Foreword

Kenneth Macaulay came from an extraordinary family. He was born in the Hebridean island of Harris in about 1723, the son of a celebrated Church of Scotland minister named Aulay Macaulay.

In 1746, when Kenneth was a young man, Reverend Aulay Macaulay was one of the few Highlanders who made a serious attempt on behalf of the British Government to apprehend Prince Charles Edward Stuart during the Young Pretender's long break for freedom after the disaster at Culloden. The prince had ill-advisedly strayed from the Catholic islands into the Protestant Hebrides and was hiding in the island of Scalpay, off the east coast of Harris, when the elderly Reverend Macaulay assembled a posse and ventured out to arrest him. The minister was dissuaded in Scalpay by a fellow Gael, who professed his own personal distaste for the Jacobite cause but invoked the inviolable rules of Highland sanctuary and hospitality. Reverend Macaulay returned empty-handed to Harris and Charles Edward Stuart broke free for France. We do not know whether or not Aulay's son Kenneth, who was then in his early twenties and assisting his father's ministry in Harris, had been a member of the frustrated raiding party.

Aulay Macaulay had 14 children. One of his other sons, John Macaulay, became the father of the anti-slavery campaigner Zachary Macaulay. Zachary, who settled in London, was in his turn the father of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, the famous nineteenth-century historian and politician. Kenneth Macaulay, the writer of this History of St Kilda, was therefore one of a very long line of eminent Hebridean Macaulays. He was the son of a dedicated principled of the Reformed Church, the uncle of a prominent abolitionist, and the great-uncle of a reforming Whig parliamentarian who wrote the Lays of Ancient Rome. It is not difficult to trace the enlightened, liberal, literary genes.

On its publication in 1764, Kenneth Macaulay's The ­History of St Kilda was the third book to be produced about those enigmatic islands 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides (or 'Aebuda', as Macaulay anachronistically referred to his homelands). In the next 250 years it would be followed by hundreds more. Their fascination has intensified rather than withered with time. The apparently endless surge of material published since the evacuation of St Kilda's human population in 1930 could blind us to the fact that the small archipelago and its inhabitants were already objects of literary and public fascination in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Like his predecessors, the Skye man Martin Martin and the Caithness minister Alexander Buchan, Kenneth Mac­aulay was not writing a guide book. When Macaulay compared the main island of Hirta to 'the Teneriffe of Britain' he was making an extravagant topographical simile, not recommending St Kilda as a winter tourist resort. Then, as now, few of his readers would ever visit the islands. Then, as now, the elementary inaccessibility of St Kilda was a cornerstone of its literary appeal.

By the eighteenth century the Age of Discovery was well underway. Human civilisations large and small were being 'discovered' by Europeans in faraway parts of the globe. The nature and lifestyles of those peoples, whether they were Caribs in the Antilles or Bandanese in the Spice Islands, and even as they were being exploited, reduced or exterminated by Europeans, led many western philosophers and poets to develop a romantic theory of noble savagery, of human beings in uncorrupted harmony with their environment and each other.

This supposed state of grace developed into the theory of the Golden Age, a notional Edenic era through which all human societies passed before the tyranny of governments and legislation curbed their instinctive bliss. In a loose translation of Ovid, the eighteenth-century poets John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and William Congreve defined it as:

The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new,

No rule but uncorrupted Reason knew:

And, with a native bent, did good pursue.

Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear.

His words were simple, and his soul sincere;

Needless was written law, where none opprest:

The law of Man was written in his breast.

In his first description of the islands, A Late Voyage to St Kilda, which was published in 1698, the university-educated Martin Martin claimed to have discovered such a breed of noble savages still extant and intact within the British Isles. It was a sensational revelation:

The inhabitants of St. Kilda [wrote Martin] are much happier than the generality of mankind, as being almost the only people in the world who feel the sweetness of true liberty: what the condition of the people in the Golden Age is feign'd by the poets to be, that theirs really is, I mean, in innocency and simplicity, purity, mutual love and cordial friendship, free from solicitous cares, and anxious covetousness; from envy, deceit, and dissimulation; from ambition and pride, and the consequences that attend them.

They are altogether ignorant of the vices of foreigners, and governed by the dictates of reason and Christianity, as it was first delivered to them by those heroick souls whose zeal moved them to undergo danger and trouble to plant religion here in one of the remotest corners of the world.

There is this only wanting to make them the happiest people in this habitable globe, viz., that they themselves do not know how happy they are, and how much they are above the avarice and slavery of the rest of mankind. Their way of living makes them condemn gold and silver, as below the dignity of human nature; they live by the munificence of Heaven; and have no designs upon one another, but such as are purely suggested by justice and benevolence.

It was a caricature which nonetheless became definitive. Even after the theory of a Golden Age had been abandoned by most of the sensible world, the St Kildans found the image impossible to shake off, up to and after their evacuation in 1930. Even in the twenty-first century the islands are occasionally portrayed as Paradise Lost and their former inhabitants as fallen angels.

Kenneth Macaulay knew it to be largely nonsense. As a ­native of Harris, Macaulay understood that the residents of St Kilda were not a unique race, hermetically sealed from and untouched by the world beyond their shores. On the contrary: they were Hebridean fishermen, fowlers and crofters, connected by ancestry, intermarriage and repopulation to the rest of the Western Isles and the larger Scottish Gàidhealtachd.

Far from being 'the only people in the world who feel the sweetness of true liberty', they were feudal vassals of the MacLeod of Harris. (Martin Martin knew that too, but as an employee and friend of MacLeod of Dunvegan he chose to ignore the inconvenient implications of their bondage.) The St Kildans lived in the islands by MacLeod's permission and could be evicted at his whim. MacLeod's steward confiscated as homage a huge proportion of their annual produce, for which they laboured hard and frequently lost their lives. MacLeod's ground officer was their de facto viceroy. MacLeod of Harris dictated to them even the finer details of their religious faith. None of those things was unusual in eighteenth-century European peasant communities, but few other eighteenth-century European peasant communities were acclaimed as living in 'what the condition of the people in the Golden Age is feign'd by the poets to be'.

Macaulay paid lip-service to the notion of St Kildans as 'our domestic Indians', but he knew the difference between a mythological independent state of natural grace and the common integrity and essential self-regulation of a remote farming and fishing community. Some of the most remarkable features of The History of St Kilda are Macaulay's repeated denunciations of MacLeod's dictatorship. They were doubtless enabled by the fact that when he wrote the book, Macaulay had left Harris and was ministering to congregations elsewhere in Scotland, beyond the reach of the petty chieftains of Clan MacLeod.

As a son of Harris as well as a Minister of the Church of Scotland, nobody could deny Macaulay's authority when he wrote that MacLeod's steward

will always have it in his power to monopolise the whole trade of this island . . . excepting what is necessary to keep the people alive; or render them fit for the labouring . . .

Nor is it an easy matter to redress this grievance. So peculiarly unhappy is the place in its situation, that the inhabitants must, I am afraid, to the end of time, be wholly at the mercy of some one person, who may swallow all the small commodities this island can afford, and rule the whole community with a rod of iron . . .

That was land reform agitprop a century before it became widespread in the Highlands and Islands.

Kenneth Macaulay was in his mid-thirties when he visited St Kilda in 1758. The History of St Kilda...