Of heroes of the sword and men of high ruling capacity Scandinavian Orkney produced many, who on a wider field of action would assuredly have left to the world at large names now chiefly known to the special student of Orcadian history. Apart too from mere men of action, personalities like St Magnus, St Rognvald, and William the Old, first Bishop of Orkney, would grace the annals even of a great people. Of distinguished men of the soldier and statesman type modern Orkney has, however, produced few, a circumstance no doubt in part due to the distance of the Islands from the centre of national activity. The Royalist general James King, Lord Eythin (b. 1589), was a native of Hoy. Fighting in the Thirty Years’ War, in the service of Gustavus Adolphus, he attained the rank of major-general, but was recalled to England in 1640. He received a command in the Civil War under Lord Newcastle, and in 1643 was created a peer of Scotland. He died in Sweden in 1652. Perhaps the two most distinguished naval officers whom Orkney can lay claim to are Commodore James Moodie of Melsetter, who performed valuable services in the War of the Spanish Succession, and Admiral Alexander Graeme of Graemeshall, a veteran of the Great War.

Among explorers two Orcadians stand high, John Rae and William Balfour Baikie, both explorers of the highest scientific type, while Baikie was in addition a good naturalist and a distinguished philologist. John Rae the famous Arctic explorer, of the Hall of Clestrain, near Stromness, entered the service of the Hudson Bay Company, under whose auspices he in 1846 commanded an expedition which linked up the coastline between the discoveries of Ross in Boothia and those of Parry at Fury and Hecla Strait. In 1847 Rae joined the first land expedition in search of Franklin, and performed important exploration and scientific work. In 1850 he himself commanded a fresh expedition, which mapped a large part of the coast of Wollaston Land, and examined to about 100° the south and east coasts of Victoria Land. For the geographical results of this expedition, and for his earlier survey work, he in 1852 received the Founders’ gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. His final Arctic expedition, organised by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1853, put the cope-stone to his fame, for on that expedition he at last succeeded in obtaining definite information regarding the fate of Sir John Franklin, and in purchasing relics of that hapless explorer and his party from the Eskimos. He died in London in July 1893, at the age of eighty, and was at his own request buried in the churchyard of St Magnus Cathedral at Kirkwall. John Rae was a man of splendid physique and persevering will, and a consideration of his work as a whole places him among the greatest of Polar explorers.

William Balfour Baikie, M.D., was born at Kirkwall in 1825. After serving for some years as a surgeon in the Navy and at Haslar Hospital, he obtained the post of surgeon and naturalist to the Niger expedition of 1854. On the death of the captain of the exploring ship “Pleiad” at Fernando Po, Baikie succeeded to the command, and this voyage, which penetrated 250 miles higher up the Niger than had yet been reached, he described in his Narrative of an Exploring Voyage up the Niger and Isadda. In 1857 Baikie left England on a second expedition. In the course of five years he opened up the navigation of the Niger, made roads, established markets, collected vocabularies of various African dialects, and translated parts of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer into Hausa. Baikie died at Sierra Leone, while on his way home on leave, on 17th December, 1864. The loving-care of his fellow-islanders has erected a fitting and touching memorial to him in that great fane of the Isles which holds, or ought to hold, the memorials of all distinguished Orcadians.

Orkney has been the birthplace of many men of high scientific attainments. Murdoch MacKenzie (d. 1797) was a distinguished hydrographer, who from 1752 to 1771 performed an enormous amount of professional work as surveyor to the Admiralty. His Treatise on Marine Surveying is still esteemed. James Copland, M.D., a native of Deerness, was one of the leading medical men of his day (1791-1870). After picking up a knowledge of tropical diseases in West Africa, and travelling in France and Germany, he settled in London. His once famous Dictionary of Practical Medicine, however, with its 3509 double-column, small-type pages, a book by one man on every branch of medical science, soon degenerated into one of the curiosities of literature. Thomas Stewart Traill (1781-1862), son of a parish minister of Kirkwall, was professor of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh University. Himself a man of almost universal learning, he fitly edited the eighth edition of the EncyclopÆdia Britannica. Matthew Forster Heddle, a son of Robert Heddle of Melsetter, was professor of chemistry at the University of St Andrews, and a mineralogist of great distinction. His great collection of Scottish minerals, now in the Royal Scottish Museum at Edinburgh, is one of the finest things of the kind that any country possesses. To these names we would add those of the Rev. Charles Clouston, minister of the parish of Sandwick, a distinguished meteorologist and naturalist, and of Sir Thomas Smith Clouston, the late distinguished specialist in mental pathology.

Sir Robert Strange, highly renowned as an engraver, was a son of David Strang, Burgh Treasurer of Kirkwall. Strange joined the Jacobites in 1745, engraved the Prince’s portrait and the plate for his bank-notes. He escaped alive from Culloden and evaded the search for him. Settling in London, he became the foremost in his art. One of his works is the engraving of West’s Apotheosis of George III’s children, Octavius and Alfred.

The most celebrated literary man whom the Islands can lay claim to is Malcolm Laing (1762-1818), the Scottish constitutional historian and protagonist in the Ossianic controversy. A friend of Charles James Fox, and a class-fellow of Lord Brougham, Laing sat in Parliament for the county in the Whig interest from 1807 to 1812. In 1808 he withdrew from the literary circles of Edinburgh to his home in the Islands, and here in 1814 he was visited by Sir Walter Scott. Malcolm Laing’s younger brother, Samuel, was the author of Travels in Norway, A Tour in Sweden, and Notes of a Traveller. A greater work, however, was his translation of the Heimskringla, the old Icelandic history of the early Kings of Norway, by Snorri Sturlason, a performance which had an important bearing on the hero-worship gospel of Carlyle. High literary ability appears to run in the blood of the Laings. Samuel Laing’s son, of the same name, was the author of those popular compendiums of nineteenth century science and thought, Human Origins, and Modern Science and Modern Thought, which are still in wide circulation.

David Vedder (1790-1854), an almost self-taught miscellaneous writer, of large output and considerable excellence, was born in the parish of Deerness. In 1830 he conducted the Edinburgh Literary Gazette, supported by De Quincey and others. The various works of Vedder, which include Orcadian Sketches, and Poems, Legendary, Lyrical, and Descriptive, have fallen on an undeserved oblivion. Vedder is the Orcadian poet par excellence. Perhaps the once highly popular novels of the amiable Mary Balfour, or Brunton, Self-Control, 1811, and Discipline, 1815, would not now be considered a passport to fame; but a later member of the family to which she belonged, David Balfour of Trenabie, has in his Odal Rights and Feudal Wrongs written of the Scottish oppressions of Orkney in the sixteenth century in such fine limpid English as makes one regret the purely local interest of his subject. Walter Traill Dennison, who in his Orcadian Sketch Book has given his fellow-islanders some light fiction of a high quality, unfortunately elected to write in the strictly local dialect of the North Isles of Orkney, using a phonetic spelling which is a stumbling-block to many readers who are quite at home in ordinary Scots literature. Traill Dennison, like Vedder, is a humourist, and Orkney gifted to the outside world a greater humourist than either when she sent the father of Washington Irving across the sea.

Orkney has produced scarce a churchman or a lawyer who has distinguished himself as such. The great Robert Reid, founder of Edinburgh University, was perhaps the most celebrated of her pre-reformation bishops, while James Atkine, a native of Kirkwall, was bishop of Moray in the seventeenth century. William Honyman, of the Honymans of Graemsay, sat on the Scottish bench as Lord Armidale in the early part of the nineteenth century, but his marrying Lord Braxfield’s daughter was perhaps his doughtiest feat. The list of Orkney Sheriffs, however, includes the famous names of Charles Neaves, Adam Gifford, and William Edmonstone Aytoun. Aytoun kept house at Berstane, near Kirkwall, and his humourous sketch The Dreep-daily Burghs, is supposed to make covert allusion to the climatic and other amenities of the group of parliamentary burghs of which the Orcadian capital at that time formed one. His connection with the Islands also inspired his poem of Bothwell; and contact with the surrounding seas moved the lively Neaves to verse of nigh as dolorous strain.