Whence Buchanan drew the possibilities of great fleets in the Firth of Cromarty is unknown unless he had in his memory some of the vessels of the old mariners, such as Sir Andrew Wood and the bold Bartons, or even the 'verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael' that 'cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea.' Certain it is that for many a day its position had marked out the town as the natural centre of a coasting trade, though shortly after the Union the commerce of the place which had been considerable had declined. The real commencement of the prosperity of the place was due to the energy of a native, William Forsyth, whose life Miller has sketched in a little memoir originally drawn up for the family, and subsequently republished in his _Tales and Sketches_ under the title of 'A Scottish Merchant of the Eighteenth century.' Forsyth had been appointed by the British Linen Company, established about 1746 in Edinburgh to promote the linen trade, its agent in the North throughout the whole district extending from Beauly to the Pentland Firth. The flax which was brought in vessels from Holland was prepared for use in Cromarty, and distributed by boats along the coast to Wick and Thurso. In the early days of the trade the distaff and the spindle were in general use; but Forsyth's efforts were successful in the introduction of the spinning-wheel, though the older means of production lasted far into this century in the west of Ross and in the Hebrides. The coasting schooners of the agent were the means of introducing into the town teas and wines, cloth, glass, Flemish tiles, Swedish iron, and Norwegian tar and spars. The rents of the landed proprietors were still largely paid in kind, or in the feudal labour by which the Baron of Bradwardine managed to eke out a rather scanty rent roll. In this way the _mains_ or the demesnes of the laird were tilled and worked, and the Martinmas corn rents were stocked in a barn or 'girnal,' like that of the Antiquary's famous John of legend, often to cause a surplus to hang on the hands of the proprietor, until the idea was fortunately devised of exporting it to England or to Flanders for conversion into malt.
Ship-carpentry or boat-building upon a humble scale had been long established, and the coasting trade lay between the North, Leith, Newcastle, and London. The Scottish sailors then on the eastern coast enjoyed a strong reputation for piety, such as, we fear, their descendants have not maintained. John Gibb of Borrowstouness, the antiquary may remember as the founder of the now forgotten sect of Gibbites or 'sweet singers,' who denounced all tolls and statutory impositions, abolished the use of tobacco and all excisable articles, and finally made a pilgrimage to the Pentland Hills to see the smoke and the desolation of Edinburgh as foretold by their founder. The wardrobes and scrutoires of the local cabinet-maker, Donald Sandison, enjoyed a reputation through the North, and were, far into this century, found in the houses of Ross, together with the old eight-day clocks made in Kilwinning. But the great founder of its modern prosperity was George Ross, the son of a small proprietor in Easter Ross, who, after amassing a fortune as an army-agent as the friend of Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Grafton, had in 1772 purchased the estate of Cromarty. When he started his improvements in his native district, there was not a wheeled-cart in all the parish, and the knowledge of agriculture was rude. Green cropping and the rotation of crops were unknown, and in autumn the long irregular patches of arable land were intersected by stretches of moorland that wound deviously into the land, like the reaches of the Cromarty and the Beauly Firths. Though long opposed by tenacious local prejudices, he at length triumphed over the backward habits of the people, who yoked their oxen and their horses by the tail, and who justified their action by an appeal to the argument from design, and by a query as to what other end in creation such tails had been provided? Ross also established in the town a manufactory for hempen cloth, and erected what at the time was the largest ale-brewery in the North. A harbour was built at his own expense, and a pork trade of a thriving nature set on foot, wheat reared, the rotation of crops introduced, a nail and spade manufactory set up, and lace manufactures brought from England. Such, then, was the condition of Cromarty at the beginning of the present century.