wrote in a chronicle that in 1493, James IV directed that a mute woman and two infants be transported to the island, in order to ascertain which language the infants would grow up to speak isolated from the rest of the world. This speech, in contemporary theory, would be the "original" language, or the "language of God". Pitscottie's version of the story was:

However, there are no contemporary sources or documents describing such an experiment, and modern historians consider the story implausible. James