Leith.! HARBOUR AND PIER 271
Hence all attempts, therefore, to obtain a good
or workable harbour at Leith have been, of a
necessity, limited to the constfuction of long limes
of piers, to divert the current of the tides, to give
the river mastery over them, and enable it, by the
weight of its downward and concentrated volume,
to sweep away, or at least diminish, the bar, and to
the excavation of docks for the reception of vessels
floated in at high water, and for retaining them safe
from the inexorable power of the receding tide.
From the GentZeman?s Magazine for May, I 786, we
learn that, owing to a long continuance of easterly
wind, the bar at the mouth of Leith harbour had attained
such a height, that vessels could scarcely pass
out or in with any chance of safety ; that many were
aground upon it ; and that the magistrates of Edinburghwere
considering how it could best be removed.
It is related that when, in the spring of the year
1820, Lord Erskine re-visited Edinburgh, after an
absence of nearly half a century, on which occasion
a banquet was given him in the Assembly
Rooms, at which all the then master spirits of the
Scottish bar were present, and Maxwell of Carriden
presided, he returned to London by sea from
Leith. He took his passage in the Favourite,
one of the famous old fighting-smacks, Captain
Mark Sanderson; but it so happened that she
either grounded on the bar, or there was not in the
harbour sufficient water to float her over it; thus
for days no vessel could leave the harbour. Lord
Erskine, with other disappointed passengers, was
seen daily, at the hours of the tide flowing, waiting
with anxiety the floating of the vessel; and
when at last she cleared the harbour, and stood
round the martello tower, he wittily expressed his
satisfaction in the following verse :-
?( Of depth profound, o?erfiowing far,
I blessed the Edinburgh Bar ;
While muttering oaths between my teeth,
I cursed the shallow Bar of Leith ! ? 1
In the cabin a motion was made, and unanimously
canied, that this impromptu stanza should
be printed on board by Mr. John Ruthven, who
was among the passengers, and whose name is so
well known as the inventor of the celebrated printing
press and other valuable improvements in
machines. With one of his portable printingpresses
he proceeded to gratify his companions,
and struck off several copies of the verse, to which
one of the voyagers added another, thus :-
? To Lord Erskme-
Nor lower us thus, 8s if at war;
We at our harbour placed a bar.?
? Spare, spare, my lord, your angry feelings, .
?Tm only to retain you with us
The first pier constructed at Leith was of wood,
)ut was destroyed in 1544, at the time of the
nvasion in that year, and we have no means of
ndicating its precise site. During the earlier years
if the seventeenth century another wooden pier
uas erected, and for two hundred and forty years
ts massive pillars and beams, embedded in a
:ompact mass of whinstone and clay, withstood
;he rough contacts of shipping and the long up
:oming rollers from the stormy Firth, and the last
races of it only disappeared about the year 1850.
Between the years 1720 and ?1730, a stone pier,
n continuatioii of this ancient wooden one, which
inly to a slight extent assisted the somewhat meagre
iatural facilities of the harbour, was carried seaward
for a hundred yards, constructed.pa+y of
nassive squared stones from a curious old coal-pit
it Culross ; and for a time this, to some degree, renedied
the difficulty and hazard of the inward navi-
:ation, but still left the harbour mouth encumbered
with its unlucky bar of unsafe and shifting sand.
The old pier figures in more than one Scottish
;ong, and perhaps the oldest is that fragment preierved
by Cromek, in his ?Remains of Nithsdale
ind Galloway Song? :-
?Were ye at the Pier 0? Leith?
Or cam ye in by Bennochie ?
Crossed ye at the boat 0? Cra.ig?-
Saw ye the lad wha courted me?
Short hose and belted plaidie,
Garters tied below his knee :
Oh, he was a bonnie lad,
The blythe lad wha courted me?
Contemporaneous, or nearly so, with this early
;tone pier was the formation of the oldest dock,
which will be referred to in its place.
So early as 1454, the improvement and main-
:enance of a harbour at Leith was the care of
lames 11. (that gallant king who was killed at the
iiege of Roxburgh) ; and in his charter granted in
that year, and which was indorsed !?Provost and BaS
yies, the time that thir letters war gottin, Alexmder
Naper, Andrew Craufurd, William of Caribas,
md Richart Paterson,? he gave the silver customs
md duty of all ships and vessels entering Leith for
:he purpose of enlarging and repairing the port
:hereof (Burgh Charters, No. XXXII.).
In 1620 we first read of several beacons being
Erected, when, as Sir James Balfour records, the
zoal-masters on both sides of the Forth, for the
xydit of the countrey and saftie of strangers trading
Lo them for cole and salte,? in the June of that
year, erected marks and beacons on all the craigs
md sunken rocks within the Eirth, above the Roads
st Leith, at their own expense.
