The Abbotsford Trust is delighted to be able to share this new transcription of Walter Scott’s Lighthouse Yacht Journal for the first time. The manuscript was acquired by The Abbotsford Trust through a remarkable collaborative fundraising effort spearheaded by the Friends of the National Libraries, leading to the purchase and dispersal of the Blavatnik Honresfield library in 2021. You can read about this great achievement here.

The journal was created by Scott from July to early September 1814, as he voyaged from the Port of Leith to Glasgow aboard the ‘Light House Yacht’, as he refers to it, carrying 6 guns & ten men, and is gloriously titled, "Voyage in the Light House Yacht to Nova Zembla & the Lord knows where".

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Scott seized the opportunity to become a nineteenth century Scottish Sinbad, and joined the summer inspection voyage of the Northern Lighthouse Board as they travelled around the entire coast of Scotland and her islands in a survey of the lighthouses to ensure the safety of those at sea. Given Scott’s youthful proclivity for shipwreck stories, one can perhaps understand the appeal. It also taps into a general interest in adventure and exploration that characterises other areas of Scott’s life. There is also the possibility that Scott chose this particular time to journey into Poseidon’s realm, brave the storms of the Pentland Firth and the risks posed by American Privateers, due to the fact that his first novel, Waverley, had just been published, and he felt absence from the world preferable as a storm of his own making began to break on land.

Joining the expedition at the invitation of the Lighthouse Board, Scott was also keen to spend time in the company of men of science, technology and industry markedly different from the literary circles he often moved in. He was hardly a fish out of water however, as a number of his new shipmates were acquaintances of his in the legal profession, who made up the bulk of the Board’s members. Scott’s observations across his six-week journey provide background, vocabulary and characters for later work, such as The Lord of the Isles and The Pirate, but they also chronicle the way of life and hardships of rural communities living on the fringes at a time of great change.

Video Credit: Mark Haddon, Penny Fielding, Robert Irvine, the AHRC and the University of Edinburgh

This is a body of work unlike most of Scott’s other writing, and feels a very personal account of his time at sea, unpressured and unaltered by the possibility of publication. In it, he describes the otherworldly landscapes and features of Scotland’s wild peripheries, and the communities he encounters give the sense of some far flung frontier, from another time and working to a set of rules and norms with which Scott is unfamiliar.

We are told tales of sea monsters, myths and legends, folklore and the sailor’s stories of generations past, as well as constant battles with sea-sickness. Scott is not just travelling on the geographical peripheries of Scotland, but in a very palpable sense moving through the mist of sea spray thrown up by the clashes with ancient rocky headlands into a lost past of coastal communities, scratching a living from sea and soil at the edge of the world.

The diplomatic transcription presented here was produced by Dr. Hilary Clydesdale, whose work was funded by a generous private donation to The Abbotsford Trust and from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Read Abbotsford's latest blog about the project here.