The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  It was the same kind of day; perhaps a little slacker in the wind, but bitter cold, with a steep sea making ashore and promising a soaking launch. We were now beginning to reckon exposure among our potential handicaps. Yesterday had shown that, with the wind northerly, the heat of paddling was not enough to eliminate over very many hours the fangs of the wind, nor could our bodies be sure of warming up to a tolerable temperature the inevitable shipped water in which we sat. So we tried a new launching trick in the hope of getting dry away. Normally we pushed off straight into shore breakers, wading until we had two feet of depth, slipping aboard and sitting, to paddle out through the broken water. The essential pause when the canoe was taking our weight meant a brief loss of headway and control, and by the time the canoe was driving well offshore the cockpit had swallowed some inches of water, a nucleus of which remained for the rest of the day.

  Our last camp on Eigg: Seumas is on the right, and Rum is seen in the background, beyond the boulders on which we were nearly wrecked the night before. The islet inshore is Eilan Thuilm.

  For today’s launch we donned bonnets and oilskins against the wind. Running the canoes out through the nearest shallows, we shielded the cockpits with the skirts of our oilskins against the first few breakers. Then, each man watching for his wave lull, we stepped in and paddled off standing up, so that the canoes were never halted, and we hitched and jumped them over the waves rather than through them, until fairly into the Sound.

  Only then did we take time to get squeezed down into the sitting position, finding negligible water there compared with our normal intake. This is perhaps an advanced form of canoe handling. We used it several times later in similar conditions, finding that our bare feet planted on the canoe bottom gave us an enormously stronger and more urgent control of balance, in spite of the much higher centre of gravity in the standing position.

  And then the long slog to Rum, although we were inside the grand pillared entrance of Loch Scresort before we could feel assured that the wind would not beat us back. Every mile of the seven took us a full half-hour, heads down and eyes three-quarters shut. Only when we were well in towards the loch end could we look up, in the lee, and see round. Ahead was Kinloch Castle, a red sandstone pile, distinguished among fine trees, with a hamlet scattering of houses about. We turned aside and landed below a small plantation of trees which promised camping shelter, splashing ashore with more noise than we were used to making, and intoning ‘Rum, Rum! Here we come!’ or some such exuberance.

  This time we brought up the canoes and laid them in a V to enclose the tent. A stag came up to the fence and leaned his Royal head over, coughing at us in the bronchial signal of the rut. He came to visit us frequently in the next hours.

  A large man, in tweeds, with a gun and two dogs, arrived scrambling round a shore path and came over towards us. As we continued with the arrangement of our campsite, there was a short conversation:

  ‘Have you got permission to land here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Ourselves!’

  It was an almost casual opening, but complete. In the stiff ensuing silence Seumas and I conversed normally as we unpacked. There was an adjacent throat-clearing and ‘You can’t stay here without permission.’

  ‘We’re here!’

  ‘You’ll need permission!’

  ‘We’re staying!’

  Our contribution to this was of an offhand character. The tent was now out of its bundle and the pole was assembling. The visitor drew nearer.

  ‘You’ll have to see Lady Bullough before you put that tent up. Just leave the tent here and come to see Lady Bullough.’

  ‘The tent is going up!’ This was said with some volume, and the tones may well have reached the castle. Short as the conversation was, it took place at a backcloth which was the rising tent. Its off-white weathered shape was already erect and pegged. Now we ripped out our bundles with the dry clothes and towels, and, as if the man with the gun had no existence, we stripped and dried ourselves upon the grass, standing and flexing and towelling with the shiver of cold delight this moment always gave us. It was a naked insult, and on the horizon of our casual view

  – for we didn’t even look at him – we could see the man’s face flame as red as the sunset. This was from no physical embarrassment, but because he was ignored – treated like a paid convenience, a situation with which, in his present service, he was doubtless familiar. There was a sense, indeed, in which we pitied the man for our behaviour. He was a Highlander, but he was in the wrong setting, and we were at no pains to hide our contempt. In a moment or two we were kilted and clothed and well shod, glowing against the chill of the night. As we started to make a meal, the man with the gun and the dogs went off by the way they had come.

  Some time later he was back, with a new opening: ‘Would you gentlemen like to come and see Lady Bullough?’ ‘Certainly! We should very much like to see Lady Bullough.’

  Our little procession wound round to the head of the loch, and we chatted on such topics as might be allowed to be of common interest. The island well knew of our voyage, and, indeed, of our intention to make Rum a port of call. But the conversation was heavy with an overlay of the proprietorial principle, that no part of this island moor could under any circumstances offer a welcome, or perhaps even a foothold, to the visitor.

  At one point, our guide related, pathetically ingratiating: ‘When you were paddling up the loch this evening Lady Bullough phoned me down and said: “There are poachers in the loch. Don’t allow them to land!” And I said: “These aren’t poachers. They’re sports.” “Well,” she said, “they musn’t land anyway!” But I said …’

  Arrived at the castle, our guide went in to announce us. He was back soon, with apologies. ‘Lady Bullough is very sorry, she can’t see you now. But you have her permission to camp on the island, and we have to give you a haunch of venison with her compliments.’

  We accepted the explanation, and the promise of the tribute, gravely, and strolled off about our business upon the forbidden ground. Not another hint of hostility came into the air again, although we have not heard that subsequent excursions have fared as lavishly. We were indeed received with kindness on all sides, as if the people of the place were relieved to be able to break away from a forbidding routine. In one of the houses we were invited to a sumptuous supper of roast venison, and the lady of the house prepared a packet of sandwiches to take us over the Sound of Sleat on the next day. For a long time we retained the memory of a child of this house – a girl at least 12 years of age, yet so unused to new faces on this desert island that she crouched all the evening shyly behind a chair, peeping and giggling like a four-year-old.

  Crossing a courtyard in the late darkness, we came on an unforgettable scene. Lamplight streamed from a deep door, and we stepped into a butcher’s workshop. Four stags, the day’s kill, were being dismembered by a group of young Skyemen, who went at the job with bloody hands, making enormous shadows on the walls. As we watched them, they ripped the venison apart, the heads with their antlers on a side bench, the carcasses slung up to chained hooks, the hides off like cheese-cloth, and the knives and saws going with inhuman skill. These were apparently gillies brought to the island for the shooting season. It was a vivid picture – a strong and simple scene – one to put on canvas.

  There is a post office on the island, although the traffic is trifling. It was a Cockney voice which served us here – indeed, we discovered only one Gaelic speaker among the two dozen or so of permanent residents. He was the chief stalker, and he had little opportunity of using his native language. While the postmistress went into the rear premises for some telegraph forms, we took from the counter the dated franking stamp and imprinted it plentifully upon our log, so as to authenticate our visit. And, oddly, this landing and camping affair of ours still seems to be most rare. We also stamped the backs of our wrists, and even, I think, our palms, with ‘Isle of Rum’.

  Having lan
ded, there was nothing else to be done here. We had hoped to include also in our Small Isles circuit a visit to Canna, lying still farther to the west, but decided to abandon this in favour of a push north, via Mallaig. Accordingly we were packing by early morning, with the wind still westerly, and fresher than we cared to have it. Our course was to be due east to Mallaig, and this 20-mile passage would be the longest yet in open water, with only a passing glance, midway, at the shore of Sleat, in Skye. Anyway, the wind was right for us, and we packed. Also, we took delivery ceremoniously of the haunch of venison. It weighed 26 pounds, professionally bagged and sewn, and it dangerously upset all our stowage technique.

  Rather than refuse it on any ground of sailing safety, we should have abandoned our most needful possessions. After a deal of experiment, however, we lashed the mighty thing on the top of Seumas’s stern section, with the shank bone pointing aft, and the massed meat of the haunch snugging up to the small of his back. I took over bundles of his stuff to spread out the weight, and in this way we got trimmed and afloat at last.

  On the way out of Loch Scresort towards the east we had enough smooth water to see how Seumas was riding. He was truly weighted, with precariously little freeboard left; and this persuaded us not to use the sails, although we were to have the wind with us. There was a fine wind, too, for the direction we were taking. But paddling would have to do. Sailing, although giving us a good deal more speed and ease, would have forced the freighted canoe much too low.

  It was a six-hour pull at the paddles, in heavy sea all the way. Once clear of the Rum coast there was no shelter whatever, and we took more water aboard than normal because the sterns were too heavy to come up fast to the following sea. However, the venison was a good breakwater on Seumas’s poop, and it was well brined before we had gone far. It was not a passage which could be forced. We went on at our own pace, stopping the paddles for not more than five minutes in the six hours. It was too cold, indeed, to stop, and much rain blashed in showers that looked like smoke columns as they came up astern, and felt like lances.

  We had hoped to encounter on the way some of the great fleet of steam herring drifters then fishing out of Mallaig, many of whose crews we knew. But for four-fifths of the way there were none in sight, and that for a reason which was later to cause us modestly to preen. The weather was too bad for them! Of course, we had the wind more or less astern. At no point of the passage could we conceivably have turned round and attempted to go back. Only one vessel passed us on the route. It was later than our half-way stage, when we seemed to be close to the Point of Sleat, Skye’s most southerly mark, and felt a sense of comfort that here was a solid place to make for if things should get worse. The white houses of Aird were quite clear in the occasional sunshine. Then the upper works of a small ship appeared between us and the land. She was throwing water over her mast, but, what made for more unease, she was hull down, which meant that the land beyond her was even miles away.

  Seumas leaving Loch Scresort, Isle of Rum. Kinloch Castle is to the left.

  For the second part of the trip we needed no compass, as the great white pillar of smoke rising above Mallaig fattened out of the sea ahead, and we watched it grow for ten miles, until the roofs of the high kippering sheds appeared, where it comes from. When we were so far past the Point of Sleat that we could no longer see it on our left without turning to look, we had a few miles only to go. They were long, but they passed.

  A mile or two off Mallaig we could see the houses and the harbour easily. One or two herring drifters came out – the only ones, we learned later, to make a fishing that day – and turned south-west for the Coll banks. This pointed them into the weather, so that they shortly looked like Shetland sea-ponies, throwing ragged manes of spray out of their eyes, and bucking skittishly. Soon we were near enough to see people on the pier, and to be seen ourselves. Nearing still, we watched the whole silent and busy pantomime of arrival excitement – the pointed arms, the beckonings and runnings, the training and passing of binoculars, the climbings on to railway wagons – until the outer quay wall was a black spectating mass, which moved with us shouting round the end of the pier. The mass fringed the harbour edge with our progress all the way, and eventually milled below the end of the road to watch us bump ashore. Then the active fragments sprayed off from the edges and ran towards us, and they were men and boys helping to lift us and our canoes ashore. This was a kind welcome, the more so because the people had dignity themselves. As we chatted and chaffed with them in a first passage of words, the news spread back that we had come from Rum, and this was satisfying in the highest degree, being both a joke and a wonder as well. As the crowd continued to grow and press around, we left the canoes to them at last and slipped off to see to our livelihood at the post office.

  Here we found a certain shyness, as we sent off our press wires, for the ladies of the official service had urged our arrival, and here we were! Nor were we prepared to be fobbed off, as was their ruse, by being attended at the grill by the junior staff. We had Mrs Watt, the postmistress, and her daughter Ethel haled from the back premises to answer for themselves, and there was a hilarious session of mock-complaint and counter-charge, until passers-by came in to discover what the laughter was about, and another concourse formed. One thing, as the saying goes, led to another, to such effect that we were shortly installed in the parlour of the Watts’ house, which was handily affixed to the post office. Here, still in our tattered and salt-bleached paddling flimsies, we went at a substantial tea, and held occasional court as friendly heads came round the door incessantly. Everybody, I think, felt better after this.

  Ardmore, 1948: fourteen years later, I am standing on the spot where I am seen sitting in the picture on page 117. The whole roof has fallen in and the floorboards have rotted away. But is this the end for Ardmore? Picture: Dorothy Dunnett

  CHAPTER 13

  THE HIGHLAND PROBLEM

  Laughter was easy yonder!

  Life was alive to win.

  Yesterday’s tale was wonder,

  Albyn was light and thunder,

  Rich in my clan and kin.

  Whether I’m leal or lying,

  Life at the start, or done

  Today has a tale of dying,

  Doom, and no glory nor crying,

  Sunset without the sun.

  The Highland problem is the oldest problem in Scotland. The attempt to solve it has always been abandoned by those whom it has defeated, and the story spread that the place is not worth having and saving anyway. In the days when physical conquest was the mode of achieving economic unity, many a sour-grapes despatch went back to Rome by the military post from the Wall. It was doubtless mentioned on all sides that the country was poor and barren, and the people shiftless and lazy – although, as the serving Roman would admit, they kept the legions on the run.

  It has been easy, in the 19 centuries which have passed, to put the same tale about, and to have it believed. The eagerness of the world to believe it is worth a study in itself. Samuel Johnson, speaking on the subject of the Highlands, committed one of the greatest howlers in European letters, and his reputation has suffered not a whit. The Highlander has never been in charge of the organs of civilised opinion, and, in any case, he has never been asked for evidence. Giving the Highland dog a bad name has long been a sport nearer home. ‘Wolves and wild boars’ was James VI’s description of his Hebridean subjects. A hundred years later, here is a Sheriff-Clerk of Inverness-shire writing to the Privy Council and telling of the people of the Highlands and Isles as ‘infested with poverty and idleness’.

  There must have been some virtue there too, and energy. Very shortly afterwards, in 1745, a few thousands of them emerged from their wilderness and blitzkrieged a dazzling way southward to stagger England to the vitals. It is the only army I know of in well-recorded history of which no atrocity stories are told.

  A straight line drawn from a spot 20 miles north of Glasgow to one 20 miles north of Aberdeen will cut Scotland in
half. Broadly speaking, everything to the north and west of this line is in the Highlands; and, the farther west, the more Highland. In the western sea there is a spray of islands, the Hebrides, close on a hundred of them inhabited. Only at one or two short periods of recorded history have the Highlands moved sweetly along with the rest of Scotland in a progressive picture of a homogeneous nation. In the basic sense, Scotland is an economic unity. The Highland satellites still find their orbit in the administrative centre of Scotland, and nowhere else. But in every other sense the apartness of the Highlands is complete. They cannot, by their own efforts, fit into the modern industrial state: they never could: and the State is too busy to find a berth for them: it always has been. This is the Highland problem.

  Nevertheless, the Highlander has been able to find for himself an ample life. He has a fertile land. Upon it – apart from the stony uplands – he used to feed a multitude of cattle, and could still do so. There is a mildness along the western coasts, brought by the Gulf Stream: or rather by its offshoot, the North Atlantic Drift, whose eternal task is to import to this spot the warm sea-climate of Florida. Frost and snow seldom lie in the islands, nor in the rich alluvial valleys of the mainland. High winds and a heavy rainfall are frequent, but the harvests are always brought in. Not until 1950 did anything come of endless efforts to create an asset out of the high rainfall for the benefit of the Highland people themselves. In that year started the first of the great water-power schemes of the North of Scotland HydroElectric Board. It seems likely that a harnessing of the winds will follow after. And if tides can also be turned to power for the switching on, there are tides and races ready for the experiment.