HEBRIDES, the general name of some islands lying to the north-west of Scotland, of which kingdom they constitute a part. They are situated between the 55th and 59th degrees of latitude. The names of the largest are Lewis, Skye, Mull, Ilay, and Arran. Of these islands, generally, Mr Pennant gives the following history.

“All the accounts left us by the Greek and Roman writers are enveloped with obscurity; at all times brief even in their descriptions of places they had easiest access to, and might have described with the most satisfactory precision; but in remote places, their relations furnish little more than hints, the food for conjecture to the visionary antiquary.

“That Pytheas, a traveller mentioned by Strabo, had visited Great Britain, I wousd wish to make only apocryphal. He asserts that he visited the remoter parts; and that he had also seen Thule, the land of romance amongst the ancients; which all might pretend to have seen; but every voyager, to swell his fame, made the island he saw last the Ultima Thule of his travels. If Pytheas had reached these parts, he might have observed, floating in the seas, multitudes of gelatinous animals, the medusae of Linnaeus, and out of these have formed his fable. He made his Thule a composition of neither earth, sea, nor air ; but like a composition of them all ; then, catching his simile from what floated before him, compares it to the lungs of the sea, the Aristotelian idea of these bodies, and from him adopted by naturalists, successors to that great philosopher. Strabo very justly explodes these absurd tales; yet allows him merit in describing the climate of the places he had seen. As a farther proof of his having visited the Hebrides, he mentions their unfriendly sky, that prohibits the growth of the finer fruits; and that the natives are obliged to carry their corn under shelter to beat the grain out, lest it should be spoiled by the effect of sun and violence of the rains. This is the probable part of his narrative; but when the time that the great geographer wrote is considered, at a period that these islands had been neglected for a very long space by the Romans, and when the difficulties of getting among a fierce and unfriendly nation must be almost insuperable, doubts innumerable respecting the veracity of this relater must arise. All that can be admitted in favour of him is, that he was a great traveller; and that he might have either visited Britain from some of the nations commercing with our isle, or received from them accounts, which he afterwards dressed out, mixed with the ornaments of íable. A traffic must have been carried on with the very northern inhabitants of our islands in the time of Pytheas; for one of the articles of commerce mentioned by Strabo, the ivory bits, were made either of the teeth of the walrus, or of a species of whale, native of the northern seas.

“The geographer Mela, who flourished in the reign of Claudius, is the next who takes notice of our lesser islands. He mentions the Orcades as consisting of 30, the Aemodae [7:11:202]of seven. The Romans had then made a conquest of the former, and might have seen the latter: but, from the words of the historian, it is probable that the Shetland Islands were those intended; for he informs us that the ‘ Aemodae were carried out over against Germany.’ The site of the Hebrides will not admit this description, which agrees very well with the others; for the ancients extended their Germany, and its imaginary islands, to the extreme north.

“Pliny the Elder is the next that mentions these remote places. He lived later than the preceding writers, and of course his information is fuller. By means of intervening discoveries, he has added ten more to the number of the Orcades; is the first writer that mentions the Hoebudes, the islands in question; and joins in the same line Aemodae, or, as it is in the best editions more properly written, the Acmodae, or extreme point of the Roman expeditions to the north, as the Shetland Isles in the highest probability were. Pliny and Mela agree in the number of the Aemodae or Acmodae; the former makes that of the Hoebudes 30; an account extremely near the truth, deducting the little isles, or rather rocks, that surround most of the greater, and many of them so indistinct as scarcely to be remarked, except on an actual survey.

“Solinus succeeds Pliny. If he, as is supposed, was contemporary with Agricoa, he has made very ill use of the light he might have received from the expeditions of that great general; his officers might have furnished the historian with better materials than those he has communicated. He has reduced the number of the Hoebudes to five. He tells us that t the inhabitants were unacquainted with corn; that they lived only on fish and milk; that they had one king, as the islands were only separated from each other by narrow straits; that their prince was bound by certain rules of government to do justice, and was prevented by poverty from deviating from the true course, being supported by the public, and allowed nothing That he could call his own, not even a wife; but then he was allowed free choice, by turns one out of every district, of any female that caught his affection; which deprived him of all ambition about a successor.’

“By the number of these islands, and by the minute attention given by the historian to the circumstance of their being separated from each other by very narrow straits, I should imagine that which is now called the Long Island, and includes Lewis, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra, to have been the five Hoebudes of Solinus; for the other great islands, such, as Sky, &c. are too remote from each other to form the preceding very characteristic description of that chain of islands. These might naturally fall under the rule of one petty prince, almost the only probable part of Solinus’s narrative.

“After a long interval appears Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer. He also enumerates five Ebudae, and has given each a name; the western Ebuda, the Eastern Ricino, Malcos, Epidiurn. Camden conjectures them to be the modern Sky, Lewis, Rathry or Racline, Mull, and Hay; and I will not controvert his opinion.

“The Roman historians give very little light into the geography of these parts. Tacitus, from whom most might have been expected, is quite silent about the names of places; notwithstanding he informs us, that a fleet by the command of Agricoa performed the circumnavigation of Britain. All that he takes notice of is the discovery and the conquest of the Orkneys: it should seem, that with the biographers of an ambitious nation, nothing seemed worthy of notice but what they could dignify with the glory of victory. ∙

“It is very difficult to assign a reason for the change of name from Ebudae to Hebrides : the last is modern, and seems, as the annotator on Dr Macpherson supposes, to have arisen from the error of a transcriber, who changed the u into ri.

“From all that has been collected from the ancients, it appears that they were acquainted with little more of the Hebrides than the bare names: it is probable that the Romans, either from contempt of such barren spots, from the dangers of the seas, the violence of the tides, and horrors of the narrow sounds, in the inexperienced ages of navigation, never attempted their conquest, or saw more of them than what they had in sight during the few circumnavigations of Great Britain, which were expeditions more of ostentation than of utility.

“The inhabitants had probably for some ages their own governors, one little king to each island, or to each group, as necessity required. It is reasonable to suppose that their government was as much divided as that of Great Britain, which, it is well known, was under the direction of numbers of petty princes before it was reduced under the power of the Romans.

“No account is given in history of the time these islands were annexed to the government of Scotland. If we may credit our Saxon historians, they appear to have been early under the dominion of the Picts; for Bede and Adamnanus inform us, that soon after the arrival of St Columba in their country, Brude, a Pictish monarch, made the saint a present of the celebrated island of Iona. But neither the holy men of this island, nor the natives of the rest of the Hebrides, enjoyed a permanent repose after this event. The first invasion of the Danes does not seem to be easily ascertained. It appears that they ravaged Ireland, and the Isle of Rathry, as early as the year 735. In the following century their expeditions became more frequent; Harold Harfager, or the light-haired, pursued, in 875, several petty princes, whom he had expelled out of Norway; who had taken refuge in the Hebrides, and molested his dominions by perpetual descents from those islands. He seems to have made a rapid conquest; he gained as many victories as he fought battles; he put to death the chief of the pirates, and made an indiscriminate slaughter of their followers. Soon after his return, the islanders repossessed their ancient seats; and, in order to repress their insults, he sent Ketil the flat-nosed with a fleet and some forces for that purpose. He soon reduced them to terms, but made his vietories subservient to his own ambition; he made alliances with the reguli he had subdued; he formed intermarriages, and confirmed to them their old dominions. This effected, he sent back the fleet to Harold; openly declared himself independent; made himself prince of the Hebrides; and caused them to acknowledge him as such, by the payment of tribute and the badges of vassalage. Ketil remained, during life, master of the islands; and his subjects appear to have been a warlike set of freebooters, ready to Join with any adventurers. Thus when Eric, son of Harold Harfager, after being driven out of his own country, made an invasion of England, he put with his fleet into the Hebrides, received a large reinforcement of people fired with the hopes of prey, and then proceeded on his plan of rapine. After the death of Ketil, a kingdom was in after times composed out of them, which, from the residence of the little monarch in the Isle of Man, was styled that of Man. The islands became tributary to that of Norway for a considerable time, and princes were sent from thence to govern; but at length they again shook off the yoke. Whether the little potentates ruled independent, or whether they put themselves under the protection of the Scottish monarchs, does not clearly appear; but it is reasonable to suppose the last, as Donald-bane is accused of making the Hebrides the price of the assistance given him by the Norwegians against his own subjects. Notwithstanding they might occasionally seek the protection of Scotland, [7:11:203]yet they never were without princes of their own: policy alone directed them to the former. From the chronicles of the kings of Man we learn that they had a succession of princes.

“In 1089 is an evident proof of the independency of the islanders on Norway; for, on the death of Lagnan, one of their monarchs, they sent a deputation to O’Brian, king of Ireland, to request a regent of royal blood to govern them during the minority of their young prince. They probably might in turn compliment in some other respects their Scottish neighbours; the islanders must have given them some pretence to sovereignty; for,

“In 1093, Donald-bane, king of Scotland, calls in the assistance of Magnus the Barefooted, king of Norway, and bribes him with the promise of all the islands. Magnus accepts the terms; but at the same time boasts, that he does not come to invade the territories of others, but only to resume the ancient rights of Norway. His conquests are rapid and complete; for, besides the islands, by an ingenious fraud he adds Cantyre to his dominions.

“The Hebrides continued governed by a prince dependent on Norway, a species of viceroy appointed by that court; and who paid, on assuming the dignity, ten marks of gold, and never made any other pecuniary acknowledgment during life: but if another viceroy was appointed, the same sum was exacted from him. These viceroys were sometimes Norwegians, sometimes natives of the isles. In 1097 we find that Magnus deputes a nobleman of the name of Ingemund : in after times we learn that natives were appointed to that high office. Thus were the Hebrides governed, from the conquest by Magnus, till the year 1263, when Acho, or Haquin, king of Norway, by an unfortunate invasion of Scotland, terminating in his defeat at Largs, so weakened the powers of his kingdom, that his successor Magnus IV. was content to make a cession of the islands to Alexander HI.: but not without stipulating for the payment of a large sum, and a tribute of 100 merks for ever, which bore the name of the annual of Norway. Ample provision was also made by Magnus in the same treaty, for the security of the rights and properties of his Norwegian subjects who chose to continue in the isles, where many of their posterity remain to this day.

“Notwithstanding this revolution, Scotland seems to have received no real acquisition of strength. The islands still remained governed by powerful chieftains, the descendants of Somerled, thane of Heregaidel, or Argyle, who, marrying the daughter of Olave, king of Man, left a divided dominion to his sons Dugal and Reginald; from the first were descended the Macdougals of Lorn, from the last the powerful clan of the Macdonalds. The lordship of Argyle, with Mull, and the islands north of it, fell to the share of the first; Hay, Cantyre, and the southern isles, were the portion of the last; a division that formed the distinction of the Sudereys and Nordereys (as further noticed in the article Iona).

“These chieftains were the scourges of the kingdom; they are known in history but as the devastations of a tempest; for their paths were marked with the most barbarous desolation. Encouraged by their distance from the seat of royalty, and the turbulence of the times, which gave their monarchs full employ, they exercised a regal power, and often assumed the title; but are more generally known in history by the style of the Lords of the Isles, or the Earls of Ross; and sometimes by that of the Great Macdonald.

“Historians are silent about their proceedings, from the retreat of the Danes, in 1263, till that of 1335, when John, lord of the isles, withdrew his allegiance. In the beginning of the next century his successors were so independent,· that Henry IV. entered into a formal alliance with the brothers Donald and John. This encou raged them to commit fresh hostilities against their natural prince. Donald, under pretence of a claim to the earldom of Ross, invaded and made a conquest of that county; but, penetrating as far as the shire of Aberdeen, after a fierce but undecisive battle with the royal party, thought proper to retire, and in a little time to swear allegiance to his monarch James I. But he was permitted to retain the county of Ross, and assume the title of earl. His successor Alexander, at the head of 10,000 men, attacked and burnt Inverness; at length, terrified with the preparations made against him, he fell at the royal feet, and obtained pardon as to life, but was committed to strict confinement.

“His kinsman and deputy, Donald Balloch, resenting the imprisonment of his chieftain, excited another rebellion, and destroyed the country with fire and sword; but on his flight was taken and put to death by an Irish chieftain, with whom he sought protection.”

“These barbarous inroads were very frequent with a set of banditti, who had no other motive in war but the infamous inducement of plunder.

“In the reign of James II. in the year 1461, Donald, another petty tyrant, an Earl of Ross, and Lord of the Isles, renewed the pretence of independency; surprised the castle of Inverness; forced his way as far as Athol; and obliged the carl and countess, with the principal inhabitants, to seek refuge in the church of St Bridget, in hopes of finding security from his cruelty by the sanctity of the place; but the barbarian and his followers set fire to the church, put the ecclesiastics to the sword, and, with a great booty, carried the earΓand countess prisoners to his castle of Claig, in the island of Hay. In a second expedition, immediately following the first, he suffered the penalty of his impiety: a tempest overtook him, and overwhelmed most of his associates; and he, escaping to Inverness, perished by the hands of an Irish harper; his surviving followers returned to Hay, conveyed the Earl and Countess of Athol to the sanctuary they had violated, and expiated their crime by restoring the plunder, and making large donations to the shrine of the offended saint.

“John, successor to the late Earl of Ross, entered into alliance with Edward IV. and sent ambassadors to the court of England, where Edward empowered the Bishop of Durham and Earl of Winchester to conclude a treaty with him, another Donald Balloch, and his son and heir John. They agreed to serve the king with all their power, and to become his subjects: the earl was to have 100 marks sterling for life in time of peace, and L.200 in time of war; and these island allies, in case of the conquest of Scotland, were to have confirmed to them all the possessions benorth of the Scottish sea; and in case of a truce with the Scottish monarch, they were to be included in it. But about the year 1476, Edward, from a change of politics, courted the alliance of James III. and dropt his new allies. James, determined to subdue this rebellious race, sent against them a powerful armyunder the Earl of Athol; and took leave of him with this good wish, Exirth, fortune, and fill the fetters ; as much as to say, “Go forth, be fortunate, and bring home many captives ;” which the family of Athol has used ever since for its motto. Ross was terrified into submission; obtained his pardon; but was deprived of his earldom, which by act of parliament was then declared unalienably annexed to the crown; at the same time the king restored to him Knapdale and Cantyre, which the earl had resigned; and invested him anew with the lordship of the isles, to hold them of the king by service and relief.

“Thus the great power of the isles was broken: yet for a considerable time after, the petty chieftains were continually breaking out into small rebellions, or harassed each other in private wars; and tyranny seems but to [7:11:204]have been multiplied. James V. found it necessary to make the voyage of the isles in person in 1536, seized and brought away with him several of the most considerable leaders, and obliged them to find security for their own good behaviour and that of their vassals. The names of these chieftains were (according to Lindesay), Mydyart, Mac-connel, Alac-loyd of the Lewis, Mac-niel, Mac-lane, Mac-intosh, John Mudyart, Mac-hay, Moe-kenzie, and many others; but, by the names of some of the above, there seem to have been continental as well as insular malecontents. He examined the titles of their holdings; and finding several to have been usurped, reunited their lands to the crown. In the same voyage he had the glory of causing a survey to be taken of the coasts of Scotland, and of the islands, by his pilot Alexander Lindesay; which was published in 1583, at Paris, by Nicholas de Nicholay, geographer to the French monarch.

“The troubles that succeeded the death of James occasioned a neglect of these insulated parts of the Scottish dominions, and left them in a state of anarchy. In 1614, the Mac-donalds made a formidable insurrection, oppugning the royal grant of Cantyre to the Earl of Argyle and his relations. The petty chieftains continued in a sort of rebellion; and the sword of the greater, as usual in weak governments, was employed against them; the encouragement and protection given by them to pirates employed the power of the Campbells during the reign of James VI. and the beginning of that of Charles I.

“But the turbulent spirit of the old times continued down till a comparatively late period. The heads of clans were, by the divisions, and a false policy that predominated in Scotland during the reign of William III. flattered with an ideal importance: instead of being treated as bad subjects, they were courted as desirable allies; instead of feeling the hand of power, money was allowed to bribe them into the loyalty of the times. They would have accepted the subsidies, notwithstanding they detested the prince that offered them. They were taught to believe themselves of such consequence, that in these days turned to their destruction. Two rebellions gave the legislature a late experience of the folly of permitting the feudal system to exist in any part of its dominions. The act of 1748, for abolishing heritable jurisdictions, at once deprived the chieftains of all power of injuring the public by their commotions.”

New Hebrides,. a cluster of islands lying in the Great South Sca, or Pacific Ocean. See Australasia.