. . .Otterswick.  ‘Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the shore.  We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.  It blows “mere fire,” as the sailors express it.’  And for three days more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer Sound.  I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about details.  It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and perils; that to him it was ‘great gain’ to be eight nights and seven days in the savage bay of Levenswick—to read a book in the much agitated cabin—to go on deck and. . . Read More