Sir Walter says that “the feeling of superstitious awe annexed to the catastrophe could not have been improved by any circumstances of additional horror which a poet could have invented.”  But is there not something more moving still in the boatman’s version:  “they were never seen again . . . they were not found indeed till this day”?

The folklorist, of course, is eager to know whether the boatman’s much more complete and connected narrative is a popular mythical development in the years between 1820 and 1890, or whether the schoolmaster of Rannoch did not tell all he knew.  It is unlikely, I think, that the siege of Seringapatam would have been remembered so long in connection with the Black Officer if it had not formed part of his original legend.  Meanwhile the earliest printed notice of the event with which I am acquainted, a notice only ten years later than the date of the Major’s death in 1799, is given by Hogg in “The Spy,” 1810-11, pp. 101-3.  I offer an abridgment of the narrative.

“About the end of last century Major Macpherson and a party of friends went out to hunt on the Grampians between Athole and Badenoch.  They were highly successful, and in the afternoon they went into a little bothy, and, having meat and drink, they abandoned themselves to jollity.

“During their merry-making a young man entered whose appearance particularly struck and somewhat shocked Macpherson; the stranger beckoned to the Major, and he followed him instantly out of the bothy.

“When they parted, after apparently having had some earnest conversation, the stranger was out of sight long before the Major was half-way back, though only twenty yards away.

“The Major showed on his return such evident marks of trepidation that the mirth was marred and no one cared to ask him questions.

“This was early in the week, and on Friday the Major persuaded his friends to make a second expedition to the mountains, from which they never returned.

“On a search being made their dead bodies were found in the bothy, some considerably mangled, but some were not marked by any wound.

“It was visible that this had not been effected by human agency:  the bothy was torn from its foundations and scarcely a vestige left of it, and one huge stone, which twelve men could not have raised, was tossed to a considerable distance.

“On this event Scott’s beautiful ballad of ‘Glenfinlas’ is said to have been founded.”

As will be seen presently, Hogg was wrong about ‘Glenfinlas’; the boatman was acquainted with a traditional version of that wild legend.  I found another at Rannoch.