Читать книгу The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The moving story of a vanished island community - Tom Steel - Страница 11

Boys on St Kilda were taught to climb cliffs as soon as they were able. ‘The first thing to attract our notice’, wrote John Ross the schoolmaster of an August day he spent in a boat at the foot of the cliffs of Conachair, ‘was one of the men and his little boy on a rugged but fairly level piece of ground rather down near the sea. One end of the rope was tied round the father’s waist while the other was tied round the boy’s waist. Most probably, lest he being young, rash and inexperienced, might slip into the sea. There they were all alone then, killing away at a terrible rate, for the boy was collecting while the father kept shaking and twisting.

‘The man removing himself from the rope shouldered a burden of dead fulmars and made for a cutting in the rock, too narrow one would think for a dog, and too slippery for a goat. Along this he crawled on hands and knees. A single slip in the middle would have hurled him at least eighty feet sheer down into the sea. But he landed his burden safely and returned for the boy. The rope was tied as before, but only about a yard was left between them this time and that brave little fellow of only ten summers fearlessly followed his father and reached safety without a hitch. This is how the St Kildans train their young to the rocks and what a dangerous life it is.’

The St Kildans learnt how to climb from childhood. Most of them remember playing on the cliffs of Conachair when they were young and thinking nothing of it. They grew up to be short, stocky, agile men, natural climbers. The bone structure of their ankles differed from that of people born elsewhere. The ankle of a St Kildan male was practically half as thick again as that of a mainland person, and the toes were set further apart and almost prehensile.

The slaughter of sea fowl for food was essential to life on St Kilda. What the reindeer is to the Laplander, so the gannets, fulmars and puffins that each year made their nests on the cliffs of the rocky archipelago were to the St Kildans. Due to the poverty of the soil, other forms of subsistence were incapable, on their own, of maintaining human life on Hirta. The islanders had their sheep, a few cattle, and a meagre crop of potatoes, barley and corn, but without the flesh of the sea birds they could never have survived. Totally cut off from the rest of society, they were only able to live on their island by denying themselves the way of life common to crofters in other parts of Scotland and becoming, as Julian Huxley remarked, ‘bird people’.

‘The air is full of feathered animals,’ wrote John MacCulloch when he visited St Kilda in 1819. ‘The sea is covered with them,’ he continued, ‘the houses are ornamented by them, the ground is speckled with them like a flowery meadow in May. The town is paved with feathers…The inhabitants look as if they had all been tarred and feathered, for their hair is full of feathers and their clothes are covered with feathers…Everything smells of feathers.’

The sea birds and their eggs were jealously guarded by the St Kildans. In 1695, a boatload of strangers attempted to steal some eggs from the cliffs. The St Kildans fought off the intruders and put the precious eggs back in their nests. For good measure the islanders confiscated the pirates’ trousers before sending them on their way. During the nesting season, the single egg laid by the fulmar was not allowed to be removed for eating. Steps were taken to prevent the sheep and dogs from worrying the birds. Every June, the St Kildans fenced off the cliff tops with ropes made from hay with feathers stuck into them, so vital was it to the community that the eggs be allowed to hatch. When Parliament at Westminster passed an Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds in 1869, acknowledgement was made of the islanders’ dependence upon their feathered itinerants. A clause was inserted excluding St Kilda from the provisions of the Act because of ‘the necessities of the inhabitants’.

For nearly nine months of the year, the St Kildans were preoccupied with the killing of sea birds. ‘From their dependency on the capture of sea fowl for their support,’ wrote George Atkinson, ‘all their energies of body and mind are centred in that subject and scarcely any of their regulations extend to anything else; from the period of the arrival of the fowl in the month of March, till their departure in November, it is one continued scene of activity and destruction.’

Puffins in their hundreds of thousands were the first birds to return in March after a winter at sea. Most of them made for the island of Dun, and the St Kildans lost little time in seeking out the first fresh meat they had had the opportunity to taste for nearly four months. The adult gannets would begin to come back at the end of January, but it was not until April that the islanders would launch the boats to go to Stac Lee and Stac an Armin to kill the birds. During the month that followed, gannets and puffins continued to provide the people with food, and the fulmars nesting on the ledges of the cliffs of Conachair offered a welcome change of diet. Although the fulmar eggs were never taken from the nest because the female laid only one, those of the gannet and the guillemot were taken in their thousands. The St Kildans ate them fresh, or preserved for consumption at some later date, in the knowledge that the female of those species would replace the stolen egg.

June and July were lean months as far as sea birds were concerned. The puffin was the only bird available for eating while the young gannets and fulmars hatched and grew. The harvesting of fulmars took place in August when the young birds would be killed in their thousands before they could leave the nest. The young brown-feathered gannets, or gugas as they were called, matured more slowly, and it would be a month later before the men would take to the boats and rob the stacs of the birds.

When Martin Martin visited St Kilda in 1697, he estimated that 180 islanders consumed 16,000 eggs every week and ate 22,600 sea birds. From Stac Lee alone, he reckoned, the St Kildans took between five and seven thousand gannets annually. A century later an observer calculated that nearly 20,000 gannets were harvested each year on Stac Lee and Stac an Armin. In 1786, over 1,200 gugas were taken from their nests in a single expedition.

In the nineteenth century, however, the number of gannets killed declined. No more than 5,000 birds were taken each year in the first half of the century. By 1841, the catch had dropped to an average of 1,400 a year, and after the turn of the century only about 300 young gannets were killed and preserved for winter eating by the St Kildans.

As early as 1758, the islanders claimed that the fulmar had begun to replace the gannet as the staple of their diet. The reasons for the change were probably many. There was a sharp increase at that time in the number of fulmars breeding upon St Kilda, and the feathers and oils of the bird were of great value to the proprietor. Until 1878, St Kilda was the only breeding colony of the fulmar petrel in Great Britain, and the MacLeods may well have wished their tenants to exploit the situation. Centuries of decimation, moreover, may well have laid the great stacs almost bare of gannets. Robbed of its eggs as well as its young, the colony of solan geese had probably decreased.

The ratio of fulmars killed per inhabitant remained fairly steady throughout the island’s history. During the years 1829 to 1843 when the population of St Kilda stood at about 100, an average of 12,000 fulmars was slaughtered every year, which divided out meant 118 birds for every inhabitant. In 1901, by which time the population had fallen to 74, the harvest numbered some 9,000 birds, which meant that each islander was consuming some 130 fulmars annually. Even in 1929, the year before the evacuation, the last harvest comprised some 4,000 carcasses, an average of 125 per inhabitant.

The diet of the St Kildans was based on the flesh of these sea birds. Breakfast normally consisted of porridge and milk, with a puffin boiled in with the oats to give flavour. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the people disliked wheaten food and fish, and ate mutton or beef only as a last resort. The main meal of the day, taken at about lunchtime, comprised potatoes and the flesh of fulmars.

Nearly all food on Hirta had to be boiled or stewed. There were no ovens on the island, save the range that was the proud possession of the minister in the manse. To the outsider, food tasted rather bland, and a lack of proper fuel meant that it was usually under-cooked and never served very hot. ‘When boiling the fulmar,’ wrote John Ross, ‘they sometimes pour some oatmeal over the juice and take that as porridge, which they consider very good and wholesome food which I have no doubt it is to a stomach that can manage to digest it.’

The flesh of the fulmar is white. In the older birds, it is a mixture of fat and meat, while the young birds are nearly all fat. When cooked, the fulmar tasted somewhat like beef, and Heathcote, having eaten a meal with the St Kildans, remarked, ‘I must say that we were agreeably surprised. We had expected something nasty, but it was not nasty. It was oleaginous, but distinctly tasty.’

If the fulmar was tasty, it was also tough – good for the St Kildans’ teeth and gums. Ross noted that at the time of the fulmar season, the whiteness and strength of the inhabitants’ teeth improved. Dental care was never to be a problem worthy of note on Hirta, in spite of the fact that toothbrushes were non-existent. Eating the flesh of fulmars, puffins, and gannets seems to have preserved the islanders’ teeth.

In the summer months, the puffins were the main source of food. Mrs Munro, the wife of the last missionary, remembers how they tasted when she tried to cook them. ‘The first lot of puffins (of the season) were brought by the postmaster. They were all dressed, ready for cooking. I asked Nurse Barclay how to cook them and she said put them in the oven and roast them. My husband was in school and came home to dinner and he said, “Try them”. I said, “No thanks, I’ve had enough – I’ve roasted them.” I went to empty the tin and each time I emptied it nothing but oil would come out till you got fed up with seeing it.’

‘The gannets we ate’, recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘tasted fishy and salty.’ Like the fulmar, the gannet was normally salted down for eating in winter. Ferguson recalls: ‘You had to steep them in water for twenty-four hours to take the salt out of them, and then boil them with tatties for your dinner.’ The guga, in fact, was not a food peculiar to St Kilda: the birds were regarded by some on the mainland as delicacies and were regularly served by ships’ cooks on the steamers that plied the Western Isles.

The islanders also ate large quantities of eggs, which, one visitor remarked, ‘they just eat as the peasantry eat potatoes’. Gathered in the spring months, the eggs were boiled and eaten immediately, or else preserved in barrels. The St Kildans were never too fussy about the freshness of the eggs, often keeping them for six to eight weeks before eating them because, they said, time added to their flavour.

The most important possessions on Hirta, used and maintained by the community as a whole, were the boats. Without them, the St Kildans could hardly have existed. They depended upon being able to make the frequently hazardous journey to Boreray and the great stacs to trap the thousands of sea birds that were their livelihood.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the community owned one boat only, sixteen cubits long. It was divided into sections, proportional to the number of families on the island at the time, and every householder was responsible for providing a piece of turf large enough to cover his section of the boat in summer to prevent the hot sun from warping and rotting the precious wooden shell. In winter, the boat was dragged up high above the water line and filled with rocks so that it would not be swept away in a storm or dashed against the rocks.

By 1831, the St Kildans were having to make do with an awkward ship’s boat, weighing almost three tons. Although the boat had three oars either side, the St Kildans made a square mainsail out of their own cloth. Because each family had been responsible for making its share of the sail, the final product was made up of twenty-one patches of various sizes and shades, ‘like what you would have fancied Joseph’s coat to have been’, wrote George Atkinson. The islanders had given their boat a nickname – Lair-Dhonn (Brown Mare).

Ten years later, there was still one boat on Hirta, although the advantages to the community of possessing a second were being talked about by philanthropists on the mainland. In 1861, at a cost of £60, the St Kildans were presented with a fine, new, fully equipped boat. The Dargavel, as she was called, was tragically lost at sea with all hands two years later.

By May 1877 there were four boats on Hirta. Two were given to the people by a wealthy visitor and the others, although almost new, were not thought by the St Kildans to be strong enough to withstand rough usage.

Never in their history did the St Kildans build a boat of their own. Although each household possessed a hammer, and one islander, it is said, had a complete set of carpenter’s tools, there was no indigenous supply of wood on Hirta. It was just as easy therefore to transport a finished boat from the mainland as it was to bring over the materials from which one could be built. The men did their best to repair the boats they had, although many from the mainland thought they did so in a less than enthusiastic way.

Like their cousins in the Hebrides, the St Kildans regarded the sea as a spirit to be wooed rather than a challenge. Although not thought to be particularly good sailors, they did at least respect the Atlantic Ocean surrounding them. ‘The St Kildans’, commented Wigglesworth in 1902, ‘are as expert in the art of managing their boats as they are in climbing the cliffs. I do not mean to say that they are specially expert sailors, but the skilful manner in which they bring their boats up to the rocks and land and re-embark in the face of a heavy swell, where few sailors would even care to risk their boats, is remarkable.’

Every year, the men of Hirta would make the dangerous trip to Stac Lee. It was agreed by the morning meeting that time and tide were right to risk a boat on the four-mile crossing. While the little rowing boat rose and fell with the swell of the ocean, the man in the bows would throw a rope towards the giant stac. ‘In the olden days,’ remembers Lachlan Macdonald, ‘there was a bolt put into the rock there. You’d be lucky sometimes when you were in the boat if you would see it.’ Once the rope was secured on the steel bolt, those who were to land scrambled from the boat onto the rock. ‘Everyone’, says Lachlan, ‘had to take an empty box. You’d carry it up to the top of Stac Lee and when you reached the top you would fill it up with gannets’ eggs.’ Several men would have to stay in the boat. There was no safe mooring by the rock, so they would try to seek as sheltered water as there was available and wait.

When all the St Kildans had filled their boxes, the most dangerous part of the exercise began. Carrying the boxes of eggs on their backs they would make the treacherous descent, ‘which was a worse job than going up’, recalls Lachlan. ‘There would be anything in the box from half a hundredweight to a hundredweight. And you hadn’t got to break them; you had to take them down whole. Maybe sometimes there would be an odd one broken, but there weren’t many.’ The boat, laden down with men and eggs, then returned to the safety of Village Bay. The women, by tradition, were always waiting at the landing-place to greet their exhausted men.

In the early days, eggs were rarely taken from Stac Lee. Most were removed from the nests of Boreray and Stac an Armin. The St Kildans reasoned that by leaving the eggs on Stac Lee, by autumn the young gannets would be more advanced there. A double crop of sea birds was thus assured. Should bad weather, moreover, prevent a crossing to Stac Lee at the appropriate time of year, there were always the birds on Boreray. At the time of the evacuation, Stac Lee was climbed for eggs and nothing else. By then it was too dangerous, given the number of men available, to risk a crossing.

The St Kildans took the eggs of some fourteen species of birds that bred on their archipelago. Some, like those of the gannet and the guillemot, were for eating, others were blown and sold to tourists in the summer months or sent to egg collectors on the mainland. The eggs of the starling, oyster catcher, tree sparrow, fork-tailed petrel, grey crow, raven, and eider duck were frequently asked for, but the greatest prize was the egg of the St Kilda wren – a species of wren slightly larger than the mainland varieties, that was found only on Hirta. After all the eggs were harvested, they were laid out in boxes on the grass and divided out among the islanders. Most homes owned a glass blowpipe brought over from Scotland which was used to remove the contents of the eggs.

Puffins, the major source of fresh food throughout the summer months, arrived in March and remained on Soay and Dun until the end of August. The birds made their nests in the turf. The female laid her single egg at the end of a burrow, usually three or four feet long, dug by both birds. Until recently, it was estimated that the puffin population of St Kilda was over a million; but in the past two years the number has more than halved, and there is some mystery as to what has happened to the birds that never returned. It is thought that oil pollution out at sea has claimed them.

The islanders trained their dogs to drive the birds from their burrows. Once they were forced into the open, the puffins were trapped by an ingenious method. The St Kildans laid a length of rope to which were attached anything up to forty little nooses made of horsehair upon a rock or patch of turf that the puffins frequented. The bird would catch its ungainly legs in the noose. The capture of a few would attract the inquisitive attention of others who, by investigating, got caught themselves. It was estimated that using a puffin gin (as it was called) on the slopes and rocks of Dun, an islander could kill fifty puffins a day.

The puffins were plucked and their carcasses split down the middle. They were hung up on strings outside the house to dry and were then ready for the cooking pot. Apart from eating the flesh themselves, the islanders gave it to their dogs and cattle. In the first half of the nineteenth century, between 20,000 and 25,000 puffins were killed every year. By 1876, more puffins were taken in the summer months than all the other birds put together – upwards of 89,000 birds were slaughtered. In later years when the population was smaller, the St Kildans were still catching 10,000 annually.

There was a time when the women and young girls went to Boreray to catch puffins, while the men saw to the sheep on the island. Before the snaring began, a curious rite was performed. A puffin was caught and plucked of all its feathers, save those on its wings and tail. It was then set free and, according to the St Kildans, immediately attracted other puffins around it. Mass slaughter would then begin.

On occasions, the frightened birds were dragged from their burrows by the dogs. ‘While the sagacious animals pawed at one hole,’ wrote Sands who witnessed the harvest in 1877, ‘they (the women) kept a watchful eye on the burrows adjacent as if they expected the puffins to issue from them. Some of the girls at the same time were plunging their hands deep into the holes and dragging out the birds, and twisting their necks with a dexterity which only long practice could give.’

Guillemots were also killed in the spring and summer months. Their flesh was eaten by the islanders and their feathers kept to be exported later in the year. Stac Biorach was their main breeding ground. The stac was nicknamed the ‘Thumb Stac’ because on the needle of rock the only firm hold available was of the size of a thumb.

Apart from the brief three months September to November, the fulmar petrel could be found on Hirta all the year round. The St Kildans ate some adult birds in the early part of the year, but their main concern was to harvest the thousands of young fulmars in mid-August.

Similar in size to the common gull, the female fulmar lays a single white egg towards the end of May. Both parents take it in turn to incubate the egg. After some forty to fifty days the young bird is hatched, and after seven weeks or so is big enough and strong enough to leave the nest. The St Kildans surveyed the cliffs daily from the beginning of August to be sure that they would commence their slaughter before the birds had flown.

The fulmar harvest was the busiest, most exciting and most important incident in the St Kildan year. ‘They catch the birds for the sake of their meat, oil and feathers,’ wrote Norman Heathcote in 1900, ‘and the act of catching them is their only sport. It is this that makes them love their island home. If it were not that they can rival one another on the rocks, they would be less unwilling to seek adventures in the outer world.’

In the weeks prior to the harvest, many preparations had to be made. The women brought the cattle back to Village Bay from their summer grazing in Glean Mor and made sure that they had ground enough corn to feed the family during the harvest period. The men meanwhile got out the old barrels that would be used to store the prepared birds for winter. The salt, used to preserve the birds and normally delivered to the island by the factor in June, was fetched from the storehouse and distributed to each householder. The stomachs of adult gannets caught earlier in the year would be inflated and dried out. They would be used during the slaughter to contain the precious amber oil of the petrels.

The talk at the daily meeting would be of fulmars. The men would discuss and decide what parts of the cliffs should be cleared first. Normally the harvest began where it was agreed the young fulmars were most advanced, for fear that the islanders might lose them forever. The weather was also an important consideration. Some areas of the cliff were notoriously more dangerous in damp or wet conditions than others.

The most important task was to test the ropes. A length of rope taken from the loft of each home was tested by the men in full view of the rest of the community lest it had rotted during the months of storage. The rope was agreed to be safe if it could stand the strain of being pulled by four men against the weight of a large boulder.

On 12 August the harvest began. Everyone on the island took to the cliff tops. The men had ropes slung across their chests and the women carried the empty stomachs of the solan geese. The children accompanied their parents to watch and learn and help the women carry the day’s catch back to the village. Many women were capable of carrying as much as two hundred pounds of dead birds on their shoulders at a time.

In the early days, particularly when St Kildans went off singly to kill birds, an iron stake was hammered into the cliff top to secure one end of the rope while the fowler descended the face. By the nineteenth century such a practice had been done away with. Instead, an islander would fasten the rope round his chest, low enough to allow the maximum freedom of movement. His colleague would hold on to the other end of the rope while a descent was made. The men worked in their bare feet to ensure a firmer grip on the grassy cliffs that plunged a thousand feet into the sea. When the fowler had gained support for his feet, he would shout up to his friend, ‘Leigas!’ (‘Let go!’), at which command the man at the top would slacken the rope. Below, the slaughter could then begin.

On the cliffs of Conachair the fulmars were normally so dense that the fowler had to kill them in order to clear a way for himself along the ledge. Each young fulmar could weigh up to two or three pounds. The man who did the killing wore a belt, and as the birds were strangled, he slipped the head through the gap between the belt and his body. When he had killed twenty or so birds, or had cleared a particular part of the cliff and wished to move on, the bundle of birds was tied to the end of a second rope and pulled up by one of his companions at the top. ‘And then maybe you go to another place’, recalls Lachlan Macdonald, ‘and do the same and then you maybe take thirty or forty of them on your back home. It’s pretty heavy sometimes. Hard work in a way.’ As little time as possible was spent in the actual killing of birds, and with the call of ‘Tarning nard’ (‘Pull up’), the fowler would be pulled up to the top of the cliff and safety.

Occasionally the thirty-fathom ropes that the St Kildans used would not be long enough to reach the lower parts of the cliffs. In such instances, three men would work together. The first would stay at the top, as before, and the other two would be lowered down one at a time. The second man, having found a secure platform, would then lower the third down to a position from which he could continue the slaughter.

The St Kildans always adopted the easiest method of killing the birds. In many parts of the cliffs, ropes were not needed at all as the nests were readily accessible. In other parts, rather than haul the birds up to the cliff top, the islanders tossed them into the sea, where a waiting boat would pick them up.

The most dangerous operation of all, however, was the ascent of the cliffs from the sea. An island boat would be taken round to the foot of Conachair and two cragsmen would climb by turns in true alpine fashion. In such cases an end of the rope was attached to both fowlers so that in the event of the foremost losing his footing, his companion would be able to break his fall.

The fulmar is capable of spitting the vile-smelling oil contained in its stomach some two or three feet. To the St Kildans, the oil was valuable. ‘As you were going down the rock on the rope,’ remembers Lachlan Macdonald, ‘you try and hide yourself as much as you can. The young fulmars were just about the stage to fly, right enough, but if you don’t get them quickly they’ll make an awful mess of you. They’d spew that oil out on you.’ The fowlers had also to be wary of being startled by such an action lest they be thrown off balance and fall off the face of the cliff. In order to retain the oil in the bird’s stomach, the St Kildans gave the neck a twist.

Sometimes the fulmars nested in places out of reach of a fowler on the end of a rope. To capture them, the St Kildans used a fowling rod, which they made themselves. This was a bamboo pole about fifteen feet long, to one end of which was attached a thin strip of cane. A running noose, made of plaited horsehair or wire and stiffened with a gannet’s quill to maintain a bow, was attached to the cane. With a fowling rod the St Kildans could easily lasso the unsuspecting, inaccessible bird.

The killing lasted a fortnight. Every evening the fulmars were laid in a heap by the shore in front of the village and divided out carefully and equally amongst the islanders. Although the cliffs themselves were divided out before the harvest began, the St Kildans also shared the final catch. ‘You see, supposing you had a share in the cliffs,’ says Lachlan Macdonald, ‘you might have a lot more than the other fellow, so it was fairer to share them all when they came home so that there wouldn’t be any difference.’

‘They all put them in one place,’ recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘and they shared them out – so much for each house – and when they took them home they started plucking them and cleaning them. The old men salted them and the young boys cut their feet and head off and the women took the guts out, and that was the way of it. Next morning you went for another load. That went on until you had two big barrels of fulmars salted. They didn’t get much sleep at all. They would be working till maybe two or three in the morning and away again at eight o’clock for some more.’ Every islander was given an equal share of the harvest, whether or not he or she had taken part in the work. The only exceptions to the rule of absolute equality were those fulmars killed while out of the nest, which the fowler was allowed to keep for himself. The reason why was explained to John Ross by an islander. ‘Should they be left out there all night,’ he said, ‘the ravens, hawks or crows would have eaten them up and they would do good to no one.’

The St Kildans had a use for every part of the fulmar. The feathers, a valuable source of income, were graded according to colour and put into sacks. The fulmar oil, of which every bird normally yielded anything up to half a pint, was poured out of the gannet stomachs into canisters to be bartered when the factor came. Those birds that were to be preserved for eating in winter were split lengthways down the back and filled with salt. They were then packed like herring in barrels. The entrails of the birds were often used as fishing bait, while the bones were condemned to the midden at the back of the house to become a good, rich fertilizer by the following spring. A large number of birds, of course, would be eaten fresh. The carcasses were boiled and the fat that came out of them, once cooled, could be skimmed off and used in the islanders’ lamps. ‘All this time there is nothing but birds, fat and feathers everywhere,’ remarked the Reverend Neil Mackenzie of the village at the time of the harvest. ‘Their clothes are literally soaked in oil, and everywhere inside and outside their houses, nothing but feathers; often it looks as if it were snowing.’

Traditionally, the St Kildans did not use salt to preserve the flesh of the sea birds. Salt was frequently scarce and to a poor people often expensive. The strong winds that are rarely absent from Hirta were used instead to stop the carcasses from going bad during the winter months. To be preserved by the wind, however, the birds had to be kept dry and the islanders built hundreds of little stone storehouses called cleits that allowed the wind to pass over the food, but not take with it any moisture.

Cleits are unique to St Kilda. Without them life would not have been possible on such a damp and wet island. They were constructed entirely out of stone and turf. The granophyre slabs that litter the eastern part of the island were admirably suited to the building of corbelled, dry-stone walls. Large, flat slabs covered with turf provided the structure with a roof. For strength as well as dryness, the little doorway was normally set in the end of the cleit facing the hillside. The cleits were usually about eight to twelve feet in diameter and four or five feet high. Those built by the St Kildans inside the wall surrounding the village were used mainly to store the carcasses of sea birds and were round in shape.

The greatest concentration of cleits lies in the Village Bay area, but the islanders built hundreds more on Hirta, some on the slopes of Conachair, others on Oiseval. Beyond the wall, cleits were used to store practically everything that had to be kept dry, like ropes, feathers and even clothing. High on the hill-slopes they were used almost exclusively to dry and store the lumps of turf for the fires of Village Bay.

At the end of the fulmar harvest, the St Kildans would take two or three days’ rest. Exhausted by their labours, they could relax for a while in the knowledge that safely stored away were some of the food supplies that would keep them alive in winter. But another harvest still remained to be reaped, that of the young gannet, or guga.

St Kilda, then as now, could claim to be the largest gannetry in the world. A count of the colony taken in 1960 revealed that some 40,000 pairs breed on Boreray, Stac Lee, and Stac an Armin. Until the nineteenth century the gannet was the buttress of the community’s economy: the oils and feathers of the bird helped pay the rent and provide the people with essential supplies from the mainland.

The gannet builds its nest on ledges of rock. The female lays one egg which is incubated by both sexes for anything up to forty-five days. When the chick hatches it is black and naked but soon develops a white down. By September, the down is replaced by brown feathers. It was then that the St Kildans would prepare for the most spectacular and dangerous task of their year, the hunting of the gannet.

The gugas had to be killed at night, when the birds would be on their nests. Usually a dozen men were involved in the trip – seven would land on Boreray and the other five would stay in the boat and row and drift round the island all night. ‘This island’, wrote George Atkinson, ‘is more universally precipitous than St Kilda, and to a timid or awkward person would be really difficult to land on.’ Before a landing was attempted each man would remove his boots and don a pair of heavy woollen socks.

‘The St Kildans’, continued Atkinson, who went with a party of islanders to Boreray in the summer of 1831, ‘are very dexterous in landing or embarking on, or from, a rocky shore, where the long, heavy swell of the Atlantic keeps the boat rising and falling by the side of the cliff, a height of fourteen or fifteen feet, even when the sea appears quite calm. The boat is placed with her broadside to the rock and kept from striking by a man in the head and stern, each with a long pole for the purpose. One of their barefooted climbers stands ready in the middle with a coil of rope on his arms, and seizing an opportunity springs on the rock and establishes himself firmly on some rough projection. He then hauls on the rope, the other end of which, I should have observed, is held by some in the boat, or attached to it, and giving way when the boat falls, tightens the rope at its rising. Another companion joins him and standing three or four feet from him employs another rope in a similar manner, so that together they form a firm and safe gangway or railing, for an inexpert person to spring to land by.

‘When this is attained, however, a most arduous ascent of the precipice is to be accomplished, which is here of the height of six hundred or seven hundred feet, and quite difficult enough for the most indifferent climbers, though unembarrassed by any load, and we were told the women often ascend and descend this with a sheep or a couple of lambs in their arms.’

The colony of gannets on Boreray would be asleep on their nests, but one bird would remain awake and would give the alarm as soon as his suspicions were aroused. The ‘sentry’ bird always had to be killed first, then the fowlers could slaughter the unsuspecting birds at will with the aid of a small club. ‘After working for an hour or two,’ wrote George Murray in 1886, ‘we rested and three of us sat down on the bare rocks with the ropes about our middles, the cloudless sky our canopy, the moon our lamp, and had family worship. The scene to me was very impressive. The the ocean still and quiet far below, and offered praise and prayer to Him who was able to preserve us in such dangerous work.’ Before catching a few hours’ rest, some of the night’s catch would be gutted and stored in the cleits built on Boreray, to be eaten on further expeditions to the island. At daybreak, hundreds of gannets would be loaded into the boat and the crew would return to Hirta. At the landing-place the women, relieved at the sight of their returning men, would carry the catch after it had been divided out to their cottages.

A large bird with a five-foot wingspan, the gannet could be ferocious when disturbed on its nest. Although the birds would not intentionally attack the fowlers, they could and did hit them a hard blow with their powerful wings and sharp beaks as they attempted to flee. On the great stacs, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, there was always the danger, in the dark particularly, of losing footing and falling off. ‘They used to go at night time’, recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘and climb the rock [Stac Lee] at night when the gannets were roosting. But there was always one on watch and that’s the one they made for first in the dark and broke its neck. They then killed all the rest one after the other and left them lying there till daybreak and then threw them out to the sea for the boat to pick up.’ On Stac Lee, the St Kildans stood on a promontory, called the Casting Point, to throw the gannets to the men in the boat below. The point overhangs the base of the rock, so there was little danger of the night’s kill being blown and crushed against the rocks.

A landing on Stac Lee was always dangerous. ‘As we approached the stacs,’ wrote Lady Mackenzie in 1853, ‘the gannets came to meet us in their thousands, and one could hardly see the sky through them. There is no possible landing place on the stacs where a boat can be drawn up, as they rise sheer out of the ocean. At one place for which we steered, there had been an iron pin three feet long let into the rock perhaps ten feet above high-water mark, and from the boat a rope with a loop at the end of it was thrown over this pin and the boat drawn in near enough for some of the best of the St Kildan climbers to spring on to a small ledge. Then they ascended very carefully and very slowly with their rods, with the nooses at the end, and soon they had caught and killed a large number of the solans.’ As with the fulmar, the St Kildans would use fowling rods to trap the less accessible gannets.

When the gannets had been killed, the ropes and rods could be put away for another year. The St Kildans could face another winter confidently. Supplies of food were assured and the feathers and oils extracted from the fulmar and gannet would pay the rent.

The feathers of both birds fetched a fair price on the mainland. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the factor sold most of the fulmar feathers to the British government. Once fumigated, they were impervious to lice and bed-bugs, and as such were much favoured by the army. The amber oil of the fulmar was said to have many of the properties of cod liver oil. Rich in vitamins A and D it was sold on the mainland as a medicine. The St Kildans claimed it helped soothe rheumatic pains and in London and Edinburgh it was sold in bottles to the public as the perfect remedy for tooth-ache. ‘Can the world exhibit a more valuable commodity?’ remarked a St Kildan in the eighteenth century. ‘The fulmar furnishes oil for the lamp, down for the bed, the most salubrious food, the most efficacious ointments for healing wounds, besides a thousand other virtues of which he is possessed, which I have no time to enumerate. But to say all, in one word, deprive us of the fulmar and St Kilda is no more.’

From time immemorial people could only live on Hirta at the expense of the fulmar and the gannet. Year after year the sea birds managed to survive the massive onslaught made by the St Kildans upon their number. Despite the decimation, the colonies were never to desert the stacs and cliffs of the archipelago. St Kilda was first to be deprived of men.