Kidnapped

Some people, after returning from a first trip to Hawaii, can't resist reading James Michener's novel about the Islands. Or they visit Paris, and come home to read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Within a week of my return from Scotland, I found myself rummaging through my childhood books for my copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

I read Kidnapped as a boy -- my folks had bought it for me along with Treasure Island as a matched set -- and, as I recall, it seemed kind of boring at the time. I read it several years ago as an adult, and found it more captivating. But after visiting Scotland -- having hiked in and about many of the same regions described in the book -- the novel is infinitely more interesting.

Kidnapped is a first-person tale narrated by a Scots teenager from a small town near Edinburgh. The plot is simple. In 1751, David Balfour, having lost both his parents, is cheated out of his inheritance by his uncle, who essentially sells him into slavery to work in the tobacco fields in the American colonies. He is shanghaied aboard a sailing ship, and the first half of the book describes life -- and David's horror and despair -- aboard ship. The ship is wrecked in the Hebrides, off the Isle of Mull. David survives and allies himself with a Highlander named Alan Breck Stewart, a real historical figure.

David and Alan are present when a Campbell clansman -- the Campbells being a clan that willingly acted as agents of the Crown in seizing the property of members of the dissident clans -- was shot and killed upon the highway. The so-called Appin Murder was a national sensation. Warrants were issued for the arrest of both David and his older companion on charges of murder and accessory to murder. The remainder of the story describes their grueling escape from the authorities by way of a circuitous path through the Highlands, back to Edinburgh. It ends with David's being restored to his inheritance.

After an awkward and halting farewell, David walks away into the glittering and busy streets of Edinburgh, well-dressed, with a prosperous life lying ahead. He leaves Alan in hiding, facing a dangerous sail for France, his sole hope for avoiding the noose. David is a well to do Lowlander; Alan, whose unwavering friendship kept David alive, is a dispossessed and despised Highlander.¹

I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties)there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.

The novel was serialized in a boys' magazine in 1886, but has always appealed to adults as well as kids. David, a reserved and conscientious "Whig" Lowlander, and Alan, a flamboyantly argumentative Jacobite Highlander, learn to appreciate each other's strengths and overlook each other's weaknesses. The story is satisfyingly biased in favor of the Highlander cause, and the book forces us, and ultimately even David, to root against the English authorities and the quisling Campbell clan.

What's fascinating to me -- aside from the vivid portrayal of one version of real historical events -- is the description of the same countryside that I visited some 260 years later, and of the lives and personalities of the people who inhabited it. Stevenson has his Highland characters speak in dialect when they're speaking English (or Scots, as the dialect is called), as opposed to Gaelic. The author said later that he had anglicized the Scots dialect somewhat to make it more readable, and my edition has a few footnotes defining unfamiliar terms; even so, I suspect that the language would pose a challenge to many kids reading it today.

In fact, the book is impressively sophisticated in language, description, motivation, and characterization, compared with much of what passes as Young Adult fiction -- e.g., vampire books -- today. The long days aboard ship, and the difficulties of hiking secretly through the bracken and heather of the wild Highlands rarely elicit sudden bursts of adrenaline,² as more modern readers may demand, but rather paint a picture, layer by layer, of the dangers and hardships of life and politics in 18th century Scotland, and the growth of a friendship between two protagonists from opposite backgrounds.

With that caveat, Kidnapped is worth reading for anyone, young or adult, who has an interest in history, and in the traditional life of the Scottish Highlands.

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¹Historically, Alan Breck Stewart was tried in absentia and sentenced to hang. He was never hanged, but no record exists as to his life after leaving Scotland. His father was tried in person as an accessory to the murder. Although no evidence was produced that the father intended the murder or had any part in it, he was convicted by a jury of Campbells and a Campbell judge, and was hanged. Recent historical studies have absolved both Alan and his father of any guilt in the killing. (David, of course, is a wholly fictional character.)

²Although the chapter in which David and Alan singlehandedly mutiny and seize control of the ship headed for the Colonies -- shortly before it runs onto a reef and is wrecked -- is exciting by anyone's standard.