The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  With so many additional shipping casualties during the war, there was also plenty of extra wreck. Sigurd Scott, then the young son of Skerryvore’s principal keeper, remembers what happened when an American liberty ship was blown up in Bunnessan Bay off the western edge of Mull in 1942. The keepers had a 14-foot Shetland yawl equipped with both sails and oars, and broad enough to allow two men to sit abreast of one another. For several evenings after the explosion, the keepers made frequent trips to the stricken ship. ‘I have the clearest memory,’ Scott wrote,

  of their coming back in the bright light dawns to Earraid pier, the boat laden with an exotic miscellany of plunder, the gunwhales only a few inches above the water. Everything was transferred to the Lighthouse store near the pier. The variety of the loot was extraordinary. There were bales of calico, bags of white flour, packets of dried eggs, oranges, plywood, shellac, tools of all descriptions, hammers (magnetic and claw), planes, nails . . . It was my father who was appointed quartermaster. The spoils were divided out into piles, one for each family, their contents depending on the size and constitution of each household. After several days we were summoned to uplift our ration. Mothers, fathers, boys and girls all spent a day bringing home their haul, traipsing up and down the rocky road from the pier. Wheelbarrows, pails, sacks, bowls—every type of container served. I did my duty pulling a toy lorry my father had made for me on the rock. There were no dire repercussions, no sudden appearance of customs officials or police, but the ladies did suggest that a large hole be dug in the garden for the disposal of all contraband should authority threaten to pounce! For months we lived off the spoils in a style few could enjoy in those days . . .

  The fact that lighthouse keepers were explicitly banned from doing anything that might bring the Lighthouse Board into disrepute was beside the point; this was war, and no-one was counting. ‘Of course,’ Scott admitted,

  where beachcombing was a natural part of the way of life, we were always picking up the fruits of war. My father scarcely ever came ashore from the rock without some object, toy, stool, chair, carved ornament, which he had wrought out of the flotsam and jetsam swept by the Atlantic Westerlies on to Skerryvore, mindings of the high price paid by our merchant seamen on convoy. Not everything beached was useful or harmless. In school, a poster depicted an assortment of dangerous weaponry which we as youngsters were sternly warned to leave alone. Not that we paid heed . . . until a rogue floating mine exploded on the rocks a hundred yards below the houses!

  The lighthouse authorities were also aware that normal human impulses would occasionally override the keepers’ sense of duty. In theory, a reputation for temperance and probity was a vital prerequisite for the life of a lighthouse keeper. James Taylor considers that there are no verifiable cases of the keepers ever tampering with the lights because any desire to do so should have been vetted out of them when they were first employed. ‘There are no cases of tampering that we know of. Of course, one of the reasons there is this puritanical view of the light-keepers—they weren’t to drink, they were to be upright and sober men of good character etcetera—was, in the early days, so they weren’t corruptible and so they couldn’t be bribed to put the light on or off. But there are so many stories, mostly from the Western Isles, about ships running aground, and you’re never sure whether it’s all Whisky Galore—whether truth follows art or what.’

  Sigurd Scott made the point that, along with most other coastal dwellers, the keepers considered beachcombing to be a good example of the invocation to ‘waste not, want not’. To have ignored the detritus which landed on their rocks or beaches would almost have been regarded as a kind of moral profligacy. Most Scots are by nature suspicious of waste; most are inclined to believe that all things perishable should be husbanded with care, whether it be food or love. To ignore what appeared on their doorsteps would thus be considered as much of a psychological failing as to leave the children uneducated or the errands unattended.

  Alasdair Maclean, whose father ran a croft on Ardnamurchan, explained something of the local philosophy in his memoirs: ‘In theory, presumably, all flotsam and jetsam is the property of the Receiver of Wrecks, working through his agents the police and the coastguard. In practice it is not so simple. If you found, for example, a washed-in dinghy you would expect to report it. A tragedy might be involved; in any event the boat would be valuable and its owner would wish it returned. Mere firewood, on the other hand, the authorities would not thank you for wasting their time with. It is what lies between these extremes that can cause problems.’ Maclean also remembered the local etiquette attached to beachcombing. ‘In Ardnamurchan of old, if you took your beachcombing finds well clear of the high-water mark, so eliminating any possible ambiguity about their status, they were there till you chose to fetch them or, if you did not choose, till they mouldered where they lay. Generations might pass and no-one would touch them. I have seen some handsome pieces of timber disappear into the ground almost, through decay, after having been put up by someone who had died before managing to retrieve them.’

  Alasdair Sinclair lives on Tiree and helps to run the small local museum. He’s a thin, trim man, with scraped grey hair lifted into tufts over his ears and the vitality of someone with an outdoor life and a well-nourished mind. His own house—one of the distinctive, low-lying island houses—was built partly from bits of wreck. ‘There are partitions between one room and another upstairs which are an inch thick. They really are most beautifully figured wood—a sort of reddish, fairly hard type. I’m told that that stuff came ashore in big logs. They’d already been sawn, the best part of a foot square. That stuff would be regarded as a soft wood, but it’s certainly pretty hard stuff and it has lasted all these years without being painted. I did put some clear varnish on it to seal it off a bit, but the figuring of it, the grain, is beautiful stuff.’

  He also remembers the kind of things which came ashore during the war and the uses the islanders put them to. ‘Of course, a lot of warships were being sunk and anything that would float off such a ship came ashore. Typically, there would be lifeboats and life rafts, copper tanks and the like. Quite often they were filled with kapok—a fibrey stuff—I think they were put into the tanks so that if they were punctured by gunfire, they wouldn’t sink. And among the other odds and ends that might have been in lifeboats there were the cargoes of the ships themselves. There was a huge cargo of grapefruit that arrived on Tiree in the middle of the war, but that was unfortunate to an extent. Had they been sweet oranges that would have been fine, but they were grapefruit, and the last thing that you could get during the war was sugar. Any of us who were around at the time could remember the shortage of sugar more than anything else, so the grapefruit weren’t a great success.’

  From the islanders’ point of view, perhaps the most successful wreck during the war was the Nevada 2, a 3,500-ton general cargo steamship on her way to join a convoy heading for West Africa which ran aground off the northern tip of Coll in 1942. She was packed with all kinds of supplies, including vehicles, food, cement, cigarettes and clothing.

  The islanders fell on her. As Sinclair recalls it: ‘Word got round of this wonderful bonanza of stuff there at the far end of Coll. So off went everyone to find out, as many as could get a boat round the corner down there. But of course the salvage people and the Receiver of Wreck—not just the local chap in Coll but the official one, and the customs officers and everyone—they were in on it too, so it was a battle of wits as to who would get what. And it was quite remarkable what that ship had. She had lots of whisky, and a good proportion of that was picked up by expeditions from here and roundabout. She had an immense quantity of cigarettes; in fact, so many tins came ashore that you could have chain-smoked all day long. And cloth—great rolls of very brightly coloured cloth. I remember seeing this rather old-fashioned-looking cloth, different from all the rest. Perhaps it had been in a store for a very long time and then bought and put on that steamer. This stuff was quite dark; shiny, but not silk. It wa
s perhaps some kind of printed cotton, but it had machine embroidery all over it, like something which had been made in late Victorian times. One of my aunts was a dressmaker, and she used to have people from here and the other islands coming in and saying, I want you to make me a dress, I’m going to a wedding, or I need this or that. They would duly get measured and if they had a piece of cloth, that was fine, and if not, she would get something from her own stock. This woman, she got all measured up for a dress, and then she said to Annie, “You can make it out of that,” and she produced a roll of this cloth on a wooden stick. It was maybe not a complete roll, but there was still plenty of it. And she said, “You can take as much as you want of that, and take some for yourself while you’re at it”.’

  Even now, there are still things to be found for those who look. Go for a walk around many Hebridean beaches and you could probably return with enough inessential household objects to stock a small ironmongery. A representative wander round Tiree yields several car tyres, a section of vinyl flooring, two tins of paint, a loo seat, infinite quantities of rope and plastic twine, an excellent stock of undamaged driftwood, several shoes (suitable mainly for the one-legged and fashion-free), twelve plastic buoys, cattle-feed bags, light bulbs, oil cans, three large car batteries, an exhaust pipe, and a large colour television apparently in full working order. It is also possible to see the uses to which this flotsam and wreck has been put. Look closely at much of Tiree’s fencing, and you may note that the strainer posts could once have done duty as a mainmast. Several farm gates have a bespoke quality; one of the uprights has a curve on it very much like the curve on a small boat’s stem post, and the crossbar is surely the spitting image of a wooden tiller. Once in a while, you may pass a post holding up a washing line formed from high-quality hardwood and about a foot in diameter, or note that the lintel above a doorway is thick enough to support the weight of a small castle.

  Here among the sea’s twice-a-day leavings is a silent record of the ways in which we currently use the sea. Against the cautious monochrome of the stones and the sand, the plastic flotsam stands out with discordant clarity. Welly boots and washing-up bottles, rope and old feed bags. These things won’t rot, they’ll just remain, rolling around the rocks until the next big storm throws them out on a different beach. Every creek and gully has been made a resting place for twenty-first-century detritus: plastic fishing boxes, bright rope, rubber gloves. Looking at these, it is difficult not to see something melancholy. All of this everlasting garbage just serves as a reminder of the mainland’s indifference to the consequences of their consumption. Much of the litter will have been hurled overboard from boats and trawlers; some will have been surreptitiously dumped from cliffs and outfall pipes. None of it will go away.

  But even this rubbish has something interesting to say. Among the flotsam left above high-water mark on Tiree are a Danish apple-juice carton and a plastic Norwegian milk bottle. Were they dumped overboard from Scandinavian trawlers fishing in this area? Or have they somehow drifted all the way from their native makers round the east coast, through the Pentland Firth and into the west? What great journey did those inconsequential things make in order to end up here? Scientists have already begun to use the transoceanic movements of plastic litter to study the patterns of currents. They’ve read the messages in bottles, watched the migrations of Lego blocks or plastic bath ducks and used their trajectories as a way of understanding the behaviour of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic gyre.

  An American website, www.beachcombers.org, collates stories of curious things found on the world’s beaches and the uses they have been put to. The majority of the objects were lost from container vessels which shed their loads during storms. Around 10,000 containers are lost overboard every year and though many sink immediately, some burst open, releasing their contents out into the sea. In 1992, some 29,000 yellow plastic bath ducks and ‘bathtub friends’ were lost overboard from a ship in the Pacific. Having sailed in a complete circle around the North Pacific, the ducks are now nearing their final nesting place.

  If some of this plastic flotsam can be reused to tell us something useful about the habits of the ocean, then it should also find other purposes as well. Looking back inland from the beach on Tiree, it is possible to see the way in which these leavings have found other lives as fencing or furniture or just as beautiful sea-washed objects existing in their own right. They also act as commemorative proof that, though the west may be a more peaceable place than it was in the days before lighthouses and ear-chewing thieves, there are parts of this place which will always stay dark.

  The Thames

  SIX

  Royal Fish

  Somewhere in the lost corners of the Natural History Museum, Richard Sabin passes me a jar of pygmy sperm whale’s eyeballs. As they bump against the walls of their transparent grave, the eyeballs look like strange fruit—giant rotted lychees, perhaps, or some weird deep-fried kiwi. Parts of the soft tissue around the cornea have begun to unfurl, and as the eyes come to rest again, they squint at me darkly through the glass. After the first shock has passed, it occurs to me that what seems surprising is not that a pair of disembodied whale’s eyes are rolling around at the bottom of a jam jar in central London, but that they are so small. These things once belonged to a beast twice the length of Sabin’s office, but they are not much bigger than the eye of a sheep. I put them down, and look around. Sabin’s office has plenty to hold the attention: two jars of noodlish-looking nematode parasites; a giant pair of antelope horns; a squid beak; a whale’s rib honeycombed with age and wrapped in tissue paper; two or three posters describing the various species of cetacean; a computer, and a framed copperplate document listing exemptions to the ‘Royal Fishes’ Act.

  It is that Act which explains the eyeballs. Royal Fish—or, more correctly, Fishes Royal—are those cetaceans (whales, sturgeon, porpoises, dolphins, and ‘generally whatsoever other fish having in themselves great or immense size or fat’) which were once claimed by the Crown. These were not whales or porpoises killed during commercial hunting, but those which had stranded themselves along the shores of Britain either deliberately or accidentally, dead or alive. It is one of the many anomalies in Britain’s salvage laws that, along with all flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict, cetaceans are also classified as wreck and have exactly the same legal status as a container full of trainers. In the twenty-first century, the psychological leap from a ship spilling its cargo of whisky or car parts to a decaying minke whale on a Hebridean beach is a sizeable one. But until fairly recently, the leap between animal and mineral was less extreme.

  Until well into the 1960s, the British hunted whales not just to eat them, but to strip them of everything they offered, since almost every part of a whale could be used for something. Baleen (a rigid, horn-like material from the upper jaw of certain whale species) could be moulded in the same way as plastic, and would either be cut into strips to be used for the splinting in Victorian corsetage, or used as the guard plates at the back of military helmets. Teeth could be decorated with scrimshaw (a form of engraving considered no more than an old whaler’s novelty until recently, but now beginning to command high prices among collectors). Tendons could be threaded into surgical catgut, bones supported furniture, skin became bootlaces or bicycle saddles. In several places, whale bones were used as a traditional building material. There is evidence in Orkney of whale rib and jawbones being used as rafters in houses, and there are arches formed from sperm whale jawbones in Shetland, Harris, North Berwick and North Yorkshire.

  Whale and porpoise meat—considered by one early consumer to be of ‘very hard digestion, noysome to the stomack, and of a very grosse, excrementall and naughty juice’, was nevertheless considered a delicacy in mediaeval times. Ambergris, found in the stomachs of sperm whales and used as a fixative in the perfume trade, was to cetaceans what pearls are to oysters. Sperm whales feed on squid and octopus, and since the beaks of the squid irritate the lining of whales’ stomachs, they
produce a thick sticky resin which coats the beaks, reducing the irritation. Over time, the resin builds up and is eventually expelled in a lump. Those lumps can be immense; one of the largest single pieces of ambergris ever found weighed 926 lbs. Initially, the ambergris is pale in colour, though it will darken to a heavy golden orange shaded with bands of black and grey, and with the squid beaks still visible inside. Its rarity, and its usefulness, made ambergris exceptionally valuable in the past. A single lump once saved an entire shipping company from bankruptcy, and at one stage it was worth more than its weight in gold.

  Perhaps most crucially of all, spermaceti oil is ambergris’ liquid equivalent. It is produced and stored in a large chamber in the heads of sperm whales, though zoology has yet to explain why exactly one particular breed of cetacean needs a vast internal fuel tank. A single animal can yield over 500 gallons—part of the reason why sperm whales were hunted with such intent for so long. Once extracted, that oil has exceptional properties. Unlike most animal fats, which burn with too much smoke and not enough fire, spermaceti produces a clear, bright white light. It freezes only at very low temperatures, and it can be stored for years. For many years NASA used spermaceti oil in preference to all other oils because of its low freezing temperatures, and because of the clarity of its light. It was also used as a waterproofing material, and was the fuel which lit the Scottish lighthouses for almost a century. Unfortunately, spermaceti oil has one other quality. It reeks. It is the smell to end all smells; olfactory Armageddon. Many of the old Scottish lights have rooms in which barrels of spermaceti oil were stored. Nearly two hundred years after the oil was phased out in favour of paraffin, those rooms still stink like the grave-pits of Hell.