General introduction (by Nigel Leask)

[N.B. This is a beta-version of our edition of Pennant's 1772 Scottish tour, which includes the general introduction below, and Chapters 7 and 8 covering Pennant's journey from Iona to Skye. We welcome feedback before the publication of the full edition, if you have any please contact us here [external link].]

The Background to the 1772 Tour of Scotland.

Capitalising on the success of the publication of his Tour in Scotland 1769 (1771), Pennant’s ‘Advertisement’ to his second Tour in Scotland 1772 Part 1 (1774) observes that ‘this journey was undertaken in the summer of 1772; in order to render more complete, my preceding tour; and to allay that species of restlessness that infects many minds, on leaving any attempt unfinished.' (p.iii). Pennant’s three-month tour in Scotland in 1769, travelling on horseback and accompanied by a single groom, had been hastily conceived and planned: he covered nearly 1,622 miles, and reached as far north as Duncansby Head on the Pentland Firth, ‘the remotest part of North Britain, a country almost as little known to its southern brethren as Kamtschatka.' (Lit. Life. p. 11) Although Pennant had already travelled widely in England, Ireland and the Continent, the first Scottish tour was largely inspired by his curiosity as a naturalist, author of the multivolume British Zoology. The published Tour 1769 was a runaway success, going through five editions by 1790, especially in Scotland, in part due to Pennant’s positive representation of that country, and his concern to ‘conciliate the affections of the two nations, so wickedly and studiously set at variance by evil-designing people’ (Lit. Life. p. 13) in a decade of Anglo-Scottish friction following the disastrous Bute administration.

Increasingly persuaded of the commercial possibilities of a more methodically prepared and presented Scottish Tour, in 1771 Pennant began to plan for a second journey to Scotland, publishing a letter in the Scots Magazine for 31 Jan 1772 addressed to ‘Gentlemen desirous to promote the publication of an Accurate Account of the Antiquities, Present State, and Natural History of SCOTLAND’. (SM, pp. 173-4) He invited correspondents to assist and supplement his description by responding to a questionnaire which requested information on the whole range of topics referred to. As we will see, Pennant was inviting the literati of Scotland to cooperate in his project, in the words of Charles Withers depicting himself as ‘both commentator and rapporteur, allowing Scots, or some of them at least, to represent themselves’. (Intro to Tour 1772, p. xxi). In his Literary Life, Pennant recalled that ‘in every tour I made I kept a regular journal, all which are placed apart in my library’ but insisted that they ‘never be made public, as they contain many inaccuracies, either from haste or mismanagement’. (p.17) Unfortunately, the journals of his two Scottish tours are lost, although he doubtless used them as scaffolding for preparing the published Tours, supplemented by information subsequently furnished by his Scottish informants when he was back home in Downing.

Returning home from his Scottish tour of 1769, Pennant had stopped off at the Borders spa town of Moffat where he met the local minister, the eminent naturalist Rev. John Walker, who showed him the manuscripts of his natural history tours in the Hebrides and Western Highlands in 1764 and 1771. This inspired Pennant to centre his second Scottish tour on a ‘Voyage to the Hebrides’, given that he had left the West Highlands and islands unvisited in 1769. Mobilising his natural history and antiquarian networks, via his dedicated Edinburgh agent George Paton, his ‘Voyage’ was also in part inspired by the global travels of Cook and Joseph Banks, dedicatee of Tour 1772, a traveller who had ‘enriched yourself with the treasures of the globe, by a circumnavigation, founded on the most liberal and scientific principles’. As we’ll see in chapter 7, one of the book's selling points was Banks' own account of his ‘discovery’ of the island of Staffa and its iconic Fingal’s Cave, which Pennant had been unable to visit himself.

Also influenced by contemporary practices of scientific travel was Pennant’s plan to travel with a team of specialists, including the clergymen/botanists Rev John Lightfoot and Rev. John Stuart: ‘conscious of my deficiency in several respects, I prevailed on two gentlemen to favour me with their company, and to supply by their knowledge what I found wanting in my self.’ As with Banks’s team in the Pacific, Pennant’s ‘savants’ gave appropriate emphasis to the importance of indigenous and Gaelic knowledge of the natural and social world, in line with Linnaean practice. Lightfoot’s Flora Scotica, the first published account of Scottish flora, was published with Pennant’s assistance in 1778. Although the young Edinburgh graduate Stuart was qualified as a student of Linnaean botany to follow in Lightfoot’s footsteps, he is remembered as one of the leading Gaelic scholar of his generation, and co-translator of the first Scottish Gaelic Old Testament. There is no doubt that Stuart’s expertise as a native Gaelic speaker and scholar provided Pennant with a unique window into the world of the eighteenth-century Scottish Gàidhealtachd, its history, social life and culture as well as its natural history. In this edition, Tour 1772, Part 1 is collated with the surviving correspondence of John Stuart (as well as other informants, such as George Paton, Donald Macqueen, and Donald MacNicol of Lismore), providing us with insight into how Pennant constructed his text from available sources (much of this correspondence is also available via this link to Curious Travellers Editions [external link]). Although Pennant’s ‘Advertisement’ mentions only Lightfoot and Stuart, in fact they were just part of his larger ‘troop’ of ‘knowledge workers’: as he put it in April 1772, ‘my own expenses will be great, for my troop consists of Revd Mr Lightfoot. French serv’t [Louis Gold] painter serv’t [Moses Griffith], Lan[d]scape painter a fowler, & besides a groom I must leave with the horse’. Rev John Stuart would join the party at Glasgow by June 15th.

Because he had travelled without a professional artist in 1769, Pennant had incurred considerable expenses in commissioning plates for his volume: to allay this problem, he now sought to hire a landscape painter, although in the end this was unsuccessful. He resolved to make do with ‘that treasure, Moses Griffith’, a humbly-born Welshman from Caernarvonshire, who moved into Downing Hall and would accompany Pennant on all his subsequent tours after 1769: ‘the public may thank him’, remarked Pennant, ‘for numberless scenes and antiquities, which would otherwise have remained probably for ever concealed’. (LL p.10) The plates based on drawings by Griffith and others represented the most extensive visual record of Scotland to date: topographical views, maps and coastal profiles, brochs and ‘Druidical’ standing stones, Roman antiquities, ruined abbeys and castles, medieval grave-stones, Highland cottages, Gaelic song performances, as well as geological formations, botanical and natural history specimens. As an independent Welsh gentleman and landowner, Pennant was not concerned like other contemporary travel writers (e.g. Dr Johnson or Rev William Gilpin) to profit from his publications, but he stressed that ‘my own expenses will be great’ in hiring a team of specialists. He also incurred the costs of a 90-ton cutter, the Lady Frederick Campbell, to transport his ‘troop’ through the Hebrides, captained by the ever-reliable Archibald Thompson. Not to mention the cost of publishing an expensive travel book with 45 (90 including Part 2) copperplate engravings, mostly based on the work of Moses Griffith, which amounted to £225/1/0. We know from Pennant’s meticulous accounts that the Scottish tour itself cost him £296; letterpress printing Tour 1772 cost £50/18/6, and a further £115/7/6 went to the intaglio printers for producing 1,500 copies. ‘The costs of each original illustration and copperplate, such as the £8/8 that Pennant paid the engraver Peter Mazell for copying the famous image of Fingal’s Cave…alongside the costs associated with the postage of volumes to the booksellers throughout Britain….totalled £1,256/14’.¹ But Pennant was privileged enough to be more concerned with breaking even, rather than profiting, from his publications: and he later recouped outstanding costs by ‘selling the copyright of [both] Scottish tours to his publisher Benjamin White for £550 in 1775’.²

Part 1 of Tour in Scotland 1772 was published on 19 May 1774 by John Monk of Chester, while Part 2 came out in 1776, published in London by Benjamin White, alongside (an extended) second edition of Part 1, which has tended to be conflated with the original 1774 Chester first edition (see note on text below). White published a third edition of both Parts 1 and 2 in 1790, with some fairly minor further additions. Although in modern times Pennant’s Scottish Tours have been eclipsed by Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (1775), contemporary reviewers saw the matter differently: in 1775, for example, the Monthly Review concluded that ‘Mr Pennant has led the way, Dr Johnson has followed…Dr Johnson’s book may be regarded as a valuable supplement to Mr Pennant’s two accounts of his northern expeditions’.³

The Itinerary of 1772

In his Literary Life, Pennant described his 1772 Scottish tour, five months by land and sea, as ‘the longest of my journies in our island’ (p.15). Setting out from Chester on 18th May 1772, he and his party travelled to the very far north of Scotland and back, returning home to Downing on 20th October (our map of the tour can be viewed via this link [external link]). Having journeyed from Chester to Glasgow via Lancashire, the English Lakes and Dumfriesshire, they boarded their chartered vessel Lady Frederick Campbell on 16th June at Ardencaple on the Firth of Clyde. Sailing down the Firth of Clyde and rounding the Mull of Kintyre to the West Coast, on their seven-week ‘voyage to the Hebrides’ they ‘island-hopped’ Bute, Arran, Gigha, Jura, Islay, Oronsay, Colonsay, Iona, Staffa, Canna, Rum, and Skye, returning to the mainland for two overland treks through the mountainous North West Highlands. Geographically speaking, the book’s subtitle would be more correctly rendered as ‘Voyage to the Inner Hebrides and the North-Western Highlands’: a cholera epidemic in Stornoway prevented Pennant from extending his nautical tour to the Outer Hebrides, so the two land expeditions in Sutherland and Wester Ross seem to have been undertaken in compensation. In the first of these, Pennant’s party set out on horseback from Loch Broom with a view to reaching the northern coast at Cape Wrath, but got no further than Ledbeg in Sutherland, as the country turned out to be impassible for horses; a few days later, they trekked through the mountainous ‘Great Wilderness’ from Dundonnell to Loch Maree. Resuming their sea voyage, they returned southwards from Gairloch, via Glenelg and Loch Hourn, to Argyll, taking in Mull, Morvern, Lismore, and the Slate Islands, before arriving at their final destination, Ardmaddy House, where they bad farewell to their vessel and picked up their horses and groom. The second stage of the 1772 Scottish tour, narrated in Part 2 (1776), followed their overland progress through Argyll, the Perthshire Highlands, Angus and Aberdeenshire, to Forfar and Fife, revisiting some of the sites already described in Tour 1769, before returning south via Edinburgh and Newcastle.

In his Literary Life, Pennant recalled of his 1772 Scottish tour that ‘my success was equal to my hopes; I pointed out every thing I thought would be of service to my country; it was roused to look into its advantages; societies have been formed for the improvements of the fisheries, and for founding of towns in proper places; to all of which I sincerely wish the most happy event’. (LL, pp. 15-16). Pennant’s boosterism is redolent of the improving spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment, coming into full bloom during the decade of the 1770s, and his Tour is a precious record of Scotland (especially the bustling city of Glasgow) on the cusp of modernity, but also of the condition of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd at a time of severe cultural, climatic and economic crisis, following the dismantling of the old clan system in the decades following Culloden. Despite his Whig and latitudinarian principles, and his support for the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, Pennant is unsparing in his social criticism of the rapid transition of Highland landowners from clan chiefs to ‘rapacious landlords’, oppressors of their Gaelic tenants.

This critique reaches a crescendo in the powerful ‘vision at Ardmaddie’, in the final pages of chapter 10, differentiating Pennant’s views of improvement from the social and economic theories of Scottish literati like Adam Smith or Lord Kames. As mentioned above, it strongly influenced Dr Johnson, although contemporary reviewers constantly compared Johnson’s adverse criticisms of Scotland with Pennant’s equanimity and open-mindedness. Pennant’s ambition was to combine the gentlemanly authority of the ‘curious traveller’s’ eye with the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge-making, evident in the extraordinary erudition underpinning his narrative, although as Horace Walpole noted, his focus did shift during the 1772 tour from natural history towards topography and history: ‘a round jump from ornithology to antiquities’.⁴ As the present annotated edition aims to make clear, Tour in Scotland 1772 and Voyage to the Hebrides is far from being another travel book written by an outsider making a brief transit through Scotland. It is a remarkable ‘deep mapping’ of a whole country, a palimpsest in which prehistoric Druid Circles, Brochs and Fingalian caverns are overwritten by the advent of Columbian Christianity, profoundly marking the Hebridean landscape with its sacred place names and (now ruined) abbeys and monasteries, followed by the turbulence of the Wars of Scottish Independence and the Lordship of the Isles. The modern era is ushered in by the Reformation and the Cromwellian invasion, up to the near contemporary events of Culloden and the collapse of the Clan system. Drawing as much on local and Gaelic sources as on his extensive scientific knowledge and antiquarian erudition, Pennant’s ‘deep map’ of Scotland represents a unique record of a lost history and geography, but also a sensitive thermometer of social and environmental change.

A Note on the Text.

Although both Pennant’s 1769 and 1772 Scottish Tours are still in print, they have a complicated publication history, and have never been edited and annotated. Part 1 of Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 was published on 19 May 1774 by John Monk of Chester, while Part 2 came out two years later in 1776, published in London by Benjamin White, alongside a second edition of Part 1. However, the first and second editions of Part 1 have tended to be conflated, because some copies of the 1776 second edition of Part 1 confusingly bear the title page of Monk’s Chester 1st edition. This means that there appear to be two versions of Tour 1772 Pt 1, a ‘short’ (379 page) and a ‘long’ (439 page) text, although in fact the ‘long’ text is really the second edition of 1776. The reasons for this are unclear, although Pennant’s London publisher Benjamin White may have permitted John Monk to run off copies of the second edition under his own imprint, reusing the same title page as the 1774 edition. This complication has passed unnoticed by scholars, except for the eagle-eyed Richard Sharpe, who notes ‘Page-number references to Pennant are tiresome because there are two editions with the imprint of John Monk, Chester, 1774: the first setting is paginated 1–379, the second 1–439. Priority of the first is easily proven.’⁵

The increased length of the 1776 text is a result of passages added throughout the volume, as printed (probably in 1775) in Pennant’s pamphlet ‘Additions to the Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772’, but there are also some omissions from the first edition, which make it a rather different text. For example, criticism of Lord Bute (p.161) is cut from the 1776 edition, as well as some Swiftian playfulness (p. 260), and a swipe at Dr Johnson’s Scotophobic account of oat-eating (p. 270), which give the ‘short’ text of Part 1 a rather more polemical feel than the more sedate ‘long’ text published in 1776. This ‘short’ text was the one read by earlier reviewers, and importantly, by Dr Samuel Johnson, just a month before he submitted the manuscript of his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland to his publisher William Strahan on 20th June 1774, which responded to a number of passages in Pennant’s book. (J. D. Fleeman suggests that Johnson was involved in ’extensive rewriting’ of his draft rather later than has been assumed, in later May and early June 1774, after reading Pennant’s Tour 1772 Part 1, hot off the press.)⁶ Accordingly, the copy text for the present edition is the ‘short’, 379-page, Chester first edition published by John Monk in 1774, collated with the 2nd edition of 1776, with all additional material included in the footnotes. Only minor additions were made to the 3rd and final edition of Pennant’s Tour in Scotland Parts 1 and 2, published together (although with separate pagination) by Benjamin White in 1790, the most significant of which are noted here.

My editorial principle has been to produce a diplomatic version of the first printed text of 1774, with only minor corrections of obvious printing errors, but observing Pennant’s original spelling, capitalisation, italicization and paragraphing, and including all the author’s own footnotes and references. Pennant’s original pagination in the Chester edition of Pt 1, and his marginal headings are maintained throughout for ease of reference. Included in this edition are all the significant paratexts: the ‘Dedication’ to Joseph Banks, ‘Advertisement’, and original list of Plates, as well as the itinerary and index at the end. Although the appendices to both Parts 1 and 2 were published together in 1776 at the conclusion of Part 2, I have selected the following Appendices for inclusion here, given that they relate to material in Part 1. They are presented with only light annotations: Appendix 1, ‘Concerning the Constitution of the Church of Scotland’; III ‘Galic Proverbs’; VI. ‘Of Slough Dogs’; VII ‘A Letter from George Malcolm concerning Sheep-Farms’; VIII ‘Of the Antiquities found at the Station at Burrens’; IX ‘List of Barons summoned to the Siege of Caerlaverock’; X ‘Of the Gold Mines of Scotland’; XI ‘A Dissertation on the Government of the People in the Western Isles’, and ‘Of the Gruagich’ by ‘Rev. Donald Macqueen, of Kilmuir, in the Isle of Skye’; XII ‘On the Numbers in the Hebrides and the Western Highlands’.

Finally, to make this long (and in some respects unwieldy) travel account more accessible to modern readers, I have divided Pennant’s original book into 10 chapters, structured by the geography of his tour, each of which is preceded by an explanatory headnote. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the journey through England from Chester to the Scottish border, including an important description of the Lake District. Chapters 3 and 4 narrate Pennant’s ongoing travels through Lowland Scotland to the bustling commercial city of Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, where he and his party boarded the Lady Frederick Campbell to set sail on their seven-week ‘voyage to the Hebrides’. In stark contrast to the long description of Glasgow, a hub of modernity, chapters 5 to 8 are concerned with the insular topography, history and natural history of the Hebrides, which as Pennant’s separate subtitle indicates, really represents a thematically unified travel narrative in its own right. Remaining within the Gàidhealtachd, chapters 9 and 10 return to the Scottish mainland, describing the party’s travels in the North Western Highlands, Wester Ross and Invernesshire, concluding with the return voyage from Skye via Mull to Argyll. The book’s climactic finale is the ‘vision at Ardmaddie’, in which Pennant gives vent to criticism aroused by the often dire conditions that he had witnessed in the Highlands and islands.

In ‘the voyage to the Hebrides’ (chapters 5-10) Pennant was travelling in a world where Gaelic was the principal language, and where relatively few people spoke English, so he was reliant on the interpretative skills of Rev. John Stuart, and his hosts among the bilingual local gentry and clergy. I am grateful to the community of Gaelic scholars and historians who have provided assistance, especially in relation to linguistic matters, in making sense of Pennant’s unique, fascinating (and sometimes depressing) record of a now-lost Gaelic world. It is hoped that Pennant’s portrait of the western Gàidhealtachd in 1772, much of it dependent on information supplied to him by native informants like Stuart and Macqueen (agents of what we can now recognise as an indigenous ‘Gaelic enlightenment’) will add fuel to the current ongoing revival of the historic language and culture of Gaelic Scotland.