The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  The fertility of the Highlands is an old story. Only the absence of a reliable transport system on land and sea has kept this benign productivity on a freak and amateur basis. The Highlands share with the rest of Scotland in enjoying the acceptance of the description ‘Scotch’ as a universal indication of superior quality – herring, salmon, beef, honey, wool, potatoes, mutton, lobsters, shellfish, whisky, bacon, tomatoes. In the world markets, the adjective ‘Scotch’ applied to these items and to many more means invariably a price higher than the market average. The word means quality.

  MacKenzie, in his A Hundred Years in the Highlands, tells of luxurious growths in his remarkable garden. We ourselves spoke to men who had seen peaches growing in the open air in Rum. Canna, Islay, and others of the islands can grow early potatoes as early and as good as the southern fields. During our visit to Muck they had a hay crop of over two tons to the acre. Much of the soil appears to have great potential, responding richly when well limed and nourished with manures. The wind is the chief enemy, burning the unprotected growths with its salt content; and the development of tree belts should be a matter for early investigation. In sheltered gardens and parklands the growth is prodigious. Palms are comfortable immigrants. Tomatoes are open-air plants. We saw fruit trees at Scallasdale whose branches had had to be supported as the weight of fruit became insupportable by the tree trunks themselves, and indeed eventually broke off by their own exuberance. Other garden and wild fruits blacken their bushes in the season, and have undoubtedly a commercial significance.

  The wealth of the place, the fertility, the richness that could ensue in the provision of good eating and plenishing for modern man, is by no means an empty speculation. To apply to the potential energy of the soil all the modern techniques of agriculture and chemistry would be a fair and rewarding sight. But the result would not be novel. At one time the wilderness did indeed blossom like the rose – although, on present-day standards, perhaps it was like the wild rose. Those who find some difficulty in conceding the possibilities of a re-established cattle industry might well remember that this was at one time a great cash and export trade. At one cattle fair in Crieff in 1723 more than 30,000 guineas in ready money were paid over, mainly by English dealers. The ‘Roast Beef of Old England’ was a Highland tale, and a well-paying one at that. I find it hard to believe, following these Argentinian-fed post-war years, that a similar gathering in Crieff would not bring the English dealers flocking with ready guineas.

  It is the sight of the vast derelict tracts of the modern Highlands, with their ruined homesteads, bracken-covered pastures and soured and bogged meadows, which create the ready illusion that these places were always the scenes of a doleful and meagre living standard, from which emigration was a welcome rescue. It would be as valid to assume, from the sight of the ruined Parthenon, that ancient Athens boasted nothing better than a tumbledown and roofless culture.

  The cause of the Highland problem, and its ills, is that every trend and event of its modern life has been out of timing, and it has been nobody’s business to set it right. When the wreck of the ’45 Rising threw down all the geographical barriers, it was the task of government to nurse this delicate area, with its almost prehistoric social structure, out of its apartness and into the growing modern society in which it could have played so potent a part. But the government of the United Kingdom had other tasks on its hands. It found itself able to call on the Highlanders, but not on the Highlands. They were to become a mere quarry for the raw material of pioneering and soldiery. And it was to be the task of the Highlander to play a great part in the shaping of the New World, while at the same time his community was debarred from growing into rhythm with the expanding Britain to which it belonged.

  You cannot, however, man a New World without leaving gaps in the defences of the Old. The traditional Highland way of life upon the land was a patriarchal system, and so it remains. It makes little difference to the case – or to the Highlander – if the landlord is an individual, or the State. After the ’45, few clan chiefs remained as landlords. They suffered proscription; or they cut themselves off by entering into English society. In this way or that, they were leaders permanently lost to a community which was badly in need of leadership. The Highlander answered this deprivation by imposing upon himself the severest discipline of Calvinism, at a time when the rest of Christendom was progressively adopting more liberal doctrines.

  The Highlands were further caught out of stride by the sudden onset of the Industrial Age at their back door. It was in the southwest of Scotland on the Clyde, that the machine started first to take over from man, and many of the Highlanders fled from their forgotten lands to a scene in which society was at least interested. At the same time, the vacuum left by the lost chief was being filled, on a number of estates, by the arrival of wealthy landowners, who had purchased the estates, perhaps for sporting or picturesque reasons, but were disposed to spend money on amenities. This was the benevolent modern version of the protecting clan chief, and the Highlander welcomed it. If he was not to move with the times, at least he might as well be comfortable where he sat. It was a shrewd enough instinct, for in the recent Highland history, proprietors have spent more development money on their estates than the government. This is not to make a case for those proprietors who have been permitted to buy land and to shed the people from off it. These, always to be execrated for their own sake, are the mere proof that the state had abandoned the Highlands. Such expenditure as had been forced from it was mere scratching of the surface; a grant for a piece of road here, a pier there. Britain’s Highland policy has been one of relief doles, not capital investment.

  By another costly act of ill-timing, the work of the romantic writers, who ‘discovered’ the Highlands after the Jacobite barriers fell, tended to keep the place forced back into its archaic shell. It became overdosed with historical curiosity. The result was that too early a start was made with a tourist movement, before, as it were, a modern shape of the land was well laid. It was the wrong kind of tourism – a moneyed, shooting, antlers-in-the-great-hall, piper-on-the-terrace tourism. Hence much energy went to the creation of vast hotels and shooting lodges, and the development of sporting estates, with fatal diversions into the easily learned techniques of gillies, stalkers, gamekeepers, and piper-valets. This has caused the slow growth of what could be a most lucrative modern tourist industry, due to the long-held belief in the Highlands that the tourist is a millionaire, with excessive expectations in the matters of food, service, and sanitation.

  The special blight of the romantic school of writing has been that it denied the countryside any present-day significance, and the people any forward-looking way of thought. A tourist policy for the Highlands must work hard now to combat the determined bid which the romantics have made for over 150 years to suggest that the land is even emptier than is the case. Ruined castles, picturesque and empty landscapes, an occasional elderly shepherd or crofter figure mumbling some clan legend, is all that has been permitted to appear. Many a current – and I hope a rapidly tarnishing – reputation has been made on a stock collection of worn old yarns, strung together in a volume with photographs. ‘Didn’t so-and-so visit the island last year?’ we asked of one woman, mentioning a renowned writer of this school. ‘Yes,’ she agreed heavily, with terrible patience. ‘He was here looking for fairy tales!’ This was an island which was plainly dying because of the mere matter of communications, whose solution was one of the earliest triumphs of the modern age everywhere else. There was no way of assuring regular transport to the mainland and south for the wealth of lobsters they could catch. And all other development was subject to the same frustration. Yet among this present decay a self-styled journalist was peddling his ill-timed antiquarianism. Those who charge that the Highlander lives in the past had better make sure that they mean the Highlander himself, and not his accepted interpreters.

  The pictures, the scenic photographs, the postcards, which illustrate these romantic scenes, are
a plague in themselves of a special sort. Almost without exception they portray an empty landscape. Broken-down sheilings, the empty glen, the castle on the seacliff – these are the stock-in-trade of the cameraman in the Highlands. We differ from all other peoples in this, that we portray as a tourist inducement, not an active and lively peopled country, but an empty one. Elsewhere, the boasted charm of the foreign scene lies in its crowded mart, busy streets and cafés, rural pursuits and festivals, its peasant types, its craftsmen. Scotland’s habit has been to display itself as a land without Scots. Indeed, without life. I have watched one of the best-known scenic photographers in Scotland drive a straying flock of sheep out of the foreground of his picture, lest it should disturb the barren composition.

  The Highlands are not deserted. But over great tracts they are empty, with the bleakness of a neglected asset. We have seen that the Highlands and Isles occupy one half of the land area of Scotland. To the south of the Highland line live close on five million people. To the north live fewer than 300,000 Highlanders. It is a pitiful total: and yet, thinking of the Highland problem, it is a miracle that there are people there at all. Our canoe voyage lay among the more remote fringes, far from the bigger centres of population. In the Highlands there are many small towns, some of them prosperous. From none of these has come any leadership for the rural areas, nor for the Highlands as a whole. The Highlander of the countryside – of the crofting and fishing fringes – lives on a constant pendulum of the gluts and slumps which bedevil the primary producer in any unprotected economic system. He is further shackled through the almost certain failure of any production project – be it fruit-growing, shellfish-gathering, lobster-fishing, or any other of the ventures in quality perishables which would be highly profitable in another place with similar resources – because of the lack of any reliable form of communications or transport. The steamer cannot call in certain weather because of the lack of a pier; or there is no road across the sodden bog; or there is no telephone with which to make a transaction. I anchored in a yacht in the lovely isle of Canna a year or two after the war, and went ashore in the evening to telephone to Edinburgh. The postmistress worked vigorously to connect me, and when she failed I came ashore again in the morning, when we tried again. At last I got through, and carried out a faint and tinny conversation across the paltry distance. The postmistress regarded this as a feat on the part of her installation. It was the first time for two days that anyone had been able to talk beyond Mallaig. My business was private and might well have waited. In the bay, however, were six or eight herring boats which had come to anchor the morning before with their catches. They had hoped to discover by telephone which was the likeliest market for their herring. And, trying for hours, they had failed; eventually having to scramble the catches aboard one or two of the vessels and send them speculatively to ports where there might be a market. It seemed to me an illustration of the commercial need for good communications in these parts, quite apart from the social and tourist needs.

  Transport, the physical moving of men and things from place to place, is a fantastic ordeal and difficulty. The existing systems are in no way adequate to the needs of the community or its visitors, and the burdens of its oncost are hard to believe. When we were at Tobermory, the transfer of live stock by steamer to the sales at Oban, 25 miles away, cost 5% of what the stock might be expected to realise at the sale. The whole price of one sheep out of 20 went to pay the transport for the score. To realise the price of 19 cows, a farmer had to rear and feed another one to pay for the transport alone.

  Because of such incidents, which are the substance of his daily life, the chief virtue of the Highlander on his own ground is patience. It is a patience born of facing, not only the raw end of every modern development, but of endless weather, driving with a ceaseless wind and a heavy winter rain under the lintels of his mind. He has paced himself to his difficulties, and shows little visible reaction to failure or success, in himself or others. Denied the great part of contemporary amenity, he has taken refuge from contemporary excitements by seeing himself as a part of a long and noble tradition, and by being little moved to action by day-to-day details. If this be laziness – the description most normally applied by his critics – it is a quality whose adoption might lead to more mental ease in other spheres.

  One disadvantage of his leaning on tradition is that the Gael always puts himself at the hinder end of his own history, and would have you believe that there is nothing to come after. Having suffered at the hands of the modern world, and seeing little future for his people as a community, he will rather bemoan the past than tempt providence by hopeful forecasts of the future. He is especially wary of tempting providence. This is the origin of the phrase that came word-perfect and unanimously from so many different lips: ‘It’s too late in the year’, in describing our own trip. It is his normal mode to quell optimism – and who, knowing the history of the Gael, will blame him for the trick at this stage in his career. Not that he lost faith in himself, as an individual. Far from it. But he ceased to dare hope for a future for his race, as a factor in the world community. ‘The old people are all away,’ the elderly Gael will say grudgingly. He means merely that most of his own generation have gone, and that they were the best of their kind. That is why, in spite of the well-developed sense of social responsibility which makes him the kindly succourer of the distressed neighbour and the hospitable host to the stranger, he will with infinite reluctance take part in any move of communal organisation to save himself.

  The Highlander of the present day, marvellously adaptable to the world in which he finds himself, is ceaselessly conscious of the world from which he comes. He has a sure knowledge of his roots and their worth. It is a point well made in two very different books published within the past few years. Each is autobiographical, dealing with the life of a young child growing up in Britain in the 1880s. In Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson tells of her girlhood in rural Oxfordshire; while in The Former Days,Dr. Norman MacLean describes his boyhood in Skye, at precisely the same period of history. The rural folk of the English book are rustics, with a hazy recollection of their local lore and little awareness of the manner and persons of even their grandparents. The Skye book, on the other hand, is a description of a civilisation, well recorded in its own mind with the events which have shaped it, and conscious of the men and the events it comes from.

  The clan sentiments go deep, and they are more than sentimental. ‘Where do you come from?’ is one of the first questions asked of a town Scot by another, for the interest is real in the place of origin. I myself find great pleasure in reading in country papers the names of football, shinty and cricket games, and seeing how the expected clan names of that district reel off for the modern fray.

  In a certain sense, this continuing communal instinct of the Highlander, this habit of responsibility towards his own community, is his handicap. In the small villages and hamlets there is a strenuous reluctance to take any hand in altering the habits and social practices. It takes the form of a diffidence to be first in the doing of anything – to try the new season’s potatoes, to plant a new crop. It is a relic of the time when the man who stepped aside from the close-knit pattern of the village or clan might endanger the whole community. We had a friend in one of the Hebridean islands who decided to plant early potatoes, in the belief that they would grow well enough to be put on the market even before the Ayrshire crop. His neighbours denounced the project as foolhardy and doomed, and when he persisted, ploughing and planting the seed in February, they used to come along to his field fence and laugh at him. The first year the thing was an amazing success; and it was known to be a success, with the bags of earlies going away by the steamer before the Ayrshires were on the market, and the huge price he got per ton well known to the whole place. On each succeeding year of the venture it was a similar success. But persistently they came along to laugh at his efforts, and the venture remained a local joke, to be dismissed with something of a sneer as
the greedy impudence of an incomer. It is a savage trait, this condemnation of newness; but it speaks with terrible clarity of communities elbowed out of the main stream of national progress, and forced to retreat to the last wall of their crude securities. It is tragic to note that this is the first characteristic of the Highlander to be lost when he is away from his native soil. It drops from him once he is over the Highland line. I believe that over the years the pressure towards emigration has come not so much from a desire to escape from adverse economic conditions, as to quit the inhibiting social discipline of the ancient style of life.

  The fell word emigration brings the question to the point of its special curse. It is certain that no part of Europe has suffered the depopulating blight of the Highlands. Even in Ireland, with its great manpower losses of the 19th century, the movement had a different quality. Ireland has no great industrial centres eating its landward fat. The Irish countryside is still well carpeted with population; events did not unman it, as with us, by whole islands and parishes at a time.

  Long back into the records of our history, the Highlander has been venturing forth upon the world in search of fortune; long after his present injustices are righted, and his citizenship restored, individuals among him will go the same road – and good luck to them. But these are not the examples which come to the mind at the thought of Highland emigration and depopulation. After the failure of the ’45, the Highlander embraced failure to himself as his whole fate. By complete clans and tribes, the exodus started and went on; they were swallowed up in the currents of the world, while the springs of life in the native places they had left slowed to a trickle. The effect of their prodigious pioneering in the new worlds has been amply recorded. They navigated rivers and tamed and bridged and harnessed them. They drained the swamps, cleared or planted the forests, broke the soil and made it abundant. They built cities and camps, poured out their lore and their laughter, sent herds and flocks widespread over virgin lands to the glory of God and the nobility of man. In these two centuries they made themselves forever a world people, as they had in medieval times made themselves a European people. Forced into conflict with the new world, they mastered and shaped it. At their backs, in its turn, the land they had left became a new wilderness. And it is to this, to the home of such a people, that the wise have been pointing this hundred years, saying that here were rivers too wide for bridging; fields too sour for planting; slopes too choked with rank growth to be worth cultivation. And these are not only opinions expressed, but lessons officially taught, to the children of those great-hearted enough to wait behind.