The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  Comfort, a word which has made several recent appearances in these pages, is admittedly only relative in its meaning. We rarely travelled dry, and it was normal for us to be sitting permanently in several inches of water. From time to time in our day’s journey we would stop to bale this out. For this purpose we had cans, and sponges to mop up the last half-inch. Sitting on the extreme lowest part of the craft, one becomes aware of the slightest first intrusion of water, and so it is better to develop a familiarity – an attitude not difficult after the first chill tremors and trickles.

  We grew to a similar state of mind in the matter of our canoeing clothes. These mere scraps we simply took off on landing and threw in a heap, knowing there was little chance of their being dry in the morning anyway. Saltwater-soaked clothing will not dry until it has been rinsed in fresh water, and we did not find it necessary to go to such elaborate lengths.

  We found quickly, as we must, methods of packing which kept the rest of our equipment imperviously dry. Treblewrapped in rubber groundsheets, oiled silk, and then heavy oilcloth, all bound like string bags, our bundles shared the swilling bilge-water with us, and never leaked. One separate bundle apiece contained our ‘going ashore’ outfits, along with a dry towel. On landing, we would heave the canoes up out of the sea’s way, pick a camping site, and run the tent up. The going-ashore bundles were jerked open; our singlets and shorts cast aside. The towels flayed us up pinkly, and in seconds we would have thrown on shirt, kilt, jacket, bonnet, shoes and stockings, and be ready for visiting.

  If the day was dark and chill when we arrived, making it necessary to postpone until the morning an excursion for provisions or conversation, we varied the routine by crawling with all our bundles into the tent, lacing the door, lighting both stoves, and sitting naked upon a blanket while steam rose from us in a most pleasing way. Only mounting hunger would drive us to stir from the luxurious dwam which this practice induced.

  This may well be the proper place at which to say something of our food arrangements. We had two folding pressure stoves and a suitable outfit of lightweight utensils. The provisions we carried in waterproof bags, and very large bundles they made. Bread, we found, was not a suitable item of travelling provisions, unless for our midday sandwiches. It was bulky, and we could dispose of six loaves at frightening speed.

  The basis of our eating was oatmeal, lentils, dried fruit and potatoes. We made quantities of lentil soup, or at least a pottage, boiling up steeped lentils into a fine green khaki mush into which we dropped, when we could spare it, a rasher of bacon by way of stock.

  Oatmeal brose was the true foundation of the expedition, and the correct method of making it must be put on record. A quantity of coarse oatmeal – with salt ‘to taste’ as they say – is placed in a bowl and boiling water poured over it. The water must be boiling hard as it pours and there should be enough of it to just cover the oatmeal. A plate is immediately placed over the bowl like a lid. You now sit by for a few minutes, gloating.

  This is your brose cooking in its own steam. During this pause, slip a nut of butter under the plate and into the brose. In four or five minutes whip off the lid, stir the mass violently together, splash in some milk, and eat. You will never again be happy with the wersh and fushionless silky slop which passes for porridge. This was the food whose devotees staggered the legions of Rome; broke the Norsemen; held the Border for five hundred years; and are standing fast on borders still. It is a dish for men. It also happens to taste superbly. We ate it twice a day, frequently without milk, although such a simplification demands what an Ayrshire farmer once described to me as a ‘guid-gaun stomach’. He is a happy traveller who has with him a bag of oatmeal and a poke of salt. He will travel fast and far.

  Dried fruit was a pleasant accompaniment. We always soaked a large canful overnight and stewed it briefly in the morning. The fruits could also be eaten in their dry wrinkled state, when determined mastication brought out juicy hints of their dormant virtues. At times we made pancakes, or even simpler articles with flour.

  After breakfast each morning we prepared a prodigious bundle of food to be consumed en route. This consisted of sandwiches, which we shared by laying the canoes alongside each other wherever we might be. In seas too rough for the proximity, the man with the sandwiches would have to pass some over by paddle. This meant balancing the sandwiches on one of the blades, and holding the paddle out like an old-fashioned church collecting-ladle, until the other snatched the food off safely. Here again we grew skilful, and in the end the gestures of proferring and grabbing, among the heaving of the seas, canoes and paddle, were dainty indeed. A loaf or two, followed by some dried fruits, or a few hard-boiled eggs, were adequate and satisfying in these conditions. Strangely, although we carried bottles for drinking-water, and were many hours afloat at a stretch, we rarely felt thirsty on the sea.

  Seumas at Stornoway. This canoe carried him across the Minch on his own in the year after our trip.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SPANISH ARMADA

  They came no far and glamoured road,

  They bear no magic sign;

  What wisdom have they from abroad?

  We ken their kin and line.

  What folly to believe that they

  Could profit us on market day!

  It is unusual to see a startled Highlander. Sudden exclamations of surprise form little part of his vocabulary. The words of ejaculation which he employs are vented only after consideration, and have a ponderable quality. The reason for this stoicism is that he is inured to the unexpected. It is indeed the constant accompaniment of his life, for there is a surprise round every Highland corner.

  We had splashed ashore at Scallasdale expecting a deserted moorland bog, and we had found a golf course. As we watched them, ourselves like sodden kelpies, only more tousled, the man and the girl holed out levelly, nodded towards us with grave courtesy, and took their trim way to the next tee, leaving the lance of the fifth hole reared and swaying in possession of the field where we crouched. They drove off adequately – she with a trig yellow jumper and a swing like an angel – and walked away down the fairway out of our lives.

  They dwindled, and we came back to the chill present. Dropping back to the beach, we stripped, dried, and changed before setting off to the farm of Scallasdale, nesting distantly in its rich woody garden on the far side of the course. Here would undoubtedly be a suitable camping corner, well beyond the range of the fashionable sporting scene we had just left.

  In a field near the farm we encountered a large and sturdy bell-tent. A few forays round it revealed that it was unoccupied. We learned at the farm that it was the property of a regular visitor to the place, Meg Buchanan, the actress, better known to Scots radio audiences as Mrs McFlannel. Later we had to confess to her that we had moved in and squatted overnight in her tent, on the suggestion of the farm folk.

  There can be times, concerning the elements of living – food and shelter – when a bell-tent pitched on wet grass can appear, in perspective, to offer the grossest of luxury. We hauled our gear into it, and weighted the canoes above the tide with stones from the beach. After the frail gauze of our lightweight, the bell-tent rolled sturdily through the rising wind like a battleship, flinging off the gouts of rain that struck her like streams of bullets. It was a comfortable night for the tent also, because our lit stoves cheered up the interior, and we trimmed her rigging afresh against Meg’s return.

  The Campbells of Scallasdale Farm received us warmly, and we sat in to tea with them and heard the news of the place. Apart from the onerous tasks of the farming and the crofts around there were ample activities to cheer their leisure time.

  Golf is a recent sport in the West Highlands, unlike the east of Scotland, where the game was born and has its roots. So the course was a new craze, taken up with great keenness. Everyone was playing golf, and used clubs and balls from relatives in other parts of the country were arriving to fire the zeal of the new recruits. Other active sports, dances,
a badminton club, filled the winter, which is farming’s holiday time.

  Among the farm folk was a town lad in his teens, who had been working there for a year or two. ‘I would never want to leave here,’ he told us. ‘Ye never weary; there’s always something interesting going on.’ In his words was a summary of much of the continuing and living significance of our Highlands. In this remote lively corner of Mull, they were a new proof of what we had come to prove.

  Another was to be found in a little personal achievement of the son of the house. An old cottar building standing near had been ‘restored’ by the landowner, mainly for decorative purposes, and when it was to be roofed no professional thatcher could be found in the neighbourhood to do the job. All the recent housebuilding had been concerned with more modern forms of roofing. However, thatching was wanted, and thatching would be done. ‘I’ll try it myself,’ said Duncan Campbell, and he set to, with someone carting the rushes to him. There was the finished task, as good a job of thatching as we saw in our whole journey, and a sign of the ready invention which exists beyond the range of chain-store life.

  The Campbells showed us round their charming garden, pointing out, among their trees, the superb Spanish chestnut which was probably the largest in Scotland. They told us with a twinkle that local belief attributed the planting of the tree to survivors from the Spanish Armada.

  Throughout the British Isles there is a range of legend which deals generously with the prowess of other nations. We have always been kind to the foreigner. This is an acute and comic development of a determined human belief, that no good thing can come out of the adjacent soil. For the Scottish scene the situation is neatly summed up in a recent incident, already classic. A visitor to a small town made conversation with a citizen about a young native of the place who was already an author of renown. ‘Whit!’ exclaimed the townsman, in a spasm of repudiation. ‘Him write books? I kent his faither!’

  More than once we laughed irresistibly in the faces of certain holiday-makers who would come running to watch us land, with shouts of ‘Hurrah! Here come the Danish canoeists!’ – and were almost indignantly crestfallen to hear us talk. They had rushed to salute some noble and mysterious alien impulse, and remained to be critics of foolhardy locals.

  History is a peculiarly rich vein for this attitude, since the topical proofs are not present. One will be told freely in Scotland, with chapter and verse, that the kilt was invented by an English navvy-master; that some London tailor was the first to devise tartans; that (although the sword and the pipes kept us alive as a nation) our greatest sword-maker was a central European, and the MacCrimmons, the master pipers, were Italians; that no one ever climbed Scottish peaks until some gentlemen came from Oxford in 1860 or thereabouts.

  I do not believe these tales; and I disbelieve them by instinct, without the need for research. I have a habit of labelling them all with what is intended to be the sceptical title of ‘Spanish Armada’, because the Armada is by far the richest seam for the pro-foreigner school of historical study. One is deeply in the toils of it on all the Scottish islands, from the north of Shetland down to Gigha.

  The story is put forward that all our coasts are thickly peopled with descendants of Spaniards shipwrecked with the Armada, and that these introduced to the natives, not only a dominant racial type, but also a wealth of learning in the arts, husbandry, and the graces of life. ‘The inhabitants of Barra are all Spanish’ I was told, on the eve of my first visit to that truly Celtic Hebridean isle. ‘The men are all olive-skinned, and they wear gold earrings.’ Alas, but I never found a male earring, nor a native guitar, in all my visits: and the dark ones among them looked incorrigibly Celtic to me!

  These Spanish castaways had many skills, if all the tales are even half true. They taught the women of Shetland and Fair Isle to knit, and those of Harris to weave. To other islands came cheese-makers, or sea-dogs skilled in fancy sewing and lacemaking. The more masculine were meantime teaching the eager islanders how to distil whisky, build and navigate boats, breed ponies and dogs, improve their flocks, fields, and woods, and other useful arts which have not survived in Spain. Others devoted themselves to the design of buildings, the illumination of manuscripts, and the general raising of taste and standards. It can be seen that all progress and all knowledge were lacking in Scotland until that autumn of 1588 when the Spaniard was washed up.

  History has done its best for England too. It is said that there are villages of Devon where the entire population is clearly of Spanish origin, descendants of refugees from the Armada. As if the men of Bideford, for their part in that affair, had need to improve their stock by a Latin importation.

  Plenty of history has been written about the Armada, but the facts will hardly support the prowess with which the Spaniards are decorated at the scenes of their shipwrecks. It was a terrifying disaster which overtook them, the moment they entered the English Channel, and pursued them all round the British coasts. Seumas and I could even feel for their wretchedness, in that summer of our own, for 1588 was another of those incessant periods of storm, with winter gales swamping the whole autumn. Wounded and scattered by Drake, the Armada ships squeezed out of the Channel through the Straits of Dover and staggered north along the English east coast, with Howard chasing them beyond the Forth. On they heaved, the remnants of them, round the Orkneys and south past Scotland and Ireland to the open Atlantic and a long struggle back to home ports, successfully reached by only a battered few. Here and there on our west coast they crashed and vanished.

  The picture of their alleged social influence suggests orderly and able bands of them marching ashore and setting to rights the long-neglected education of the natives. In contemporary eyes, they cut a different figure. James Melville, the minister of Anstruther, saw them. He describes in his Diary how one wandered galleon anchored off his town while the commander came ashore to beg for water and stores. It was a sharp moment for the Fifers, as, granting the favour, they thought of those of their own seafaring number who had died on the faggots of the Inquisition. There was nothing formidable about the ship’s company of about 250 ‘for the maist part’, says Melville, ‘young beardless men, silly, trauchled and hungered’.

  The most famous Armada ship in Scotland was not wrecked by storm, but blown up and sunk when at anchor in Tobermory Bay, in Mull. Fragments of salvage have been recovered from time to time, and the known presence of the wreck in shallow water, with the belief that it was in some way the treasure ship of the Armada, has made the spot for a century or two the scene of trial for all new diving equipment as it was invented. A gun recovered in a drag is believed to have been designed and cast by Benvenuto Cellini; but the most thrilling signal from the deep was experienced by the crew of a barque last century, who, weighing anchor, found a gold doubloon stuck by a dab of mud to one of the flukes. Many of this galleon’s crew are believed to have been safely ashore when she went down, but there is no record that any of them settled in Mull. They probably set out to plod their way overland homewards like the other scattered survivors.

  These were the fortunate ones, and there were very few of them. Of the 20 ships or less wrecked on the whole length of the Scottish and Irish coasts, not many men came ashore and lived. Over 1100 dead bodies came up on one Irish beach. Those who came in alive quickly joined them. One actually survived to creep trembling home to Spain and write his memoirs, telling of the terrible men of Ireland who came out of the shore bog to despatch and despoil his comrades. His narrative is given a mounting frenzy of terror by the recollection that these Irish were claiming to be brutally held down by the English, who had just scourged God’s favourite Spaniards; while with his own eyes he had seen an Ireland which was under no man’s law at all. There were certain survivors who got ashore also in England, but there is no historical doubt about their fate. Froude describes bluntly how the officers were imprisoned for the ransom they might fetch, while all the others rescued were shot or hanged on the spot.

  So that the Spani
sh Armada has left nothing more real than a tourist tale; although, in the unbalanced narrative of the West and its life, that can be real enough. But until an island is discovered where the men are called largely Pedro and Juan, and the people speak a Hispano-Gaelic tongue and drink their whisky from porrons, one will be able to assume that the folk of the Hebrides who happen to bear the dark complexion of their forebears belong to a Scottish race which was in its place before the Spaniard was in his.

  Not that the Armada was an unalloyed victory for England and her neighbours. Indeed, it is clear to me that the Spaniards got the last word, although I have not seen the point made before. These months in the middle of 1588 were summer turned winter, with week-long gales constantly renewed. ‘No one remembers such a season’, said the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Commander of the Armada, writing to his king. Nor did he and the other survivors spare themselves in describing the weather, for it was one way of assuaging the disaster. For long after, the human stragglers were landed by neutral ships on the coasts of the Baltic and the Low Countries. And as they lurched their way home, gaunt and shaken, displaying their rock-scarred wounds gouged by early frostbite, they planted in Europe for ever the grim legend of the British climate.

  Many of the people at Scallasdale came to see our canoes. We gave solo trips to all who wanted them, and could readily have set up a profitable hiring business on the shore – an opportunity which was to arise frequently. It was not a bad day when we left eventually, in the afternoon. The wind was less than moderate, and diminishing slowly. Heading for Tobermory we had showers of rain for most of the way, but these are little-noticed discomforts once the boats are fairly launched and dampness is familiar. We took as straight a line as possible for the bay of Tobermory, 17 miles away; a course which carried us well across to the Morven shore opposite the village and bay of Salen.