It is tempting and flattering to think you are in the centre of your circle, that you are, pretty well, where your calculations put you, and that the circle of uncertainty is just a construct devised by the over-cautious to discipline the free. But the circle of uncertainty is the hardest fact you have. The haziness of your condition is not helped by the difficulty of reading the land from the sea. Even from a few miles out, land shows little of its nature. There is scarcely any colour in the shore and the forms of the coast are flattened. Headlands and bays merge into a single canvas-thin backdrop. In that way, the circle of uncertainty is not resolved by landfall, but dramatised by it. It has never been wider. You are days away from the last moment of real knowledge and now the land confronts you with its questions. What am I? Am I what you think I am? Where does this shore welcome, and where does it threaten? And don’t interpret me in the way that would be most convenient. Expect the worst, stay alert, treat me with the suspicion I deserve.
As the grey shapes thickened and darkened, the Faeroes announced themselves in blank-faced, un-interrogatable simplicity. Stark, black, volcanic basalts, sheet after sheet of them, one on top of another, preserve the sequence of the vast eruptions which made these islands fifty million years ago. The guts of the earth spat the Faeroes out and the Atlantic is now doing its best to level them. Black rock, grey ocean and, between those two brutalities, a skin of green, the colour of life. It is a naked landscape, almost exactly the same in every part, a two-phase drama on display in front of you - eruption then destruction -with a brief interval, between the two, of life staking its claim.
Night fell while we were still at sea and the wind picked up another notch. We were making for Torshavn on Streymoy, Thor’s harbour, the place where the Thunderer could rest, and we were now reaching north on a big westerly. The islands are sliced by deep, sharp-sided glacial fjords and sounds, through which the Atlantic winds and tides drive with a force rarely matched further south. The Faeroes are like a giant sieve placed across the tidal streams of the ocean, and those streams, forced through the gaps, are Amazons and Mississippis for weight and strength of water on the move.
As we approached them in the evening, longing as ever for arrival, the relationship of sea and land began to shift. When the tide runs, it is not in fact the water that moves. The bulge of water that the moon and the sun’s gravitational pull creates on each side of the earth remains pretty well where it is. The movement is of the solid, rocky earth inside that stretched envelope of the ocean. So it isn’t the tide that is moving: it is the earth revolving within its skin of water. As we neared the huge black bulk of the Faeroes at night, with a powerful westerly wind coming over them towards us, and an equally powerful west-going tide pulling us into the channels and gaps between the islands, it was not difficult to think that the islands were heading towards us. The tidal atlas for the Faeroes shows deep, ragged red flags of turbulence in the mouths of the sounds, around the headlands and tailing out for many miles into the Atlantic on either side. In the presence of these huge, planetary forces, what was the Auk but a bobbing piece of flotsam? The islands were coming for us like a herd of bison.
Our journey had never seemed so elemental as this, nor the Atlantic world so animated, so animal. As we crossed the mouth of the wide channel between Su6uroy, the southernmost of the Faeroes, and the islands to the north of it, that tidal stream dragging us westwards, that enfolding of the great black batlike cloak of the Faeroes around us, suddenly became more intense. The wind had the Auk well over. The whole of her leeward side-deck was awash. The water was up on the coach house roof and, from below, the glass of the coach house windows was filled with the Atlantic, mesmerisingly strange at night, that gushing runnel of water, no more than a quarter of an inch of glass away, lit from inside like a model of natural violence.
Entranced by this night scene, I clipped my harness on to the lifeline and went to sit on the foredeck as we plunged through the dark. Everything was high energy: the sea around us, driven one way by the tide, the other by the shrieking wind, was standing in peaks and ridges that were breaking on the spot. The Auk, for all her surging progress through the water, was scarcely making headway over the ground. Looking to see how we were doing by measuring the apparent speed at which one headland crossed another, or a distant piece of land disappeared behind a nearer -taking transits, as it is called - it was perfectly clear that the islands and their tide-rivers had us in their grip. A hellish kind of adrenaline thrill. I sat down below, trying to work out with the charts, the tide tables, and the tide atlas what would happen if we could not escape the grasp of these west-going tides; if, even with the engine on at full throttle, the hold of the Faeroes, its magical and invisible fingers - the turning of the earth itself - would pull us in and swallow us, some kind of northern Homeric fate, as if this were Charybdis and Calypso combined. It felt like the sea of fate.
The figures were clear enough: if the tide could not be beaten, we could go with it, allow ourselves to be swept through the Sound between Skuvoy and Sandoy and then, in five or six hours, as the tide turned, we would be swept back in with it, north of Sandoy and up to Torshavn.
That sounds like a neat bit of geography, riding the earth as the earth needs to be ridden. But it failed to take account of one thing: the wind. It had veered again into the northwest and was coming at us in lumps, gusted and broken in the lee of the tall islands. One of the gusts, its arrival invisible in the dark, drove the Auk further over than she had ever been. Books, pans, and possessions went scattering all over the cabin below. I found myself, for a moment, standing vertically on the lowest part of the mizzenmast, the entire world of the Auk turned through what must have been sixty or seventy degrees. Then she came back up again and on we plunged. No damage except to the anemometer at the very head of the mainmast, whose revolving cups and arms had been swept away. We now had no idea how hard the wind was blowing.
There was no way we could head into a wind like that, and so our predicament was set. We were held for the time being almost fixed between wind and tide, as if between the finger and thumb of the Atlantic world, the boat, and all of us, under immense strain, the seas breaking white on the dark headlands a mile or two to the west, but, for all the rush and violence, immobile.
It was wonderful, a savage spectacle in bitter monochrome. I had never been in such a place, held as if gravity-free, but so brutally subject to the world, to its wind and waters. The Vikings thought hell was cold, ‘the cave of sharp thorns, a cold, wet hollow where even the water is bitter’. But was anywhere so hellish and so heavenly as this? At once? I said as much to George, but he didn’t like it.
The engine was not happy. Its note had changed and George guessed, as turned out to be the case, that when it was running with the boat heeled over so far in the gusts, it had sucked a dose of seawater in through the leeward diesel breather pipe, whose mouth is only just above deck level. The fuel was probably contaminated now and the engine was labouring. If it failed out here, and if the rig broke and left us without motive power, then the tide would surely set us on to the headlands, no place for any talk of magnificence or spectacle. I stood corrected, my excitement from then kept private, my love of all this silent.
Perhaps that too is an Atlantic lesson. If you are to exist in these wild places, then you must be both George and me: relish the totality, give yourself over to the magnificence of this world and, at the same time, resist and control it. In other words, both submit and deny. Neither is good enough without the other.
We read the instruments and gauged the transits. The strength of the tide was due to fall over the evening and eventually, before midnight, to turn in our direction. Very slowly, our speed over the ground began to climb. We could reduce the revs of the engine. The lighthouses guarding the entrance to Torshavn Sound began to beckon us in. Finally, just before midnight, the lights of the port itself came clear of the headland to the south of them. We were out of the tide grip and making for safety. Harbour light
s! Our final landfall, at last, tying up between the Faeroese boats in the inner harbour, exhausted after another dance with the Furies.
Even as we arrived in the Faeroes, it was clear that the time had come to go home. The week or so we spent in the islands was overshadowed by the winter. The snow had already come to lie on the tops of the hills. The Faeroese themselves stood with their hands in their pockets on the quaysides and clucked their tongues at us. Where had we come from? Where? A Cornish boat? At this time of year? It could be windy in the Faeroes. And did we know about the tides?
But, for all that, there was no wagging of fingers. The Faeroese are seamen of the most self-reliant kind. There are no lifeboats in Faeroese harbours, because ‘we don’t want to rely on an organization to save us. If we are out fishing and someone is in trouble, we’ll go and help him ourselves.’ They have made this Arctic frontier of the North Atlantic their own. They make a fortune out of the cod and haddock in the spectacularly rich grounds their 200-mile fishing limit encloses.
The islands’ GNP is over £1 billion a year, just over 80 per cent of that coming from the fish. One morning, when we were in the northern boomtown port of Klaksvik on Bordoy, a trawler came in after only ten days out on the Faeroes Bank, carrying 100 tons of cod, worth £180,000, and paying each of the twenty crew £5,500 for their ten days’ work. Klaksvik was full of fishing stories: boats taking so much fish that they have sunk under the weight of their own catch; another, a rather rusty second-hand trawler from Hull, going down a few years ago when the weight of fish actually broke through the bottom of the hull.
Can you imagine, after all George and I had struggled through in the course of the year, how extraordinary this atmosphere seemed? All year we had been on an impoverished edge, which was drawing what life it had from the exigencies and difficulties of its existence. Out here in the wildest province the North Atlantic could provide, after such a hair-raising arrival, we had come to a world of over-brimming wellbeing. In Torshavn, little wooden cafes, smelling of apple and cinnamon, served Viennese cakes and cups of dense, rich coffee. The boatyard on the south side of the inner harbour was run with a photocopier-level of efficiency - no rubbish, no fuss, no rusty, macho heroics, just acres of clean, businesslike, swept concrete and men getting on with it. This wasn’t some raw, exposed outermost place. It was its own middle.
We went catching fulmars on Kalsoy in the far north of the archipelago; we went digging coal with handpicks at Hvalba on Suduroy; we went catching sheep on Koltur with Bjorn Patursson, the one farmer still living on that island, teetering with him along a cliff path in pursuit of the rams he had put out on the most exposed flank of cliffside pasture he could find. He had brought along his friends and cousins, and his nephew, who farmed the other side of a tide-ripped channel at Kirkjubour on Streymoy, where the Paturs-sons had farmed at least since the mid-sixteenth century. All of them had arrived on Streymoy by helicopter, a subsidised service for remote island farmers who wanted to gather their sheep. Bjorn’s son-in-law, an engineer on an oil support boat in the Gulf of Benin, now on leave, told me how a farmer on the neighbouring island of Hestur had been gathering sheep on a path like this a few years ago and had slipped. Half of him had been found in the sea and half on the rocks. We talked about seabirds. ‘There’s nothing I love more than a Manx shearwater,’ I said. ‘Yes, delicious, aren’t they?’ the handsome engineer said. And we all slaughtered the big, rough-woolled rams with Bjorn that evening, a captive bolt to the head as he held the animals in his arms. Tears came into his eyes as the first of them died, ‘because it is that time of year, and I cannot help thinking of all the years past when I do this’.
I wanted to be Faeroese! Everything I had hoped for from the Atlantic world seemed to come to fruition here. We were in our last few days but we had landed in the place I had wanted to be all year. The islands had neither died, in the way so much of the west coast of Scotland has died, nor been reinvaded and yuppified as so much of southwest Ireland has been. The ways of being on the Faeroes, which had always sustained people here, of fishing and fowling, of raising sheep and cattle, of making extraordinarily warm, dry, and comfortable, turf-roofed houses, even of knitting jerseys and building small wooden boats - all this was alive here in a way it simply is not further south.
The living survival of habits of mind, more than any ancient technology, is what drew me. The Faeroese think that the more extreme the conditions an animal has been subjected to, the tastier the meat. Hilltop flesh is better than the soggy stuff from the seaside; remote island flesh better than the wide open pastures of Streymoy; best of all is mutton from the sort of near-vertical ‘garden’, as he described it, in which Bjorn had kept his young rams all year. The Faeroese continue to chase and eat the wild things that the rest of Europe has become too squeamish to countenance. Puffins, fulmars, guillemots, pilot whales, even dolphins, form a steady part of the Faroese diet, not as some fetishistic return to the life-giving properties of wild food but ‘because they are delicious’, as Bjorn said, which they are.
What was I after here? What did I envy in them? Everything! Their smiling, skilful relaxation as they danced their way along the tiny, sometimes slippery cliff path we took to collect the rams, which I and the film crew crept along as if we were within an inch of our lives (as we were); the unaffectedly serious and respectful way in which they treated the animals they were preparing to slaughter; their uncomplicated hospitality; their knowledge that their families had owned and farmed the same hillsides for many centuries, not, as it might be further south in Europe, as grounds for rather fat complacency, but for a sort of tough-minded confidence and brio; the combination of calculation and breeziness that means that houses are only built in those places where boulders from the fast-eroding ridge-tops will not crush them, and yet which decides to paint them in the most expressive fishing-boat colours; which lays out the long-lines to catch cod in the most precise and delicate ways on the seabed, and then decides to sit up and play cards all night because ‘sleep is for old men’. The Faeroese, in other words, combine precision - Switzerland is not tidier - and gusto, daring and kindness, an understanding of the violence and difficulty of their environment, with a kind of panache and showmanship, and a phlegmatic calm, all of which makes them the great seamen they are. Maybe, I wondered, this is what the Vikings were like. Were these the qualities that conquered the world?
Or perhaps there is something broader at work here. This is exactly how nineteenth-century visitors used to describe the St Kildans, dancing down their 1,000-foot cliffs on horsehair ropes with as much abandon as most of us can manage on a bicycle, laughingly living on an edge that would terrify others. It is not now, though, a set of qualities you find in those parts of Atlantic Britain from which the population has drained away over the last 150 years. Why is that? Why has the vitality remained in the Faeroes that has largely evaporated from other North Atlantic islands?
There may be a political-cum-historical explanation. The Faeroes are a unique case. Although their population and language are largely derived from Norway, a series of historical accidents has meant they are politically subject to Denmark. The Faeroese’s idea of themselves disconnects them at heart from the country into which they might otherwise have retreated. To be Faeroese is to be, in your essence, independent and self-sufficient, not reliant on some big, powerful centralised market to the east and south but to be thriving, coherent, and well, out here, a thousand miles away in mid-Atlantic. This is where they are. Remote from where?
Life on the Faeroes is not antique or nostalgic. All farmers are on the Internet. The ferries are full of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes. The cod-processing factory in Klaksvik is as sleek and neat as any in the world, producing goujons de cod or boxes full of ready-to-sell stockfish for anywhere in the world that wants it. The Faeroes, in other words, are not living in the past, but importantly they haven’t abandoned it either. Sheep, for example, are not sent to some central abattoir-cum-wholesaler to be slaughtered and s
old. They are killed, and eaten, on the farm where they grew up, something that is now illegal in the rest of Europe. Men continue to be both farmers and fishermen here, in a way that was once universal on the Atlantic margin but has now almost entirely disappeared under the pressures of professionalisation.
That perfectly real, and often clearly difficult, combination of the inherited and the current made me love the place. The Faeroes didn’t get to me emotionally, in the way that the monks of the Golgotha monastery had done; nor give me the moments of ecstasy that Skellig Michael had; nor seem as intriguingly and disturbingly powerful as the figure of Herve Mahe in Port Magee. But the Faeroes felt rather better and even healthier than those strange extremes had done. The Faeroes, if only I had been Faeroese, would have been for me what they are for the Faeroese - that strange and beautiful thing: a wild Atlantic home, filled with women, children, schools, home, homeliness; and with wildness, bravura, excitement, an incredibly abundant wildlife, and a perfectly straightforward relationship to it, neither destructive nor over-reverential, but energetic, optimistic, confident, healthy, and alive. Everything you might hope for from home you can find there; as well as everything you might hope for from the wild. I don’t know anywhere like it, and it now floats in my mind as a kind of dream.
If the monks of Golgotha have any influence on these things I would ask them simply to pray for this: would God please bring me, and all those I love, back as Faeroese? But I know they don’t, he won’t and that the world does not work like that. Perhaps, in the end, we are all removed from the lives we would like to lead, emigrants and exiles to a man.
Atlantic Britain Page 10
