and
work he rendered the place so rich in holy associations that to-day
the hosts of divided Christendom, Roman Catholic, Protestant
Episcopal, and Presbyterian, claim Iona as the cradle of their faith,
and on different days—never together in holy union—visit the sacred
isle. Sweethearts and wives must not meet. Which is which?
Iona’s scenery was ever attractive, with its precipitous cliffs, its
dazzling stretches of white shells and sand, its fertile fields, and its
grassy hollows. Its natural charms drew visitors from afar and made
those dwelling upon its acres content. Even before the name of
Christ was uttered, it had been, as the Highlanders called it in their
Gaelic tongue, the “Island of the Druids.” It was therefore famous,
before it became the centre of Celtic Christianity, and the mother
community, whose children were the depositories of the human
spirit. From its numerous monastic houses, hundreds of alumni went
out as missionaries to convert all northern Britain. In a word, the
story of humanity in all the earth is told here. The strata of religions,
the deposits of the human soul, are almost as discernible on Iona as
are the layers of geology, or the floors of successive cities revealed
by the spade, in Egypt or Palestine, in the terpen of Holland or the
mounds of Babylon.
Even the humorous side of religion is here discernible to sharp
eyes. Some of the carvings in the choir stalls and chisellings of the
marble aloft show the joker in stone. The demons are represented as
having their fun—and this is equally true in the art of Buddhism in
Japan and of mediævalism in Iona. The tower of the church of St.
Mary, on this island, has one bit of sculpture representing an angel
weighing souls in a pair of scales, one of which is kept down by a
demon’s paw. It reminded us of Dr. Franklin’s Yankee
characterization of the Dutchman’s trade with the Indians.
Iona was at times so sacred a place, with its scores of
monasteries and nunneries, with its small forest of crosses, and with
architecture that enthralled by its beauty, that it was for centuries a
spot to which pilgrims came from all lands, and in its holy soil kings
and nobles longed to be buried; yet it was not free from the robber
pagan and the bloody spoiler. The North Sea rovers, from Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark, descended in the eighth century to plunder,
to burn, and to kill. For two hundred years Iona lay desolate, until
Queen Margaret restored the desecrated monastery, building the
chapel over the site of St. Columba’s grave. Later came the
Benedictine monks, who expelled or absorbed the Celtic community.
Intermittently the island was the seat of the bishopric of the Western
Isles, but at the Reformation the monastic buildings were dismantled
by order of the legal authorities. When Dr. Johnson visited Iona in
1773, only two persons on the island could speak English. None
could read or write.
Of Iona’s political fortunes the story is brief, the most interesting
point to an American being that, when oppression and the severe
conditions made life here undesirable or scarcely possible, the
people emigrated. From the hardy race, inhabiting this and other of
the Western Isles, the United States received a noble contingent, to
enrich its grand composite of humanity.
 We spent some time in the cemetery called “the Burial Place of
Kings,” which is reputed to contain the dust of forty-eight Scottish,
four Irish, and eight Danish and Norwegian monarchs, besides many
monumental stones. The number of crosses set up on Iona was
nearly equal to that of the days of the year. These were standing, up
to Reformation times, when most of them were thrown into the sea
by order of the Synod of Argyl. Yet a few still remain. The finest are
the Maclean’s cross and St. Martin’s cross, both being almost perfect
in form, despite centuries of weathering. Both are richly carved with
runic inscriptions, emblematic devices, and fanciful scroll-work.

THE KINGS’ GRAVES, IONA

It was certainly a brain stimulant and a heart-warmer to ramble
among these ruins. Imagination re-created the scenes in those
ancient days when the light of the gospel was brought by a saintly
man filled with the spirit of Jesus. We realized, in measure at least,
how great was his work and how far-reaching was his influence in
winning men to Christ, before Latin and Germanic disputes for
mastery had divided the Christian Church. Columba’s coming quickly
changed the landscape of pagan Scotland. First in the cities and
then in almost every village, the cross, symbol of the sacrificial death
of Him who came to give life more abundantly, arose, first in wood
and then in enduring stone. The savage people, whose passions and
appetites had so closely allied them to the brutes, were transformed
and uplifted.
In time the children of the first hearers of the gospel message
were converted, not only outwardly to the acceptance of creeds,—
which in their scholastic form they could not at first understand,—not
only to symbols, which are ever but the shadows of eternal truths,
but were inwardly transformed in the renewing of their minds.
Gradually they became so changed in heart and life that we, after
having seen Christianity in very many of its varied ethnic forms, and
met its exemplars in lands not a few, cannot but feel that in the
home, the school, and the church, there is no land on earth in which
Christianity is more genuine than in Scotland. Between Columba’s
homilies and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” long centuries were to
pass slowly away. Nothing in literature, or art, or history, or statistics,
furnishes so true a picture of the leavening of a whole nation, or
illustrates more finely the truth that among believers, even the
common people may be “kings and priests unto God,” than this
poem of Burns. It is a revelation of “Old Scotia’s grandeur.”
 CHAPTER XIII
THE CALEDONIAN CANAL—SCOTTISH
SPORTS

The long inland waterway, of which the “Caledonian Canal” is the

main portion, unites the waters of the German Ocean, at Moray Firth,
with those of the Atlantic, which wash the shores of the Island of
Mull. Considered as one highway, this trough, which forms also the
eastern boundary of “the Highlands,” was made in part by nature and
in part by art. In easy and safe passage, it saves the shipmasters
about four hundred miles of coasting voyage around the north of
Great Britain, through the stormy Pentland Firth which divides
Caithness from the Orkney Islands. The total length of the canal
proper is about sixty miles; the part made by man’s work covering
twenty-two miles. A chain of fresh-water lakes, four in number, on
various levels, stretching along the line of the great glen of Scotland,
has been united by water ladders, up which ships are lifted and by
which time is saved.
The route of the canal was surveyed in 1773 by James Watt, the
famous engineer, better known in the annals of steam. Following an
Act of Parliament in 1803, the canal, constructed under the
supervision of Thomas Telford, was opened to navigation in 1822.
There are twenty-eight locks, each having the standard dimension of
one hundred and sixty feet length, so that steamers of comfortable
length can go through. It was on one of these, the Fusileer, that we
travelled from Oban to Inverness, on another we moved in reverse
order, and great were these days. One was sunny and warm. The
other was so cloudy and cold that a grate fire at the hotel at Fort
William felt thoroughly delightful.
 On the second of these inland voyages we were on the steamer
Gondolier. From Oban we cross Loch Linnhe, which forms the
southern end of the great canal, and call at Ardgour. At the head of
the loch we stop at Fort William, formerly called “the Key of the
Highlands.” It is now a town consisting chiefly of a long, narrow
street, full of hotels. The fort was originally erected in 1655 by
Cromwell’s General Monk and called “Kilmallie.” Under the reign of
King William, in 1690, General Hugh McKay enlarged the work and
named it after the Dutch king, the town being called “Maryburgh,” in
honor of the queen. It was to this place that the perpetrators of the
massacre at Glencoe came to divide their spoil.
In 1715 and again in 1746, the followers of “Bonnie Prince
Charlie,” the Jacobites, besieged the place, but unsuccessfully. No
remnants of the fort, which was dismantled in 1860, now remain, for
in 1890 the ruins were wholly removed to provide room for the iron
rails and railway station; for, since the hills come down close
together, there is not much level real-estate room. It illustrates the
sadness of things to find here great distilleries which are large
enough to mar the landscape.
The town produced a poet, and near the railway station is an
obelisk to the memory of Ewen MacLachlin, who wrote verses in
Gaelic. Four miles away is Ben Nevis, 4406 feet high, the loftiest
mountain in the British Islands. Later, at Inverness, I met a Scottish
artist who had painted the mountain from many points of view, but he
seemed more impressed with its ugliness and shaggy character than
with its beauty. In fact, in comparing the artistic work of this painter
with that of Mr. Robert Allan, who transfers to canvas the ideal
loveliness of the ocean,—both Scottish and both masterly,—we
recalled that inimitable passage of Ruskin, contrasting the form and
functions of the mountains and the sea, which furnishes so
illuminating a commentary on the passage written by an ancient
admirer of nature and its Creator,—“Thy righteousness is like the
great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep.”
We noted, in our summer travels, not a few men of the easel. A
mile and a half from the town is the grand old ruin of Inverlochie, to
which many landscape painters resort. Other places of interest are
the site of the battlefield of 1645 and the castle of Lord Abinger, built
in the Scottish baronial style.
Yet at all these attractions we did not much more than glance,
despite the importunities of local guides, who sounded their praises
unremittingly. The reason for which we stopped for a day or two in
this mountain stronghold was not to study military fortification, or to
see the town, which, apart from its summer life, has little allurement
for the tourist who values time. We were there to see the Highland
games, for this day in August was the date set for “the gathering of
the clans” of the shire. They came not for battle as in the old times,
but for the Lochaber Highland games, such as the hammer-throwing,
putting the stone, pole-vaulting, leaping, and jumping; besides the
various Scottish dances, such as prancing and stepping over swords
and the Highland fling.
Heavy rain came down in the early part of the morning, and
during the whole day there was a drizzle, making the air heavy with
dampness and the ground meadows miry. We supposed of course
that there would be no exhibition.
Vain thought! What does a Highlander care about moisture? To
him rain is but an old friend, whom he would no more think of
speaking against than of reviling his mother. Indeed, it is his native
element. So in the afternoon, our lady, donning her mackintosh,
which she had just purchased at Oban, and I with umbrella and
overcoat splashed over the fields to the hillside and meadows, where
thousands of people were gathered together. There may have been
other umbrellas in use, but they were not conspicuous, and certainly
not numerous. Some of the athletic performances were admirable
and the achievements of manly strength were worthy of the applause
which they so generously received.
Yet an alien, one not of the heather, cannot be rapturous in
honest praise of the dances, at least those which were prolonged to
the full and apparently appropriate time, and which the spectators
seemed greatly to enjoy. It was something, no doubt, to behold an
able-bodied man in a dress that quite equalled that of the peacock,
jumping about among the crossed lines of naked steel without
getting his toes cut off. There was undoubtedly some grace also in
the way he curved his arms above his head. Doubtless the very
swish of his kilts and the sight of his bare and hairy legs filled some
bosoms with emotions of envy, accompanied, as they were, with
what seemed blood-curdling cries, the relics of old savagery.
Probably my education had been neglected, for I should not wish to
attend these exhibitions too frequently, unless paid handsomely for
the labor incurred.
Indeed, my feelings of appreciation were very much on the same
par with those experiences when, in Japan, we were expected to sit
on the mats with our lower limbs doubled up, or tied in a knot, during
hours of personal agony. These classic performances were
manifestly full of delight to the cultured admirers of pose and motion,
in the “No” dances, though insufferably tedious to those whose legs
had fallen asleep. Even in later times, when chairs were provided
and the accessories were suggestive of comfort, there was not
enough in the dancing of the “No” operatic performers or in the
antics of the geisha, to serve as magnets.
It was easy to explain, however, why and wherefore Scottish
cheeks are so suggestive of rose gardens, and also why
consumption is so common. The rain did indeed redden the
complexions, but as to the number of cases of pneumonia, or
tuberculosis, which ensued after exposure on this chilly day, we
cannot inform our readers, not having the statistics at hand. To this,
however, we can testify, that when we got back to Room No. 6, of
the Waverley Hotel, we were the subjects of a sort of telepathy that
enabled us to feel profound sympathy with Peary when in search of
the North Pole. Never did a grate full of live coals seem more
welcome. We almost literally hung up ourselves, or at least what had
been our outward semblance, to dry. When properly desiccated, we
retired early, in order the more to enjoy the glorious island voyage
among the Highlands which we knew awaited us next morning.
It was genuine Scotch weather when we woke up and looked out
upon a landscape dominated by Ben Nevis, of whose towering form
we could catch glimpses now and then through the cloud rifts, while
on the hills around us lay patches and lines of snow. At times we
were in that “Scotch mist,” in which, as hostile critics declare, the
metaphysicians who live north of the Tweed do at times get lost. Just
when it began or left off raining might have puzzled a weather
bureau man to tell. As for ourselves, we could have taken oath as to
our own inability if we had been called upon in court. If a jury had
been empanelled, then and there, to determine whether it was or
was not raining, the verdict in either case would undoubtedly have
been, as became the country, “Not proven.”
Nevertheless, after we had crossed the gangway of the boat, a
sister ship to the Gondolier of yesterday, and looked over the
landscape, from both starboard and port side, we began to think it
was true, as Professor Blaikie once said, that “Scotland is like a
pebble, it requires rain to bring out its colors.” It is certain that many
spots in this charming glen did look like the water lines, waves, and
layers of varied tints which we have seen on the surfaces of
chalcedony.
When at the lapidary’s I used to watch the process of cutting in
half a stone, rolled for many ages mayhap and ground daily on the
outside by glacial or stream action, it seemed for a few seconds as if
the diamond saw, revolving with its irresistible edge, was to cut in
vain and reveal nothing. From an outward view all beauty was
hidden and the pebble seemed thoroughly ugly and uninteresting.
Nor could I guess that treasures were hidden in the interior; but
when the hemispheres were in our hands, emerging from their
baptism in clean water, there was revealed, if the stone were hollow,
a grotto of crystals, rich in Nature’s heraldry of color, telling the story
of its fiery past. It seemed a more wonderful story, in fact, than that
of Ali Baba and Open Sesame in fiction. Or, if solid, and, like Venus,
born from water, and formed in slow deposit of liquid instead of from
the cosmic flames, the curvilinear strata white, ruby red, black,
yellow, and brown, seemed to excel in splendor.
Even so, to-day Scotland revealed herself as a new wonderland.
The Caledonian pebble seemed a sapphire. For when, toward noon,
something like dry weather arrived and sunbursts were occasional,
Scotland looked as fresh as her maidens and almost as beautiful.
We passed cataracts in full activity. One, which we did not see,
ninety feet high and probably the finest on the great island, was near
Fort Augustus. Beyond this, called “Foyers,” was another fall thirty
feet high. To one, however, who has seen Niagara a hundred times,
and who dwells near Taughannock Falls, which are thirty feet higher,
and near Lake Cayuga, with two hundred waterfalls within a radius of
twenty miles, a cataract must be out of the ordinary to be visited at
the expenditure of time and money, when both these assets are
limited and things more novel are to be seen. In our home town of
Ithaca, as we two Americans mused, in that conceit and love of
business peculiar to our nationals, we have a “local Niagara” over
eighty feet high. Why visit Foyers?
At one of the lochs, we saw an Irishman, with the popular and
traditional face, shape, and garb; that is, of the kind we read about in
novels and see on the stage. He had on brogans, short breeches
split in the end at the knees, woollen stockings, a small and short-
tailed coat, a stumpy shillaly, a narrow-brimmed high hat, with pipe
stuck in the front band and a shamrock set in another place. Besides
bog-trotters’ capers and the dancing of an Irish jig, he sang songs
which recalled boyhood’s memories in Philadelphia. After the potato
famine in Ireland, the Emerald Isle was semi-depopulated, and the
emigrant ships, despite the Know-Nothings, set their prows in fleets
to the Land of Hope. I often saw seven ships a day bringing over the
raw material of citizenship. Some of the girls, as we learned from our
household experience in employing domestics, had never gone up—
though on ship and with us, at first, they came backwards down—a
pair of stairs. Such green but promising maids had never dwelt in a
house built with more than one story, or touched a faucet, or lighted
a gas jet. The Irishman’s song, in which his mention of Philadelphia
was mnemonic, was delightful to hear. Another song, which as a
child I heard my father’s coal-drivers and coal-heavers sing, told of
travels nearer home, and of this I caught the words. They ran thus:—

“I cut my stick and greased my brogues—

’T was in the month of May, sir:
And off to England I did go
To mow the corn and hay, sir.”
 With this son of Erin was a dirty and very skinny Highland lad, in
kilts and other checkered woollen garments much the worse for
wear. He also danced what was probably a Highland fling, though an
almost vicious desire possessed some of us to fling him into the
bathtub.
It is a good sign for the future of a noble race that the
manufacture of soap occupies many people in Scotland. Though the
glens are full of distilleries, which are sure to create poverty and dirt,
perhaps we must consider soap-boiling as a very honorable
occupation and the manufacture of this cleansing material as an
antidote to some of the mischief done by John Barleycorn. How
terrible is the scourge of alcohol in Great Britain was revealed, as
never before, during the war crisis of 1915, when even an appeal to
patriotism could not make the sodden workmen give up their cups.
My kinsman, the United States Consul at Dundee, showed me the
statistics of the liquor traffic in Scotland alone, which were appalling.
Even Christians, supposed to be devout in worship and genuine in
faith, invest their money, and some of them exclusively, in the
distilleries, thus upsetting at one end what the gospel agencies are
doing at the other. The British Empire is thus handicapped in the
race for progress. Yet who from the glorious Yankee nation can
throw a stone, especially when he sees the “American bar,”
“American long drinks,” and “American mixed drinks” flauntingly
advertised in Europe? We have heard, however, that the “long
drinks” are soft and harmless.
While propelled along Loch Ness, an earth-cleft, narrow, deep,
and twenty-four miles in length, we are again reminded of our home
near Lake Cayuga, fairest in the Iroquois chain of “finger lakes” in
the Empire State, and one of the deepest; for on either side of the
Caledonian Canal are metamorphic rocks rising out of crystal clear
water, and beneath, in the Byronic profundity of “a thousand feet in
depth below,” the rocky bottom. Grander and more rugged, however,
is the scenery, for the mountains are here higher, even as the water
is deeper, than in Iroquois land. The Scottish Highlands are the
fragments of the earliest land that emerged above the prehistoric
oceans. For centuries they formed a boundary in ethnology, politics,
and religion, even as in the æons of geology they form a frontier of
chronology.
When our voyage ends, we find that it is some distance between
the stopping-place of the steamer at Muirtown and Inverness. Since
names and sounds are continually playing tricks, summoning from
the privacy of memory forms long ago forgotten and ever retreating
in the perspective of the past, I recall my old Scotch professor at the
Central High School in Philadelphia. That good man MacMurtrie—
with a name meaning, I suppose, of, or from, or son of the Muirtrie,
or Moor-tree clan—first introduced thousands of youth, through his
lexicon, his fascinating lectures, and his choice cabinets, to the great
world of nature and science, and to the rapturous joy of discovery of
order and beauty in the mathematics of the universe.
From Muirtown, we take the hotel omnibus and soon enter
“Rose-red Inverness,” the bright and lively town, which in August
bursts into the full bloom of its summer activities.
 CHAPTER XIV
INVERNESS: THE CAPITAL OF THE
HIGHLANDS

One of the first things we noticed in this summer capital of the

Highlands was a male being, whom Thackeray would have liked to
cage for his “Book of Snobs.” From the monocle, or window in his
eye, and from certain physical peculiarities, and even pronunciation
in his speech, which he was helpless to conceal, I should imagine
that he was really a London cockney masquerading in a
Highlander’s costume. According to the fad or fashion of vacation
time, and appropriate for hot weather, he was encased in the
complete pavonine dress of the old days of clans and claymores, but
the motor within hardly suited the machine. With his buckled shoes,
checkered leggings,—in the side of one of which was stuck a long
dirk, having a silver handle holding a Cairngorm stone set in the top,
—with considerable public exposure of the cuticle around and above
his skinny knees, with gay kilts, decorated pouch, shoulder-brooch of
silver, coat, plaid, bonnet, and feather, the pageant of costume
seemed vastly more imposing than the man within.
This creature seemed a walking museum of Scottish antiquities.
All his unwonted paraphernalia, however, did not cure his gawkiness
or prevent impending disaster to his pride. In trying to pass by some
baskets belonging to a huckster, and full, if I remember aright, of
turnips, his dirk-handle caught in the end of a loose hoop. “Oh, what
a fall was there, my countrymen!” In a moment one would have
taken him for a measuring-rod. At least six feet of the gawk, more or
less, lay on the soil of what may have been his beloved native land.
Nevertheless, in all Christian charity, we tried our best to appear
blind, and resisted the temptation to laugh.
 I am bound to say, however, that I saw some solid-looking
citizens of Inverness wear the kilt and Highland coat most gracefully.
Moreover, in the evening, when some of the Gordon Highlanders,—I
believe they were,—whose barracks were not far away, rambled
through the streets, they certainly showed that the man and the
clothes had grown together.
One could easily see how well adapted was such a dress to a
rough campaign in a mountainous country. One scarcely wondered
why, when fighting in hilly regions, the Highlander was usually the
superior of the average infantryman. Nevertheless, some comical
chapters in eighteenth-century American history come into mind.
When we remembered that modern footgear was strange to men
who had been used to the ancient brogues and to whom the proverb
“as easy as an old shoe” was a novelty, the story is quite credible
that, in the repulse by the French of the attack made by the British
army under Abercrombie at Ticonderoga, in 1758, when the
Highlanders were forced to retreat from Fort Carillon, there were
thousands of shoes left stuck in the mud when the British ran to their
boats.
We could see at a glance that Inverness was the centre of traffic
and travel during the summer months, when tourists made the
northeast and west of cool Scotland very lively for a few weeks. We
looked in at the Town Hall, near which stands the old town cross. At
the foot of this is the lozenge-shaped stone, called the “Stone of the
Tubs,” reverenced as the palladium of Inverness. It was anciently
useful from its having served as a resting-place for women carrying
water from the river.
It is a sight for a stranger in the Highlands to see the
washerwomen in their fullest muscular activity on summer days,
when they renovate the linen of the tourists. Why men should want
to pay money to see the Salome and other dances popular in
Christian countries is a mystery to some of us, when among the
laundry-women the limits of cuticular exposure are reached. They
leap in frenzy upon the masses of linen in the suds which fill the
deep tubs, but the results justify the use of these primitive washing-
machines.
 Curiously enough, this part of Scotland is not wholly free from
earthquakes, for which the geologists give reasons. In the seismic
disturbances of 1816, the spire of the old jail, one hundred and fifty
feet high, was curiously twisted. Now this spire serves as a belfry for
the town clock. Westward from the Ness is the higher ground, called
the “Hill of the Fairies,” where lies the beautiful city of the dead—one
of the most attractively situated cemeteries in the whole of Britain.
On the athletic grounds near the town, at the end of September, are
held the Scottish games and athletic contests, the most important in
the country. Four bridges span the river. Altogether, our impressions
of the town were very pleasing.
But Inverness has a history also. It is believed to have been one
of those primitive strongholds—in this case, of the Picts—which were
so often to be found at the junction of waters. To this place came St.
Columba, in the year 565. Here, too, was the castle of Macbeth, in
which he murdered Duncan, which stood until it was demolished by
Malcolm Canmore, who built on its site a larger one. William the
Lion, in 1214, granted the town a charter, by which it became a royal
burgh. Of the Dominican abbey, founded in 1233, nothing remains.
The town was burned in 1411, by Donald of the Isles, and when
fifteen years later, James I held a parliament in the castle, Scottish
statecraft was still in a primitive stage of evolution, for three of the
northern chieftains summoned to the council were executed for
daring to assert their independence. In 1652, Queen Mary was
denied admittance into the castle, but she remembered the slight
and caused the governor to be hanged afterwards. Cromwell came
hither also and built a great fort. In Inverness gathered the Jacobites
who followed both the Old and the Young Pretender. Inverness has
had its ups and downs, and, as a Western orator once declared of
his district, has, besides raising much ham, raised also much more
of what General Sherman named as the synonym for war.
To come to Inverness without visiting Culloden would be like
going to Rome without seeing St. Peters; for at Culloden, where was
fought one of the decisive battles of the world, the death-blow was
given to Scottish feudalism. There the clan system was knocked to
pieces. Then, also, for the benefit and blessing of the whole world,