Читать книгу Sea Room - Adam Nicolson - Страница 9

‘THE SEA WANTS TO BE VISITED’, a Gaelic proverb says and, as scarcely needs to be added, the host will murder its guests. Nothing can be understood about these islands, about the life that has been lived on them, and about the tensions under which people have existed here, without grasping that dual fact. The sea invites and the sea destroys. It is often said that the Hebrideans are not as natural seamen as the islanders in Orkney or Shetland, and that the northerners were fishermen who occasionally farmed and the Hebrideans farmers who occasionally fished. That isn’t entirely true, particularly in Lochs. In 1796, there were three hundred and sixty-six families. The ability of the ground itself to sustain the people was minimal. They were lucky if for every oat or grain of barley sown, they could harvest three or four.

Before the nineteenth-century Clearances, when the inhabitants of twenty-seven townships in Pairc were evicted, about three hundred of those Lochs families, distributed like limpets around the shore in their tiny hamlets, were dependent on fishing, mostly of cod and ling which were at their best between February and May. There were seventy fishing boats in Lochs, each with a crew of three or four. The Shiants would probably have had a single boat, or at most two, shared between the five families that lived here. The boats were, essentially, the same as my Freyja, although a little longer, twenty rather than sixteen feet, undecked, with six or eight oars, a heavy dipping lug rig and a hull made of pine (or larch for the better quality) on oak frames. The timber would have been imported, as it was for Freyja, from the mainland.

They can be horribly dangerous in a rising sea, when large volumes of water can land inboard without warning, and I know what would happen if a sea ever came into Freyja. Beside me in the stern I have a large bucket and I would start baling with that. I have watched myself in these situations: a kind of cold panic grips me, a terse rejection of terror. Of course it wouldn’t be enough. With the boat half full, Freyja would be riding lower than before. Almost certainly the next wave or the one after that would come in too. There would be no chance of keeping it out. The stern which John MacAulay had made for me, with that little sprung lift to its line, would not have the buoyancy. Within a minute or two the boat would be awash and there’s no baling then. That’s why the fishermen on Scalpay always ask me if I am going alone, why I am not taking anyone with me. Donald MacSween asks me every time: he smiles with the question, but not with his eyes. They say, ‘You don’t know what it will be like out there if something goes wrong. You would be safer with two.’ I know he thinks that, but he has never once said it.

I have seen one of these boats sunk before, in the warm, still conditions of a quiet bay in the Hebrides. It had been out of the water for a while, the wood had shrunk and when it was launched, the sea poured in like miniature Niagaras between the strakes on either side, rippling down step by step into a widening pool in the bilges. In half an hour she was down to her gunwales. I watched entranced as she went under. It was a blessing, not a catastrophe. I could feel the wood absorbing the water and it was like giving a thirsty animal a drink, a gulping at the longed-for element. The boat looked buried in the sea that morning. She no longer had an existence independent of the water, but sat there still and submerged as if in jelly, an embalming of her life, neither sinking nor floating but absorbed by the water from which she was usually so distinct.

That is a picture you see all around the Hebrides in the early spring, as men who have kept their boats ashore in the winter sink them for a week or so before the summer fishing. Each is tethered to its mooring in the loch like a cow in her paddock. She is happy there ingesting the goodness around her. The season of fatness is to hand and her belly is filling. It is an image of contentment but it is also a prefiguring of something worse: what happens to these small open boats when caught out in the wrong weather. They do not sink but they fill. The sea invades them. All weight in the boat must be thrown out if it is not to pull the hull down. I kept a knife beside me in the stern, ready to cut the rope which was holding down my belongings amidships so that once the hull filled I too could throw everything away. The sea, Donald MacSween told me, would soon turn the boat over and your only chance of survival was to hold onto that upturned hull. It is not easy. The little ledges formed by one strake overlapping the next do provide the thinnest of rock climbers’ footholds but the underwater profile is coated in the deliberately slimy Stockholm tar. As the weather worsens and the cold loosens your grip, the next big wave will wash you off into the sea. Then you are lost.

Records of boat losses are thin before 1800 but the nineteenth century in Lewis and Harris records again and again the loss of these boats and the drowning of their men. In February 1836, two boats from Point were caught out in a sudden gale. They were forced south before the wind, running for the Lochs coast at Cromore, just north of the Shiants. The crew of one boat survived. In the other, the four young men, inexperienced and perhaps underdressed, died of cold. Township after township lost their men. Year after year, boats went down from Barvas, Skigersta, in the district of Ness. In 1875 an oar was all that was found of a boat from Borve, coming ashore at Bragar. Two years later, a Bernera boat was lost with all its crew off the Flannans. Between 1862 and 1889, seventy fishermen from the district of Ness were drowned, in 1895, nineteen men from Back. Almost three hundred Lewis men were drowned in the second half of the nineteenth century, all of them within a few miles of their home shores, some of them watched by their families and friends as the small boats struggled to get home through the surf.

If the bodies came ashore, which they often didn’t, they, like the boats, were smashed into pieces or rotted beyond recognition. It was the pattern all down the western seaboard of the British Isles. Poor soils drive men to boats in which they drown.

At the Shiants themselves, in the spring of 1881 four young fishermen from the village of Lemreway in Lochs came out to the islands to catch a few puffins. None of them was more than twenty years old: Murdo Macmillan, Norman’s son; John Macinnes, Donald’s son; Angus Ferguson, Murdo’s son, and Donald Macdonald, Kenneth’s son. That’s how Dan Macleod, a retired merchant seaman, weaver, story-teller and the carrier of memories and traditions in Lemreway, described them to me. He tells the story in the way Hughie MacSween does, twisting his roll-up between his fingers, looking away to draw on the memory, looking at you to communicate it. Dan also gave me their addresses: the Macmillans lived at 1 Lemreway, the Fergusons at 3 Lemreway, the Macinneses at 5, the Macdonalds at 7. None of the boys was married. ‘They were young boys,’ Dan says. ‘And they wouldn’t be salting the puffins. They’d be giving them away.’

For several decades, probably since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Lemreway men had come out to the Shiants in May and June to catch the puffins. In the 1850s, Osgood Mackenzie, then still a boy, but in time the creator of the subtropical gardens on his inherited estate at Inverewe, near Gairloch, on the mainland, came out to the Shiants and witnessed the Lemreway men catching the puffins: ‘They brought back boatloads of them because they valued the feathers,’ he wrote in his autobiography.

They also enjoyed big pots of boiled puffins for their dinners as a welcome change from the usual fish diet. They told us how they slaughter the puffins. They choose a day when there is a strong breeze blowing against the steep braes where the puffin breed, and the lads then lie on their backs on these nearly perpendicular slopes holding the butt-ends of their fishing rods. These stiff rods would be about nine or ten feet long [and almost certainly at this time made of bamboo]. Holding them with both hands, they whack at the puffins as they fly past them quite low in their tens of thousands, and whether the puffin is killed outright or only stunned he rolls down the hill and tumbles on the shore or into the sea, where the rest of the crew are kept busily employed, gathering them into the boat.

It is possible to reconstruct something of the conditions in May 1881. The steep braes to which Mackenzie refers are on the north face of Garbh Eilean, a big, green, grassy bank, the grass itself thickly enriched by the generations of puffin droppings that have fallen on it. You cannot spend five minutes there without being spattered yourself. The puffin bank faces the small rocky inlet called simply Bagh, the Bay, and beyond it the Stream of the Blue Men and the square outline of Kebock Head in Lewis. A strong breeze blowing on to them, creating the conditions the fowlers preferred, would have been a northerly. That would also be the wind that would carry the boys easily down southwards from Lemreway to the Shiants. With an ebb tide under them, it would scarcely take more than an hour to run down the six miles or so.

You can imagine the dream of the day. The colours which drain out of the Hebrides in the winter, leaving the black rock and grey turf as a monochrome ghost of the summer life, have now begun to return. The lichen glows yellow on the rocks. The off-lying skerries are pink with the thrift in flower. Fat red and white campions make cushions in the nicks of the cliffs. The sea is silk, patterned in the Stream of the Blue Men with the twisted curls and table-top bubbles of the upwelling sea.

It would have been the same in the 1850s and the 1880s as it is today: that glowing light, the notched outline of the mainland to the east hazed by the rising sun, the hills of Skye still wrapped in the morning clouds, the long broken back of the Hebrides running down to south Harris, the Uists and to Barra, and the Shiants hanging in the middle distance, a secret world, asking to be visited.

The Lemreway boys in 1881 planned to stay overnight on the islands. There was a shepherd and his family living there at the time. Donald Campbell, better known as Domhnall nan Eilean, or Donald of the Islands, had come over from Molinginish, a small township on the coast of Harris near the mouth of Loch Seaforth, twenty years before. He had his wife and children with him and together they lived in a good house of two rooms on the island, which had previously been called Eilean na Cille, the Island of the Church, but which they called Eilean an Tighe, House Island, the name it has today.

Summer was the time for visiting. Winters for the Campbells would have been lonely, but come April and May, with the stilling of the sea, the network of connections that have always bound the summer Shiants to the neighbouring islands, would re-emerge. Campbell’s employer, the farmer and Stornoway merchant, Roderick Martin of Orinsay, would bring out to him the meal and other supplies he needed. The socks which the Campbell girls had knitted over the winter would be sold or even given to anyone visiting. Gentlemen in yachts might arrive to investigate the geology or the birds. There were plenty of diversions.

The fowlers, as a courtesy as much as anything else, would have taken their boat to the anchorage just in front of the shepherd’s house on the west side of Eilean an Tighe. Courtesy and hospitality remain the norm here. Even nowadays, when a stranger arrives and the shepherds happen to be there, the greetings are warm, welcoming and generous, far more than among English people in the same situation. ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo,’ I heard Donald ‘Nona’ Smith, one of the modern shepherds, say to a man landing on the beach here one day, a rising chorus of delighted welcome.

‘Do you know him well?’ I asked Nona later.

‘No, I’ve never met him before,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to be diplomatic.’ There is no sense of anyone’s isolation being invaded. Sociability has always included the Shiants. But it can only be presumed on to a certain extent. The Lemreway boys brought their own provisions with them, some oatmeal and perhaps some of the cod or ling they might have caught on the way down.

There is a patch of sandy grey mud on the sea-bed a hundred yards or so offshore in front of the house, and in a northerly it is protected from the worst of the sea. A cairn high on the hill may well be a mark of this anchorage. Its stones are hairy with a long-bearded lichen, and because lichen takes a long time to grow, that alone is a mark of its age. Although people are always ready to attribute seamarks in the Hebrides to the Norse, there is no real way of dating them. The boys would have dropped anchor, unstepped the mast, furled the sail and would have come ashore in their dinghy to the beach next to the Campbells’ house.

The time of birds is the time of abundance, the season of summer-time adventure but the expedition to the Shiants of the Lemreway boys ended in disaster. Their boat, ‘an Orkney-type boat, a double ender, a stout boat’, Dan Macleod calls it, eighteen feet in the keel, a little longer than Freyja, had been safe enough overnight, protected from the northerlies by the bulk of Garbh Eilean. It can be quite still in there even on a wild day. While you hear the groaning of the breakers on the other side a mile away, plunging their long tongues into the caves at the cliff foot and exploding inside them – a heavy, quarryman’s boom reverberating through the island, at your feet, in the lee of the vast, whale body of Garbh Eilean, the water laps on the rocks and the eiders paddle from one inlet to another as if asking for bread in St James’s Park.

The boys spent the night with the Campbells and were due to return home the following day – it was a Wednesday – but they never arrived. That evening, as Dan Macleod has written,

their families, neighbours and friends gathered around scattered vantage points anxiously scanning the surface of the water to see if they could detect any sign of their loved ones’ boat coming home. Alas, there was none and the young men’s fathers resolved to sail out to the Shiants at first light the following day.

The party of fathers arrived at the shepherd’s cottage, and Domhnall nan Eilean told them that the boys had stayed with him on the Tuesday night but when the wind changed direction on Wednesday morning, they had decided to move the boat to a more sheltered spot.

The wind had gone round to the south-west and stiffened. In that wind the anchorage off the house was the most exposed place on the Shiants and there was no way they could leave it there. In a southwesterly, the only usable place is in the shadow of the giant boulder screes that run along the eastern side of Garbh Eilean. Looking down from the cliff-top there on a sunny day, at low tide, with the light driving down through the twenty feet or so of water, in which the puffins and the other auks dive and dart for food, you can see the pale turquoise patch of sand into which boats can drop their anchor. All around are boulders, in which an anchor would get caught and could never be retrieved; or cobbles, through which the anchor would slither in a wind. That sandy patch is well tucked in, sheltered from the west by the block of land above it, and sheltered from the north by a narrow arm of the island which stretches out eastwards towards Eilean Mhuire.

It would have been tricky work, getting the dinghy away from the beach, with the sea coming straight on to them, then sailing the boat away from the now aggressive and surf-lined shore. These long-keeled, broad-beamed boats do not point high into the wind. You are lucky if you can bring the boat to within sixty degrees. The wind that day had become a gale. The seas as they arrived at the Shiant shore were kicking up into long, whitened combers, driving into the notches and crannies of the coastline where they burst into plumes reaching fifty or sixty feet on to the grass. But the boys knew what they were doing. Keeping just out from the shore, with the boat on a broad reach, they could make their way to the far corner of Garbh Eilean. Donald Campbell told their fathers that he had watched them get away, pulling with the oars to begin with and then hoisting the sail, covering the mile or so westwards at a fair pace, reaching the far point of Garbh Eilean, the headland called Stocanish, before disappearing around the corner.

No one can know what happened next. Out there, beyond Stocanish, in a southwesterly gale, with the tide ebbing southwards, can be as good a version of hell as the Hebrides can offer. I have taken Freyja in there on a bad day; not a gale but blowing perhaps Force 5 or 6 with the ebb coming down from Cape Wrath. The sea picks up. When you are in among it, there seems to be no pattern. It stands in little peaks all around you, like the points into which the whipped whites of egg can be made to stand. Or more like that miniature thorny landscape which is left behind if you pick one recently glued plank away from another. As the two separate, the glue is pulled up into little pinnacles with sharp, cup-shaped valleys between them. There is no structure to this form, no readable order, just a little world of mobile chaos, a dancing three-dimensional spiky surface through which you can only hope to make your way. It is disconcerting even in a slight wind, the randomness of it, the unpredictability of those mobile pin-ranges, the lurching and jumping of the boat from one side to another, the steep little walls of sea that the wind makes against the tide, the picture of anarchy and its primordial threat. If you increase the energy in that system, if you turn a gale on to it, if you make these water pinnacles eight rather than four feet high, this stretch of sea would be unsailable.

After an hour or so the Campbells started to get worried. The Lemreway boys had not come back to the house. Donald sent his son John, a blond giant who was deaf and dumb, down to the beach connecting Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe to see if he could make out what was happening in the bay. John returned, highly agitated, somehow communicating to his father the fact that the boat was not to be seen. It had vanished. The Lemreway boys had left their provisions in the Campbells’ house. Clearly they had been intending to stay. Where were they now? The Campbells guessed, or so they told the Lemreway men the next day, that once the boys had got round the corner at Stocanish, they had thought they had better run for home. As soon as the fathers heard this from Donald Campbell, they knew the boat was lost, and without pause set off for the Lewis shore. They searched loch after loch there, hoping to find the boys sheltering from the storm, or driven in there perhaps with their gear broken. They nosed into all the corners of Loch Claìdh, into Bagh Ciarach, Loch Valamus, Loch Bhrollúm, at Camas Thomascro, at Mol Truisg and in the further reaches of Loch Sealg. Their sons were in none of them.

It wasn’t a stupid exercise. The Lewis coast has always provided shelter from the Stream of the Blue Men but in 1881 the boys from Lemreway were never seen again. The rudder of the boat was found a little later washed up on the Mol Bhan, the blond beach, near Orinsay, a few miles west of Lemreway. Timber was scarce in the Hebrides and the rudder was used for more than forty years as a foot-bridge across the stream that runs down over its pale pebbles on to the beach there. It was the way people took back to the village from the peat-bank and nothing was more welcome, when loaded down with peats, than to find the stream properly bridged, an easy step or two across a difficult passage.

A few weeks later, a rudderless Orkney-built boat was found drifting around Cape Wrath, seventy-five miles away to the north. It was recognised by the Lewis fishermen who came across it as the boat that had been lost at the Shiants. There were sickles stowed away in the gunwale. Shortly before the boys had taken the boat to the islands, it had been used for gathering the seaweed that was to be spread on the fields just before the spring sowing of the oats and the barley. The sickles had been left aboard, jammed between the gunwale and the stringer. The sea had clearly turned the boat over twice: once to drown Murdo Macmillan, John Macinnes, Angus Ferguson and Donald Macdonald, and once to set it on its way again to Cape Wrath, with its cargo of sickles intact.

In 1910, another generation of boys, this time from the village of Gravir, just north of Lemreway, set off on the same summer expedition for the Shiants. The party included fourteen-year-old Donald MacPhail. It was the ‘last sad summer of my boyhood’, as he wrote as an old man, before he was sent away as a scholar to the Nicolson Institute, the secondary school in Stornoway, to fulfil his father’s ambitions for him to have ‘a gentleman’s job, chained to a desk, a school room, pulpit or doctor’s surgery.’ He was going to make the best of his last weeks of freedom.

One fine day, with three other boys, I decided to make a hail and farewell trip to the Shiant Islands. My father was away fishing, and my mother did not like the idea very much; however my heart was set on the trip and after getting up early and packing some food and drink in a small cask, we set sail, swathed in the calm early morning sunshine.

When they arrived, they ‘roamed all over the island, collected a lot of eggs and watched the thousands of birds that assembled on the cliffs. We had taken shotguns and ammunition and passed the time away shooting at the puffins.’

Only on the way home from their puffin-shooting trip did the schoolboy crew find themselves in trouble. As they left the Shiants, the wind that day seemed suddenly to get up from the north-west – almost precisely the direction they needed to go – and the boat had far too little weight in it to push itself into the wind.

The bright calmness of the morning gave way to a darkening moody sky and we began to have difficulty beating against the wind in our light, unballasted boat. As the sea got choppy we shortened the sail and had to take it in turns to bale out furiously as the spray washed over the boat making it harder for us to steer and retain control.

Eventually, after many hours, late in the evening, they managed to get into the shelter of Kebock Head, tucked in under its big brutish cliffs, which could protect them from the northwesterlies. A little pool of still water lay under the lee of the headland itself. There they had to wait on their oars, unable, with this wind, to sail up Loch Odhairn into Gravir. At midnight, the boys heard the thudding note of a propeller. They set light to a tarred rag and attracted the attention of a trawler which towed them home. Their parents were out searching on the headlands and nobody noticed the trawler coming into the loch bringing their sons in from the sea. The last hope, so they guessed, was that the boys might be sheltering under Kebock Head, and the Gravir families made their way there across the moor. ‘When they arrived at the Cabag [the Gaelic spelling of Kebock Head] and discovered that there was no sign of our whereabouts they feared the worst.’ Donald MacPhail put the experience behind him. ‘The menacing mass of the Shiant Islands,’ he wrote many years later, ‘never again held any mystery for me. Only a painful memory. My father saw to that.’

A famous and beautiful Gaelic song, still sung at ceilidhs and in the great annual competition, the Mod, can stand for all the laments over those who have drowned in the Shiant seas. In the spring of 1786, the young and handsome Allan Morrison, a shipmaster from Stornoway, who usually traded between Lewis and the Isle of Man, took his boat down the coast of Lewis to Scalpay, where he was to be engaged to Annie Campbell, Campbell of Scalpay’s daughter. In the Stream of the Blue Men, off the Shiants, the wind turned, as it does, his boat was swamped and he and all his crew drowned. Annie Campbell, broken with grief, wasted away and soon died herself. There is no burying ground on Scalpay. The soil is too thin and still today the Scalpay dead are carried over to the sandy soils on the Atlantic side at Luskentyre to be buried. Annie Campbell’s father took her body in a coffin by boat to the most distinguished of all the burying grounds in Harris, at Rodel, in the south-eastern corner of the island. On the way there, another storm came up at them and to lighten the boat, the coffin had to be thrown overboard.

Soon afterwards, the body of Allan Morrison was found washed up on the shore of the Shiants and a few days later Annie’s body was found at the same place.

The song – this is the Shiants’ only brush with Hollywood: it was sung in the film Rob Roy – is in the voice of Annie Campbell, grieving on Scalpay for her lost lover. It survives in many versions, some of them still sung in Cape Breton, in Canada, where the descendants of emigrating Hebrideans took it in the nineteenth century.

Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee; hó rì rì rì u ho, e o hùg hoireann ó, Brown-haired Allan, ó hì, I would go with thee.

I am tormented,

I have no thought for merriment tonight

but only for the sound of the elements

and the strength of the gales …

And brown-haired Allan, my darling sweetheart,

I heard you had gone across the sea

on the slender black boat of oak …

Brown-haired Allan, my heart’s darling,

I was young when I fell in love with you.

Tonight my tale is wretched.

It is not the tale of the death of cattle in the bog

but of the wetness of your shirt

and of how you are being torn by the whales.

I would drink a drink, in spite of everyone,

of your heart’s blood,

after you had been drowned.