The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  We got our sails down as the Point came abreast, paddling in to make a landing. From the higher level of the shore there was little comfort in the sight of Loch Fyne. The last run down the wind had left us reluctant to face a wet pull into it, although our decided goal for the night was Tarbert, or at least that side of the loch. We unshipped our masts, stowing them and the sails below decks to give us the least wind resistance. Later against headwinds we always travelled mast-less, and learned even to crouch like TT riders going upwind. In this way we sneaked a kindergarten passage round the Point and for three miles up the Loch Fyne shore, where, except for one or two half-exposed beaches, we had shelter and were rarely in more than four feet of water. The Skate Islands were to be our jumping-off for the wallow across the loch, and until we reached the first of them this contour voyaging, as in a paddling pool, kept our thoughts away from the noisy malevolence on our left. In this easy way we came up to the Wee Skate, startling a long dormitory of resting seals so that they dived simultaneously like a breaking wave. Landing on their ledge, we tethered the canoes by their lifted bows run up on the rocks, and stood there for a time, whistling through mouths full of bread to coax the seals up. Some of them surfaced, more worried than charmed, and blew rudely through their whiskers.

  The first stage was simple, to the Big Skate with its winking beacon. Beyond this shelter we got it badly. It was on Loch Fyne we learned to like beam seas. They came down on our right high and quickly, but clean. In maybe half an hour of splashing and misjudgment we had the trick of the haunch roll that lifted us flat on to the waves and seemed to twitch them onwards under us and away. The wind, we found, was our real enemy here, and not the increasing waves, for it kept us off the line we had made for Loch Tarbert, and we soon knew that our limit was to keep from losing ground downward and out of the loch towards Arran. Eventually we were able to hold a straight course across, pointing to the highest of the land ahead. This, if we remembered rightly, would take us to the bay marked on the chart as Fionn Phort. It was now too dark to read the chart. But this was enjoyable, and tiring only on our left arms, with the extra work they had in holding us up against the forcing of the wide wind. Other occupants of the loch also found that it was fun. Porpoises started to roll in the breakers, until, near us, with disconcerting zest, they set to leaping clear of the water like salmon, the grunts of their untidy descent sounding like sighs heaved over our inept progress. We hoped their underwater eyesight was good, and that fins were not revving up for a take-off under our keels. This uncomfortable company subsided after we were more than half-way across. We were exchanging pleasantries of well-schooled relief when, less than 50 yards from our bows, four of the brutes in line left the water, heaving in our direction like a charging three-quarter line, arched over in glistening mid-air unison, and struck the water together, leaving four rising fountains which only the next wave dispersed.

  ‘Come closer!’ we shouted to each other. But one of them overheard. We were not ten yards apart on a converging course when a black torpedo burst from the water between us. It was a beautiful movement, as we agreed – but later! We saw the whites of his piggy eyes, slewing (we swore) from one to the other of us; heard his horrid pech in mid-air; then he was in with a mighty splash and tail-flip and we were off on a terrific burst on the last mile shorewards. I was downwind, and got the spray of him. He was the last we saw, but he gave a great impetus to our final lap for the night.

  It was quite dark inshore. Entering the shelter of Fionn Phort, we saw ahead the riding lights of boats. They were two Tarbert fishing skiffs which had taken refuge there, and as the canoes passed they were getting up anchor to make for the herring grounds in Kilbrannan Sound. From their deck level the men could probably just see our pointed outlines black against the dusky water. They knew about us, and scolded with the quick judgment of the professional in his own sphere. We were well inshore when their last hails came. One was inevitable: ‘It’s too late in the year.’ And then, more novel: ‘Ye should be put in jail for going to sea in boats like that!’

  There was never a better camp in all our trip than the one we had in Fionn Phort. Above the steep shore a flat little plateau ran level to the cliff foot on the three shoreward sides. A burn leapt in waterfalls down the rock face and spread at last to the loch in a murmuring delta. It was a desirable spot, typical of the countless abandoned homestead sites of the West. But from the very edge of the grass, and choking the whole plateau, a jostling growth of giant bracken flourished, so thickly that we could not push a way in. With our knives we cut a path six feet forward, and started at that point to pull up the bracken fronds singly by the roots. Soon we had a little clearing in which we could turn round. It grew to two yards square, then three yards, and that was enough for us. On the sweet grass of this patch we pitched the tent, and the bracken rose a foot above its top. Wind eddies, spilling in from the loch, flogged the burn-side bushes. Standing at the tent door with an arm upheld we could feel the gusts cold on our fingers. But in our snug clearing there was not a whisper. Something of a calm was on us too. We ate, and slept, and awoke in the Highlands.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE KINSMAN

  Victim and shaper of the laws

  The memories’ rich wale of him

  Abide to show the man he was,

  Rather than my poor tale of him.

  With the daylight the gale died, although we did not guess it at the time, cut off as we were in our thicket of bracken. Our awakening was a slow and soaring sweep upwards from limp depths, until the velvet warmth left our eyes and let them open, and the morning air was cold and bracing in our noses. The bracken stems squeaked thickly together in a dying wind. Their frondy tops, like palms in an oasis, stroked moving shadows on the tent top as the sun came up.

  We lay luxuriating for a while, in the satisfaction of having fairly started. The preliminaries were over; the trip was begun; we had entered our course, and could now stand up and be seen; everything we met and saw from now onwards was valid to our purpose. In this mood, with only our heads emerging from our sleeping-bags, we shaped up some noble passages for a couple of articles which would be despatched from Tarbert later that day. Then, rising, we crashed through the bracken to the beach to greet a balmy morning. The long fiord of Loch Fyne stretched away from us with an innocent sparkle, as if conflict with its dark tumult could never involve us, and many another man before and after. We dipped our cans in the burn for morning tea and porridge, and soon we were thrusting out of the bay in well-fed urgency.

  This elation bore us northwards towards the port of Tarbert. The few miles we had to travel took us along the foot of the steep-to rocks, amid a lazily dying swell. There was even a little heat in the sun. The smells of the sea and the land were in our noses at the same time, and three or four fathoms below, as we stopped often to tilt and peer at them, bushes of seaweeds waved in the currents, with fish fending among their stems. When Loch Tarbert opened out, and the first houses appeared, we dressed ship – a process completed by combing our hair and smoothing out our waterproof aprons with a housewifely gesture – and stroked a tidy course in unison up to the end of the landlocked harbour. Here we stepped out literally on to the main street, leaving the canoes half on the pavement and half in the sea. Fishermen and holiday-makers came crowding round, eager but courteously silent, although in the more distant parts of the town could be heard the hurrying cries of:

  ‘The canoes! … Canoes …!’

  Tarbert is a dramatic place, with its houses and churches stepping up the crags which cup it in. On one of the rock shelves is a castle which was known to Robert the Bruce, and the foreign trade in herrings is so ancient that Tarbert is probably one of the oldest centres in the United Kingdom in continuous production with the same commodity. The water of East Loch Tarbert, round which the town is built, searches in westwards among the houses and almost bites through the peninsula of Kintyre. The isthmus (or tairbeart, the Gaelic word) separating Tarbert from West Loch Tarbe
rt, a branch of the Atlantic, is not much wider than a mile, and about the end of last century it was scheduled for linking by a canal.

  At this time the local herring industry was enduring one of its periodic miseries. The capricious herring, which in these parts has been honoured by the association of its name with that of Loch Fyne, frequently fails to return the courtesy. From time to time the shoals disappear entirely from the loch, and often from the entire coast. They had now been elusive for a period of years, and disaster was coming on the Loch Fyne fishing. One by one the little villages between Tarbert and Inveraray were dropping out of the ruin – Loch Gair, Minard, Furnace, Newton, Strachur. The older men and their small light skiffs had searched to the limit of their course, and now, crew by crew, were going to other jobs or the dole, and maintenance was failing on the boats. Had the young village men come into the business in these days they could well have sustained it until the herring returned. New boats, new energy, would have carried them fast and far, until the shoals had found their way inevitably back to the great water of their race.

  But these middle 1930s were not a time of homing for men or fish. Such national leadership as existed pointed to the future with a shaking finger. The Highlander who might be disposed to look for future profit from his own resources was likely to be named a laughable figure of reaction. So they turned their backs upon the sea: took jobs as labourers and navvies, or set out again on the old emigrant quest, scourged by poverty round the world. The boats died on the shore and lay in dozens like animal skeletons. The negative façade behind which the Celt hides so much of his endeavour now came easily to his aid. ‘The fishing’s done’ had become the commonest phrase of these shores. Of course, the fishing was not done. But the men were done.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the shoals of herring came surging back up Loch Fyne. In the year or two before the war they teemed nightly in millions as far inland as Inveraray. From Fife, and Ayrshire, and further afield, came the modern boats in hundreds, scooping up the treasure and turning it to gold. On the shore, straightening their backs from the stone-breaking at the quarries or the roadsides, the remnants of the best coastal fishermen and seamen in the world – boatless, net-less, and grounded – watched them do it.

  The full force of this change did not strike Tarbert. The vitality of a community larger than the hamlets kept them at the task and brought them to their later rewards. Their splendid fleet of boats is now a sight to see, and even the younger men tell me that the life and the living are comfortable. They have money and enjoy it – and why shouldn’t they! – although the day’s round of some of them brings cries of envious criticism from the old fishermen. Some of these new young sea-dogs of Argyll, still with the blue ganzies and the mahogany faces of the old school, are to be seen in the luxurious bar of one of the tourist hotels, having an early aperitif before setting out for the night’s fishing. They cast off from the quay in their roomy vessels, make their shot in the night waters round Arran, and then on the morning run up Kilbrannan Sound can even lift the radio telephone instrument to call their wives or mothers in Tarbert and tell them to put the kettle on for breakfast.

  None of this latter-day ease, however, was to be seen in the little town on the day of our arrival. Depression lay over the place, and was ill-concealed in the neglected mien of men and craft. ‘It’s too late in the year for boats like that to be out,’ insisted a knot of fishermen round the canoes, in fierce justification of the lifetime of sea-lore which had left them full minds, if empty nets. We spent much time in talking there, for it was a time when the fishermen who were left were experiencing almost from day to day a double bitterness. It is bad enough to fish and catch nothing. It is worse to catch well, and to throw the fish away. This is what was happening to them. Often, after a far-ranging search in that stormy summer, they had triumphed and filled the hold, to return and find that no one would buy the catch. Here was a case and a cause for us, in what was later to become a familiar tale until a less erratic marketing technique was created. We took from their lips the restrained gall of their existence, and made it ready for print.

  There followed a prodigious writing session, when we transformed a respectable little teashop into a press-room, by clearing two tables and writing industriously for the whole afternoon. Regular customers came and went, while we toiled on shamelessly, on the strength of having purchased some inexpensive food about midday. The result was three articles with which we made a tousled expedition to the post office. In the meantime the beached canoes acted as a bait for the unattached population, which gathered round them in growing numbers, tapping the canvas sides, testing their weights, and above all eager to see them water-borne. A press photographer who was holidaying in Tarbert spent a day-long vigil among the onlookers, sending relays of messengers in search of us to urge us afloat. His presence gave a superior cachet to the occasion, and we hastened to gratify the rising demands of the public by launching away, and posing in various paddling attitudes. Eventually, wedged afresh with loaves of bread, pots of jam, and a splaying hand of sausages, we got truly aboard.

  Bulletin, August 28, 1934.

  The shaking of warning heads among the done fishermen was less obvious than the little cheer that wafted us away from the heart of the town, with the high church belfry striking a dissonant five o’clock. We had a youthful shore cortege of cyclists along the pier road close to our passage, until we crossed the sudden narrowing harbour bar and slanted over to the houseless north shore. There we rounded the limpet-pocked heads of the bay and came into the full flood of the tide up Loch Fyne, and a grey and sliding swell.

  Our course was a ten-mile paddle due north to Loch Gilp and Ardrishaig, where the Crinan Canal begins. The canal opens the door to the Atlantic for smaller shipping travelling from the Clyde. Our halting-place for the night was to be with my kinsfolk the MacTavishes at Castleton, and as the wooded hill of Shirvan grew towards our bows all that evening, I could yield myself readily to an intimate apprehension of our calmly planned purpose in the voyage – to reveal and explore, not a foreign uncharted land, but the alien familiarity of our own places. The night was golden, heavy with the sun. There was no help from the wind, which puffed coldly off the east. Our activities in Tarbert had been too public to permit us to cut and prepare sandwiches in the eye of the populace – although we were later to intrude our domesticities in a less bashful fashion. So we chilled a little as we stopped two miles off the shore and sliced heartily into a loaf. Loch Fyne was smooth and empty, but for us. Not even a rowing-boat out for the twilight rise of the cuddies – the saithe – competed with us for the lordship of the water. It looked a dead and a done sea indeed. And yet, because created things always do blunderingly what they have done before, in a year or two the place was to swarm with fish and fishermen. And in a year or two later it was to roar with the craft and weapons of an army, whetting John Splendid’s sword for the old business of the foreign wars.

  It was deep twilight when we crept round the islands of Castleton Bay and grounded below the house. Then we were in the big kitchen with its great fire and the inside timber staircase leading overhead to the loft bedroom. Here presided my Great-aunt Mary, my kinsman Duncan’s mother, over 80 and blind, and the question she put to me about our journey had the simple perspective of age: ‘Could you get nothing better to do?’ It was not, to be sure, a question which demanded an answer, for she had a long lifetime of experience in the caprices of those of her household and its offshoots. They had all, in their time, come home to her roof; and here was I, at the beginning of an exploration into the hidden aspects of a familiar land, sitting at the fireside that warmed half my roots, and more.

  And Duncan. At this time he was the Joint County Clerk of Argyll, a lean, tall, dark Celt who was an epic in himself. He did not live to hear an official of the county tell me: ‘It was Duncan MacTavish who brought Argyll through the war.’ The odd claim would have amused him, although he killed himself proving it. As a youth he had come from
the croft and been a rare scholar at Glasgow University, winning a famous scholarship to Oxford. But he refused it, for he did not want to go to Oxford. He wanted to stay in Scotland, and he became the village master at a tiny school in the north of the county of Argyll. With the Kaiser’s war he endured, for conscience’ sake, a gross range of humiliations, including forced navvy labour on the road outside his school. When peace came they let him go, a silent youth, and he went back to the croft.

  Soon there was a meagre clerkship in the county office, in Lochgilphead, and he worked there. His splendid mind was irresistible, and that was how, at the start of the Hitler war, he was able to gather up into his brown hands a great part of the administration of his beloved and scattered Argyll. Before I knew him, he was a legend of my childhood, with his Gaelic songs and poems. Later I was to learn of his real scholarship, and how the books he published, and the researches he made, were but fragments in preparation for a great history of Argyll he would have written. In the end it was to be his portion rather to make and to take part in the history of Argyll, than to write it.

  On long-spaced occasions I shared the inwardness of his mind, and his laughter, as we fished the saithe of the Liath Eilean rocks, or scythed his meadow hay. And yet, by the time I had at last grown towards him, and knew his ardent height, he had gone on ahead into the quiet change.

  Seumas and I slept that night in sheets in a familiar bedroom looking to the bay, and were not up before the middle of the morning. Duncan had cycled off early to his Saturday forenoon’s work in the county offices. He was back before lunch to take us out to the Big Island across the dried-out bay, and down to the ledges on the south tip where the seals were basking. In the early afternoon came more of our MacTavishes from the houses round about to help us in the carrying of the laden canoes across the tidal sand to the water. We took our farewells and got our blessings, especially from Great-aunt Mary, who gave us a gay and heartening send-off. I was never to see her again, and I think that, with the foreseeing gift which she and many of her people possess, she knew it.