Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  The deaf-and-dumb boy guided Harvie-Brown on his ecstatic trip around the islands. ‘Puffins breeding here and filling the air and covering the sea with their hosts. Compared with other rock stations of the Puffin I would fancy that the Shiants far surpass any other,’ he wrote excitedly.

  The gentlemen left the next day, ‘after bestowing our little presents all round, and were rewarded by the bright smiles and thanks of this most interesting and kind family. Before leaving the Shore, I received a small collection of eggs of the various birds which are found breeding here, originally collected by the shepherds family for food.’

  The beautiful Mòr and Catriona were, increasingly, trouble for their mother. Among the attractions for the Lemreway boys who drowned here in 1881 may well have been the prospect of spending an evening with the two uncommonly handsome Shiant daughters. Three years later, another yacht, the Stella, owned by Mr JT Marsden of Lancaster, called in at the Shiants. There must have been many other visiting yachtsmen but Marsden was known to Harvie-Brown, and a page from the Stella’s log is preserved among Harvie-Brown’s papers. Marsden had a party of sporting London doctors on board: AK Gale, a surgeon from Fulham, Dr Atkinson from Kensington (known as ‘Professor’) and Dr RJ Reece from Bart’s Hospital in Smithfield.

  July 23rd 1884

  Shooting and fishing is now the order of the day – puffins, Guillemots, razorbills, Kittiwakes &c falling to the gun … Not waiting until the anchor was dropped, [an] eager party consisting of Reece, Gale, Professor, Skipper, and Bobby [cabin boy] lowered the dinghy and rowed ashore, intent upon slaying many wild fowl and armed with guns, rifles, & revolver in a most formidable manner.

  From information received from the book of sailing directions, we were under the impression that the islands (3 in number, but one is inaccessible), were not inhabited except by sheep: what then was our surprise to come upon first, a boat hauled high and dry upon the narrow neck of gravel connecting the two most southerly islands. It was much cracked and dried by the sun, and perfectly unseaworthy and bore the appearance of having been out of the water a considerable time. Leaving this, and turning a corner of the rocks, we came upon a calf and a cottage and proved it to be used exclusively for cattle. Further on we came upon yet another cottage, and approaching it, we were met on the threshold by a colly dog who showed his teeth in anything but a friendly manner. The dog was followed by an ancient Gael [Donald was about fifty-eight] who kept us in conversation of a limited description (owing to his ignorance of English and ours of Gaelic). Evidently this delay was to enable his family to put their interior in order, for presently we were invited to enter by the Gael’s wife [now about fifty-one] and two blooming daughters [twenty-one and nineteen] (the latter, by the way, the best looking lassies we have yet seen in Scotland). Milk was set before us. After a short chat of rather limited description, the party separated …

  The ancient Gael was taken on board by the Skipper and treated to whisky and various cakes of tobacco, which made him almost dance for joy. Professor afterwards came on board and after rummaging several silk handkerchiefs from his locker went ashore again and presented them to one of the damsels aforesaid. She seemed inclined to hug him but was evidently controlled by the presence of her mother who never for a moment left her.

  Nothing could be clearer: fierce attraction between the young English doctors on the hunt and these extraordinary island girls, their father’s universal good will and good cheer, and in the background Catherine’s anxious, overseeing, patrolling severity. One can only imagine the scene after the doctors have left, the silk handkerchiefs the object of Catherine’s contempt and of the unfavoured sister’s silent envy.

  Harvie-Brown returned a couple of years later, this time on his own yacht, which he had called the Shiantelle, and with a photographer, William Norrie of 28 Cross St, Fraserburgh. They had come, Harvie-Brown wrote in his journal, ‘in order to get a photo taken’. On 24 June, there is this note: ‘Fog, fog, fog as we lay at anchor at the Shiants. With line caught Dab, landed and Mr Norrie took several photos of the Campbell family – the shepherds on the Shiants. Mr & Mrs C, their deaf and dumb son and daughters, a nice group.’

  I have searched the world for those photographs. Harvie-Brown deposited his collection with what are now the National Museums of Scotland. Norrie’s glass plates are likely to have been among the papers given to the museum but the curators cannot find them. There is some confusion between departments and accounts of a few ‘clearings-out’ of their holdings in the Thirties and Fifties. The Shiants photographs may have been thrown away then. There are some Norrie photographs in the Geological Museum in London, but any picture of the last Shiant Islanders is not among them. William Norrie himself died in South Africa, pursuing minerals, but there seems to be no trace there. The family then moved to America and William Norrie does have a grandson alive in Idaho, but the Idahoan Norrie has been ill and no one with an interest in the photographer has yet had access to what he holds. It seems as if those precious images, captured on a foggy June day in 1887, have disappeared.

  Before Norrie and Harvie-Brown left, they gave the Campbells some presents and received others in return: ‘2 pairs of lovely stockings, a basket of eggs and a bottle of fine milk.’ Those are the objects by which to judge the Campbell’s life: knitting by the fire, chickens on the midden, the house cow, milk in a bottle, an exchange of presents, a sense of generosity, civility, beauty, industry and grace.

  By then, though, the catastrophe which Catherine Campbell must have been dreading for years had already struck. Every winter, lobstermen came over to the Shiants from Scalpay to set their creels in the incomparably rich waters around the islands. Even into the twentieth century, there were so many lobsters around the Shiants that one boat from Scalpay in the 1920s caught sixty dozen in the space of a single week. I have spoken to a member of its crew, Bullet Cunningham. (‘Why is he called Bullet?’ I asked a neighbour. ‘Because standing in his way was never thought to be that good an idea.’) He can remember hauling up a creel at the Shiants with six fully grown marketable lobsters inside. ‘Six of them snapping like there was no tomorrow.’

  The nineteenth-century Scalpaymen were here for income and food. They took their lives in their hands in search of it. Only two years before the visit, a boatload of four young Scalpay fishermen, two of them Morrisons, had disappeared at the mouth of Loch Bhrollúm. Their eighteen-foot open boat had been overwhelmed in a sudden surge. Donald MacSween told me about it when describing the ‘bad corners’ of the Minch:

  There’s a rock there, not so wide a channel as between Mianish and Sgeir Mianish on the Shiants, and the rock is not so high but you can just squeeze yourself in there and the theory is that they went in there, that day, a rough day, a bad day, and the backwash just caught them. There was another boat that got in that day ahead of them but they didn’t get in and they only found the pieces of the boat, nothing more, not the men. That was a Morrison boat and there was another boat disappeared not long after. They didn’t known where because they had gone for a week’s fishing and they didn’t come back, and no one knew where it was they were drowned but they think it might have been there, because that is a bad place, a bad corner.

  The mother of the Morrison boys searched the shore for weeks, looking for their bodies, but found only a cap and the tiller of the boat. Glamorous, charming, brave, healthy, strong, witty, sexy men: is it any wonder that Mòr and Catriona Campbell fell for them?

  When William Norrie was photographing his ‘nice group’ by the house, Mòr, the elder, then about twenty-three, was already pregnant with a child, a girl, called Catherine or Kate, who was born later that year. The father was a young fisherman, John Morrison of Scalpay. Two years later, her younger sister Catriona followed suit and gave birth to a boy, Donald. Her lover, unrelated to the other, was another young Scalpay Morrison, Donald, a fisherman. Neither man married his girl.

  You can still hear a faint echo of the talk in Scalpay at the boys’ conqu
ests. It’s ribald enough. High on the south-east side of Eilean an Tighe, at the top of the sea cliffs, not far from the peregrines’ nest, there is a rock formation, of the sort to which people like to give names. A couple of boulders have fallen and jammed into a cleft. From the sea, as you come round the point of Mianish, it looks like the silhouette of a man with his head slightly bowed and his penis stuck out in front of him. I have heard that Malcolm Macleod, the Stornoway boatman, likes to call it ‘Adam Nicolson finding relief’. The name for it on Scalpay remains, a little chillingly: Iomall Tòn Catriona, ‘Catriona’s arse’.

  Not that Mòr or Catriona would have been that unwilling. Songs collected by Margaret Fay Shaw in South Uist in the 1930s are quite clear that a kind of excited sexual naughtiness was common currency among Hebridean girls. ‘Brown John,’ one love song begins, ‘catch me, Brown John, hug me, / Brown John, catch me, before I make for the wood. / If you do not catch me, someone else will.’

  Another is more explicit still, an invitation to rape, sung to Margaret Fay Shaw by Màiri MacRae of Glendale, then perhaps in her sixties. It might well have been a song the Campbell girls knew.

  Did you see the modest maiden

  whom young Neil ravished

  on the top of a mountain on a sunny day…

  Alas, oh King! that I was not his.

  I would not shout out

  or cry out loud,

  though the bosom of my dress were torn.

  Mòr and Catriona kept their little children with them on the Shiants and the Morrison boys never married them. The Campbell girls, who would have graced any ballroom, remained spinsters all their lives. Illegitimacy was not unheard of but it was a source of shame. I have spoken to an old woman on Lewis about her own illegitimacy. She knows of her own half-sister, a teacher on Lewis, and has seen her and even spoken to her, but the teacher doesn’t know that they share a father, and the illegitimate daughter ‘will not trouble her with it.’ She had never talked to her own mother about it either. ‘I didn’t want to drag it up again, not just to hear the story. What was the point of that?’ And at the end of every sentence, as I asked her about this, she would say ‘That’s it’, with a closing sigh.

  Those, I guess, might have been Catherine Campbell’s words too, an exhausted resignation, perhaps accompanied by an intensifying of control, perhaps a deepening of the anger. The women themselves were considered at fault. I have heard a story in Scalpay, scarcely repeatable, and certainly not with names attached, of a married man who was in the bar in Tarbert, being ribbed about his inability to father any children. ‘It’s not me,’ he said. ‘It’s the wife.’ The others doubted him and he walked out of the bar to prove it. He went to his wife’s sister, a woman ‘of easy virtue’. She duly became pregnant, had the child, his honour was saved and she was banished for the rest of her life to a house on the edge of the moor, away from the heart and warmth of the village, ‘a terrible fate’, as it is rightly considered on Scalpay today.

  Not that the Morrisons disowned their children. Both Mòr’s daughter Kate and Catriona’s son Donald were accepted as Morrisons by their families and treated as such, although again I have heard people say on Scalpay that Kate, when she was an older and still beautiful woman, known as Kate of the Island (she had never left the Shiants until she was fourteen), would always be coming around to see her Morrison relatives, insisting, too much it was felt, on their blood relation, as if her island conception and birth somehow cut her off from a sense of belonging.

  These beautiful and sexy girls out in the middle of the Minch, surrounded and besieged by the man’s world of boats and danger at sea, exercised a powerful pull on the male imagination of Harris and Lewis. Stories still circulate there – and I don’t give them much credence myself, in the light of Donald’s character – of incest in the family, and of Kate and Donald as the products of incestuous union. Others tell with some relish of the girls rowing themselves across the Minch to visit their boyfriends on the opposite shore. It was what, I suppose, every man there longed for. Tommy Macrae, the keeper at Eishken, even told me that one of the Shiant Islanders, no name, had a lover in Crossbost, fifteen miles from the islands. It was, he said, just near enough for the boat to be carried up there on one tide, for a single kiss to be snatched from the girl, before the Shiant Islander, whoever he was, had to turn again for home on the ebb. Tommy Macrae also told me, with a face as straight as a die, that a sea monster had landed on the Shiants when the Campbells were there and had impregnated one of their cows, that a calf had been born, that it had ‘been carried ashore’ at Lemreway in Lewis and that every cow now to be found in Lemreway is a descendant of that calf.

  My father, in one of those cross-generational meetings that seem to collapse the passage of time, met Mòr Campbell in Tarbert in July 1946. Calum MacSween introduced them. ‘She is eighty-six years old, can neither read nor write, and speaks no English,’ my father’s diary says. There was not much beauty now. ‘She lives in a one-roomed poor-house, crouching over a peat fire, or sitting at a distaff.’ Her mother, she told him through MacSween, had not allowed her to visit Harris until she was nineteen, in the early 1880s. When there, ‘she was very homesick for the Shiants and cried all day until she was taken back. When we got up to go, she laid a skinny hand on my knee and tears came into her bleary old eyes. She clearly loves the Shiants very much.’

  One small object survives from the Campbell life of the 1890s. It was found by the naturalist and historian Mary Harman, author of a classic work on St Kilda, who was on the Shiants researching a book on other smaller, outlying Hebrides. Tucked into the stones of the kailyard next to the eighteenth-century house on Eilean an Tighe, she found the wooden hull of a small boat model.

  It is a finely carved and subtly formed thing, cut out of a single block of deal, and beneath its lichened surface are the remains of one or two coats of paint, a fleck here and there, the black boot-strap at the water-line, the green hull above it, red below. I took the boat to Simon Stephens, the Curator of Ship Models at the National Maritime Museum. He knew immediately:

  It’s a Zulu, vertical stem, raking stern, double-ended. That is a classic Scottish Fishing Zulu. Invented on the east coast, 1878, something like that. When was the Anglo-Zulu war? 1879 was it? And what did Zulu mean? Something classy, modern and outlandish I suppose. This one’s been through the wars. ‘Weathered’ shall we say? But you can see what it is. It’s the work of a fisherman or whatever, someone who understood the boat.

  This is the last of the Shiants’ list of tutelary objects: the torc, the hermit’s pillow stone, the medieval brooch, the decorated cragganware, the stone tools, the scrimshawed plate, the kelp irons, the boat nails from the house roof and now this. Who made it? It might well have been one of the Scalpay lobstermen. Donald Morrison himself, Catriona’s lover, may have carved it for their son Donald. All the Scalpay boys used to have their toy boats and all except this one have now disappeared. But there is another possibility. The deaf and dumb John, in his thirties by the 1890s, was well known for his skill in woodworking. It is possible that the Zulu was made by the silent and indulgent uncle for his small nephew, to play with on winter evenings or in the summer when the family was up at the grazings on Eilean an Tighe, keeping the flock from wandering down to the vegetable patch and arable rigs around the bay, filling his boring hours with this wonderful modern toy. Perhaps that was why it ended up in the wall of the kailyard. Young Donald just pushed it one day between the stones, leaving it there – he was twelve in 1901 – and never came back.

  At Easter that year, his grandmother Catherine died. She was about sixty-eight, by all accounts exhausted and saddened by the turn her life had taken, with her family – a disabled son, still referred to on Lewis as the balabhan, the dummy, two fallen daughters and their bastard children – held in a vice around her. Schooling had been compulsory for all five- to thirteen-year-olds since the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act in 1872 but no Shiant Islander had been near a sc
hool. They were not allowed away. Nevertheless, Catherine was undoubtedly loved and revered by her son John. He made a coffin for her out of driftwood, so perfectly, I was told by DR Morrison, historian and poet on Scalpay, that ‘when the undertaker from Tarbert, Robert Morrison the joiner, was asked to prepare her for burial, all that was necessary was what they call the braid, the cloth for the body, and the handles for the coffin. Everything else, even just with the driftwood he had, John had made flawlessly.’

  There are other signs, though, that Catherine’s death was a form of release. As soon as she died, the family lit a fire on the beach next to the house, a place in which a flame is clearly visible from Molinginish, where their Campbell cousins were still living. Catriona’s grandson, Donald Morrison lives in Tarbert. His father Donald was the owner of the toy boat and I have now returned it to him. He knew little of the life on the Shiants but had heard from his father about the urgency of their departure from the islands.