by Farley Mowat
Their earliest kitchen middens are chiefly composed of limpet, oyster, and clam shells; but later mounds include the bones of fishes, seabirds, and sea mammals. So we know that, although the strand lopers initially foraged mainly at the edge of the sea, there came a time when they ventured out upon the unquiet waters to catch fishes, seals, and porpoises, and to visit distant reefs and rocks after seabirds and their eggs. Eventually they became such practised boatmen they were able to reach, and in most cases settle, the most remote and storm-lashed offshore islands.
To accomplish all this, they had to invent or acquire seaworthy boats.
British archaeologist Thomas Lethbridge has suggested that the early strand lopers sheltered under domed tents made by stretching skins over a framework woven of Arctic birch or willow branches, for there were as yet no forests and few, if any, real trees in northern Scotland. The skins would have been sewn or laced together and smeared with animal fat for preservation and waterproofing. The resultant lightweight structure would have looked something like a big upside-down bowl—or a coracle, the round skin boat used by early southern Britons.
Lethbridge envisioned a sudden offshore squall flipping one of these onto its back and blowing it into the nearby sea—where it floated lightly as a gull. Or perhaps some early thinker and tinkerer, lying in his bed of skins and contemplating the curved roof of his home, came to the conclusion that the thing might be made to float. With a few modifications to give it better stability and greater strength, the house could become a boat. Furthermore, the transformation could be reversible. Carried ashore and turned over, a skin boat could as readily become a shelter.
Certain it is that almost every Stone Age people throughout the northern circumpolar region depended upon skin boats. The kayak is a well-known, if highly specialized, example. The less familiar umiak, or Inuit woman’s boat, was more versatile and even more widely distributed. As late as the 1970s Alaskan Eskimos still made umiaks sheathed in walrus hides that could carry thirty or forty people across the stormy Bering Strait. When bad weather (or good hunting) brought such travellers ashore, they would turn their umiaks upside down to provide themselves with shelter. A big one upturned on a stone-and-turf foundation could provide comfortable housing for a large family, even in winter.
Skin-covered houses... into boats . . . into houses. . . .1
By as early as the fifth millennium B.C., having mastered the art of making and using skin boats, the first-footers had become islanders wedded to the sea.
Although surrounded and protected by salt water, they were not stay-at-homes, ignorant of the outer world. Seagoing skills and sea-kindly vessels gave them the ability to come and go across broad reaches of ocean.
Many ancient peoples were of this stripe. South Sea Islanders routinely, and with marvellous insouciance, sailed frail outrigger canoes thousands of miles from land. Secure in their mastery of the seas, the Northern Islanders would not have hesitated to visit faraway places and distant folk.
By about six thousand years ago, climatic conditions in the Northern Islands of Britain—Orkney and Shetland—had much improved. Although still essentially treeless, the island landscape was no longer Arctic. Tundra was being replaced by grass and sedge, and arable soil was accumulating in protected places. Now the Northern Islanders imported cattle descended from the wild ox, together with coarse-haired sheep, and goats. As the climate continued to warm, they brought home certain hardy cereal grains such as barley, and bere, an ancestor of oats.
This cut-away drawing gives an impression of the construction and carrying capacity of a fifty-foot, skin-covered vessel of Alban type.
This Irish curragh, probably sheathed in ox hides, was drawn by an 18th century English sea captain. She would have been about 36’ in length.
Although some considerable portion of their food was now coming from the land, the sea continued to nurture them and to command their allegiance. It beat at the very heart of their existence. It still does. To this day an Orkneyman is a crofter who usually also fishes, while a Shetlander is generally a fisherman who also crofts.
Standing on the thrusting beak of Duncansby Head at Scotland’s northern tip during an easterly gale, I heard an echo of that ancient alliance between islanders and the sea from Alexander Mowat, Walter’s father, who had spent most of his life fishing the wild waters of the Pentland Firth between Caithness and Orkney.
As we leaned against each other, steadying ourselves from the buffeting of spume-laden gusts howling in from the North Sea, Sandy pointed towards the indistinct shape of Stroma Island in the midst of the maelstrom. To my horror, I saw the mazed outline of a lobster boat tossing about like a demented thing in the terrible rip tides called the Boars.
She was evidently trying to gain the scant shelter of the pier at John o’Groats. The black bulk of her steersman, tiller clamped under his arm, seemed rooted to her like an extension of the stern post. The little double-ender bucked under him like a manic horse. It seemed certain she would not make it.
“God Almighty!” I shouted in Sandy’s ear. “He’ll go under! Hadn’t we better call the Huna lifeboat? They might still get to him in time!”
Sandy’s reply came in a roar of laughter louder than the storm.
“Nae, laddie! Robbie’d think us daft. He’s an island man, ye ken. The sea shaped him and she’ll no do him ony hurt. We’ll ha’e a dram wi’ him at the pub tonight, but dinna tell him you was for sending the lifeboat out!”
The sea shaped the Northern Islanders, and shaped the evolution of their vessels. Small craft, which sufficed for coastwise fishing and interisland travel, lacked the carrying capacity or seaworthiness necessary for long-distance voyaging. That problem was solved by developing broadbeamed double-enders that could carry several tons of cargo while still riding the grey-beard seas of open ocean as lightly as birds. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about these vessels, from our modern point of view, was that, large as they were, they continued to be sheathed with animal skins.
Even after trading voyages began to take the Islanders to forested coasts where ship-building timber was available, they continued to use skin coverings, not because of innate conservatism, but because this construction served them best.
Skin-sheathed vessels were lighter than wooden ones, were cheaper and easier to build, and could be more readily repaired. To this day the hull sheathing of a ship, whether it be wood, steel, or plastic, is referred to as her skin.
Although the skin might have to be renewed, the frame would last a long time, and timbers could endure for generations. The elasticity of the framing limited overall length to about eighty feet. However, that same flexibility bestowed exceptional seaworthiness since it permitted the hull to “work” in a seaway.
Paddles and oars, which sufficed for the propulsion of small craft in more-or-less-protected waters, proved inadequate for seagoing ships, so harnessing the wind became essential. The rig adopted by the Islanders (one still in use on big Irish curraghs into the eighteenth century) centred on a large square sail that could be set in such as way as to enable the vessel to go to weather as well as run before the wind. The efficiency of the square sail must not be underestimated. The finest wind ships ever built were the great square-riggers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of which regularly outran steam-driven vessels on the long haul between Britain and Australia.
We do not know how far afield the Islanders went, or how early, but by around 3000 B.C. they and certain Mediterranean peoples were sharing such characteristic cultural elements as henges, chambered tombs, and standing stones.
It used to be thought that this megalithic tradition originated in the Mediterranean, perhaps with the Mycenaeans; but now some suspect it may have begun in the north and spread southward.
Remnants of a sophisticated megalithic culture that reached its zenith between 3000 and 2700 B.C. are still very visible on the Islands. In western Orkney alone they include two great stone circles marked out by m
assive monoliths in the style of Stonehenge; a number of tall, independent, standing stones; and one of the most impressive megalithic structures extant, the monumental chambered tomb known as Maeshowe.
These and other structures show that the ancient Islanders were somehow able to achieve sufficient prosperity and leisure to indulge the human propensity for raising monuments on a grand scale. It is estimated that the construction of the Maeshowe complex alone required as much as a quarter of a million man-hours!
From very early times the Islanders were in contact with distant cultures, from whom they obtained bronze tools, better pottery than could be made from island clay, and exotic jewellery, including gold sun discs, black jet, green jadeite from the Alps, and amber.
Two questions arise: What could they possibly have produced that was valuable enough to be exchanged for goods like these? And how could they have afforded to expend so much labour on monument building?
The islands themselves held no terrestrial sources of wealth; no significant ore deposits; no precious stones. Moreover, what amounted to subsistence production on poor soils in a rigorous climate could have produced little if any wealth in the form of agricultural surplus.
What about the surrounding seas? These offered none of the fabulous valuables found in warmer waters, such as pearls, or murex snails, from which came the rich purple dye so valued in Mediterranean countries.
Yet there was wealth in plenty in those northern waters, and the aboriginal people of the Islands learned early how to harvest and make use of it.
CHAPTER THREE
TUSKERS
It is five thousand years before our time. The sky over Orkney on this June day is streaked with tendrils of cirrus cloud. A puffy easterly breeze tells of dirty weather in the offing, though for the moment the sun burns brazen.
On Sanday Island a saffron-coloured beach several miles long hones its edge in the heavy roll of ocean. This glittering scimitar is discoloured here and there by rough-textured patches, several acres in extent. Each consists of hundreds of immense, cylindrical creatures crowded so close to one another as to be virtually a single entity. Most are sprawled lethargically on their backs, careless that their exposed bellies are beginning to glow an alarming shade of copper-pink.
Goggle-eyed faces, spiky whiskers, deep-wrinkled cheeks and jowls make them resemble a multitude of Colonel Blimps—except that each, no matter what age or sex, carries a down-curving pair of gleaming tusks. Those of the biggest bulls are as long and thick as a man’s arm. They glitter in the harsh sunlight, imparting an aura of primal power to their ponderous owners.
Formidable as they may seem, there is nonetheless something endearing about these lumpen beings packing the long sweep of beach like so many middle-aged holiday makers. Perhaps this is because they seem so patently content with life. Not all are lolling on the sands. Just beyond the breakers small parties of cows lave their sunburnt hides while keeping alert eyes on calves sporting in the surf.
In the water these mighty creatures are transformed into sleek and sinuous masters of another element from which, were it not for the requirements of calving and the joys of sex and sunbathing, they would have no cause ever to depart. Water is their true medium, and has been since their ancestors rejected life on the land millions of years ago.
UP TO FOURTEEN FEET LONG, SUPERBLY MUSCLED, CLAD in a hide as tough as armour, adult walrus fear nothing in the ocean. Gregarious, and amiable except when roused in defence of kith and kin, they once lived in vast and far-flung tribes in all the northern oceans.
They have been known by many names. Eskimos called them aivalik; Russians called them morse; Scandinavians knew them as hvalross; Englishspeakers have called them sea-cows and sea-horses.
By whatever name, walrus have been a major source of wealth for human beings from dim antiquity.
One day in the museum of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad, a Siberian archaeologist handed me an intricately carved piece of yellowed bone. What did I think it was?
“Ivory?” I hazarded. “Elephant, or maybe mammoth?”
“Ivory, da. The hilt of a sword from an excavation in Astrakhan on the old trade route to Persia. But it is neither elephant nor mammoth. It is morse. You must know that for a very long time morse tusks were the main source of ivory in northern Asia and Europe. Sometimes they were worth more than their weight in gold.”
He went on to tell me of a Muscovite prince captured by Tartars whose ransom was set at 114 pounds of gold—or an equal weight in walrus tusks. This was no isolated example. From very ancient times until as late as the seventeenth century, walrus ivory was one of civilization’s most sought-after and highly valued luxuries. Compact and portable, the teeth in their natural “ingot” state served as currency or were carved into precious objects—some purely ornamental; some quasi-functional, as sword and dagger pommels; and some religious, including phallic symbols in fertility cults.
“The tooth of the morse,” the archaeologist continued, “was white gold from time out of mind. There was nothing: no precious metals, gems, spices, no valuta more sought after.1 How odd that such hideous monsters should have been the source of such wealth.”
Wealth derived from walrus was not limited to ivory. The inch-thick leather made from the hides of old bulls would stop musket balls and offered as much resistance to cutting and thrusting weapons as did bronze. For tens of centuries it was the first choice of shield makers and their warrior customers.
Walrus ivory was chosen for the most costly and elaborate carvings such, as these chess pieces, part of a set from the Outer Hebrides.
The hide had other uses as well. Split into two or even three layers, it made a superb sheathing for ships’ hulls. A narrow strap, cut spirally from a single hide, could yield a continuous thong as much as two hundred feet in length. When rolled into the “round,” such a thong became rope as flexible and durable as that made from the best vegetable fibres, and it was a good deal stronger. In fact, walrus-hide rope remained the preferred cordage and rigging on some north European and Asian vessels until as late as the sixteenth century.
Although walrus are today restricted almost exclusively to Arctic waters, they were formerly found in Europe south to the Bay of Biscay and, in the western Atlantic, as far to the south as Cape Cod. However, as people became more numerous and more rapacious, and as walrus ivory steadily increased in value, the more southerly herds were exterminated, one by one.2
The afternoon was well advanced before the skipper turned the homeward-bound Farfarer into the tidal bore pouring out of the narrow sound between Unst and Yell. Swirling waters shouldered her about in rough fashion as the crew stared hungrily at familiar shores. Thin coils of pungent peat smoke blew away from the roofs of stone-and-sod crofts scattered along green slopes. Here and there a tiny figure waved at the passing ship.
Then a crewman happened to look forward over the bows.
“Tusker!” he cried in astonishment.
All hands craned to see a beast which would hardly have merited a passing glance in Tilli. Here, it was a novelty. The men cheered and waved as the bull walrus thrust himself half out of the water to stare back at them. The skipper, at the helm, caught only a glimpse of a great domed head, bulbous eyes, and the gleam of ivory before the beast submerged. He laughed aloud at being welcomed back to home waters by a creature now so rare amongst the Islands that a decade had passed since the last one had been sighted.
According to the old people, the seas around the Northern Islands had once thronged with tuskers. In the spring they had hauled themselves out in thousands on every available beach. Having himself witnessed such spectacles on the strands of distant Tilli, the skipper did not doubt that they had once been commonplace amongst the home islands.
His sighting recalled folk memories of his people.
In the beginning men had mostly left the tuskers alone. Fishers in small boats had given them a wide berth for they could be mortally dangerous if interfered with.
Occasionally some foolhardy soul might kill a calf that had strayed away from sunbathing multitudes on a beach. But such a deed was unnecessarily risky since there was no shortage of other food to be had from waters alive with seals and fishes. Moreover, these great creatures that spanned the void between land and sea bore a totemic relationship to human islanders and so were virtually sacrosanct.
People and walrus shared the Northern Islands and surrounding waters without conflict until, one nameless summer thousands of years ago, an Island crew made a venturesome voyage to the south.
The travellers hoped to obtain some of the hard yellow metal born of the union of tin and copper. In those times bronze was still so scarce in the north that few Islanders had even seen the substance, though all had heard of its superlative qualities.
The inhabitants of the first mainland coast the voyagers visited possessed only a little bronze, and none to spare. However, they spoke of other peoples still farther south supposedly rich in the metal. So the Islanders sailed on, coasting unfamiliar shores, until one day they came upon a settlement so large they were afraid to approach it.
Wattle-and-daub houses clustered in a meadow at the bottom of a sandy bay upon whose broad beach many wooden boats were drawn up. While the Islanders apprehensively rested on their oars, people streamed from the houses to the beach, shouting and gesticulating. Their tongue was unfamiliar, but they brandished no weapons and it seemed they were inviting the strangers to come ashore.
Doubtfully, the Islanders beached their big skin boat. They were received in friendly style and, to their delight, saw that many of the residents wore yellow metal knives and ornaments. Delight turned to disappointment when they found that the carefully worked flint tools, soapstone pots, skin bags filled with eiderdown and spun wool they had brought with them would not fetch so much as a finger’s length of bronze.
