The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  So there he is now, holding sole dominion over a number of beautiful but derelict crofts, a small amount of grazing land, and a community of viciously territorial terns. In the absence of people, Stroma has become a breeding ground for the birds. Flocks which used to nest on the mainland have moved over here, and the colony is now protected under law. As I walk back up the track from the lighthouse at the far end of the island, the terns, incensed at the human intrusion, started mobbing me. Looking up, I found myself staring at several large white missiles coming at me with malice aforethought. Realising that being strafed by high-velocity guano is not doing anything for either my dignity or my coat, I dive for respite into one of the derelict crofts.

  Inside, I find the shocking white pelvic bone of a cow submerged beneath a sea of sheep droppings. The windows, cut deep into the feet-thick walls, have been blocked up with a couple of planks nailed together in the shape of a St Andrew’s cross. The daylight which shines through provides the only illumination in the house. In another, the sea-green structure of an old box bed still stands in the divide between two rooms. The floor below has gone—either deliberately removed, or accidentally destroyed by the trampling livestock—but the bed and the limed matchboard ceiling above it are intact, untouched even by the damp. The kitchen table still stands in the parlour and a framed and fading photograph gazes out from the top of the mantelpiece. In the grate there are five plastic fishing buoys and by the sink is an old bottle of sheep drench. In the croft near the Baptist kirk, the upstairs rooms have been emptied of everything except fading yellow wallpaper and the mummified body of a rabbit. As I walk from room to room below the coombed ceiling, there is a sudden scritter of feet directly above my head and then the answering echo of rafter-dust falling. The rooms are tiny, each doorway barely measuring more than five and a half foot high. A man the height of James Simpson would have to bow himself in or out every time.

  Back outside, the terns attack with renewed enthusiasm. Bolting from croft to croft, I hear a strange sound coming from the shoreline—a low, plaintive mumble rising and falling. A seal colony. The seals watch me walking towards them. When I get too close, the colony rises as one, flumping over the rocks and into the sea. I sit on the rocks and watch them. Fifty dark faces stare back at me, huge-eyed and curious. With their bodies underwater and their silent interested gaze, it is not hard to see why so many people considered the seals too close to humankind for comfort. Bobbing there by the shore, waiting for me to do something, they look disconcertingly like shipwreck survivors.

  I turn away and walk back up the hill, through what remains of Stroma’s old township. The houses along the main road down the spine of the island seem to have rotted at different rates. Those crofts, which have somehow managed to keep their glazing and their roof-slates, are in much better condition than the others. In some, the furniture is still laid out as if only recently abandoned: iron bedsteads with mattresses, tables, armchairs, cupboards full of boots and bottles, everything arranged with the same care and compaction as it would be on a boat. But most crofts have already lost the war with the weather. As soon as the tiles go, the damp begins to sidle into the mortaring; within a couple of years all that is left are a few bony ribs and the stark gable ends. Even so, these places have done well to last as long as they have. They were built for resistance, to resist the intrusion of the sea, the air, the sun, and the wind. And, perhaps more pointedly, to resist outsiders.

  The number of seals and terns is evidence that the fishing round here must still be plentiful, and the nettles in front of most crofts is proof of the land’s potential fertility. Given the possibility of a good living and the evidence of so much activity in the past, it is tempting to see Stroma’s abandonment as the result of some appalling trauma. Abandonment is always taken as a sign of failure, a collective death. There’s plenty of abandonment to be found in Scotland—the Highland Clearances saw to that. But Stroma does not feel sad. True, there is sorrow in seeing the once meticulous vegetable patches turned over to weeds, or wondering how many more winters the box beds will stand before they start to rot. But that isn’t the whole story. What is interesting about Stroma is not the fact of its abandonment, but the tale of its past.

  An official book published in 1992 to commemorate the islanders’ lives includes photos, reminiscences, essays on the school, the kirk, the food, the crops, the fishing; all the social and anti-social aspects of their past. What it does not include is anything about wrecking. Which is a curious (and, as it turns out, a deliberate) omission. Because, apart from being almost universally remembered as a happy place, Stroma was overwhelmingly a wreckers’ island.

  Standing in the lantern room of Stroma lighthouse, it is easy to see why. It is early afternoon now, and there is near-perfect visibility for a distance of ten miles or more at all points of the compass. Down below, the sea is midway through the ebb tide. Throughout the Firth, the water is arguing with itself, jostling and barging, rising and returning, endlessly restless. Directly below, spray mobs the submerged reefs. The current pushes through alleyways of rock, bangs round the edges of headlands, punishes the base of the beacon out by the Skerries. Whitewater seethes around the base of the cliffs, crashing up, receding, crashing again without rhythm or coherent motion. Broad plumes of spray appear where clear sea should be, and the grass on the cliff tops grows in tight, salt-licked quiffs. The battle between one current is fought in foaming haste against the opposing roost, and the sea often passes through in three dimensions. When the wind gets up, or when there is a particularly strong spring tide flowing, the water thrashes at itself, finding its own violent passage from one place to the next. It looks ill-tempered, impatient, a furious place. If there could be such a thing as a liquid riot, then it would be found here in the Pentland Firth. Step back a few yards inland, and there’s not much noise apart from the birds and the wind. But stand over the sea, and the noise is almost constant: a thick rush of sound as the water finds its way in or out of the Firth. The terns hover above, watching but never landing.

  A few weeks earlier, on an equally windy, equally sunny day, I had stood over on the other side of the water, at the furthest edge of South Ronaldsay. In Scapa Flow to the north, the sea was calm enough to see the islands reflected, and it was high summer in the sky above. But in the Firth, it looked like war.

  The distance between the mainland and the most southerly of the Orkney Islands is seven miles. Through that thin passage, the North Sea and the Atlantic race each other twice each day. All the tides and eddies of the great wide west and north meet the currents of the east and south, and funnel themselves through a passage which, in oceanic terms, is barely wider than a drainpipe. Twice a day through this reversible river, two seas hurtle together. Towards the narrowest point in the Firth, the current (either east or west) picks up speed, joins the confused currents around the land, and begins to leap and tumble. When it enters the Firth, water travelling in one direction with the flowing tide would be travelling at a speed of around two or three knots. White with fury, it races past the land, leaving a wake of whirlpools, roosts and overfalls in its path. When it bolts out the eastern end near Duncansby Head, it will be running at 10 knots or more, over three times its usual tidal speed. Where it meets the land, it breaks far more violently than you would expect, even on the calmest days.

  Mix bad weather or a spring tide into this equation, and things become even more difficult. Due west of Orkney, the nearest land is Canada, 3,000 miles away. Due east, it is Norway. Given the time, the winds and the distance, it is perfectly possible for a light breeze in mid-Atlantic to hit the Pentland Firth as a fullblown gale. Any rough weather blowing westwards will often meet a tide coming in the opposite direction right in the middle of the Firth. It has been estimated that for fifteen days out of every month, the winds in the Firth rise to Force 7, and to Force 8 (with waves 30 foot high or more) seven days out of every thirty-one. As the Admiralty chart for the area cautions: ‘Spring rates of 12 knots occur, an
d extreme rates of 16 knots have been reported’—a speed almost unheard of in the seas around the rest of Europe. In most parts of the country, wind speeds of 70 or 80 mph are considered extreme, but during the Great Gale of 1953, the local anemometer registered a speed of 120 mph before it too blew away. Bruce Brown, the last keeper of Duncansby Head lighthouse, recalled seeing his wife, Hazel, almost taking an unscheduled flight to Orkney. ‘Hazel was on the way back from the doctor once. I was sitting here [in the keepers’ lounge] and Hazel suddenly went flying past the windows. If she hadn’t got a grip on the dyke, she’d have been away out to sea.’

  To complicate matters further, neither the mainland nor Orkney are solid landmasses. The shores of both are a confusion of creeks, reefs and islands which, like Stroma, Swona, Copinsay and the Pentland Skerries, stand directly in the path of the current. Each of these in their turn set up their own individual maelstroms, many of which are sufficiently notorious to have earned their own names: the Swilkie, the Men of Mey, and the Bores of Duncansby. The tides too have their stings. Because of their power, they can recoil at the edges or rebound off the land, they can dawdle along and then spring suddenly forwards with the merest swing in the wind. And, despite the scouring tides, the sea bed of the Firth is not smooth. Below the water lie not only the usual snags of reefs and shoals, but the bones of every ship that ever came to grief here. Because the currents are so powerful, a ship that goes down north of Stroma can easily end its days cluttering a corner of Duncansby. One dive expert recalled leading a trip out to the Firth which nearly ended in disaster. Two experienced divers found themselves towed along so fast by the current that, within a few minutes, they ended up a mile away from the dive boat with a dwindling supply of oxygen and not much chance of hailing the skipper. In the end, they were saved only by luck and the captain’s best guesswork.

  In most cases, guesswork is not enough. As almost anyone on the islands will tell you, in-depth knowledge of the Firth is not to be bought, and nothing but years of practice can really show sailors how to navigate this place. As one fisherman who has lived in a house overlooking these waters all of his life noted: ‘In bad weather, I was always at my best. On a fine day, that was the time that a treacherous thing could happen, not a coarse day. I’ve seen me get tricked on a fine day at sea. Not with a gale of wind, but with the sea.’

  Those who do use the Firth to best advantage do so with caution. George Gunn, who fished the area for several decades and who now lives in John o’Groats, is clear about the best way to treat it. ‘We took chances, but we knew when to take them—we didn’t just take them willy-nilly.’ What did he think made a good Pentland navigator? ‘Remember that the sea is always the master. Realise that. You’re not the master, by no means. You might be the skipper, but the sea is always the master. People forget that before they ever start the sea—they think they know everything afore ever they start. That’s why some of them get lost. We didn’t have all the navigational gadgets, but we knew exactly where we were.’

  No survey or Admiralty chart can ever hope to correctly identify each of the Pentlands’ hazards, since what appears in soundings one day might be a mile or more to west or east by the next. Add to this the prevailing weather conditions around the Firth—smothering fogs, scorching winds, gales which arrive with no apparent preamble—and the abrupt cornering of the coastline at Duncansby Head, and it is a wonder that anyone ever makes the passage at all.

  But they do. Like the English Channel, the Pentland Firth sees an exceptionally high number of shipping movements every year—around 6,000 in the mid-1990s, and far more in the past. These are not the aimless putterings of private yachts as they might be on the west coast or in southern England. Until the 1970s and the precipitate decline of the Scottish fishing industry, shipping movements in the area tended to be split three ways: passenger ferries plying to and from Orkney, fishing trawlers, and commercial cargo vessels. In theory, their captains do have alternatives. In the days of sail, many found the prospect of the Firth so daunting that they went the long way round to the Continent, either via the northern passage between Orkney and Shetland, or through the English Channel. The route through the Firth is faster (literally, if you get the tides right), but it is also infinitely more hazardous. It also guards the entrance to Scapa Flow, once Europe’s finest natural anchorage, and now, as a consequence, Europe’s finest wreck dive site.

  Aside from smaller traffic entering the Firth on the way to mainland Orkney or one of the smaller islands, there is also the Flotta oil terminal, responsible for a threefold increase in shipping tonnage between 1990 and 2000 alone. Most tankers are large and powerful enough to enter and leave Scapa Flow at all times of day, but even they seem to pause suspended in the water, making such slow headway against the currents that they remain stationary for minutes at a time. One ex-submariner recalls travelling through the Firth on the way to Norway in 1969: ‘We would do 12 knots on the surface flat out in those old diesel submarines. But we went north of Stroma and Pentland Skerries doing over 25 knots. There was a huge wind behind us ripping the sea up, and we were right on the peak of the tidal stream. We just whanged through it like a cork fired from a bottle. It was amazing fun!’

  Until the late eighteenth century, neither side of the Firth was well lit. Mariners coming from Canada or America and navigating by dead reckoning could find themselves many miles off course by the time they reached British waters. Captains could find themselves wrapped in fog from Newfoundland to Bergen, making it impossible to take an accurate sextant reading and leaving them fatally dependent on compass readings and guesswork. Charts would often be either incomplete or inaccurate, and any pilot guide to the Firth would be more likely to induce panic than complacency. Captains could, and frequently did, sail blinded by cloud across the Atlantic and then guess their way through an unlit Firth, relying on nothing more than prayer and a farsighted lookout. Today, most of the ships passing through here would be equipped with more navigational aids than they know what to do with: sonar, radar, GPS, VHF, fish-finders, magnetometers, computerised charts, hourly weather checks. And if all those electronics should fail, there are five major lighthouses overlooking the Firth; Dunnet Head, Duncansby Head, Stroma, Swona and the Pentland Skerries. Plus, of course, the supplementary aids of foghorns, long-range forecasts, and the promise of assistance from local pilots. Even then, ships still go astray, tripped by a strong spring tide or a current unmarked in any guidebook.

  The combination of wind, weather, tides, and the configuration of the land make the Pentland Firth both one of the most compelling parts of the British Isles and a wrecker’s heaven. Those who once lived on the Caithness mainland, the south of Orkney and the two inhabited islands—Stroma and its smaller northerly neighbour, Swona—never had to create a shipwreck; they happened without prompting. Precise figures on the numbers of wrecks in and around the Firth over the past 300 years are difficult to obtain, but the most detailed recent estimate calculates that, between 1830 and 1990, over 560 vessels were either refloated after getting into difficulties, or—more likely—were entirely ruined. Since the Shipwreck Index of Great Britain places the total number of recorded wrecks around Scotland at around 7,500, the Pentland Firth’s toll seems alarmingly high.

  The sea alone might have made the Pentland a hopeful searching ground for pirates, but the area also provided other reasons to go wrecking. Orkney is geographically closer to Norway than to England. All the islands still retain the fishy stink of their Viking past. Floating around in the background are all the generations of sea raiders and maritime opportunists who used the nearby seas as skilfully and aggressively as did the British Navy in the time of Nelson. Though Orkney is comparatively low-lying and fertile, the islanders were never rich, and could rarely afford to turn away the opportunity for extra gain. Since Orkney is also almost entirely treeless, all timber had to be imported from elsewhere. And, most importantly of all, the ocean is inescapable. Caithness men might have been able to turn their bac
ks on the sea; Orcadians never could. It was said of them that they were ‘farmers with boats’, as accustomed to harvesting water as landsmen are to harvesting earth. What was true of the north side of the Firth was doubly so for the islands in the middle of it. Apart from subsistence farming on the crofts in Stroma, almost all the islanders’ money came from fishing, boat building, piloting, smuggling, illegal whisky distilling, and wrecking.

  In 1814, Walter Scott accepted the engineer Robert Stevenson’s invitation to join him on the lighthouse yacht’s annual tour of the Scottish lights. They sailed slowly up from Leith, stopping off to inspect the various east coast keepers and their charges, before arriving in Orkney. As Scott later noted, his first visit to the Pentland Firth did at least impress upon him the urgent need for lights:

  The wrecks on this coast were numerous before the erection of the lighthouse on Sanday. It was not uncommon to see five or six vessels on shore at once. The goods and chattels of the inhabitants are all said to savour of flotsome and jetsome, as the floating wreck and that which is driven ashore are severally called. Mr Stevenson happened to observe that the boat of a Sunday farmer had bad sails—‘If it had been His [i.e. God’s] will that you hadna built so many lighthouses hearabouts,’ answered the Orcadian with great composure, ‘I would have had new sails last winter.’ Thus do they talk and think upon these subjects; and so talking and thinking, I fear the poor mariner has little chance of any very anxious attempt to assist him.