Series 1 > Diary of the Reverend John Mill, minister of the parishes of Dunrossness Sandwick and Cunningsburgh in Shetland, 1740-1803. With selections from local records and original documents relating to the district

BOAT ACCIDENT
53
1778]
Custom Officers were afraid to board him. He went from
Levenwick to Walls. Received accounts of the arrival of a
vessel from Hamburgh with whom our Commission for house
necessaries were sent, notwithstanding of being endangered
by a storm and privateers; and desire to bless a kind Provi¬
dence, that I never yet lost anything in this way. An awful
Providence befell a daughter of Symburgh’s by an old stupid
man thrusting a knife in her eye, that is like to deprive her
of the sight of it, which put Sumburgh into such a rage
that he stabbed the man in the breast with a knife, hut not
mortally.
January 1st. Our days are as an handhreadth and years are
as nothing before thee. Man at his best estate is altogether
Vanity etc. O ! to be helped to improve precious time and
talents better than ever, that when the last period of life comes
I may be enabled, through grace, to give up my accounts
with joy and not with grief. And 0! that God would be
pleased to smile upon my poor labours and endeavours, that
I may see or hear of the travail of Christ’s soul in the conver¬
sion of poor sinners to God, which my very heart is set upon,
and nothing in time would afford greater joy.
Jan. 24. Three men in Cunningsburgh with Sumburgh’s
clerk and a boy in crossing Clift Sound1 were so infatuated
as to come upon a point that lay out a little from the shore
at Sandsere,2 and a lump of sea arising overset the boat and
all were drowned. On Sabbath, the day following, a boy came
into the Church during sermon, and called out several men to
take up their corpses then driven ashore—’tis said they had
been drunk. A little before, a Scotch vessel from Riga loaden
with flax and lint-seed was stranded at Cunningsburgh, but
the crew were saved.
1 Cliftsound : the sea on the east side of the Clifts of Cunningsburgh. Clift-
sound proper is on the west side of the country, between Cunningsburgh and
Burra Isle.
2 Sandsere, or Sands Ayre : the beach at Sand (Icelandic, Sands Eyrr).
1778