by Farley Mowat
Most important of all were several wooden casks bulging with tusks, each cask so heavy that two men were needed to carry it. Here was ivory to trade for sufficient grain, honey, even raisins, to last the clan a year or more. And with plenty left over for southern pottery, flaxen cloth, wood, copper, iron, and other goods, not forgetting finery for the women.
As soon as the hold was empty, crewmen leapt into the surf to grab at screaming girls and women, or to wrestle with young kinsmen, until the skipper shouted with mock ferocity:
“Haul her up, you feckless clods! Up on the beach with her now! And be bloody careful! Tear her skin and I’ll rip the hide right off your backs!”
But he was grinning, for he knew Farfarer could not have been in more caring hands.
For two weeks everyone celebrated. People entertained, and were entertained, not only in their own clan homes but in other settlements around the island. Then, one sunny day made auspicious by a sportive nor’west wind, Farfarer slid back into her own element. Re-laden with most of the cargo she had brought from Tilli, she was now crowded with people of both sexes and all ages. In holiday mood, they set out to the southward, bound for Orkney’s Main Island, which had been the social, trade, and religious centre of the twin archipelagos since time immemorial.
Since this was the tag end of the year and a time for taking life easy, the voyage was leisurely. By day Farfarer coursed along with a white bone of foam in her teeth, but at night she ran her bows up on some convenient beach, or anchored off one of the scores of little coastal settlements on the scattered islands along the way. Her people were welcomed wherever they landed, for the Islanders were all of one blood.
On the third day Farfarer fell in with an island ship returning from a voyage to the land of the Northmen where her people had traded walrus rope and seal tar for timber. The two vessels put into harbour together that night, and there was a great exchange of seafaring gossip.
None of the Fetlar men had ever made the crossing to Norway. Although this could be accomplished in two or three days, weather permitting, the nature of the reception at the other end was always in doubt. The Northmen had a name for being quick with sword and battleaxe, and their contempt for strangers could be deadly. The crew of the visiting vessel had played safe by anchoring at the mouth of a fiord. Northmen had come off to them in slim, lap-strake, wooden boats, built more like canoes than ships.
“They towed rafts of timbers out to us, but called us worms when we would not go ashore. And they mocked our vessel, threatening to skin her like a fat cow if we did not give them double what their wood was worth. It’s as well they stick to their own coasts. I would not like to see them come to ours. . . .”
The third night Farfarer rested her head on the beach at Sandwick under the protective loom of the Broch of Mousa. Her people were welcomed by the Sandwick folk and surfeited with mutton. Many stories were told and songs sung around the smoky peat fires. The visitors listened, not for the first time, to the gory tale of a Pictish raid on Mousa that had taken place fifty years earlier. Four boatloads of Picts had tried to rush the broch and, when repulsed, had laid siege to it. But they neglected to keep a proper watch on their boats.
“One black night our Sandwick men rowed across the Sound with muffled oars. Quiet as otters they landed, seized the pirates’ boats, and, when the Picts came roaring down to the beach, met them with arrows and sling stones. Then our folk, penned up in the tower, stormed out and took them in the rear with spears and axes. . . .”
On the fifth day Farfarer steered into open ocean past the great cliff and swirling tide rip at the southern end of Shetland. At dusk the lookout raised Fair Isle, midway between Shetland and Orkney. Here the ship was storm-bound by a howling nor’easter for two days. Her people ate and slept in the snug houses of the small island’s one clan; old friends, who also sent men to Tilli every year.
A day’s sail south from Fair Isle brought Farfarer to the coast of Sanday, a low, verdant island fringed by miles of saffron-coloured beaches. This was a legendary place where, in ancient times, legions of walrus had been used to coming ashore to sun themselves on the broad sands. Storms still uncovered their bones from the shore dunes, or rolled them up from the sea bottom.
The Fetlar people visited relatives at Sty Bay, where they were shown a giant tusk washed ashore by the nor’easter only two days earlier. Time-yellowed and sandpolished, it was more than a yard long. Visitors and residents alike took its resurrection as a good omen for the future.
Departing from Sanday on a sou’westerly course, the vessel made her leisurely way amongst the low, fertile, well-peopled Orkneys. Almost always a broch, sometimes several, were in view. Although now growing unkempt from long neglect, the towers remained a comforting presence.
In due course Farfarer arrived at Wide Bay, which knifes into the north side of Main Island. Not only was Main the largest in the Orkney group, but it had always been the most prosperous. It was here that the Old Ones had built their most massive stone circles; raised the highest standing stones; and constructed the magnificent monument of Maeshowe.
Through countless generations the greatest part of all northern valuta, whether originating in Shetland, the Faeroes, or Tilli, had been brought into Wide Bay, to be carried over a narrow isthmus to a cove in Scapa Sound where Orkney ships trading south to Scilly awaited it. The narrow isthmus between the two harbours had early become, and remained, the site of a great annual trade fair which took place at summer’s end.
Far-faring valuta seekers, crofter-fishermen, and Orkney southfarers foregathered at the isthmus. Those belonging to Main generally came on foot or riding small, shaggy ponies; most others arrived in skin-covered boats ranging in size from four-oared skiffs to ocean-going ships. Although a few clans maintained permanent sod-walled shelters at the isthmus, the majority camped under their own overturned vessels set on sod-and-stone foundations just above the high-water mark. Seen from a distance, these resembled elongated tortoise shells bleached to the colour of old bone.
On the day Farfarer nosed up on the beach in Wide Bay, a pair of big Orkney merchantmen, not long arrived from Scilly, lay at anchor in Scapa Bay. Their cargoes were being unloaded and ferried ashore to be displayed in booths set up upon the isthmus separating the two bodies of water.
While Farfarer’s skipper and the clan elders saw to the exchange of goods, the rest of her people made the most of the opportunities for visiting, feasting, love making, story telling, singing, drinking, and, on occasion when beer had flowed too freely, fighting.
The fair was about far more than trade. It was the principal forum for an exchange of news about other islanders and about the world beyond. The days hardly seemed long enough for all that had to be seen and done—said and heard.
The boys from Fetlar were especially curious about the Orkney merchantmen. Although built to the same double-ended design as Farfarer, the southfaring vessels were larger, broader, and able to carry huge cargoes. They also carried large crews—not so much to handle the ships as for protection. The waters between Little Minch in the Sea of the Hebrides and Solway Firth were infested with swift Pictish vessels. An Orkney merchantman could hope to survive attack only if she had a large crew well skilled in the use of the bow, the sling, and the long pikes designed to repel boarders.
“Your northfarers may have to contend with wild winds, mountainous waves, terrible sea beasts, even floating ice,” an Orkney crewman told the group of Fetlar lads. “Aye, but we have to face human beasts worse than all those put together. The Picts, for one. They are said to be kin to us, but you would not know it if they boarded you and fed you to the fishes. The people on the Irish coast are not so handy at sea, but they’re even more bloody minded. If they catch you they think nothing of ripping your belly open and making rope of your guts.”
Everyone was keenly interested in a report that the Romans, whose warships patrolled British waters south of Solway Firth, were contemplating basing a squadron in Alban territory o
n the island of Mull. An Orkney skipper who had been convoyed south from Solway by a Roman galley brought this welcome news.
There were other cheering tidings from the south. Newly arrived Roman legions and Celtic auxiliaries were driving the Picts back to the Clyde–Forth line where, it was said, a new wall would be built to pen them in. What with one thing and another, it seemed the Picts would have little time or energy to spare for harassing Alba.
Northfarers had their own stories to tell, and Farfarer’s skipper held everyone’s attention with his description of a voyage made late that summer to the waters northwest of Tilli.
It had been an exceptionally warm summer and the river of pack ice which normally separated Tilli from the seldom seen, but always felt, presence of Crona, the great land to the westward, had thinned remarkably.1
As the skipper told it, “We had a bumper cargo, and some of the summer left before it would be time to lay course for home. I’d never seen the western waters so clear of ice. So I asked the lads if they’d like to take a look at Crona—a better look than what we’d ever had, even from the top of Tilli’s mountains.”
Farfarer sailed west for a day and a mostly sunlit night. On the morning of the second day, when pack ice finally stopped her, she was in full view of a giant’s land. It was fringed, the skipper told his listeners, with peaks higher than any he had ever seen or heard about. And above these rose the most enormous mass of ice in all the world.
Farfarer’s crew had been lucky. The window through which they viewed this majestic and mysterious land soon closed again as a spell of renewed cold and stormy weather descended on the north, and pack ice re-established its dominion over the Cronian Sea.
Farfarer’s return home from the trade fair to Fetlar was quickly made. When all the newly acquired goods had been taken ashore, the ship was hauled well out of reach of the highest storm tide and overturned to become her own boathouse. Lashed down with walrus-hide ropes against the tug and thrust of nor’east gales, she crouched like a broody hen over the gear stored under her well-tarred “roof.”
The clanspeople prepared themselves for winter. Peat that had been cut and dried on hillside bogs during the summer was brought down and stacked against house walls, where it provided added protection against the wind until it was needed on the hearths within. Bundles of sun-and-wind-dried fish and mutton were stacked in stone shelters, protected from the rain but open to the antiseptic sweep of wind. Storerooms built into the house walls were packed with sacks of imported grain and bladders redolent with the heavy odour of rendered sea-mammal oil and sheep tallow.
As the first great winter storms came blasting across the wide sweep of sea between Fetlar and Norway, the island grew comatose. Half-wild sheep retreated from the wind-and-sea-lashed coasts to seek shelter in inland valleys. In the smoky comfort of dim-lit houses men and women busied themselves with their crafts, while children played, asked questions, and listened to endless tales.
At night, when the peat had burned to white ash and the lamps had been doused, people dreamed of spring days to come. Farfarer’s skipper dreamed mostly of Tilli . . . but sometimes of the vast and icy land called Crona.
CHAPTER TEN
ALBA REBORN
WET, COOL, AND STORMY WEATHER SEEMS TO HAVE dominated the northeastern Atlantic throughout most of the third century, making life more difficult for Alban crofters and farfarers alike. But at least they lived more or less in peace.
The Picts were too fiercely engaged with the Romans to have much time and energy to spare for Alba. British Celts were no longer a threat, for they were now more or less subordinate to Rome. The Irish posed a danger to Orkney southfarers sailing too near their shores, but Rome, anxious to prevent interruptions in the flow of northern valuta and to protect the coasts of her British province, had made herself mistress of the surrounding seas and so put a crimp in both Irish and Pictish nautical activities.
Around the end of the third century this state of affairs began to suffer a sea change. Stalemated on land by a combination of Roman legions and Celtic auxiliaries protected by forts and walls, the Picts moved to regain the initiative at sea. Anciently a seafaring people, they turned their talents to designing a small warship which was so effective that the Romans eventually paid them the compliment of copying it.
The Romans called this vessel a picta. It had a slim, wooden hull and was propelled by ten pairs of oars but could be sailed as well. Hull, sail, and rowers were camouflaged in blues and greens to match the colours of the sea. Low in the water, almost invisible at a distance, and extremely swift, swarms of these deadly little craft were able to strike from ambush and overwhelm larger, slower Roman ships, sometimes before the crews of these could even stand to arms. Perhaps the Picts were belatedly benefiting from the bloody lesson taught to their ancestors by Caesar’s fleet at the battle of Morbihan Bay in their old homeland of Armorica.
Although the success of the picta was not the only factor involved, Rome’s command of British waters was eroding. By early in the fourth century she had all but lost control of the seaways. Pictish squadrons were raiding as far south as the Bristol Channel and probably as far north as Tilli. Celts from Ireland, using both Alban-style skin-covered craft and wooden boats, were again descending on outlying Alban communities in the Hebridean Sea, and on Romano-British Celts on the western coasts of mainland Britain.
Other predators now moved in to exploit the decline of Roman power. Saxon freebooters appeared in southeastern Britain and were soon harassing the eastern coast. It may not have been long before some reached Alba and the Northern Islands. At least one broch has yielded evidence of re-occupancy in the fourth century. The people who sought refuge within its walls may have felt themselves threatened by Pictish, Irish, or Saxon marauders. Certainly something unpleasant was afoot in northern Britain, it seems.
In or about 363 a much-respected Roman general named Theodosius led a naval expedition north. Most of what little we know about it is contained in the rather florid verse of Claudius Claudianus, a classical poet who lived at the end of the fourth century. Claudianus wrote with chauvinistic smugness:
It is to Rome’s rule of peace we owe it that the world is our home, that we can live where we please, and that to visit Thule [Tilli] and explore its once dreaded wilderness is but a sport.
More to the point he also tells us that
Theodosius’s adventurous oars broke the surface of the northern seas.... He brought under subjection the coasts of Britain and laid waste in the north.... What avail against him the eternal snows, the frozen air, the uncharted seas? The Orcades ran red with Saxon slaughter; Thule was warm with the blood of Picts; ice-bound Hibernia wept for the heaps of slain Scots....
Most scholars choose to ignore this, the only surviving account of Theodosius’s expedition, or to impugn its worth. Because no corroboratory proof of a Saxon presence in Orkney in the fourth century has so far been found, some conclude that Claudianus invented the story. As for Picts in Thule—well, where’s the proof? It is, however, generally (if reluctantly) admitted that the reference to Scots, as the northern Irish were called, seems historically valid.
Regardless of academic demurs, it cannot be reasonably doubted that Theodosius did lead a naval force north. He may have done so as part of a general attempt to regain control of the seas surrounding Britain; but we will not be far wrong if we conclude he was also motivated by urgent pleas for assistance from Alban allies.
I envisage him sailing up the east coast, engaging any Saxon, Frankish, or Pictish vessels he might meet. He may very well have encountered a nest of Saxons in Orkney waters, attacked and sunk the ships, and slaughtered the crews. He could then have responded to appeals from his Alban allies and sailed on to Tilli, there to surprise and scatter Pictish raiders preying on the valuta trade.
I see Theodosius, having done his duty by Rome’s client, then turning south through western waters, engaging Pictish ships whenever he could, and going ashore in Ireland on occa
sion to make reprisals on the Dalriad Scotti and other Celtic tribes.
Claudianus’s somewhat mellifluous style (he was a poet, after all) may irritate scholastic sensibilities, but that is no reason to reject his story.
During the late 1940s a remarkable discovery was made in Iceland. In his book Gengiō á rekja, Icelandic historian Kristian Eldjarn describes the recovery of three ancient coins from old habitation sites at the head of Hamarsfjördur on the east coast of Iceland. All are Roman Antoniniani, minted between A.D. 270 and 305. A fourth Antoniniani belonging to the same age has since been found at another east-coast site.
Eldjarn does not believe, as some have suggested, that these coins were old loot brought to Iceland in the ninth century by his Viking ancestors. He suspects that a Roman ship caught in a gale in north British waters was blown so far off course as to reach Thule, where she was wrecked.
I submit that it is at least equally likely the coins were payment for fresh meat or other country produce supplied to Theodosius’s crews by Albans living on the east coast of the island. The apparent time discrepancy poses no problem. It often took several generations for coins minted in Rome to make their ways to the fringes of the Empire.
Whatever salutary effects Theodosius’s expedition may have had on the “barbarians of the north,” as the Romans continued to call the Picts, were short-lived. A few years later, after destroying a Roman fleet, Pictish vessels were attacking watchtowers and coastguard stations as far south as the English Channel. By 367 their land forces were battering Hadrian’s Wall and, by century’s end, had burst through it, overwhelming the Roman garrisons and storming southward.
The rapid decline of Rome’s power in Britain resulted in an epidemic of bloody upheavals. Irish raiders took to attacking the west coast of Britain where and when they pleased. Increasing numbers of Saxons and Franks came marauding along Britain’s southern and eastern shores. In the latter part of the fourth century all these assailants seem to have come together in a loose alliance with the Picts to overrun much of England, burning, looting, and slaving.
