But the story of the Pennsylvania, and of the other great general cargo wrecks, conceals an equally compelling truth. In order to get to wrecks and then to lift off cars or dining tables, the Stroma men—and those who came after—had to be extraordinarily skilful sailors. To work the Firth as pilots, fishermen or pirates required not only the kind of blood-born navigational skills which have almost completely vanished in the modern age, but a knowledge of the way each eddy, roost and stream would work at different times of the month and in different sea conditions. That depth of knowledge could only be taught by years of experience in fair weather and in foul.
David Stogdon points out that the first people to arrive at the scene of any shipwreck would not be the lifeboat or the coastguard, but the Stroma pirates. As he notes, the islanders had an advantage that the Orcadians and the mainlanders did not. ‘Either it was the lifeboat from Longhope or from Stromness [in Orkney], or it was from Thurso, and they would take time. The one which was farthest away might be launched because it had the tide with it, and the one that was nearest would only be launched if the tide was with it—if the tide was against it, it would hardly move. The lifeboats did about eight knots, and the tide would be nearly that—about six knots, perhaps. But the Stroma men knew every inch of the Pentland Firth. Living on Stroma, you were in it—in the turn of the tide, in the size of the sea. Wrecks were given them, virtually, because it was a dangerous place and they were dead on the right spot for it. And they took what came into their hands.’
Does he believe that the Stroma men would save life before saving loot? Stogdon is ambivalent. ‘There’s a lot I don’t know about it,’ he concedes, ‘because I only went to see them to find out if they were being helpful to the lifeboat. The lifeboat might find every time that they’d got there first, but it didn’t matter—the lifeboat would assist in taking people off, or might take over the people from the Stroma men.’ And would the Stroma men help the lifeboat crew? Stogdon thinks for a while. ‘Um—I don’t think so. No, no, I’m sure they wouldn’t. The Stroma men were there to steal. They didn’t have much time to strip the boat before she went down completely, I imagine. They [the crew and passengers] were probably quite safe, but the Stroma men just got on with their work of stripping. I assume lives were not lost. I can’t help feeling . . . they were such nice people, Bremner and the wifies. I’ve never considered that the wreckers on Stroma would ever cause a loss of life. They would save people, I’m sure.’
So did the lifeboats consider the Stroma men a help, or a liability? ‘Do you know, I don’t know. I never asked that. But I would think that they didn’t—they just knew that the Stroma men just would be there first, because they were so on top of where the casualties were, whereas the lifeboats had some way to go. So I think the lifeboats would feel that it was saving life from the Stroma men as well as everyone else—I mean, the lifeboats are responsible for saving lives, not property, and so that’s all they’re concerned with. They don’t tow something with no life on board, because it’s property, and because that’s not their job.’
To illustrate his point, Stogdon recalls the way in which events unfolded when a vessel went ashore during his visit. Stogdon was taken by Bremner (who was not himself a wrecker, but who was responsible for the apportionment of any wreck) down to the headland overlooking the Men of Mey. ‘I saw them doing it. The fishermen from Stroma went so quickly—I mean, as I turned round on the island to talk to Bremner, they’d already started to go. There weren’t many boats, and they were quite small, but they were very effective. It was fascinating seeing them arrive and jumping straight up. Crooked Jack with his one leg, he was the first on board to strip the boat. The poor people on board—I think there were about thirteen or fourteen—were desperate to get off. They thought the end of the world had come, because the Men of Mey were roaring, the tide was roaring in. They were all trying to get into the fishing boats to be rescued, and of course, there wasn’t any fishermen in them—they’d all gone stripping.’ Stogdon smiles, half-rueful, half-admiring. ‘It was the most amazing sight. The lifeboat was approaching from Stromness—I think it was Stromness—but that’s some way off, and it would take her some time to get there. It’s a long way.’ What did the Stroma men want first? ‘Well—binnacles, telescopes, sextants, and then any money they could find, I presume. There wouldn’t be much of value in that kind of small fishing boat, but every boat had something of value.’
All three men—Simpson, Mowatt and Stogdon—recall the man named Crooked Jack, ‘the greatest pirate in my time,’ according to Willie Mowatt. Crooked Jack’s real name was John Sinclair, and at some point earlier in his life his leg had been amputated just above the knee. He got around with the aid of a pair of customised crutches, and once aboard a boat was known as the best and boldest of all the Pentland Firth navigators. Like a true pirate, it is also said that he also occasionally wore a parrot on one shoulder, though one suspects the parrot at least was apocryphal. In any case, neither the subtraction of a limb nor the addition of a bird impeded his skill as a wrecker. When news of a ship aground arrived, he would be first down to the shore and first on board the casualty.
Like all the other Stroma men, Crooked Jack had spent many years refining his ship-stripping skills. On fishing vessels and smaller craft, he and the Stroma men would go first for the brasswork, then for any cigarettes or alcohol, and finally for anything else of value, including the fabric of the boat itself—engine parts, fenders, good-quality navigational equipment, non-ferrous metals. They used axes to hasten the work. Mowatt recalls: ‘You had to watch yourself. Oh, they didn’t like competition.’ All the wreckers were accustomed to working at speed, listening both for the thud of the lifeboat’s arrival or for the rending of steel plates as the ship began to break up.
Watching the Stroma men at work gave Stogdon a new respect for those who navigated the Firth so skilfully. He points out that a ship like the Pennsylvania was unrepresentative of the wrecks the Stroma men usually dealt with, since despite heavy fog on the day she grounded, the sea remained calm. More usually, the Stroma men would be sailing out to a troubled ship in the thick of a winter gale, hauling themselves through the shrieking winds and looming seas.
Over on South Ronaldsay, Willie Mowatt is torn between his respect for the Stroma sailors and indignation that anyone should get the better of an Orcadian. He does, however, take pleasure in the Stroma pirates’ audacity: ‘Oh yes, they was good sailors, definitely—the very best. It was impossible to beat the pirates of Stroma. Generations of pirates, them. They knew what they were doing—that was their trade. It was traditional. It was just bred in them; they didn’t do it by any tuition, it was just a case of “look for the best”.’ As he concedes, there were some sea raids which only Stroma men would have the impunity to attempt. ‘In the ’14–’18 war, when they sank the blockships [the wrecks sunk around the eastern approaches to Scapa Flow to block the entry of enemy submarines] Stroma men came across and looted them too for copper and brass. And they was caught by the Admiralty boys. They looted them for copper and brass and anything else besides. They went to [the scuttled German Fleet in Scapa Flow] as well, they took the coal from them and any scrap they could get.’
Whether or not this is true—and whether or not it really was Stroma men instead of South Ronaldsay sailors, who would have been much closer to the wrecks—remains unverified, and probably unverifiable, though there are also rumours that men from Burray, Graemsay and Holm were all interested in the ships for reasons that had nothing at all to do with defence of the realm. Besides, five minutes later, Mowatt reconsiders: ‘There was as good pirates on this island as ever there was on Stroma,’ he says hotly—‘Every bit. Everywhere there was an island, it was the same, there’s no difference among any of them.’
Aside from perfect seamanship, both the Stroma and the Orcadian pirates had unshakeable confidence in their own boats. The Stroma yoles (or yawls) were solid, clinker-built, open-decked boats, up to 30 feet in length a
nd 10 foot across, rigged with two masts and an extra jib. Most were broad beamed but shallow, with short keels designed to sit snugly on the sea and to be capable of sailing at speed. The stem was curved to allow the boats to run up a beach easily, and all of them provided plenty of space for cargo. James Simpson remembers them with great fondness. ‘The Stroma men were good seamen and they built lovely boats. There’s no-one so good the length and breadth of Britain. They were boats that were meant for cargo for the island—they needed a boat to carry a few tons, whereas a Shetland boat was a narrow boat, more for speed, for racing, it was no use for cargo. The Stroma carpenters built a very good yole, very beamy yole, well built. They were hauled on land a lot—they were not built for harbours. They were broad and very strong.’ He remembers being taught to sail. ‘I know when I started in Stroma in 1960 I had nothing but a compass. You got to know the speed of the tide and you got to know how many degrees to allow for the speed of the tide, and you come in to the harbour maybe 20 yards or 50 yards off on either side—you wouldn’t be that far off.’
George Gunn also remembers the yoles: ‘You couldn’t beat a Stroma boat. There were some good boatbuilders on Orkney too, but they were nowhere near half as good as the Stroma men. There’s not a bad seaman amongst them—great seamen, the lot of them. Great pirates, too.’ He misses the Stroma men and their shady skills. ‘There used to be 250 people on that island. They made their living through the cod-fishing, but they were all pirates. When they left the island, they just up and walked away—left all their easy chairs and their plates and tables just lying. They wanted some relief from it.’ Gunn was part of the syndicate which bought the Pennsylvania, though he says it was neither wrecking nor salvage which really engaged him. ‘I wasn’t really interested in the wrecks, not so long as there was a good living to be made from the fishing. There was a heck of a living to be made over at the [Pentland] Skerries. The fishing’s more or less kaput here now, but we used to get a thousand a day of crabs—now you’d get days when you’d get six.’
Gunn is now nearly ninety, and lives on his own in a warm bungalow scattered with fishermans’ flotsam overlooking the Firth. On the mantelpiece is the evidence of his life: ships in bottles, pictures of boats, cuttings and photographs tucked into the frame of the picture. One of the cuttings reads, ‘Caithness Skipper Dies At Sea’. The skipper was his brother, who drowned by Duncansby Head while on a fishing trip with George. His brother had gone to pick up a heavy lobster creel. But a sudden swell and the weight of the creel pulled him overboard, and George could not save him. ‘Before I got him back aboard,’ says George now, ‘I didn’t know enough about resuscitation to revive him. These things happen.’ He says it with stoicism, without pity or self-pity. His eyes are sunken now—so heavy-lidded he has to tip his head slightly to look at you, and he listens for the sound of the buses passing outside his window. Before I leave, I tell him I’m hoping to get over to Stroma in the next couple of days. George mentions the names of a couple of people who run trips over to the island during the summer. ‘There’s a fellow who might take you over, but I don’t trust him,’ he says disgustedly. ‘He knows less about the sea than my backside knows about the Greek alphabet.’
The navigational skills of those who lived and worked by the Pentland Firth also provided another form of income. In the days of sail, ships unfamiliar with the Firth would wait near the entrance and signal for the services of a local pilot. The pilots acted as pathfinders for captains needing help in bad weather and as guides to ships coming into harbour. Since the service worked on a first-come, first-served basis, all the accredited pilots from the surrounding islands would race their boats onto the water as soon as they saw a ship’s signal. The first on board would get the job, the last would get nothing but a wasted journey.
By local standards, piloting paid well and provided a useful supplement to their income from fishing. A straightforward passage could earn between 30 shillings and £5; more complex tasks could bring far larger sums, particularly in bad weather or over long passages. Payments could often be made in kind—whisky, tobacco and rum being, unsurprisingly, a currency as solid as sterling throughout the Highlands. But piloting had its hazards. Pilots could find themselves coerced into service as spare deckhands or pressed by the King’s men. Tyrannical captains could hold pilots hostage or refuse to pay, though pilots usually found it easy to take revenge. There are tales—unsubstantiated, of course—of pilots guiding ships onto sandbanks or reefs, thereby ensuring not only that they themselves returned safe to shore, but that they also gathered the traditional wreckers’ reward. It is also rumoured that the threat of an inadequate fee could also induce a pilot to salve his own payment from the ship’s stores when the captain was distracted. Since most pilots’ first target would be the stores of grog, this could have unfortunate results. There were pilots who got so drunk they became entirely incapacitated and could thus be transported as far from home as the captain desired.
James Simpson’s family were Stroma pilots. ‘There were pilots on Freswick, and there were pilots all over, but Stroma was the best site. It was in the middle and if there was a flood tide, they could be way out to the Pentland Skerries long before the fishing men, because they had the tide on the tail.’ There were also some who made unexpectedly lengthy voyages. ‘It has been known that the boat would sail on with the pilot on board and it wouldn’t stop,’ he says. ‘One man on Stroma was taken away, and he couldn’t read nor write. He was taken away to America, and no-one ever heard one scrap from him ever again. Some said, “Oh, the cannibals ate him.” There was a lot of them taken on board in their slippers, and they made their way back through Europe. They’d be penniless too. If you got a man for piloting a ship, they’d be paid £5, and £5 was a lot of money—a schoolteacher year’s salary was only about £6 or £7 a year. So if you got two or three ships a year, you had quite a good salary.’
But to imply that neither the pilots nor the wreckers had a scruple to rub between them fails to give the full picture. Wreckers had their own moral code, and if that code did not always remain true to the principle of honour among thieves, at least it adhered to an understanding of what was, and what was not, beyond the bounds of private precedent. And though there were undoubtedly instances of wholesale looting, things were different in cases where people had lost their lives.
The tragedy of the Johanna Thorden is still debated. Early in the morning of 12 January 1937, the Finnish motor vessel struck the Clett of Swona in almost exactly the same place that another vessel, the Gunnaren, had struck two years before. Like the Gunnaren, the 3,223-ton Johanna Thorden was carrying a 5,000-ton load of general cargo from America to Gothenberg which included cars, tractors, machinery, radio receivers, chemicals, tobacco bales, boxes of apples, paraffin wax, tinned fruit, and steel. The ship had already steered through a heavy south-westerly gale to reach Orkney, but on her way through the Firth, the wind shifted over to the south-east. It was dark, and the weather had come down so hard that visibility had almost reached zero. There was some subsequent dispute as to whether the captain had been confused by the recent construction of a lighthouse at Torness, which may have beguiled him into thinking he was heading for Dunnet Head in Caithness rather than directly for the rocks of South Ronaldsay. It is also possible that the large quantity of steel in the cargo pulled the compass needle away from its true course.
What is beyond dispute is that, of the thirty-eight people on board the ship, thirty-three lost their lives. The deaths included both the captain’s wife, the wife of the chief engineer, and her sons aged six and four. The impact of the collision broke the ship’s wireless, making it impossible for anyone to radio for help, and the storm-force conditions meant that both the nearby lighthouse keepers and the Rosie family, who lived and farmed on Swona, did not hear any of the distress calls despite over forty rockets having been fired. The first of the ship’s lifeboat was launched with twenty-five people on board; nothing more was heard of them until the lifeboat
washed up at Deerness the following day, empty and upended. The second lifeboat, containing the remaining crew and the captain, was launched just after the ship split in two and began breaking up. Having struggled through the wreckage and the boiling seas towards South Ronaldsay, the lifeboat capsized, tipping all thirteen men into the sea. Only five made it to shore alive.
In normal circumstances, the kind of cargo that the Johanna Thorden had been carrying would have been considered exceptionally desirable. Machinery parts, tobacco, food, radio parts—these were both the essentials of life and part of its great pleasures. But the circumstances in which the ship went down could not be considered normal. The deaths of so many when so close to help represented not only the worst disaster in the area since the First World War but something far deeper and more painful for the islanders.
Tom Muir, exhibitions officer at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, remembers his mother talking about the wreck. She had been living on Westray at the time and recalled parts of the cargo beginning to wash ashore. Some locals made use of the wreckage; his mother and grandmother did not. ‘My mother said there was a lot of stuff washed up on the beaches of Westray—tins of peaches, paraffin wax—and in the late thirties, a tin of peaches would have been manna from Heaven. They wouldn’t have been able to buy tins, and something like that would have been the most incredible, delicious thing that they’d ever tasted. A lot of people gathered them up and took them home, but her mother refused to have them in the house purely on moral grounds, because she said that women and bairns had died on that wreck, and she wouldn’t have any of that in the house.’ At the time, The Orcadian newspaper reported that beaches around Deerness on the eastern side of the mainland were strewn with wreck. ‘A pathetic, unlifted reminder of the tragedy was a lifebelt, lying near the ship’s lifeboat at Dingieshowe. Another five lifebelts were lying along the grassy land above the shore, unwanted by the Receiver of Wreck and neglected by souvenir hunters.’
The Wreckers Page 11
