OUTER HEBRIDES, Scotland — There are islands in the Hebrides and Orkneys where only one man lives, an island unto himself, and maybe a thousand sheep. And there are others with no one in residence at all, but wild sheep share the scenery with otters and eagles and vast colonies of nesting sea birds.

Blame Shakespeare or my school textbooks, but like scores of others, I thought the British Isles consisted of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Actually, they number way over a thousand, with more than 900 lying off the rugged coast of Scotland. Some island groups like the Shetlands stretch so far north they share the same latitude with Oslo, Norway, and St. Petersburg, Russia. From others on a clear day you can see France or, no matter what the weather, hear French spoken in the shops and along the cobblestone streets.

My geography underwent revision after boarding the Prinsendam in Amsterdam and cruising some 2,500 miles around Britain to get a gander at some of these islands. And what a bizarre, eclectic and always fascinating scattering of culture, language, history and folklore they turned out to be.

Guernsey in the Channel Islands, for instance, besides its own breed of cows, has a tomato museum, gardens with exotic butterflies, a museum recounting the German occupation in World War II, and government offices and courts where French is de rigueur. St. Peter Port, the charming capital, has a population of only 16,000 but boasts 66 banks of British, Canadian, U.S. and Australian ownership. Loyal to the queen but cocking a snook (old English for thumbing its nose) at the Westminster Parliament, this thriving tax haven has its own currency and postage stamps which, I discovered too late, most British Isles are reluctant to accept.

On the Isle of Man we failed to find the promised tail-less Manx cats and four-horned Lochtan sheep, but saw a narrow- gauge steam railway and electric trams hauling commuters, farmers and golfers across the landscape. And we heard people growl a greeting in Manx, a Celtic tongue. Here, too, are banks on almost every corner and rows of tidy Victorian seaside hotels and cozy cottages. Brits have been retiring here since the Crimean War, but anyone unable to trace his lineage back to the Vikings or the Celts who welcomed St. Patrick is labeled a "come-over."

The island claims the world's oldest continually meeting parliament, the Tynwald Court, established in 979. Every 5th of July a procession of military bands, robed dignitaries, residents and tourists wends its way to a hill outside Douglas, the capital, where laws passed by this court-parliament are proclaimed in Manx and English.

After calling at giddily prosperous Dublin, and then docking at staid Belfast, the Holland America liner headed north to Scotland's fabled westerly isles.

WHISKEY-A-GOGO

The Hebrides are a wild archipelago of wide skies, pounding surf, empty white shell beaches and forbidding cliffs with warning lighthouses designed by novelist Robert Louis Stevenson's father and uncle. They have long lured writers like Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Scott and painters like Turner. They provided Mendelssohn with the haunting echoes of "Fingal's Cave." Here Scottish biographer James Boswell played tour guide for Dr. Johnson, and Stevenson set the scene for "Kidnapped."

Blooming with purple heather and perfumed with peat smoke, these sparsely populated islands are divided into the Inner and Outer Hebrides by tumultuous seas and a wind-whipped strait called the Little Minch. Each has its own distillery boasting the world's finest single-malt Scotch and has a unique claim to notoriety.

From his monastery on remote Iona, St. Columba's Irish monks in the 6th century spread literacy, learning and Christianity across Europe. Still staunchly Catholic, the Isle of Barra shut down its post office and both pubs as every lad, lassie and wee bairn crossed over to Glasgow to welcome Pope John Paul II in 1982.

On the Isle of Eriskay, Bonnie Prince Charlie first set foot on Scottish soil. But this green dot in the sea is more notorious for the 1941 wreck of the Politician with a cargo of 20,000 cases of whiskey, which the natives craftily hid from customs agents, inspiring the movie "Tight Little Island."

On Lewis, the northernmost of the Outer Hebrides, my Irish wife chatted in Gaelic with our guide on the tour bus to the 47 standing stones called Calanais or Callanish, which are older than Stonehenge.

Looming 15 feet high, these massive upright slabs or megaliths were lifted in place some 5,000 years ago. Scientists surmise the inner circle of 13 stones is somehow aligned with the planets and stars but haven't figured out how or why.

In the village of Arnol, we visited a windowless black house, a long, narrow shed-like building where a peat fire separated the family quarters from the cattle that were housed inside with them. Many of the black houses were built in the 1800s, and some were in use as recently as the mid-20th century.

The Prinsendam rounded the northern tip of Scotland and dropped anchor at Kirkwall, the capital of the Orkney Islands, where wild winds can blow buses off the road. The 67 islands have Western Europe's greatest concentration of prehistoric sites and more runic writing than anywhere. There are burial cairns, a lunar observatory and circles of standing stones older than the pyramids. Maes Howe, a huge burial chamber, dates from 2500 B.C. and was already three millennia old when Viking raiders scratched runic graffiti and the image of a dragon with their swords.

A violent storm in 1850 exposed Skara Brae, a 5,000-year-old fishing village with 10 well-preserved houses furnished with Stone Age stone cupboards and bedsteads. In the 21st century, residents are trying to reap the wild wind and surging surf with towering stainless steel windmills and wave machines to generate electric power.

FATHOMS OF HISTORY

In the embracing island arms of Birdsay and South Ronaldsay lies the great naval anchorage of Scapa Flow, 15 miles long and 8 wide, where so much history happened in two World Wars. On June 21, 1919, Admiral Van Reuter gave the order to scuttle rather than surrender the defeated German fleet. The hulks of the 52 ships that went to the bottom are now Scotland's most popular amateur dive site.

Then on the night of Oct. 14, 1939, a U-Boat slipped beneath the defense nets and sank the battleship Royal Oak anchored beneath the cliffs, with a loss of 833 lives. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had Italian POWS build a barrier shutting off the eastern entrance to Scapa Flow. The prisoners also converted a Nissen hut (British ancestor of the U.S. Quonset hut) into a startlingly beautiful chapel that is now a tourist must.

At Invergordon on Moray Firth, busloads of passengers went off to seek the Loch Ness monster, while ignoring the huge 60-foot sea monsters that seem to have clanked into the pleasant harbor on spindly, seaweed-draped legs from some Japanese horror movie. This picturesque Highland port does a bustling business repairing North Sea oil platforms.

Our 14-day sea voyage, which began at the first landfall with a glorious sunrise gilding the white cliffs of Dover, ended with a distant skirl of bagpipes and a spectacular shower of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle, marking the end of the Edinburgh Festival and our final port call.

Author James Michener once pronounced himself a "nesiac," utterly insane about islands. I think I share the madness.