Afternoon by the Ice 273 



scendants of the warrior nation, the Aesir, led by their priest-king 

 Wotan out of central Asia at the beginning of the Christian Era — 

 there has always been a complete understanding between the in- 

 digenous populations of the Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides, the west 

 coast of Scotland, and a large part of Ireland, on the one hand, and 

 those sea rovers who came "a-viking" among them in the seventh 

 to eleventh centuries, on the other. In fact, all these peoples became 

 part of the Norse kingdom at that time and remained so until the 

 early fifteenth century. They are a maritime race of fishermen and 

 boatbuilders, and they are, incidentally, the originators and makers 

 of whisky. They are not tribalized, but have always lived in gross, 

 inbred, family groups, the size of which was governed by the size 

 of the island, loch-head, or other piece of habitable land they hap- 

 pened to live upon. They originally lived in round houses with walls 

 made of boulders, whales' ribs for rafters, and domed over with 

 blocks of peat. My family had some of these for storing seaweed for 

 manure, and the foundations of these very houses were probably 

 laid down before the Romans reached England, and possibly several 

 millennia before that. 



These "Black" Scots, or perhaps we might call them Picts, have 

 always been the boatbuilders of Scotland and seem, in fact, to be the 

 main source of that breed of engineers for which the country as a 

 whole is so famous throughout the world today. Be it noted that 

 the names Carnegie, Bonnalie, Rennie, and such are not Scottish but 

 Pictish names. These mariners had been voyaging all over the world 

 in their Httle, deep-draught smacks for hundreds of years, so that 

 when the Hollanders, English, French, Spanish, and even the Portu- 

 guese first reached the most outlandish coasts in the New World, 

 Africa, and even islands in the Indian Ocean, they found so-called 

 "Scotsmen" already there, busily engaged in trade and commerce 

 and usually surrounded by a small tribe of half-breed offspring. 

 There are some deathless expressions of surprise recorded by dum- 

 founded Spanish navigators when they encountered these early colo- 

 nists thus pre-empting some of their more choice "discoveries." The 

 reason for this emigration from Scotland is the clue to all Scots enter- 

 prise and success; namely, the virility of this prolific race in a coun- 

 try where arable land and other resources are extremely Umited. It 

 is, in fact, a sort of viking. 



