1903-4.] Mr N. Annandale on the People of the Faroes. 19 
able mass of land, but its origin must, for the present, remain a 
mystery, and its existence in no way militates against the view 
that the Faroes were devoid of human inhabitants when they were 
first visited by the wanderers of more or less mixed race who are 
known in British history as the ‘ Danes,’ although comparatively 
few of them had any connection with Denmark. Professor York 
Powell (6), in the introduction to his translation of the Faereyinga 
Saga , shows that during the early history of the Faroes their 
Norse families were closely related to several of the Icelandic 
-chiefs both by blood and marriage, and it is probable that the 
Faroes were colonised in the first half of the tenth century, a little 
later than Iceland, which commenced to be peopled in 874 a.d. 
In Icelandic history the people known to the vikings as ‘ men of 
the West,’ that is to say, Irishmen and inhabitants of the outer 
Hebrides, occasionally make their appearance, chiefly as captives of 
war ; it is to them that the Westmann Isles, off the south coast of 
Iceland, owe their name, a party of mutinous slaves having 
occupied them after slaying their master on the mainland, whence 
his avengers soon came to exterminate the murderers. In the 
Faroes, Westmannhavn, a fine natural harbour near the north-west 
-corner of Stromoe, is said to have at one time been a favourite 
resort of the Western ships, while Saxen, a place with a similar 
but smaller harbour a few miles to the north, is believed to have 
attracted Scotch and Dutch smugglers until comparatively recent 
times, when the land-locked bay became silted up in the course of 
a single storm. The people of Suderoe claim themselves to be of 
Western descent, and a curious story (3), told me some years ago in 
Stromoe to account for their physical and dialectic peculiarities, 
makes them to be descended from an Irish captain’s wife who was 
kidnapped from her husband’s vessel by a native chief. The story 
has evidently been embellished by an ignorant person in order to 
account for the name of a village in Suderoe, but, for all that, may 
-contain a germ of truth. 
A far more circumstantial tradition links the island of Naalsoe 
with Scotland. Certain families on this island, which has a popu- 
lation at the present day of about two hundred souls, believe im- 
plicitly that they are the direct descendants of 1 Jacobus the Second 
of Scotland,’ whose daughter eloped with a page of her father’s 
