1854 GALES AT DUNBAR 223 



* The wind is rising strongly from the east. The 

 sea gets white. The square-sailed fishing-boats come 

 scudding in for shelter, and two large three-masted 

 steam-screws are scudding up the Firth with all sails 

 set forward. I write during breakfast. One of the 

 boats seems unable to make Dunbar Harbour, and is 

 running for shelter into Belhaven Bay. The men's 

 wives are looking out across the walls. . . . That 

 little boat has beat up to windward after all. She is 

 now under shelter of the Castle ; down goes the square 

 sail, off go the oilskins, and out go four oars, and she 

 will be in dock in a twinkling. 



' Heigh ho ! A boat after all has been upset on 

 Tyne Sands. Three men are drowned and two saved. 

 I saw a woman pass crying, and afterwards a sailor, 

 looking very grave. I feared something. 



1 The tumult of the waves is wonderful to look at. 

 They come rolling in, and swallow up the rocky islets 

 that guard the shore, breaking over them in great 

 sheets of white water. The roar, the great masses of 

 spray, and the labouring vessels dimly seen scudding 

 up the Firth everything seems to bespeak disaster.' 



Before he left Dunbar the Director had completed 

 about a third of the area he had assigned to himself to 

 be mapped from that station. The Geological Survey 

 of Scotland was thus fairly launched. Ramsay, how- 

 ever, was never again able to find time to resume the 

 mapping of any area north of the Tweed. 1 All that 

 his increasing official duties permitted him to accom- 

 plish was to come down year after year and inspect 

 the work of his colleagues, completed and in progress. 



1 The only time that he took the maps himself into the field was some ten 

 years later, when, while spending a few days with his friend Mr. J. Carrick 

 Moore in Wigtownshire, he mapped the end of the peninsula which terminates 

 in Corsewall Point. 



