Island Scots

By Charles Elliot

THE CROFTER AND THE LAIRD by John McPhee, 159 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.75.

Until three centuries ago, before the great clans were broken and the brutal clearance policies of the late 1700s forced Highlanders to emigrate and make way for sheep, every McPhee in the world lived on a tiny island 25 miles off the western coast of Scotland. Among them were the ancestors of John McPhee, an American writer who has been responsible for several fine books of reportage, including last year's tennis classic, Levels of the Game. All his life McPhee had heard about Colonsay. In the spring of 1967, taking his family along, he finally went there.

Romantic Past. What he found was "less like a small town than a large lifeboat," 17 sq. mi. of moor, mountain and rock supporting 138 people, where a purely feudal society had precariously survived the advent of the welfare state. Utterly interlaced through confinement and bloodlines, the islanders were leading lives somehow larger than life, gossiping about each other ("When Donald Garvard's got a bucket in him, he can be a pest of hell"), struggling to make a living from the land and the edges of the sea, engulfed in a romantic sense of the past that curls over and around the island like a North Sea fog. McPhee settled down in a cottage sublet from a crofter named Donald Gibbie to watch and listen. The result is a small masterpiece of penetrating warmth and perception.

Though Colonsay boasts only one store and a pub, McPhee writes, "things amplify. It may be the light." The mountains seem bigger than they are, the cairns like fortresses, the people like characters out of sagas, even though they are cattle farmers, shepherds, dock keepers, postmen, laborers--sometimes a little of each. The past, running easily into the present, gives it a special meaning. Donald Gibbie, for example, worked ceaselessly to earn the equivalent of $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, being a blood-proud descendant of the island's ancient chiefs, when he happens to walk past a particular pinnacle of rock that juts like a bowsprit a hundred feet above the sea, he will sometimes step out on it and stand there on one foot. His ancestors did this for long periods of time, he says, "to prove to man and nature that they were superior beings."

Cloudy Future. Colonsay is an anachronism, and anachronisms are nearly always costly. The owner of the island--the "laird" of the title--is an Englishman named Euan Howard, fourth Baron Strathcona. It was his mixed fortune to inherit the place in 1959 along with the responsibility to maintain at his own expense a broad range of social and economic services. At that time the island cost -L- 10,000 a year to keep going. Through economies, the island produce, including cattle and sea kale, is now just about able to support the inhabitants. McPhee likes Strathcona (rather better than his tenants do) and sympathizes with his problems. But he notes that Strathcona's cutbacks in coal and electricity, plus lack of economic opportunity, promise to reduce the population still further. Soon there may be no more than 70 living people among the countless ghosts. Other islands--Pabbay, Sandray, Taransay, Scarba, Soay, Mingulay, St. Kilda--dot the sea round Colonsay. All were inhabited. Now all are empty.

. Charles Elliot

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