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JOHN DUNCAN remained only a
short time in Johnshaven. Rejoicing in his new freedom, dear to all young
people, and dearer to him from the previous slavery, he began to move from
place to place, to see the country, extend his experience of men and things,
and improve his skill in his trade. Smitten with a desire to see and be near
his mother, he returned to his native town, where he lived for some two
years, winning his own bread and helping her. He found Stonehaven
considerably extended since he had left it five or six years before, and
very much, since he had become a herd on the neighbouring braes. The new
town had begun to show the spacious style in which it had been laid out by
Captain Barclay's father, and it was evidently only a question of time that
the Links would soon be entirely absorbed, and the new town overshadow the
old, draining off its best people and gradually abandoning it to the poorer
population that now occupies it.
John prosecuted his studies
with growing fervour, his greater leisure giving him increased
opportunities, fully prized by the keen young weaver. Now that the miserable
influences that had stunted his physical and mental growth had been removed,
he began to feel a return of the vigorous elasticity of youth. His desire
for mental acquirement was a rising appetite, certain in time to become
dominant. He lived very simply, if not sparely, though healthily, in order
to be able to obtain the tools for intellectual work—the much-coveted books.
In Stone-haven, he began the formation of the large, well-selected, and, for
the very poor man he always remained, costly library which he gradually
accumulated, and the possession of which became one of his ruling passions.
He traversed the cliffs and
pleasant neighbourhood of Stonehaven with enlightened eyes, in search of the
herbs he was now able to distinguish and name, with the help of the great
Culpepper. These he concocted into the various wonderful preparations
therein detailed, which were to charm away all disease frail flesh is heir
to, and he began to acquire some local fame as a herbalist. Such a man could
not, however, rest satisfied with the mere memories of the borrowed volume
he had seen at Drumlithie. He must have his own text-book, and after months
of extra work, for wages were very low, he became at last the proud
possessor of a copy of his own, which cost one pound—an immense sum to a lad
so poor, just out of his apprenticeship, and having his mother to assist.
But it was the old story of a will and a way, and another proof of the
omnipotence of true resolution. The book on which John spent so much was a
remarkable one, no less than the "Bible of the Herbalists," then a very
numerous sect scattered all over the country, which received an enthusiastic
apostle in the young weaver. His belief in the system which formed his first
introduction to scientific inquiry, remained unbroken to the end, and was
strengthened by his practical mastery over it and the good it did in his
hands.
From the knowledge of the
heavenly bodies required in Culpepper's astrological system, John was early
led to the study of astronomy, which for many years, as we shall see, became
one of his special pursuits. This issued, by-and-by, in his studying several
cognate subjects, such as astrology, dialling, meteorology, and calendars,
of which more anon. In 1815, the first year he returned to Stone-haven, he
bought a copy of "Orr's Belfast Almanack," an old calendar which still holds
its own among the people; and from that time till his death, for sixty-six
years, he purchased an almanack annually, some of them high priced, and
finally possessed a complete suite of these, which he presented to one of
his disciples, Mr. John Taylor, who was following kindred studies.
That year, also, Stonehaven
took a worthy share in the national celebration of the victory of Waterloo
and the overthrow of Napoleon, in which John Duncan, with his hatred of
tyranny, recently intensified at Drumlithie, took an active part. In that
village, he had also acquired a taste for politics, and an interest in the
great questions of social progress then increasingly agitating the country,
and he now began regularly to read the newspapers and keep himself
conversant with the rapid march of events.
About this time, his mother
removed from Stonehaven to Aberdeen, where she resided in the Hardgate.
There she made a living, as hitherto, by harvest work, washing and dressing,
and other domestic employments, like the hardworking, careful woman she was.
John either accompanied or soon followed her to the same city, and continued
his kindly attentions to his mother, visiting her regularly and paying her
rent, a large demand on his poor purse, till her death, about 1830, above
fifty years of age.
In 1816, when Duncan removed
to the granite capital of the north-east of Scotland, Aberdeen was not then
the large, fine city it now is, but a comparatively small provincial town,
with narrow streets, grouped chiefly round St. Catherine's Hill. The ideas
of what then constituted a street are still preserved in the name of Broad
Street, which is little better than a winding lane, leading to the
University of Marischall College—the old building erected by Earl Keith in
1593, for the present handsome structure was not built till 1837. The
splendid thoroughfare of Union Street, now one of the good streets of
Europe, had just been begun, about 1812, by the construction of the high
bridge across the Den Burn. All south of it, where now stands the spacious
and substantial city between it and the Dee, was then green fields, where
Duncan gathered herbs in the dewy morning.
John's travelling at that
time, and long, long after, was performed altogether on foot, a mode of
locomotion then almost universal amongst the mass of the people, who thought
nothing of thirty or forty miles, a day. He was always a splendid
pedestrian, excelling most men in the smartness and extent of his journeys.
He approached Aberdeen by the old Brig of Dee, then half its present width,
passed over the narrow, parapet-less bridge spanning the Ruthrieston Burn
close by, one of the oldest bridges in the district—now deserted, but over
which went the traffic of hundreds of years—and he entered the town by the
low road that ran through the Hardgate, and crossed the Den Burn near its
mouth at the harbour. Long years after, he used to recall, with a kind of
melancholy pleasure, the old condition of things, more than half a century
before, remarking that, "like himsel'," all sublunary things must change.
Besides a desire to see the
world, one of John's reasons for coming to Aberdeen was to perfect himself
as a weaver. As he afterwards told me, he made up his mind when he became a
weaver to be one, and to master the whole subject; and he was the man to do
it. Aberdeen was even then the seat of a great manufacturing trade in
cotton, linen, and wool, carried on in numerous large factories, which
employed, at that time, more than three thousand hands, out of a population,
in 1821, of under forty-four thousand—a very large proportion of the adults.
The weavers then formed a powerful corporation in the city, and wielded
great influence. They could be seen, as in Drumlithie, standing in the
streets in wordy confabulation, arrayed in their clean white aprons, the
badge of their trade, of which they were justly proud.
At first, John entered the
Iarge weaving factory of Leys, Masson and Co., who had immense
establishments where the busy thoroughfare of Market Street now stands, and
at Broadford, then a suburb of Aberdeen, but now enclosed in the city. Their
great works, which included a foundry, were considered among the largest of
the kind then in Scotland. Here famed linen and cotton cloths of various
kinds were produced; and things were so carefully managed that, as John used
to say, they had very little waste in their productions—"there wasna muckle
i' their pob," that is, in the fluffy refuse of flax that remains in the
manufacture; ending his observations on the subject with the sentiment, that
when we do any piece of work, we should do it so thoroughly as "to leave
little in the pob." The firm had also a bleach-field at Rubeslaw, now well
known for its granite, where "green" linen yard was bleached white, from
which light-coloured cloth was produced—the first time John had seen it. His
old master Pirie had once tried bleaching, but the vitriol, a necessary
agent in the process, dangerous in the hands of the unskilled, only burnt
his yarns, and his fingers in more senses than one, and he gave it up.
Until now, John's work had
been greatly confined to linen cloth of various kinds, though he had had
some practice, even at Drumlithie, in woollen stuffs, especially wincey,
which consisted then of strong linen warp, across which was woven woollen
thread or weft of different colours, hence known as "linsey-woolseys." In
order to obtain more practice in this kind of work, he by-and-by entered a
woollen factory at Windmill Brae, where winceys and other woollen fabrics
were woven. In a short time, he was able to keep up with the best of them,
as he used to recall with pride, and soon became a superior weaver of
winceys, blankets, carpets, and the like. In proof of this, a story is told
of him, by one of his Drumlithie friends, which at once proves his skill as
a weaver and his strength of will as a man—a lifelong characteristic,
greatly hidden beneath his quiet, shy exterior. He was once engaged in a
shop, in which Pine's son, Duncan, and a weaver called Sandy Hadden, worked
along with him. Hadden wore a woollen vest of an uncommon fancy pattern,
then more difficult to produce with existing appliances than now. While
talking together on weaving matters, Hadden challenged John to make a
similar piece, wagering a good deal that he could not do it. They parted for
the evening. Next morning, John produced the. cloth required, woven to
pattern. He had worked at it all alone during that night!
Some of the woollen goods,
then woven entirely by the hand, were very trying to the weaver, and looked
much more so to the unaccustomed on-looker, from the extreme exertion and
watchfulness they required. Such were some of the patterned broad-loom
winceys, which were double the common width, and were woven in a special
large or "broad loom," the pattern being produced by means of the Jacquard
machine, invented in 1790. In these, the shuttle had to be deftly thrown
from hand to hand extended at full stretch, through the moving warp,
operated on by numerous treddles below, over which the nimble feet of the
weaver moved with unerring accuracy, though of necessity out of sight. These
cloths John used to weave at this early date in Aberdeen, which still
retains its ancient fame for winceys, though they are now made chiefly of
cotton and wool.
There also lived in Aberdeen,
during the whole of John's stay there, another weaver, poor and lame, but
full of the lyrical afflatus, who afterwards became famous, William Thom.
Born in that city in 1797, he was three years John's junior, and worked in a
cotton factory in Belmont Street, removing thence to Dundee in 1831. It was
not, however, till he returned, in 1840, to reside at Inverurie in
Aberdeenshire, where he first began to publish, that he burst into fame as
the "Inverurie poet." After a brilliant, but meteoric, career, in which he
was thrice feted in London, he died in 1848 at Dundee, where he now lies
buried. There is no proof that Thom and Duncan, fellow-weavers though they
were, ever met. Nor is it very likely that the quiet-going John Duncan moved
in the same circle with the jovial "Willie Tam." |
