ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 5 



Michael Scott. 



Though we may not all of us have studied Armstrong's 

 masterpiece, I daresay there is scarcely a gentleman j)resent 

 but is familiar with the sea-novel, " Tom Cringle's Log." 

 But though we have rejoiced in its quaint humours, and 

 admired the beauty and vividness of its literary pictures 

 of storm and calm in the tropics, perhaps not many of 

 us are aware that this wonderful book was written at 

 Birseslees Cottage, near St. Boswells. My grounds for 

 making this statement were put forward in my little 

 book on the " Blackwood Group," published four or five 

 years ago ; and " Cringle's " editor and biographer, Mr 

 Mowbray Morris, has acknowledged that the evidence 

 on which my statement rests is at least as good as that 

 on which rest most other statements regarding a life 

 which was strangely obscure. Since that time, however, 

 a West Indian correspondent has drawn my attention 

 to a local tradition that Cringle, or Michael Scott — to 

 give him his true name — wrote at least the first sketches 

 of his work whilst seated beneath a cabbage palm-tree 

 in the garden of a house known as Raymond Hill in 

 Jamaica.* This view, however, supposing we accept it, 

 is not wholly incompatible with mine. No less than 

 seven yeais are known to have elapsed between Scott's 

 final departure from Jamaica and the publication of his 

 book. Are we to assume that the completed MS. of the Log 

 lay in his desk during all that time ? The most plausible 

 theory, perhaps, is that notes and sketches made at 

 Raymond Hill were worked up at Birseslees. The writer 

 in the Biographical Dictionary says that the book was 

 probabh' composed in Glasgow, in intervals of business ; 

 but it is obvious that he wrote in ignorance of either 

 tradition. Candour compels me to acknowledge, however, 

 that beyond the single though reliable testimony quoted 



* See an article in the Jamaica Daily Gleaner for March 7th 1900. 



