Sea Room - Adam Nicolson

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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.

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