James IV, King of Scots, never had to worry about elections. This freed him up to satisfy his voracious curiosity with strange experiments: according to one old tale, in 1493 he trapped two children, and a nurse who couldn’t talk, on Inchkeith Island in the Firth of Forth.
James hoped that the children, deprived of modern influences on their speech, would naturally return to the true, divine language. They supposedly came back speaking Hebrew; for Walter Scott, it was “more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the sheep and goats on the island”.
