Seaweeds of the largest size and most beautiful colours flourish, in the
Orcadean seas, and out of 610 species of the flora in the islands we
learned that 133 were seaweeds. Stevenson the great engineer wrote that
the large Algae, and especially that one he named the "Fucus esculentus,"
grew on the rocks from self-grown seed, six feet in six months, so we
could quite understand how the speed of a ship would be affected when
carrying this enormous growth on the lower parts of her hull.
_Wednesday, September 13th._
We had the whole of the day at our disposal to explore Stromness and the
neighbourhood, and we made the most of it by rambling about the town and
then along the coast to the north, but we were seldom out of sight of
the great mountains of Hoy.
Sir Walter Scott often visited this part of the Orkneys, and some of the
characters he introduced in his novels were found here. In 1814 he made
the acquaintance of a very old woman near Stromness, named Bessie
Miller, whom he described as being nearly one hundred years old,
withered and dried up like a mummy, with light blue eyes that gleamed
with a lustre like that of insanity. She eked out her existence by
selling favourable winds to mariners, for which her fee was sixpence,
and hardly a mariner sailed out to sea from Stromness without visiting
and paying his offering to Old Bessie Miller.
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