Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  ‘Looks interesting.’ Malcolme was unimpressed.

  I wondered if we might head somewhere else and save a crossing of these lethal areas over which the dragon’s red breath was playing. A scan of the pilot book revealed a promising harbour not too far away, but the accompanying text noted that the harbour was famous for being the place where a rich lady landowner of the 14th century buried her servants alive for fun. I imagine they all had to make their own fun in those days. When the sky is grey and the cloud is scudding, you need uplifting companions and not the company of troubled ghosts, so that harbour was off the list. I decided to go back to the original plan, be brave, and head for Tórshavn. We’d harness ourselves to the boat for safety, lash down everything moveable, and prepare ourselves for the worst.

  Another yacht came alongside that evening, flying a Scottish flag. Conversation turned nervously to this now much-perused pilot book with dribbles of danger still oozing off every page. The skipper laughed. ‘I was talking to a fisherman a couple of harbours back,’ he said. ‘Told me it was all rubbish. Just point at where you want to go, and go there. That was his advice.’

  Hmm.

  Then a local appeared, wishing us a good evening and making polite conversation.

  ‘Tórshavn?’ he said. ‘You plan on going to Tórshavn!’

  I felt rather ashamed of myself, as if heading there was some kind of ridiculous thing to do.

  ‘You’ll find it busy. Very, very busy. Too crowded. I wouldn’t go.’

  Was he serious? How busy can a small town plonked on a rock in the North Atlantic Ocean be? What kind of threat could such a town be to someone who has survived the aggravating business of an M25 service area on a bank holiday Monday?

  I asked him if he was a sailor, or a fisherman? Perhaps he had a view on the threat or otherwise of the dragon’s breath.

  ‘No, I am not a fisherman,’ he explained. ‘Here there are two kinds of people. You come either from the mountains or from the sea.’

  The day dawned sunny and clear, which is unusually far removed from the default position of dark, wet and stormy. Even better, the wind was fair for a passage north and, with the time of the meridian passage of the moon carefully calculated, recalculated and mused over as if we were planning a landing on the moon itself, we dropped the lines and motored down the harbour and back on to the open sea. Except it wasn’t all that open, for there were many rocky islands to the west of us to break the Atlantic swell and give us a smooth passage. We passed small outcrops, Lítla Dímun and Stóra Dímun, then the larger island of Sandoy, or Sand Island, and the harbour of Skálavik where that lady had so much fun with her servants. The pilot book notes that ‘yachtsmen are encouraged to use the community house with hot water and toilets’. Seven centuries may have passed but we decided it remained too risky in this land of myth and legend, where this lady might easily have been reincarnated as the harbourmaster. Ferry boats appeared, stout ships built for worse weather than this, and beetled around and in front of us, running like a bus between the islands, steaming with confidence past the tall rock pinnacles standing like raised fingers to attract attention.

  The attractiveness of the settlements on these islands when seen from the sea is like looking at a shop window full of gingerbread houses. You want to eat the place. The dwellings cluster round bays and inlets; small houses, brightly painted, cower behind hills to get shelter from the winds. On Sandoy they benefit from rich, sandy soils and here gardening has its rewards, which is not the case on rockier islands where the soil is poor.

  And then came Streymoy, perfectly lit in bright sunlight, green and vivid, white houses standing out. It is the largest of the Faroe Islands and where all the safest harbours are to be found, including Tórshavn.

  ‘So where’s the wild water?’ asked Malcolme, pointedly glancing around. It was a tongue-in-cheek question.

  He was right, though. It should have been like a scene out of hell but it would have done nicely for the lid of a chocolate box. I checked the book and, sure enough, at that very moment we were ploughing through a vivid red smear of dragon’s breath, marking an area of such tumult that it can only be assumed that the dragon was having a bad day and sought revenge. Also, the tide should have been running here at a ferocious speed. An occasional white fleck where wind and tide played with each other was all we saw, certainly no standing waves or rips, or any of the other characteristics we were led to believe were common to these waters. A journey of survival was turning into a walk in the park.

  We made a triumphant arrival, guided to a berth by the welcoming harbourmaster. Malcolme started to remove his storm clothing and as he did so I glanced at his discarded shoes.

  ‘You know that seasickness patch you were wearing on the way across?’ I said. ‘Any reason you put it on the bottom of your shoe and not on your neck?’ For there it was, sticking to the sole of his boot for dear life, having travelled there, probably, all the way from Orkney.

  ‘Goes to show those patches work, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I felt dreadful. But my feet felt fine all the way.’

  The locals said it was the warmest day of the year, stripping-off weather for them, but we didn’t notice. We huddled in fleeces and scarves. It was raining hard and the wet went deep. Might it thunder in Tórshavn, Thor’s harbour, the very God of Thunder? The harbour area is a maze of jetties and creeks, narrow streets, houses painted red with vivid green grass roofs gathered together on a peninsula that divides the harbour, and which was a few steps from where we were moored. This traditional part of town is called the Reyni, but it is no museum. The streets are alive with workers, not tourists, and these toy-like houses are homes to local businesses and coffee shops with a European feel, so no fossilisation. I loved the feel of being smothered in the atmosphere of old Tórshavn and imagined it when the Atlantic storms were at their worst, or the snow falling heavy in the winter. Imagine the sheer, snug comfort of sheltering behind those brightly painted wooden walls and beneath that warming green and verdant roof. I walked in the rain to the open-air museum, where the reconstructions of the simple old houses, with their wood- and peat-burning stoves, captured the sense of hanging on to the very edge of the world, surviving. It’s a feeling I have always enjoyed, and maybe that is why I like being at sea, because it is only in sailing that it seems just possible to fall off the edge of the world. Such was the pleasure of this place that I began to enjoy the torrential rain, and my heart lifted even further when I discovered that all the buses here are free.

  Back in town, I was able to gasp at the prices of food and drink. I noticed that I seemed to be visiting a cash machine as often as a drunk taking a piss. I did the usual round of seeking out the harbourmaster, locating the supermarket, asking where to get diesel, and all the other nuts and bolts of sailing life that have to be tightened every time you step ashore. By now, the burrowing North Atlantic rain had reached down to my knees.

  I returned to the boat to find it filled with smoke of the thick, black and noxious kind, billowing out the hatches. It’s a wonder the fire brigade hadn’t been called. Malcolme had tried to light the diesel stove. I could have told him this was a mistake. It does not like strangers; it needs to be courted and have words of love spoken to it. It requires to be played as carefully as a delicate musical instrument and there was no point applying a match and expecting to get a tune out of it. First, the cold diesel has to be warmed with burning methylated spirits, and only then will it ignite. But this calls for careful judgement, especially when the rain is horizontal and a gale of wind is blowing and a draught is whistling down the chimney. Too much meths will drown the diesel and too little will not warm it enough. So instead it ‘smoulders’ and issues clouds of foul fumes, which Malcolme had managed to create in his futile quest for warmth. I told him it was a hugely reliable bit of kit, Danish in origin, and was widely used for many years on long-distance trawlers. He mumbled something about not understanding wh
y they didn’t all freeze to death and admitted that, at one stage, to keep warm, he had put on his oilskins and sat in the lavatory to be out of the cold wind.

  9

  A delicate enquiry

  I had important business to conduct in Tórshavn, and not a pleasant business either and so I approached it with trepidation. It needed tact, a subtle approach, nothing direct. Even so, I had a question and I needed an answer.

  After breakfast the next day – which was a slice of toast made on board as something similar at a quayside cafe would cost half a week’s wages – I strolled to the town’s famous bookshop, which is a joyous shop stuffed with a heady mixture of literature in all languages, children’s toys and games, all under a lush, grassy roof, which made it feel like stepping into a scene from Tales of the Riverbank. Like a nervous water rat I scuttled my way around the shelving, in and out among the shoppers, to find the tourist information.

  I had a sensitive question to ask. Like a virgin teenager queuing in Boots to buy his first condoms, I waited till the desk was vacant and nobody was likely to be in earshot. I looked this way and that, chose my moment, took a deep breath, and dived in.

  Sensing that the girl behind the desk spoke English, given that she said ‘good morning’ with as fine a Home Counties accent as if she were reading the BBC’s news, I pressed on.

  ‘Is it true,’ I blurted, ‘ that you eat puffins in the Faroe Islands?’

  I glanced down and saw her desk was littered with tourist brochures, all emblazoned with the jolly puffin’s image. How could I allow such a thought?

  But once I had got the question out of my system I felt huge relief; a great hurdle had been jumped. But I still felt some shame. It was as if I was enquiring if they ate kittens. As should be clear by now, I am fond of puffins and can think of nothing worse than to put them in a sandwich. But I had to know the truth.

  She smiled, and with not a hint of embarrassment said, ‘Yes, it is true. We do.’ She said it in such a matter-of-fact way, as if she’d been a Scotsman asked if he actually ate haggis. Then her smile drained a little.

  ‘But,’ she added, ‘there are not so many puffins as there used to be, so we don’t encourage people to eat them. We want the numbers to recover.’

  I felt disgusting for even having asked the question. Now I started to gabble. ‘Of course, I understand. I don’t want to eat one myself… dear little birds… yes, they must be allowed to recover. Of course.’

  Unimpressed by this feeble explanation, she leaned across the desk and lowered her voice as if about to share a great secret that she didn’t wish to be overheard. Was she about to deal puffins on some kind of black market? She looked around to see if the coast was clear. I leaned towards her to join the conspiracy. Was she going to flog me drugs or debauchery? Softly, so as not to be overheard, she said, ‘But if you would like to try fulmar, then I know where you can get that.’

  Fulmar! Hang on, that’s another seabird, isn’t it? What was she going to offer next? An eagle?

  She whisked out a map of the northern islands and pointed to a lonely-looking settlement, next stop the North Pole.

  ‘Fulmar?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t they just big seagulls?’

  She sidestepped my ornithological ignorance.

  ‘You should sail there and when you get there…’ – she paused and dropped her voice – ‘…you should ask for Elizabeth. She will get you fulmar.’ It felt like George Smiley stuff.

  To be honest, I never had a real desire to eat a puffin, but if one had been on offer I would have felt obliged to try it, if only to share the experience with you. I remained curious, though, about those for whom the puffin was as important a part of their nutrition as a burger might be today. There was a time, not so long ago, when a mouthful of puffin would have been a lifesaver in times of food shortage and hardship in remote places like these. Puffins for food are as much a part of the history of these islands as wooden houses with grass on the roof.

  If puffin was going to be off the menu, my thoughts had to turn to fulmar. My book on Scandinavian cooking tells me it is best roasted and served with a Waldorf salad. Who’d have thought it?

  And now I thought of the cheery little puffin being torn apart to create a snack, or the majestic white bulk of the fulmar being torn asunder for the sake of a hot dinner.

  I have always struggled with the paradox thrown up by the eating of animals, as an unashamed carnivore. My problem is that I have had the great pleasure, as a one-time farmer, of bringing lambs into the world. And then what did I do to them? Fatten them for killing to satisfy the Easter Sunday lunch market. I have spent countless nights lovingly feeding calves from bottles to get them through the early hurdles of life, only to eventually send them to the butcher to turn them into steaks. It has left me confused, and aware of the possibility that I might be a monster in the eyes of some.

  I suppose I have an innate belief in the pecking order of life; that’s what it boils down to. Human beings are at the top, feeding and surviving on what is beneath them, all the way down through farm animals, birds and fish to microbes and DNA. There’s not much we can do about it if we want to survive. But it’s a difficult philosophy to swallow without reservation, for sentimentality must be part of your make-up or you are a poor person indeed. So if I could eat my lambs and my calves, I suppose I would have eaten a puffin in the Faroe Islands. But I wouldn’t have been proud of it.

  I don’t think I will ever give up eating meat. I’ve never thought the avoidance of eating meat stands up to close scrutiny. Even vegetarians must accept that some kind of farming is required to produce food of all kinds, even vegan grub, and that farming itself is ultimately destructive of wildlife and habitat; it has to be, otherwise it would not be farming at all. The most organic and ethical of farmers has to admit that even when farming with the lightest touch, nature must take some sort of pounding, so whenever we grow food to keep ourselves alive, those below us are going to pay a price.

  But I did not have time to worry about the wider state of the world, only the puffins. The Faroese have taken to heart the fact that puffins are reducing in number and so are taking them off the menu. It’s all moving in the right direction. I was more than happy to join in the abstinence. No point in making banners and taking to the streets.

  I own a book of biblical dimensions entitled The Nordic Cookbook by distinguished Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, whose award-winning restaurants made their reputation from his devotion to local ingredients and his passion for all things Nordic. Under ‘P’ for ‘puffin’ he tells us unashamedly that puffins are best left overnight to soak in water as the ‘fresh, ocean flavour’ can be strong. Tell that to the one-time residents of the perpetually battered rocky outcrop called St Kilda, off the wild west coast of Scotland. A 250-year-old census showed that, on average, the population of 90 people each ate 18 seabirds and 36 eggs every day back then. The consumption of puffins was on such a scale that they didn’t even bother to cook them, just ate them as a snack as you or I might reach for a KitKat mid morning, and the feathers and oil products were saved as a valuable export. Writing in 1765, the resident cleric on St Kilda, Neil MacKenzie, estimated the puffin population at three million, and one writer reported that: ‘Incredible flights of these puffins flutter during the whole summer season: sometimes they cover whole plots of ground, and sometimes while on the wing involve everything below them in darkness like a small cloud of locusts in another country.’ Other writers, such as the Kearton Brothers of 1897, said, ‘Here the puffins breed in immense numbers, and the clouds of birds that swept past us made a sound like a whirlwind whipping up a great bed of dead rushes.’ With so many puffins all around you, this might be why an entirely unashamed St Kildan was reported to regularly kill over 600 birds a day. Despite that, the St Kildans were said to love the puffins and had a sentimental and not just a survivalist approach to them. Top tip from these ancient records: a little dried fulmar in a bowl of hot porridge makes for a filling breakfast.
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br />   The last islanders left St Kilda in the 1930s, leaving behind no discernible damage to the puffin population, but in the years since, and more so in recent years, the puffin population has been in relentless decline and it is estimated that by 2065 Europe’s puffin population will have halved. Eventually, a proper Faroes Puffin Feast will melt into history, but if you want to know what it might have been like, let us return to the chef, Nilsson. He tells us they are best plucked, gutted and cleaned, and then stuffed with an unlikely kind of cake mixture of sugar, flour, eggs and raisins. Be sure to tie the neck with string before popping in the oven, as Mary Berry might say. Serve with boiled potatoes.

  As for fulmar, they seem to be surviving better than the puffins, but this may not last either, although with an estimated northern hemisphere population of up to 30 million, that ogre and fulmar-slayer, Elizabeth, in her remote northern kitchen, will have her hands full if she wishes to make any meaningful reduction.

  Fulmar seem like proper working seabirds to me, not at all like opportunist, criminally inclined gulls. They can be confused with gulls at a distance, and although I’m no twitcher they seem to have fatter or more feathered necks – that’s how I would recognise them. Several things worry me about fulmars. The fulmar is related to the albatross, and like that weighty bird of the southern hemisphere they are built to glide and soar, relying on the strength of the wind to make progress. But as a mariner, I well remember what Coleridge told us about mucking about with these mighty birds of the ocean: instead of the cross, the Albatross about my neck was hung. Greenland fishermen certainly thought each fulmar was the soul of a lost comrade.