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

PAUL JONES’S SQUADRON
57
1779]
all ranks, whereof little appears etc. We had accounts in
March that the Popish Bill was thrown out and quashed.
July 2nd. I repaired to the Fair Isle, where I preached two
Sabbath days successively, joined two pairs in marriage, bap¬
tized 5 children, and rebuked two couples for ante-nuptial for¬
nication, publickly, and several others for Sabbath profanation,
for which reason I read from the pulpit the present King
George the 3rd’s proclamation against profanity and immorality.
God had blasted their crops for the two preceding years, yet
did they not return to Him. Severals of the best Christians in
the Isle had left it, and therefore had not freedom to celebrate
the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper among them as formerly I
was wont to do. I found a considerable decrease of the number
of inhabitants: four families were ruined, their houses lying
desolate, and three of the heads thereof were drowned carrying
into the isle supplys for their families. I returned July 14th
and found my family in their ordinary—praise to His worthy
name who also afforded good weather for passage; though in
my return under the isle, a blast of wind filled the boat’s sail,
whereby the mast was like to give way, and made one cry
out of returning back; yet, having bound an oar to the place
affected, they ventured forward, and it pleased a good God to
grant fair and easy weather all the way to our designed land-
ingplace. Soli Deo Gloria.
In Septr. 3 or 4 large ships were seen off Bressay Sound,
which had two sloops in tow, which they had taken in their
way from Leith to Lerwick, which put the inhabitants of
Lerwick in a great consternation. They were said to be one
of 50, another of 40, and a 3rd of 30 guns. One of these
sloops broke loose in a storm of wind, and came into Bressay
Sound, having two Americans and two Frenchmen on board,
which a cutter’s crew who was then in Bressay Sound enlisting
men here for the service of Government, seized, as also the
crew of an American merchantman loaded with tobacco and
Loggwood, who had stranded on the island of Burray during
the storm foresaid. We had the finest crops here ever known,
and got in mostly by the 20th of this month. Thus Provi¬
dence mixes mercy with judgment.