It was the 15th of August. Word came from John Marshall that the canoes were finished and had been sent to us by rail.
Daily Record, August 18, 1934: The End of Youth.
CHAPTER 3
THE START
With the Skerries for my milestones, and the sun’s salute, and rain –
Send my heart by Kishmul’s Galley and my body by MacBrayne.
When I’m old I’ll take the steamer, but the first boat was my ain.
The canoes which John Marshall had made for us were of a canvas-and-rubber fabric stretched over a tough teak framework, and were shaped in section like a slim spearhead. The pointed ends, separately made and sealed to form buoyancy tanks, were detachable. They were decked with highly varnished light wood, while the centre section, about six-feet long, had a canvas deck laced loosely all round the top of the sides and by no means watertight. An ingenious safety measure was the incorporation into the deck structure of an inflated car tyre inner tube, into which we sat as in a cockpit. This gave a comfortable back-rest and, in an emergency, a lifebelt which could be snatched at a jerk out of its fitting. A waterproof apron studded by fasteners into the canvas of the deck stretched round our waists so that, en voyage, we appeared to be wearing the canoes like snug garments.
When assembled, the three sections – centre-piece and two points – were bound by a heavy and (we believed) unbreakable wire which ran from a bulkhead in front of the cockpit, passed in a groove over the bow point, along the keel beneath, came up over the stern, and was hooked to the cockpit bulkhead at the back. Each bulkhead fastening included a screw shackle which tightened the wire to a solid twanging strain, and the whole affair was held thus rigidly together. The length overall was 13½ feet, and 32 inches in the beam. From deck to keel the measure was only twelve inches. The craft drew five or six inches of this when loaded, so that there remained about six inches of freeboard. Along the bottom of all three sections, protecting the fabric from the worst friction of shingled beach and rocks, ran a few narrow strips of wood. The weight assembled was about 80lbs unloaded. The oar was a two-bladed paddle, dipped on either side alternately.
John Marshall had experimented with a mast and sails on some of these craft, and had found that with a small square sail he got very stimulating results on a following wind. We decided on some such installation, and looked forward to many happy hours of lolling at ease against our inflated back-rests, while the prevailing south-westerly wind bore us northwards during the sunny August days.
It was readily assumed by all who learned of our project that we had, over the years, accumulated the necessary range of experience in the handling of these precarious craft. ‘Both are, of course, expert canoeists’, was a phrase frequently appearing about this time in the preliminary paragraphs which we urged into print at the hands of kindly Glasgow journalists. The facts were somewhat otherwise. We had never even seen canoes at close quarters until a few weeks previously, and our only experience of handling them had been on a recent Sunday afternoon on the Forth and Clyde Canal, with an evening wallow across the upper Firth of Forth as our salt-water introduction to open seafaring. I had never at any time been under sail in an orthodox way, but Seumas had once spent a week in somebody’s yacht in the Kyles of Bute. On the credit side was an intimate acquaintance from boyhood with rowing boats, on such mad terms of familiarity that we had frequently hoisted tents to serve as sails in a favourable wind. And we both, of course, knew very well the uncertain waters of the West Coast and the Hebrides, although this was a knowledge from which confidence in our prospects by no means followed.
The canoes were installed in the back garden of my parents’ home in Westerton, Glasgow. We assembled our kit and experimented with all the varieties of bundling we could think of. Old rubber groundsheets were cut for packing materials, as we foresaw, with sinister accuracy, that our sleeping-bags and clothes might from time to time be under water. Two five-foot broomsticks were stepped as masts, and we made yard-square sails of light cloth, on bamboo spreaders (the latter from the chrysanthemum bed), with a cord arrangement which could raise and lower them from the cockpits like small cinematograph screens.
We had decided to start from the Clyde at Broomielaw, in the heart of Glasgow. I called upon Captain Eaglesome, the Clyde Trust’s Harbourmaster, laying the scheme before him as one seafarer to another. He was amused, and even helpful, but not to be moved. It seems that, in a shipping river, vessels proceed only by special pilot licence, and it would have been embarrassing on both sides to inquire into our qualifications. He admitted, however, that his jurisdiction ended at Bowling, half-way down river to the Tail of the Bank, and it was to this place that our starting-point was switched. A great gathering of citizens would undoubtedly have been present at the Broomielaw to watch the setting forth, and the public enthusiasm so aroused would have been useful background publicity in the market of newspaper articles. At the time, we grudged sorely the loss of these few city miles. We needed a public, and we needed it quickly, if our writing was to make the vivid, adventurous and yet serious impression we wanted it to make.
It was obvious that the newspaper to which we could best attach ourselves for the supply of the voyage’s descriptive articles was the Daily Record, which proudly called itself Scotland’s National Newspaper, and meant it. Among the popular papers then and since it had the best-developed social conscience on Scots affairs. It was vigilant in the country’s welfare, and while predominantly the paper of the industrial West, had a knowledgeable eye on the rural areas where four out of every five Scots town dwellers have their roots. We felt that the appearance of our articles in the Daily Record would suit our plans best, and we set about persuading the paper to think the same of us.
Most of the day before our departure date we spent in the Daily Record office, where we have since had a much closer association. The editor agreed to look with sympathy on what we might send, although there was to be no guarantee of publication. This was probably the most that we could expect. Our story was, on the face of it, but a seasonal adventure, and only as it developed in scale could we compel a serious audience to note any of the thoughtful lessons we felt might be told after we had accumulated some freakish authority.
That the adventure might not develop very far was made plain when Mr. John Conn, Editor of the Evening News, another paper of the group, arrived at the conference we were having with some of the journalists of the morning paper. ‘Have they been photographed?’ he inquired. ‘You know, in case …’ and he turned to us, smiling with heavy reassurance. ‘Not that we want anything to happen … but – you never know.’ Weighing once more the elements of what makes news, we were conducted to the studio and photographed for, doubtless, some ultimately macabre purpose. The print went into the file, whence I removed it myself a short time ago. It records, upon our faces, the End of Youth.
Late that night we were still in the garden, putting the last touches to our ocean-going craft. Jim MacDougall, Robbie MacLean and John Burt, who had borne with us, in their spare time, the main burden of the Claymore’s production, came to help with the final stages of equipping the expedition. Until long after the daylight failed we worked by the light of candles stuck by their own grease on the taut canvas of the canoe decks. The night was still and windless, and the straight flames stood, in happy augury of calms to come, rigid four-inch lengths of illumination. This was to be the last spell for the next ten weeks when a candle would burn motionless in the open.
After midnight, when the tasks appeared finished and the other two had gone home, Jim decided to construct a tiny breakwater on the deck section of each canoe bow. This was a plywood V, pointing forward and a few inches high, which, Jim explained, would help to part the solid water we might ship over the bows. He fixed them to the decks with surgical elastic tape, and they hung on there until the end, staggering and tattered.
They were never greatly useful, but we left them even after we knew better, as evidence of the pre-excursion
anxieties of a man who knew much more about small craft than we did.
Something will have to be done about the education of the mothers of would-be explorers. Readers of JM Barrie will recall this topic as one which frequently preoccupied Margaret Ogilvie. It was necessary for us during these last hours of back-garden activity to be overheard quipping and jesting lightheartedly, in a manner which would appear to dismiss the project as a short-term and harmless romp. Early in the next afternoon a motor-lorry came to transport us and the canoes to Bowling. With Robbie and John to help, we carried the canoes singly out to the gate, taking care to cant them beamwise on the way down the path, so that my mother, watching from a window, should not be reminded of their undoubted structural resemblance to coffins. This ruse and its accompanying frolic in no way deceived that Highland imagination.
The four of us, kilted and windswept, stood astraddle of the canoes in the rear of the lorry as it hammered down to Bowling. We attracted a good deal of attention among the promenaders on the Knightswood Boulevard and along the Clyde waterfront, so that when we de-Iorried ourselves and the canoes at Bowling, stumbling across the railway levels with the grossly weighted craft, an eager Saturday afternoon crowd surged on our heels. They had been waiting for us. It was a triumph of last-minute publicity, for Seumas had been able to find a couple of spare hours on the previous day to write a full-length preliminary article on the reasons for the trip, and it had appeared that morning in ample time to afford us a rendezvous with our public. They were present in large numbers, and since that woebegone picture had also been used to illustrate the tale, the fingers and voices of recognition were raised on all sides.
Robbie MacLean, also up to his knees in water, took this picture of John Burt getting ready to push us off.
It would be true to say that the article had struck a challenging note. Starting with a stage-by-stage detail of our route – Firth of Clyde; Kyles of Bute; Loch Fyne; Crinan Canal; the Dorus Mor; Seil Sound; Firth of Lorne; Oban; Sound of Mull; Ardnamurchan Point; the Small Isles of Eigg, Rum, and Muck; MalIaig; Sound of Sleat; Skye; the Minch; Harris; Stornoway – it went on: ‘We shall meet with criticism. We have met it already. Canoeing, we are told, isn’t feasible in Scottish waters, and to take a canoe up the Hebrides is foolhardy.
Two young canoeists, James S. Adam and Alastair M. Dunnett, leaving Bowling Harbour on the Clyde, on Saturday, for their six week tour to the Outer Isles of Scotland.
‘With armchair critics we have no common ground. To others we would say this: From our earliest days as a people we have been building and sailing boats. We are a maritime race in the completest sense. But intensive industrialisation has lost us our contact with the sea. Steamers have made us forget the thrills of small-craft sailing. We want to taste the zest of physical living that town life denies us.
‘But there is something more. After the sailing comes the seeing. We want to see the Western Isles thoroughly, to complete our own picture of them. Not the Isles of the guide-books, but the real isles – the Isles of Opportunity, peopled by a vigorous race with an unrivalled climate for some types of products; islands capable of supporting more of our surplus population in large-sized holdings yielding an adequate return.
‘Therein is our real adventure – exploring the possibilities for expansion and development in our own country.’
Something of this novel and possibly naive challenge had already, it seemed, conveyed itself to the people who came to see our start. The only itinerant writing about the Scottish rural scene up to that time had depicted the countryside as a bracing background to physical adventure, but playing no significant part in the story. What Seumas had been saying in his incautious preliminary was that it was the land and the people, and not we, which would make our story. They would take the foreground, and we would try to make ourselves a part of that scene and life. It seemed to augur well that already so many people appeared to see our point.
The negative note, however, was also being resoundingly struck. ‘You’ll never come back. We’ve seen the last of you!’ was the hearty farewell greeting of a Stornoway friend. And one of the harbour men, impelled to offer a professional opinion, used for the first time the phrase that was to run like a yellow thread of defeat through the whole dark and plaided pattern of our voyage: ‘It’s too late in the year!’
There was a gratifying attendance of reporters and photographers, for whom we spoke or postured on demand. The portability of the canoes had captured the public fancy, and it was proposed that we should be photographed in a manner to illustrate this, each man standing on the stone-edged beach with his canoe under his arm. Loaded as they were with kit and comforts, the canoes by their sheer weight made this a manifest impossibility. The four of us, however, hoisted one canoe, and then Robbie and John leapt backwards out of the camera’s eye, leaving ‘the two daring canoeists’, with wan smiles, straining to hold the thing waist-high. Our arms gave out as the snapshotting finished, and the load fell heavily to the beach.
At last we got aboard, stuffing our kilts down the sides of the cockpits like shirts into trousers. Robbie and John launched us away, walking fully clad knee-high into the water to set our laden bulk afloat. The crowd delighted in this hardy gesture, and we departed basking for a moment in the reflected credit. If those left behind – so ran the public thought – could treat the sea with such nonchalance, the principals of the expedition must be robust indeed. Fresh photographs recorded the chilly scene.
Then we drove at the awkward paddles to a thin dribble of cheering, lurching round the pier into the river. Peter Leddy, the Alexandria photographer, shouted from his perch on a bolIard: ‘Wave!’ – and our hands were raised obediently to his lens. ‘Waving a cheery farewell’, was the lying caption which carried this scene in Monday’s papers. A few more uncertain strokes took us clear of Bowling Harbour.
It was a grey day, with a westerly wind in our faces up-river, and a short wet chop splashing over the low bows. But in 20 minutes of paddling we had the feel of the canoes, moving with them, the wobble created by our over-anxious thighs gone for ever. We held to the north side of the river, between the main channel and the shore, and shortly stroked our way past the rotting piles of Dumbarton’s old pier, where the Clyde opens out towards the Firth. There was a little outward-bound shipping in the channel south of us. Although our progress was slow enough, our arms were not tiring, the push-pull leverage of the paddling being well within our new powers. From the first we were ceaselessly conscious of the wind, an awareness which was to last and grow until the trip was done. Opposite Port Glasgow it seemed to have backed well to the south; we felt that the time had come to hoist sail. And so we did, the scraps of canvas filling out splendidly in the beam wind. In no time at all we were rattling ashore among the reeds of the Cardross shallows. It was the quickest method of learning that only a stern wind will travel a sailing canoe. With sails stowed, we scraped off again and slapped a damp passage round the point of Ardmore into Craigendoran Bay. By this time we knew of a pervading wetness about our persons. Several baling pauses removed a substantial body of water from about our limbs, while spray from the little bursting rollers drove at us like a ceaseless heavy rain.
With the broadening of the river towards Greenock and the Firth we felt for the first time another of the sensations familiar to sailors – the dwindling support of the shore and the wide spaciousness of waters. South to the sea the scene was bleak and cold. For that night, however, we had a heartening prospect – a camp with the three others among the firs on Rosneath Point. We had arranged a meeting with them in the water off Helensburgh.
Splashing ahead, and now tiring, we paddled on towards a rowing-boat which contained Robbie and John. They had squelched out of the water at Bowling Harbour, taken a bus to Helensburgh, dried their feet at a tearoom fire somewhere, and put off to meet us in a hired boat. They greeted our bedraggled arrival with taciturn relief. At least we were still afloat, if wallowing, and we had come ten miles. The old Lu
cy Ashton, her paddles hammering, passed on her last run for the night, stirring up an extra surge about us. Passengers, with the impassivity of the steamer-borne, leaned on the rails to see us.
A mile off, between us and the Rosneath shore, a speck showed Jim in his own 11-foot canoe. As we came up to him he raised a paddle in an antique salute, and we were all soon in the sheltered water below our camp ground. When the canoes grounded, Seumas and I, kilted and cramped, flopped from the cockpits like sodden dishclouts out of a sink.
The next hour we spent in cutting down our equipment by half. At least we were learning quickly, and it was already clear that we had no possible expectation of travelling dry. Any sort of sea would constantly search its way through the deck lacing, while we were to know many an occasion when it would break solidly into the cockpit itself. All the extras went into a heap of tweed jackets, a rug, most of the spare clothes and luxuries.
The constant threat of the rising weather among the pine-tops spurred our assessment of impediments, and we stripped ourselves to the limit in an austere new burst of simplicity.
The camp was pitched then, well inland from the shore. It was to be the last time the five of us would camp together. We had for a dozen years camped and lived together, or in twos or threes of that five, in every part of Scotland and the islands. In this company we had, it seemed, grown up more in our tents than in our own homes. And if we are ever together again, time and tide will have stopped running.
CHAPTER 4
The Canoe Boys Page 4
