Читать книгу Sea Room - Adam Nicolson - Страница 8

EARLY APRIL AND A COLD WIND was cutting up from the south-west. Freyja was anchored in the little rocky inlet at the head of Flodabay on the east coast of Harris. A seal watched from the dark water. Acid streams were draining off the moorland into the sea. The boat swung a little and the reflected sun glinted up at the strakes of her bilges. I was shivering, not because of the cold, but because I was frightened at the idea of sailing out alone in this small boat to the Shiants. The halyard was slapping against the mast and the tiny waves clucked as they were caught against the underside of the hull. The shores of Flodabay were sallow and tussocky with the dead winter grasses and the boat was washed in late-winter sun. Freyja is sixteen feet from stem to stern and looks from the shore as slight as a balsawood toy. She and the Minch are not to the same scale.

It was the first time I was going to sail to the Shiants on my own. Always before, I had allowed myself to be carried out by fishermen from Scalpay or boatmen from Lewis, travelling as I now see it like a man in a sedan chair, gracefully picked up, carefully taken over and gently set down. That could never be enough. That was not being engaged with the place. An island can only be known and understood if the sea around it is known and understood.

Six months previously, I had read a history of the birlinn, the sailing galley descended from Viking boats that was used in these waters by the highland chiefs, at least until the seventeenth century. They raided and traded with them. Their lives were as much bound up with them as with any land-based habitation. The book described the carving of a birlinn surviving on the tomb of Alasdair Crotach, Hunchback Alasdair, the Macleod chieftain in Harris in the mid-sixteenth century. He was a violent man, the mass murderer of a cave-full of Macdonalds on Eigg, men, women and children, three hundred and ninety-five of whom he suffocated with the smoke of a fire lit at its narrow mouth.

This killer’s birlinn is an image of extraordinary beauty.

The form and curve of each strake, the fixings of the rudder, even the lay of the rope in the rigging: everything is carved with exactness, clarity and what can only be called love. Around it are the relative crudities of angels, apostles and biblical stories. Their forms never escaped the stone but the carved ship shows the panels of cloth in the bellied-out sail. It even shows the way a sail can be creased against a forestay that is faintly visible through it. Above all, though, it lovingly described the form of the hull, the depth of its keel and the fullness of the bilges. All of this was carved in millimetre detail, testament of something that mattered. The birlinn was shown at full stretch and fully rigged, but out of the water, so that the swept beauty of the hull could be seen. Only a shipwright or a sailor could have carved such a thing: it is the mental, not the actual image of a ship at sea, a depiction of what you can imagine of a boat at its most perfect moment, made by a man who knew it. The author of the birlinn history had set a Gaelic proverb at the head of his central chapter:

‘S beag ‘tha fios aig fear a bhaile,Cia’mar ‘tha fear na mara beò.

The landlubber [literally the man of the village] has no idea

How the sailor [the man of the sea] exists.

That was the gap I wanted to cross; to acquire the habits of mind which the carver of the birlinn had so easily conveyed. I rang the author, John MacAulay. He lived in Flodabay in South Harris. Did he know of anyone who might be able to build me a boat that would take on something of that Norse tradition? That I could sail single-handed? Which would be safe and strong enough to survive in the Minch, even on a bad day, and which might be hauled up a beach, at least with the help of a winch?

‘Ah yes,’ John said, a light, slight voice. Definite, polite, courteous, withdrawn, sharp, sprung.

‘In Harris, would that be?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I think it would.’

Wonderful news. And who was the shipwright?

‘Well, I think you are speaking to him now.’

John MacAulay was not only a historian of the Viking inheritance, but a boat builder of thirty-five years’ experience. He had made and repaired fishing boats in the Shetland island of Unst, and at Oban and Kyle. He had been a fisherman and was an experienced yacht sailor. He was one of the leading experts on both the history of the sea kayak and the traditional working boats of the Hebrides. He was an elder of his church in Leverburgh and author of a book on the church at Rodel in which the birlinn carving was to be found. For two months or so John and I corresponded by letter and occasionally by phone. I said I thought I could do what I needed to do with a twelve-foot boat. He said it would have to be at least sixteen foot. ‘I’m not sending you out there in something twelve foot long.’ I wanted something ‘double-ended’, coming to a point at bow and stern. John said, ‘That would be a waste of wood. You’ll want a transom on it.’ A sixteen-footer with a transom – the stern cut off square – was the equivalent of a twenty-footer that came to a point at the stern. Timber in the treeless Hebrides was always at a premium. ‘It would be a waste of wood. And time. And money,’ he said.

He posted me drawings of the boat he proposed. Unpractised at reading such things, and unable to guess performance or quality from buttock lines or the sheer of the gunwale, I took him at his word. I had yet to meet him but even at a distance he exuded an authority and conviction which it was not easy to deny. I would turn repeatedly to a passage in his book about the birlinn:

A close relationship, like a spiritual bonding, develops between the shipwright and the finished vessel, which continues throughout its entire material life. It has been known for certain boatbuilders to refuse to build for a particular client, if they did not feel an affinity towards one another. A reputable shipwright might not want to see some work of devotion fall into the wrong hands, and would rather find some obscure reason for refusing to build, than later be in the position of accusing an untrustworthy client of incompetence …

Austerity lay like an acid on the page. The Nicolsons might claim to be descended from the ancient chiefs of Lewis. Their birlinn might have been run down by the Macleods in the Minch, somewhere off the Shiants. Norse blood might have been running in me, but it was scarcely the purest of streams. John MacAulay, though, was the real thing. ‘MacAulay,’ he said to me one day, ‘is only the Gaelic for Olafson.’ The world of the sagas, a thousand years away, came reeking down the telephone.

The severity was a guarantee of his seriousness. I met him for the first time when the boat was almost finished. His workshop is a Nissen hut on the shores of Flodabay. A curling strip of tarmac makes its tortuous way across rocks and around inlets down to the settlement. Nowhere in the British Isles that has been long inhabited can be bleaker than this. The ice-scraped gneiss shelters little more than dark peat hollows and sour grass. The houses of the people who live here are scattered along the road. There is no visible sign of community. It looks like a barren world.

That is certainly how outsiders have always seen such places: as an environment and a people in need of improvement and enrichment, a place of material poverty and actual sterility. But come a little closer and the picture turns on its head. A richness flowers among the rocks. John met me in front of the boat he had made. He stood four square, legs apart and shoulders back, resting a hand on the gunwale. His long, grey hair was brushed back from his temples. He wore a small grey moustache and looked me straight in the eye: a straight, calm, evaluating look. ‘Are you up to the boat I have made?’ it said. Could the shipwright trust the client? But instead, he said, ‘Welcome, welcome.’

We went over it together for two hours, inch by inch. Although I had paid for it, and I was to use it, I was to trust my life to it, there was no doubt whose boat this was. John was describing his world. The boat to my eye was extraordinarily deep and wide for its length: sixteen feet long but six feet, two inches in the beam, and drawing at least two feet below the water line at the stern. ‘Take me through it,’ I said. Little spits of rain were coming in through the open doors of the workshop. ‘This boat is for the Minch,’ he said. ‘She is not off the shelf. She knows the conditions in which she’ll have to work. And she’s within your capabilities for handling. Twelve feet would be too small and anything bigger would be too big for you.’

John enlarged on the difference between this and ‘most boats’. ‘Most boats are a tub’ – he outlined the body of a pig in the air – ‘and a keel. A tub for buoyancy, a keel for lateral stability. Easy to make, cheap to build. This boat is different. It’s the hull planking itself which makes the keel. It is a highly complex and integrated form, and that integral keel running the whole length of the boat gives you directional stability as well as lateral stability.’ The form he was describing clearly derived from the deep-draughted birlinn. There was ‘more boat in the water’ built like this. You might see her afloat and think, just from the shore, that she was a slip of a thing. She wouldn’t show a great deal. The meat of the boat was unseen, in the water, and it was that which made her a good sea boat and a good sailing boat. She had a better grip in the water that way and you wouldn’t get anything like the rolling effect you would with ‘most boats’.

Everything was precision here. The language John was using was scientific in its exactness. The saws, drawknives, hand-drills, chisels, disc-grinders and hammers were hung cleanly and neatly, ranged by size, along the corrugated metal walls of the workshop. A mallet and a measuring tape lay on the work bench. Timber was stacked on shelving in the roof and one of John’s padded checked shirts hung from the end of the baulks. The wind coming in from the large open garage doors was the only thing unregulated here. ‘Where did you learn to be so neat, John?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t bear untidiness of any kind,’ he said.

I felt a little fat in his presence, mentally fat, from the world beyond here, the world of cheap options and short cuts, the world of ‘most boats’, where the rigour of this man and his workshop was not applied. I slowly came to understand something: this was not a very large dinghy. It was a very small ship. This was the birlinn translated for me. All the principles of sea-kindliness, of robustness of construction and yet lightness of form, of a craft designed to protect its crew and save their lives, miraculously transmitted to this man and his meticulous workshop, had been poured into the boat which he would allow me to call mine. John himself, and the boat he had made, were a transmission from the world of the Shiants’ past.

But there was more to it. ‘The entry is fine’ – it comes to a sharp and narrow point at the bow – ‘which makes her easy to row. And the underwater lines are clean: a clean fine exit.’ Underwater, the stern sweeps to as narrow and subtle a point as the bow. Seen from astern, the boat’s form is a wineglass. I – the crew – would inhabit the bowl, but the sea would come into contact only with the stem of the glass. As far as the sea knew, the boat gradually slipped away to nothing. Smooth, laminar flow along the hull would allow her to slide along, no eddies, no drag. Only ‘amidships’ – John’s word, all the implications of this tradition buried in it – does she fill out. But again the middle path must be chosen. She is not so fine that she will roll too quickly, but not so full that the drag is too great. The mast and yardarm, cut and planed from lengths of Scottish larch, the oars (larch) and rudder (oak, bound and tipped with galvanised iron) had all been made by John without compromise or trimming. Everything was as full and robust as it needed to be, but not more than that. This was no butcher of a thing. It had a slightness for all its strength. He had forged the iron for the mooring rings, the eyebolts and hooks for the halyard, the upright pins for the rowlocks and the gudgeons and pintles for the rudder. Everything was fully itself, designed not only for appearance but to last and to work in difficult and harsh conditions. Nothing was too heavy or too massive. Accommodation was all.

‘A boat for the Shiants then?’ I said. John nodded silently. ‘I think she’s beautiful,’ I said. He said nothing, but shrugged.

‘How long will she last?’ I asked him.

‘It’ll last longer than you,’ he said, and then turning away, ‘There are boats at Geocrab, the next bay up, that are more than a hundred years old and they’re still sailing.’

‘And do you think I’ll make a good sailor of her?’

‘If you had another life,’ John said.

‘Ah yes,’ I said, reeling a little, ‘I suppose one needs to know these things instinctively.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You need to be entirely conscious of what you are doing and why you are doing it.’

Sharp, educative, exact: the mind was as clear and as precisely arranged as the tools on the workshop wall. John uses words like ‘declivity’, ‘counteraction’, ‘silicon bronze’ as if they were chisels. One of his saws was stamped with its date of manufacture: 1948. It hung on its hook in as clean a condition as the day it was made.

It was not hostility. Far from it. He had done his extraordinary best for me. He had wetted the keel, as one should, with a glass of whisky when it was first laid. He had buried deep in the woodwork at the stern a threepenny bit from the year of his birth, 1941. He had given the stern his own signature, a little ‘tumblehome’, a slight curving of the hull in towards the gunwale ‘because it looked right.’ He had poured himself into this beautiful thing for me. But this is not a sentimental tradition. This was a man who had grown up with boats. He had been sailing his first small boat like this when he was a teenager. His grandfather and great-grandfather had big herring drifters, fifty, sixty, seventy feet long, built in Stornoway, with which they had followed the herring on its seasonal migration around Cape Wrath, through the Pentland Firth, down the east coast of Scotland and on as far as Yarmouth. The herring have long since gone now and that is not an option.

‘Is there much fishing in this loch now?’ a Lewis crofter was asked by one of the investigating Commissioners in 1894.

‘There used to be when herring came into it,’ he said. ‘There is very little fishing except when there are herring.’

‘Do you know the reason why the herring are not coming now?’

‘Providence,’ the crofter said, ‘the administration of the Creator.’

The herring are gone but John had been at sea all his life and he had completed a five-year apprenticeship in shipbuilding. Who was I to ask if I might be a sailor like them?

Looking back on it now, I can see that I was asking him for too much, too quickly. Again and again I asked him, ‘Show me how to do this, tell me about the tides, tell me how to cope when the wind and tide run into each other. Where are the places not to be? Take me out in the boat and show me how to do it.’ And again and again, with the mixture of sharpness and distance, he said no.

I was up for a week early in the year with a friend of mine, a writer, Charlie Boxer. Each of us was as green as the other, each as hurried and muddled in our dealing with the rig or our attempts to tack. He left us to it. Day after day, Charlie and I hacked along the Harris shore, seeing how close we could bring her to the wind, frightening ourselves in the tide rip off Stocanish, suddenly finding the boat going backwards in the tide while sailing at full speed with the wind, and once, like tourists, landing in the little loch at Scadabay to buy some tweed.

John came out with us once, a gentle afternoon in Flodabay, and the boat flew under his hands. Niftily, he threaded her through a maze of unseen rocks out to the headland on which a Norse seamark stood and then back to the jetty. He stood at the stern with the tiller between his knees, the nonchalant man against the sky behind him. He showed me, in other words, the condition I hoped to reach. It was not his business to provide any waymarks towards it.

And for all this I am grateful. I loved the boat. I felt that in the boat, and in this teaching by not teaching, I was learning more about the world of the islands than I had ever grasped. Here with John MacAulay I was seeing beyond their holiday face. The tradition in which he believed was too valuable to be tarted about.

When on that April morning, I finally left Flodabay in the boat, John helped me load her up with all my odds and ends in waterproof bags. It was, or so I felt anyway, an emotional moment. The tide that would carry me north would only start to run in the early afternoon and so most of the morning I was getting things ready. A seal dawdled in the weedy shadows. The oystercatchers peeped from one rock to the next. I had the mast up and the sail unfurled. Already there was some wear on the boat where Charlie and I had sailed her up and down the coast of Harris, the sheer presence of a friend in the boat giving me the confidence to do things I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on my own. The cleats were now worn where the sheets had tightened against them. The knots in the oak thwarts had opened in a spell of dryish weather. I said goodbye to John, a hard handshake. He was off to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Clause 28, and all the larger questions of homosexuality which clustered around it, was the issue of the day. ‘Oh, you would be surprised. Even in the Church of Scotland there’s a big gay lobby,’ he said. He wasn’t in favour himself. I didn’t tell him that most of my family was gay, but I’m sure he guessed it anyway. I thanked him for everything he had done.

The inflatable dinghy in and deflated, the oars stowed, the charts in the stern sheets, the laminated folder of the pilot tucked in under the stern thwart, the compass, the VHF and GPS, the mobile phone and binoculars, the bread rolls I had bought outside Tarbert, the lump of cheese; my drysuit, life-jacket, harness, lifeline, the little knowledge I had acquired with Charlie of how the Minch might be, how it threatens you even on the gentlest of days: with all of this, and the trust in the boat, I was equipped. I raised the anchor, washed off the black mud that clung to it, stowed it away and hoisted the sail.

The wind, coming down off the hills in South Harris, snatching at the foot of the sail, pulled the bow around. The still bay water rippled against the strakes of the hull. The sunshine flicked up at me from each small wave. As the boat moved out towards the open sea, past Bogha Creag na Leum, the underwater rock which guards Flodabay against the unwary incomer, and as the surface of the water started to lift with the swelling of the Minch outside, there on the headland by the Norse seamark, a tall, lichened stone pillar, stood a man. He was waving to me. I couldn’t see for a moment who it was. I waved back, and then I realised: it was John MacAulay. He must have run half a mile to get there in time. He had made no mention of it, but this was his farewell, the shipwright saying goodbye to his boat. As the sea began to take up its longer, bigger rhythm, and the stem bit and rose in the swells, with the bow wave running and rippling the length of the hull beside me, and the wake starting to gurgle behind, I waved back to him.

‘Good luck!’ he shouted.

‘Thank you!’ I shouted back, ‘Thank you, thank you!’

The air has closed in and the north is now a featureless absence. Between me and the mist-wall, a gannet cruises above the Minch. It must be in from St Kilda, sixty miles away to the west, low over the water, quartering it, looking for the flash of silver there, cutting sickle curves across the grain of the swell. It is a frightening sea. I see a big tanker coming south down the Minch. The spray bursts around its bow as it slaps into each of the swells. No contact with its crew or master, but I feel them looking at me from the bridge and wondering what that tiny boat must be about. Not that the swells are particularly big; they lift Freyja five or six feet in a long, rolling motion. It is just that the boat seems small, the sea wide and the land in all directions a long way off. Like a climber on his ledge, I have to suppress the awareness of all that room beneath me. Concentrate on the boat. Look to the sail. Check you are on course. Do not consider the hugeness of the sea.

The muscles across my chest have tightened and my whole body is tensed, waiting for some relief. I am not at home here. I don’t have the sailor’s ease. I look at each coming sea as a possible enemy. The sea surface is streaked white as if the fat in meat has been dragged downwind. Why did I think this would be a thing to do, to push myself out here on a slightly difficult day, with the wind rising and the passage untried? It was not wise, but I am committed now. It would be just as bad turning back as going on. The sea extends like a hostile crowd around me. I want to arrive. I want to be out of uncertainty. At least on the island, however much the sea might batter it, there is no fear of the ground beneath your feet breaking or of it somehow abandoning you. An island is loyal in the way that a boat can never be. A boat can go wrong, the gear can fail. The sheer solid stillness of the islands is not like that. An island is a presence, not a motion, and there is faithfulness in rocks.

I look for the Shiants but they have yet to appear. I am shut in the world of the boat and the compass. At sea, something sixteen feet long does not feel large.

I wanted to call her Maighdean nan Eileanan Mora, the Gaelic for ‘Shiant Girl’ until John MacAulay pointed out that saying that to the Coastguard over the VHF was not going to sound quite right. Besides, the name wouldn’t fit on the boat. So I have called her Freyja, after the Norse goddess of love and fertility, who could turn herself into a falcon and fly for a day and a night over the sea; who could shepherd the fish into the nets of fishermen; who could happily sleep with an entire family of elves, each one of which would present her with a link in an amber necklace after the night she had given them. One shape Freyja would never adopt was the chaste and abstinent virgin. She was always fully engaged with life, ripe in body and desire.

I love Freyja’s beautiful fatness around her middle. (I had said this to John. ‘Not fat,’ he said. ‘Full.’) She is uncompromisingly robust and strongly nailed for all the travails she will have to go through; nothing fey but nothing brutish. The Norse used to have both their houses and their graves made in the shape of boats, smoothly narrowing to the ends. It is the most accommodating form man has ever devised. I focus on that, on the coherence of what John has made compared with all the incipient anarchy of the sea.

A gannet suddenly slaps into the sea beside me. No warning. I start at it and remember this, the story of one of the stewards of St Kilda. At some time in the seventeenth century, (no date, because dates are rarely certain here), the steward, sailing out from Harris to his island responsibilities forty miles away across the Atlantic, found his boat passing through a shoal of herring so thick that the bodies of the fish lay like a pavement on the surface of the water. There was a silver skin to the sea and any man could have walked across it. A south wind was blowing and the boat was skimming through the bodies of the herring as if skating across them. All around them the gannets were diving, again and again, no hesitation necessary, no accuracy needed. It was the atmosphere of a tobogganing party. If the gannets had been children they would have been shrieking at the pleasure. The steward and his companions were gliding to St Kilda as if to Heaven.

A gannet, mistaking his moment, plunging for fish but ignoring the people, dived for his prey but missed his mark, his narrowed, darting body slicing down past mast, sail and shrouds, past the crew at the sheets, into the body of the open boat where its beak and head were impaled in the bottom strakes of the hull. The bird was dead on impact. Its enormous wings stretched across the frames and thwarts of the boat almost from one gunwale to another. Its perfect white body, six feet across from black wing-tip to black wing-tip, and a yard long, took up as much room as a man. The bubble of perfection had been pierced. The plank was splintered through. Twenty miles of the Atlantic separated the steward and his party from Harris and twenty from St Kilda. Could they mend the punctured hull? Would they drown here? Was water coming in faster than they could keep it out? Searching for the damage down in the bilges, the steward and his crew, scrabbling the ropes and creels out of the way, looked for signs of water bubbling in. There was none. Miraculously, the bilges were dry. The gannet’s head had plugged the hole its dive had made and its body was left there for the rest of the voyage, four hours to the bay on Hirta, with the enormous corpse beside them performing its role as feathered bung.

I was first told that story when I was a ten-year-old boy. I stood up with shock as the crisis hit and, of course, I have never forgotten it. I have learned since how prone to accident the gannet is. Every year in each of the great rocky gannetries around the Scottish coast, on Ailsa Craig and Bass Rock, in the stupendous avian city of St Kilda, hundred of gannets crash on arrival, breaking a wing or a neck, either dying then or over many weeks as their thick reservoirs of subcutaneous fat slowly wither in the breast, a pitiable death. Evolution does not create the perfect creature, only the creature that is perfect enough.

It is the one bird I wish would come to live on the Shiants. For a few years in the 1980s, the islands were the smallest gannetry in the world. Like a corporal among dukes, the Shiants made their glorious appearance in the ranks of the great: starting with St Kilda 100,100 gannets and Grassholm 60,000, the list ends with:

Shiants: 1.

He was to be seen for a few years perched solemnly on one of the north-facing rock buttresses of the islands, looking out woefully to the Lewis shore, hoping, I always imagined, that a lovely gannet girl might think this a suitable place to make her life. Around him, the guillemots stared and squabbled. Above them, the fulmars spat and cackled. No other gannet came to join him and by 1987, the Shiants, still listed in the wildly prestigious catalogue of British gannetries, now had an even more woeful entry:

Shiants: o

The mind is distracted for a moment and then returns to the foolishness of what you have done. It was not exactly the vision of the drowning man but I found myself thinking of the people I love and have loved. Do men drown regretting what they have done with their lives, all the stupidities and meannesses, the self-delusions and deceits? I was driving blind and it was not comfortable. I had been in the boat nearly three hours and even through all the layers of clothes I was getting cold. I had a hand-held GPS with me and it put my position at just about six degrees, twenty-seven minutes west, fifty-seven degrees, fifty-four minutes north. I should have been almost on the islands now but I could not see into the mist-bank to the north and east of me. I needed to come round to the north side of the Shiants to bring the boat into the bay between them, protected there from the southwesterlies. I had to overrun them and then turn for shelter. I hadn’t been here for a year and by now I was in a state of high anxiety.

This approach is larded with danger. Lying off the islands to the west is a chain of rocks and small steeply banked islets called the Galtachan or Galtas. No one knows what their name means but it may perhaps come from the Old Norse word, Gaflt, meaning the gable-end of a house. That, at least, is John MacAulay’s suggestion. It is a derivation which even now makes me smile. So much for these savage seas! So much for the tides that rip through the narrow channels between the Galtas! When the Ordnance Survey first came here on 27 October 1851, the surveyor wrote a hurried and unpunctuated description in his notebook:

Received Name: Galltachan

Object: Islands

Description: This is a range of Several [?] High and Low water Rocks extending from east to west three of which has a little of their top covered with rough pasture and surrounded by small but steep rocky Cliffs. there is a channel between each and every one of the High Water Rocks. at a distance they appear low but are no way inviting as at all times especially at Spring tides there is a rapid current about them the tide flows exceedingly strong flowing the same as a large River.

That is the modern voice; the survey officer, Thomas O’Farrell, measuring, estimating, a little fearful, unable to disassociate his description of the place from his apprehension over it. It could easily have been my voice, frightened now of being swept by the tide into the channels between the Galtas through which the deep-drawing Freyja might not have passed. Perhaps John MacAulay would have felt relaxed here, but neither I nor O’Farrell were Vikings. Would either of us so calmly have named these rocks ‘the gable-ends’? Would we have wanted to or been able to domesticate them so casually? The Gables? It is a joke, a place with a double garage and stuck-on timbers outside Beaconsfield. To know them as the Gables is evidence of an attitude of heroic calm; a sudden jump into the Viking world. To call them that is as cool as the gannet, as easy in the sea as by the hearth, almost literally at home there. Or maybe something else: the roofs of buried houses, mansions drowning in the Minch.

Freyja does at least belong to that world. I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway. Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive. Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch direct to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris. Although Freyja’s own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as ‘Stockholm tar’: a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages. Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported from Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast. In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had the tenancy of the islands. They

launched forth in this gentleman’s boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea. I nearly called Freyja ‘Fulmar’ because of that phrase of Teignmouth’s. No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds. It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after. But Freyja’s fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking. The words used here for boats and the sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people’s lips for a millennium. If I say, in Gaelic, ‘windward of the sunken rock’, ‘the seaweed in the narrow creek’, ‘fasten the buoy’, ‘steer with the helm towards the shingle beach’, ‘prop the boat on an even keel’, ‘put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket’, ‘use the oar as a roller to launch the boat’, ‘put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern’, ‘set the sea chest on the frames amidships’, ‘the tide is running around the skerry’, ‘the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf’, ‘haul in the sheet’, ‘tighten the back stay’, ‘use the oar as a steerboard’, or say of a man, ‘that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat’, every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic. It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged. Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in Norse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag now is made with sugar and cream. With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used. A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse. The smock worn by fishermen is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse. Sgaireag is the Gaelic for ‘seaman’, skari the Norse word. And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation. The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for a hammock. Norse for ‘strong’ becomes Gaelic for ‘fat’. The Norse word for rough ground becomes ‘peat moss’ in Gaelic. A hook or a barb turns into an antler. To creep – that mobile, subtle movement – translates into Gaelic as ‘to crouch’: more still, more rooted to the place. A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide. ‘To drip’ becomes ‘to melt’. A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago. There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion. Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning ‘a trap’), nor for ‘strife’, nor ‘a faint resemblance’ – the word it took was svip, the Norse for ‘glimpse’. The Gaelic for ‘lullaby’ is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning ‘allurement’, ‘seduction’.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment. Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale. Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer – all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships. Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

I was steering west of the Galtas but I had to make sure it was a long way west. The water had turned, as it does sometimes with the tide, into strange, long slicks, each slab of water as smooth as a hank of brushed hair. It is a horrible sensation in the mist, a strangeness at sea, when all you want is normality and predictability. Was this the effect of a rock ahead of me which I couldn’t see? About five hundred yards off the westernmost Galta was the most dangerous rock in the Shiants: Damhag, perhaps meaning ‘ox-rock’ in Gaelic (no one knows why) or more likely ‘a rock awash’. It is pronounced ‘Davag’. O’Farrell had heard of its terrors:

Received name: Damhag

Object: Rock

Description: This is a Small low water Rock seen only at Spring tides which makes it very dangerous to mariners, lying about 15 Chains west a Group of high and low water ones, the tide flows so Strong and rapid here that unless Mariners were aware of its Situation it would often become fatal. there has been not long ago a large vessel wrecked on it the vessel and crew were all lost. at neap tides if the wind is high there is always Breakers seen on it.

That ship was in fact the Norwegian schooner, Zarna, of Christiansund, which was wrecked here on 13 February 1847, en route to Norway from Liverpool with a cargo of salt.

None of this is pleasant in a small boat in a rising sea. If the GPS could be relied on, I was well clear but I didn’t want to overrun too far. The long slicks of water were giving way to a broken, pitted surface like the skin of an orange.

North-west of the islands is the Sound of Shiant, separating them from the bulk of Lewis five or so miles to the west. The Sound is a place of deep discomfort. I have never been in there in a small boat and the fishermen in Scalpay have warned me away from it. Donald MacSween (another Viking name, Sveinson), whom I have known since I was a boy, and who, for a few years after his cousin Hugh MacSween gave up, was the tenant of the Shiants, told me only that I had to respect the Minch. ‘Pick your day and pick where you go and you will be all right.’ After supper in Rosebank, his house in Scalpay, in the sitting room, with the coal fire burbling beside us and Rachel, his wife, looking through the packets of seeds she was to plant that spring, from time to time telling me that I was a disgrace, ‘walking around the way you do with holes in your socks the like of which I have never seen in my life’, Donald and I sat over a chart together.

He is a strict churchman, a man of immense propriety and overwhelming charm. ‘What do you talk about all the time on the radio to each other when you are out at sea?’ I asked him once. Channel 6 on the VHF is solid with Gaelic chat, day and night, between the fishermen. ‘Local talent,’ he said, with a face like a gravestone. Rachel told me that in three decades of marriage she has never once seen him angry. ‘He must be a saint then,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s a saint to me.’

Donald knows all there is to know about the Minch. Without a second thought I would trust my life to him. He has fished it since he was a boy and he knows every one of its ‘dirty corners’. ‘Oh yes,’ Mary Ann Matheson, the mother of John Murdo, the present shepherd on the Shiants, said to me once, ‘you need to listen to Donald. He knows all the crooks and crannies of the wind.’

With his glasses on and his enormous, scarred hands feeling their way across the figures and the submarine contours, he went through the chart with me. Off the mouths of Lochs Seaforth, Bhrollúm and Cleidh there are big riffles on the ebb as the lochs drain out. There is a bar across the mouths of each of them so that the draining water has to rise from something like sixty to twenty fathoms as it emerges. That does not make for an easy sea and in my boat I should avoid them.

But the real danger was in a triangle of sea between the Shiants, Rubha Bhrollúm, which is the nearest point of Pairc on Lewis, and the mouth of Loch Sealg, five miles or so to the north. I was not to enter it. The sea there was not, Donald said, ‘very pleasant’. Heavy, fast tides ebbing down from Cape Wrath or flooding up from the southern Hebrides are squeezed by the islands here into a narrower channel. At the same time, the water is forced to run over a knotted and fractured sea-bed.

A huge ridge of rock, three miles long and more than three hundred and fifty feet high, coming within seventy or eighty feet of the surface, stretches most of the way across the Sound, a sharp-edged submarine peninsula reaching out from the Shiants towards Rubh’ Uisenis on Lewis. It makes that short passage on which the Admiralty chart-markers print an innocuous-looking set of wrinkly lines, meaning ‘tidal overfalls’, the equivalent of a set of rapids in a river. But the river coming up to them is five miles wide and four hundred and fifty feet deep, that enormous mass of water running at the height of spring tides at almost three knots, the speed of a fast walk. Any idea of a river is of the wrong scale. This is the equivalent in tonnage and in volume of an entire range of hills on the move. At certain states of high wind against spring tide, the sea here can turn into a white and broken mass of water, a frothing muddle of energies stretching across the whole width of the Sound, a chaos in which there are not only steep-faced seas coming at you from all directions, but, terrifyingly, holes, pits in the surface of the sea, into which the boat can plunge nose-first and find it difficult to return.

The Sound of Shiant is also known as Sruth na Fear Gorm, the Stream of the Blue Men, or more exactly the Blue-Green Men. The adjective in Gaelic describes that dark half-colour which is the colour of deep sea water at the foot of a black cliff. These Blue-Green Men are strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who come aboard and sit alongside you in the sternsheets, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same metre and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew.

The Reverend John Gregorson Campbell, Minister of Tiree from 1861 to 1891, and a renowned collector of folklore in the Hebrides, claimed to have met a fisherman who had seen one. It was, Campbell reported, ‘a blue-coloured man, with a long, grey face and floating from the waist out of the water, following the boat in which he was for a long time, and was occasionally so near that the observer might have put his hand upon him.’

Something about the Blue Men has attracted one folklorist after another. Donald A Mackenzie, author of Scottish Folk Lore and Folk Life, published in 1936, even claimed to have preserved a fragment of verse dialogue between skipper and Blue Man tossing beside him in the billows. Both had, it seems, been studying the verses of Edward Lear and the rhythms of Coromandel and the Hills of the Chankly Bore were still ringing in their ears:

Blue Chief: Man of the black cap, what do you say

As your proud ship cleaves the brine?

Skipper: My speedy ship takes the shortest way

And I’ll follow line by line.

Blue Chief: My men are eager, my men are ready

To drag you below the waves.

Skipper: My ship is speedy, my ship is steady.

If it sank it would wreck your caves.

‘Never before,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘had the chief of the blue men been answered so aptly, so unanswerably. And so he and his kelpie brethren retired to their caverns beneath the waves of the Minch.’

Mackenzie went on to describe how ‘Once upon a time,’ – a giveaway phrase, if ever there was one, for non-first hand information – ‘a ship passing through the Stream of the Blue Men came upon a blue coloured man asleep on its waters. The sleeper for all his nimbleness was captured and taken aboard.’ The crew bound him hand and foot but were appalled to see two of his friends following. Mackenzie then reports the conversation between the pair of Blue Men: ‘One said to the other: “Duncan will be one man.” The other replied: “Farquhar will be two.”’

This was clearly a threat to the crew but luckily, before disaster could strike, the Blue Man they had captured ‘broke his ropes and over he went.’

Is there anything more serious one can say about this? TC Lethbridge, sailor, archaeologist, savant, Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge for much of the twentieth century, who believed that Druidism and Brahmanism were the same, had an intriguing theory about the Blue Men. In The Power of the Pendulum, his final, eccentric and free-spirited book, published in 1976, he touched briefly on the survival of beliefs such as these. Making connections which more strait-laced archaeologists are wary of, he identified the Blue Men with Manannan, the Celtic sea-god remembered in the place-name of Clackmannan, meaning ‘Manannan’s stone’, and Manannan with Poseidon. The seaways around the shores of Europe bring stories, and ways of looking at the world, as well as goods. He plunged on into dangerous territory. A ditty had been recorded in the early twentieth century that was still being said or muttered among the fishermen of Mallaig:

Ickle Ockle, Blue Bockle		Little youthful Blue God
Fishes in the Sea.	or	Of the fishes of the sea
If you’re looking for a lover		If you’re looking for devotion
Please choose me.		Please choose me.

It is a charm-cum-game-cum-riddle for Poseidon, of whom the Blue Men in the Minch were the last, rubbed-down remnants. ‘How would you describe a god of this kind?’ Lethbridge asked. ‘As a cloud of past memories, to some extent animated by the minds of those who retained it.’

John MacAulay as a fifteen-year-old boy forty-five years ago, spending a season ‘at the fishing’ on the Monachs, to the west of Uist, heard stories from fishermen who had been out in the Sound of Shiant. On a wild day, they had hauled something or other very strange from the sea. They had no idea what it was. Other creatures of the same sort seemed to be visible in the surf around them and they didn’t like it. Nothing is easier than being spooked at sea in a small boat, and the Sound of Shiant seemed to be turning into that horrible continuity of white and broken water. All sense of one’s own fragility; the thumping of the hull against each new wave, the distance from shore, one’s own pitiable progress to windward, the sheer size of the cold, hateful sea, the knowledge of all the others that have been drowned here before you: your throat constricts, you feel it in your chest and the stories start to turn real.

The fishermen, rather than carry their mysterious catch back home in triumph or as a curiosity, threw it back into the thrashing water among its companions, and it was lost to sight. Surely not a Blue-Green Man? John MacAulay guesses that it might have been a walrus, of which one or two occasionally wander south from their Arctic breeding grounds, appearing here as enormous mustachioed aliens to Hebridean eyes. Donald MacSween is scepticism itself: ‘How have you got on with your investigations into the mermaids?’ he asks from time to time.

I wasn’t interested now. I was straining for the sight either of a Galta, a blessed gable-end, or of Damhag in front of me. Some of the swells were just breaking under their own weight. Behind me, the little grinning teeth of the breaking seas were scattered across the whole visible width of the Minch. Downwind I couldn’t see them. If I looked ahead of me, it was like a crowd from behind, a sea of wind-coiffed heads. The slick black-grey backs of the waves moved on in front of me. Scarcely any whiteness was apparent. It was like two different seas.

The wind was coming and going around me. I called the Coastguard on the VHF, Channel 16. ‘Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard, this is Freyja, Freyja, Freyja.’ My eyes were on the sea ahead for the white on Damhag, the appearance of a Galta, the radio in its waterproof case in one hand, the tiller in the other communicating the quiver of the sea to my hand. Out of the radio a voice:

‘Freyja, Freyja, Freyja, this is Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard.’ A young woman in a calm, warm office twenty miles away, grey carpet on the floor, magnetic charts of the Sea Area Hebrides covering half of one wall, men and women in their blue uniforms at the desks, coffee there on plastic coasters, a normal call on a normal day.

She gave me the forecast but we exchanged no names. She was the Coastguard, I was Freyja. She was providing a service. I was on my own. The weather would stay as steady as it was for the next twenty-four hours, south, southwesterly, four to five, with the wind dropping away after that. There would be something like calm for a day or two.

I was cold. I reached down into the bag at my feet for my own coffee in the thermos. My hands fumbled with it. Sandwiches in the plastic bag. I checked my position on the GPS again. It all feels a little absurd, to think that I might ever reach the condition in which it would be natural to call those rocks ‘The Gables’. I am in my own world of bags from the Stornoway Co-op, the VHF in its ‘Aquapac’, the GPS locating me through the American military satellites orbiting above. They tell me that I have passed Damhag and the Galtas. It is time to turn east.

It’s a relief. I must be nearly there. Simply taking the stern of the boat through the wind and gybing, moving the sail over to the other side, it feels better. That is a sign of arrival, or at least of near-arrival. I have got that amount of sea under my belt. All that strange width of sea has now, oddly, changed in my mind. Uncrossed, it felt terrifying. Having crossed it, I feel as if I could cross it any number of times. I sense John MacAulay at my shoulder. Is this all right John? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you’re not doing too badly.’

Now, though, I was moving into the shadow of the known, the sea around the Shiants. Because the Shiants are themselves such a disturbance to the flow of the tide, for others this would seem like the most hazardous and hostile section of the passage. But I’m familiar with the sea here. It is like knowing an old ill-tempered dog. I know how to get round him. Moving across the swell, a different pattern, Freyja was making a rolling barrel along the crests and then slewing into the troughs behind them. Looking up, back in the stern, with the boat underway, I saw that things would be all right. The sky was lifting. From a satellite, I would have seen the shifting of an eddy, the slight revolution of some huge cloud crozier turning on the scale of Europe, the planetary mixing of Arctic and tropical air. This was the southeastern limb of a giant depression rolling in out of the Atlantic and on to Scandinavia. It had blown me here. I felt a little sick but I could see where I was and it was where I had hoped to be. The seas breaking on Damhag were a mile to the south-east, that silent flinging of spray into the air above the rock, like a hand repeatedly flicking out its fingers, signalling ‘Keep away, keep away!’ I was well clear of it. The broken line of the Galtas extended for a mile beyond the rock, black and bitter, the knobbled spine of a half-submerged creature: one like an old woman with a bonnet, called Bodach, or Old Man; others blocky, fretted.

Beyond them, arrival, emergence, home. Coming out of the mist, draped with cloud ribbons like feather boas across their shoulders, were the islands, my islands, my destination. The Shiants are the familiar country, the place around whose shores I feel safe. Even in all its masculine severity, I know where the tide rips and bubbles, exactly where the rocks are, and the known, however harsh, is the safe and the good. Even though the sea now was more uncomfortable than anywhere on the journey, I started to feel easy. A small wave slopped aboard and I pumped it out. A shearwater cut past me and the birds were hanging around the Galtas like bees. But the relief, as ever, was ambivalent. It’s always like this. I never quite feel the comfort of arrival that I expect. It is enigmatic. This is the longed-for place, but it is so indifferent to my presence, so careless of my existence, that I might as well not have been here.

A remembered room is never as big as you think, but the Shiants always emerge much larger than I have remembered them. They are called na h-Eileanan Mora in Gaelic, which perhaps means ‘the Big Islands’, and here, now, they slowly billowed above me, a new world. They expand into reality, growing out of the mist, and their big, green, wrinkled forms drifted at me like half-inflated balloons. I let out the breath I had been holding in for hours. A home-coming to a place that provides no welcome. They come at you one by one. First Garbh Eilean, the Rough Island (garbh is the adjective you would use to describe someone who was strong, stocky, ‘a big lad’), the most masculine and the westernmost. Freyja pushed steadily eastwards, along its northern cliffs, a mile-long wall of black columned rock, slightly higher in the centre, dropping at each side, each of the columns eight or ten feet wide, bending slightly as they rise from the sea, like a stand of bamboos swayed in a breeze. The sea sucks and draws in the caves and hollows and the birds are spattered across them like paint flicked from a brush. Freyja keeps to her line without my hand on the tiller. In the lee of the cliffs, their ribbed surfaces are like the ripples of an enormous curtain, gathered in its folds; or a vast black shell.

A scallop boat skipper waves to me as my sail snaps from one side to another in the gusts off the islands. The Shiants are stretching their arms around me. Around the corner comes Eilean Mhuire, Mary Island, the sweetest, the softest, the lowest, the most feminine and the most fertile. It is early in the year and the grass has yet to grow. The islands’ skin is pale, a musty green. The sea is a little quieter here, protected by the islands from the swell. I am still a little dazed from the journey, as if I have emerged into the quiet from a room filled with noise. I slide along and remember the past.

At last, I turn into the bay which the three islands encircle. Eilean an Tighe, House Island appears, enclosing it to the south, the third of the three. Together they have always seemed to me like a family: Garbh the father, Mhuire the mother and this most domestic of the islands as their child, taking some of its character from each. The wind is less here but fluky. I let go of the tiller and the boat sails wherever it will as I tidy things away. I have crossed a sea which I have spent my life looking at: sixteen miles in three and a half hours, about four and a half miles an hour. I look back at it. There is no way I would set out on it now. Long, grey-faced waves come on at me from the south-west. For a moment I have a companion. A kittiwake, one of the smallest of the gulls, hangs buoyed above me. The way is still on the boat, making its easy last strides into the ring of islands. There is calm water in their shelter, and as if suspended above us the kittiwake comes to a point just beyond the stern, bobbing above me, curious, its arched wings like the curve of the sail, peering down from mast height into the boat, looking at me and all my possessions in their waterproof bags. Kittiwakes often hang after fishing boats, waiting for the offal as the fish are gutted. That is all it was, a hungry bird in pursuit of food, and it was only for a moment or two, but I took it as a sign of arrival.

The boat ran on into the bay. If the word ‘here’ has any meaning beyond simply the label of a place where you happen to be; if ‘here’ can be the name for the place to which you belong for more than just a moment, then this was my here. I let the anchor go and the chain ran out through the fairlead and down into the patch of sand, just off the Garbh Eilean screes where men have always anchored in a southwesterly. I unstepped the mast and folded the sail into its bag. I had arrived. I could hear the wind on the far side of the island beating without thought on the shore.