After  the  brief  blaze  of  Argyll's  insurrection  had  exhausted
itself,  the  prisoners  of  Dunnottar  were  released.  At  Leith
they  were  offered  the  Oath  of  Allegiance,  and  thirty  men  and
seven  women,  their  spirit  gone  after  treading  such  a  Dolorous
Way,  repeated  the  subservient  sentences.  But  the  majority,
"  stooping  into  a  dark  tremendous  sea  of  cloud,"  did  as
Paracelsus  did — "pressed  God's  lamp  close  to  their  breasts."
They  refused  to  conforiu.  They  were  sent  away,  in  a  ship
which  scarcely  had  turned  Land's  End  before  fatal  fever  broke


DUNNOTTAR  AND  THE  BASS  39^

out   on   board,  to   the   King's   Plantations  on  the  American
continent.
The  reader  of  Catriona  is  well  acquaint  with  Andie  Dale,
the  Prefect  of  the  Bass,  as  David  Balfour  jocularly  called  him,
the  shepherd  and  the  gamekeeper  of  that  small  and  rich  estate.
"  Ay,"  Andie  would  say,  "  it's  an  unco  place,  the  Bass  "  ;  and
the  untranslatable  Scots  adjective,  his  whilom  captive  felt,
was  the  only  one  to  describe  the  Plutonic  stronghold  on  which
he  found  himself  detained.  "  It  was  an  unco  place  by  night,
unco  by  day  ;  and  these  were  unco  sounds,  of  the  calling  of  the
solans,  and  the  plash  of  the  sea  and  the  rock  echoes,  that  hung
continually  in  our  ears."  There  were  Covenanters  who  had  a
familiar  knowledge  of  the  "  unco  place."  From  1673  to  1687
some  of  their  number  were  always  there.  Lauderdale  had
bought  it,  for  the  exorbitant  sum  of  £4000  sterling,  from  Sir
Andrew  Kamsay,  the  Provost  of  Edinburgh,  and  had  transmuted
it  into  a  state  prison.  To  its  dreariness  and  isolation,  for
periods  which  ranged  from  a  few  months  to  more  than  six
years,  the  Privy  Council  sent  nine-and-thirty  of  the  troublesome
soldiers  of  the  Kirk.
