ook his way with his fleet down the Firth. Pinkerton, who
ought to have known better, talks of "the acclamations of numerous
spectators on the adjacent hills and shores" as if the great estuary had
been a little river. It might well be that both in Fife and Lothian
there were eager lookers-on, as soon as it was seen that the fleet was
in motion, to see the ships pass: but their acclaims must have been loud
indeed to carry from Leith to Kinghorn. The King sailed early in June
1540 towards the north. Many a yacht and pleasure ship still follows the
same route round the Scottish coast towards the wild attractions of the
islands.

"Merrily, merrily, bounds the bark,
She bounds before the gale,
The mountain breeze from Ben-na-darch
Is joyous in her sail.
With fluttering sound like laughter hoarse
The cords and canvas strain,
The waves divided by her force
In rippling eddies chased her course
As if they laughed again."

But it was on no pleasure voyage that James had set out. He had in his
twelve ships two thousand armed men, led by the most trusted lords of
Scotland, and his mission was to reduce to order the clans who knew so
little what a king's dignity was, or the restraints of law, or the
pursuits of industry. No stand would seem to have been anywhere made
against him. Many of the chiefs of the more turbulent tribes were
brought off to the ships, not so much as prisoners in consequence of
their own misdoings, but as hostages for their clans: and the startled
isles, overawed by the sight of the King and his great ships, and by the
more generous motive of anxiety for their own chieftains in pledge for
them, calmed down out of their wild ways, and ceased from troubling in a
manner unprecedented in their turbulent history.

An incidental consequence of this voyage sounds oddly modern, as if it
might have been a transcript from the most recent records. James
perceived, or more probably had his attention directed to the fact, that
the fishermen of the north were much molested by fishing vessels from
Holland, Flanders, and the Scandinavian coasts, who interfered with
their fishing, sometimes even thrusting them by violence of arms out of
their own waters. The King accordingly detached one or two of his
vessels under the command of Maxwell, his admiral, to inquire into these
high-handed proceedings, with the result that one of the foreign fisher
pirate-ships was seized and brough