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Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Testimony of Tradition:
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Sometime about this Country Orkney are seen these Men which are called Finnmen; In the year 1682 one was seen sometime sailing, sometime Rowing up and down in his little Boat at the south end of the Isle of Eda, most of the people of the Isle flocked to see him, and when they adventured to put out a Boat with men to see if they could apprehend him, he presently fled away most swiftly: And in the Year 1684, another was seen from Westra, and for a while after they got few or no Fishes, for they have this Remark here, that these Finnmen drive away the fishes from the place to which they come. ...There are frequently Fin-men seen here upon the Coasts, as one about a year ago on Stronsa, and another within these few Months on Westra, a gentleman with many others in the Isle looking on him nigh to the shore, but when any endeavour to apprehend them they flee away most swiftly; Which is very strange, that one man sitting in his little Boat, should come some hundred of Leagues, from their own Coasts, as they reckon Finland to be from Orkney; It may be thought wonderfull how they live all that time, and are able to keep the Sea so long. ...I must acknowledge it seems a little unaccountable how these Finn-men should come on this coast, but they must probably be driven by storms from home, and cannot tell, when they are any way at sea, how to make their way home again; they have this advantage, that be the Seas never so boisterous, their boats being made of Fish Skins, are so contrived that he can never sink, but is like a Sea-gull swimming on the top of the watter.
About David MacRitchie, the Author:
16 MacRitchie himself argued in his Testimony of Tradition, under a chapter subheading entitled 'A Hairy Race' (p. 167) that they were somewhat connected to the Lapps or Eskimos, but were a distinct race because of their very long beards, concluding: 'one seems to see the type of a race that was even more like the Ainu than the Lapp, or the Eskimo, although closely connected in various ways with all of these' (p. ...2829 The archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins found MacRitchie's views also appealing, since in his Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (1880) he considered Upper Paleolithic culture across Europe (including Britain) to have been founded by a proto-Eskimo or Lapp race, a view at the time which was popularised after the discovery of 'Chancelade Man', in southwestern France by Leo Testut in 1889.