In the autumn of 1759, the Bay of Udoll, an arm of the sea which intersects the southern shore of the Frith of Cromarty, was occupied by two large salmon wears, the property of one Allan Thomson, a native of the province of Moray, who had settled in this part of the country a few months before. He was a thin, athletic, raw-boned man, of about five feet ten, well nigh in his thirtieth year, but apparently younger; erect and clean-limbed, with a set of handsome features, bright intelligent eyes, and a profusion of dark-brown hair, curling round an ample expanse of forehead. For the first twenty years of his life, he had lived about a farm-house, tending cattle when a boy, and guiding the plough when he had grown up; he then travelled into England, where he wrought about seven years as a common labourer. A novelist would scarcely make choice of such a person for the hero of a tale; but men are to be estimated rather by the size and colour of their minds, than the complexion of their circumstances; and this ploughman and labourer of the north was by no means a very common man. For the latter half of his life, he had pursued, in all his undertakings, one main design. He saw his brother rustics tied down by circumstance--that destiny of vulgar minds--to a youth of toil and dependence, and an old age of destitution and wretchedness; and, with a force of character which, had he been placed at his outset on what may be termed the table-land of fortune, would have raised him to her higher pinnacles, he persisted in adding shilling to shilling and pound to pound, not in the sordid spirit of the miser, but in the hope that his little hoard might yet serve him as a kind of stepping-stone in rising to a more comfortable place in society. Nor were his desires fixed very high; for, convinced that independence and the happiness which springs from situation in life lie within the reach of the frugal farmer of sixty or eighty acres, he moulded his ambition on the conviction; and scarcely looked beyond the period at which he anticipated his savings would enable him to take his place among the humbler tenantry of the country.
Our firths and estuaries at this period abounded with salmon--one of the earliest exports of the kingdom; but from the low state into which commerce had sunk in the northern districts, and the irregularity of the communication kept up between them and the sister kingdom, by far the greater part caught on our shores were consumed by the inhabitants. And so little were they deemed a luxury, that it was by no means uncommon, it is said, for servants to stipulate with their masters that they should not have to diet on salmon oftener than thrice a-week. Thomson, however, had seen quite enough, when in England, to convince him, that, meanly as they were esteemed by his countryfolks, they might be rendered the staple of a profitable trade; and, removing to the vicinity of Cromarty, for the facilities it afforded in trading to the capital, he launched boldly into the speculation. He erected his two wears with his own hands; built himself a cottage of sods on the gorge of a little ravine, sprinkled over with bushes of alder and hazel; entered into correspondence with a London merchant, whom he engaged as his agent; and began to export his fish by two large sloops, which plied, at this period, between the neighbouring port and the capital. His fishings were abundant, and his agent an honest one; and he soon began to realize the sums he had expended in establishing himself in the trade.