nastery was founded on the island
Aemonia, near Inverkeithing. For when the noble and most Christian
Sovereign Alexander, first of this name, was, in pursuit of some
state business, making a passage across the Queensferry, suddenly a
tremendous storm arose, and the fierce south-west wind forced the
vessel and sailors to make, for safety's sake, for the island of
Aemonia, where at that time lived an island hermit (_eremita
insulanus_), who, belonging to the service of St. Columba, devoted
himself sedulously to his duties at a certain little chapel there
(_ad quandam inibi capellulam_), content with such poor food as the
milk of one cow and the shell and small sea fishes which he could
collect. On the hermit's slender stores the king and his suite of
companions, detained by the storm, gratefully lived for three
consecutive days. But on the day before landing, when in very great
danger from the sea, and tossed by the fury of the tempest, the king
despaired of life, he vowed to the Saint, that if he should bring him
and his companions safe to the island, he would leave on it such a
memorial to his honour as would render it a future asylum and refuge
to sailors and those that were shipwrecked. Therefore, it was decided
on this occasion that he should found there a monastery of
prebendaries, such as now exists; and this the more so, as he had
always venerated St. Columba with special honour from his youth; and
chiefly because his own parents were for several years childless and
destitute of the solace of offspring, until, beseeching St. Columba
with suppliant devotion, they gloriously obtained what they sought
for so long a time with anxious desire. Hence the origin of the
verse--

'M.C, ter, I. bis, et X literis a tempore Christi,
Aemon, tunc ab Alexandro fundata fuisti
Scotorum primo. Structorem Canonicorum
Transferat ex imo Deus hunc ad alta polorum.'"[56]

The preceding account of King Alexander's visit to Inchcolm, and his
founding of the monastery there, occurs in the course of the fifth book
(lib. v. cap. 37) of the _Scotichronicon_, without its being marked
whether the passage itself exists in the original five books of Fordun,
or in one of the additions made to them by the Abbot Walter Bower.[57]
The first of these writers, John of Fordun, lived, it will be
recollected, in the reigns of Robert II. and III., and wrote a