Over the Sea to Skye

Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I only knew “The Skye Boat Song” as the theme song to Outlander, the fantastic time-traveling show—and genre-bending book by Diana Gabaldon. But as I got to know Andrew, my Scotland-raised partner, I learned that The Skye Boat Song was an old Scottish folk tune, narrating the fall of the romantic Scottish hero Bonnie Prince Charlie, aka Charles Edward Stuart (and less flatteringly, “The Young Pretender”).

Of course, Charles Stuart was a real person, the figurehead and failed hero of the Jacobite Rebellion. In criminally simplistic terms: the Jacobites were largely Catholic, and some Protestant, Scots that supported the House of Stuart’s bid for the British throne. There were a series of Jacobite rebellions, the most serious of which took place in 1745, culminating in The Battle of Culloden, a horribly bloody battle that the Jacobites lost, effectively ending Charles Stuart’s bid for the throne.

But Bonnie Prince Charlie’s story didn’t end there, nor does his legacy adhere only to the facts of history. He’s taken his place as a mythic character, a tragic boy king that, despite his royal status, came to represent Scottish liberty (note that I resisted saying “Scottish FREEEEDOOMMM,” damn it, failed). There are stories inspired by Bonnie Prince Charlie, statues erected of him, and of course, songs penned about him.

One of the strangest twists of the Bonnie Prince Charlie story is the bit illustrated by the lyrics of The Skye Boat Song.

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that's born to be king
Over the sea to Skye

After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, near the northern city of Inverness, the prince was whisked away by boat to Skye, an island of the Inner Hebrides. The prince was famously disguised as a woman to make his journey undetected to Skye. What I didn’t know until visiting Skye was that the key player in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape was a young woman named Flora MacDonald, who unwittingly stumbled into Scottish history.

Flora MacDonald’s story captured me, as a woman visiting the island nearly 300 years later. If you’ve ever visited Skye or the Hebrides, you know the landscape is one that strikes you dumb; it’s beautiful and bleak in equal measures. Skye is dominated by the black and red Cuillin mountains, cliffs plunging into the icy sea (that once carried the Viking ships that yoked and named much of Skye), piercing blue green mountain lochs, and grey stretches with no other beating heart apparent, save for the occasional sheep. Flora MacDonald was born in the Hebrides, and that already makes her a robust woman in my imagination. Mucking around the island in the mud and rain, walking the black sand beaches (and over the bloated carcass of a washed up seal), warming with whisky by the fire in a cottage without central heating—all of these things made me feel like a warrior just visiting Skye in 2020.

Yet Flora would have been accustomed to all of this. What she wasn’t accustomed to was aiding a fugitive. She was tasked with that challenge at just 24 years old, when a family friend and Jacobite officer approached her for help disappearing the young prince to Skye. Without apparent hesitation, MacDonald rose to the task, helping in Charles’s disguise, stashing him as “Betty Burke,” her Irish maid, on her boat to Skye, and sheltering him until his departure for the neighboring island of Raasay.

Charles Stuart remained in exile for years to come, eventually returning to France and later, Italy. Flora MacDonald, however, was caught. Her boatmen confessed upon interrogation by the English, and she spent a year held captive as a prisoner in the Tower of London. MacDonald was released in the summer of 1747 and returned home to Skye. I thought of her while on her home island (and so far from my little island home), of her taking that massive risk and paying the price, a year of her young life spent caged while her prince evaded capture.

MacDonald continued to be a prominent figure on Skye after her release, even entertaining the writer Samuel Johnson during his travels to the Hebrides, while he was researching and writing his book A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland. Johnson wrote of Flora MacDonald as "a woman of soft features, gentle manners, kind soul and elegant presence."

While in Skye, Andrew and I stayed at a friend’s cottage on Talisker Bay, one of the most dramatic settings I’ve ever experienced in my life. Cradled between cliffs, the bay’s mouth opens to the crashing sea, its black rocks studding the landscape, sweeping up to a beautiful green garden, the formidable sandstone face of Talisker House, and a rambling farm property dotted with shepherd’s cottages and wee outbuildings. We lived in one of those cottages for a week, without phone or internet, coming down the mountain and back to the mainland only to discover the world had been overtaken by disease in our absence.

But while we were still living as blissfully ignorant residents of Skye, the kind current owner of Talisker House invited us in for a cup of tea. He toured us through the strange and striking splendor of the old house, the ornate and untuned grand piano, the oil portrait of a former owner that came with the house, the taxidermized eagle (a story for another blog post), and finally, the library. Samuel Johnson and his companion, writer James Boswell stayed at Talisker House during their stay in Skye. Their books line the shelves of the library even today, and the suggestion of their ghosts sweep the halls.

It felt transformative to step back into that time. I found myself imagine dreamily, as we took tea in the library, reaching my teacup back in time, not to toast Johnson, who described the Hebridean landscape as “a man in rags” whose “naked skin is still peeping out,” but beyond him, to Flora MacDonald, a woman who may have had soft features, but I imagine, a formidable spirit.