by Paul Heiney
4
Alone, with the ‘silver darlin’s’
I left the throat-narrowing stench of guano behind by rising early, before the sun had time to heat the land and raise that megaton of moist droppings to a gentle simmer. There was a fair tide northwards, the air was clear and the sea flat, the breeze was light and coming from behind me to easily waft me along. In other words, a perfect morning for heading north, and I found the Goldstone channel between the Goldstone rock and the Plough Seat reef to the east of Holy Island. These were the only hazards between me and my next destination, which was Peterhead in Scotland.
To my regret, I paid scant notice to Holy Island. Too much else to enjoy. But I could see Lindisfarne Castle balanced atop its rock pinnacle, and even the multicoloured smudges of walkers and tourists, who carefully choose their time to visit, for this place is only accessible when the tide is low. I checked. It was now half tide and falling, so I guessed the causeway to the mainland had uncovered and declared the island open for business once again.
At this stage in the voyage I had given little thought to the importance of the Viking influence on everything that was to come, and for that reason I may not have given Lindisfarne the attention it deserved. It was here in AD 793, now believed to be on 8 June, that the first ever Viking invasion of the British Isles took place. The invaders, with blood-curdling names such as Erik Bloodaxe, landed as described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the greatest record we have of this period of our history:
‘A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.’
And so the bad lads had arrived here at Lindisfarne with their longboats, which, at the time, were as sophisticated and speedy as any craft on the water. Prayers were the monks’ only futile defence. The Northumbrian scholar, theologian and poet Alcuin reported how the church on Lindisfarne became ‘…splattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments. (The Vikings) trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the street.’ It should be noted that Alcuin was not there to witness it; he was on continental Europe at the time, but presumably word spread fast even back then.
The Viking era can be said to have commenced on that day in AD 793 and endured for nearly 300 years, during which the Vikings not only raided Europe from Ireland to Turkey, but northwards to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. I was destined to trip over their legacy in almost every place I would eventually visit.
The question worth asking is whether the Vikings were the nasty pieces of work that they are commonly supposed to be. There is a fashion among some modern historians to paint them as more benign figures than dramatists and film-makers would have us believe. They point out that the blood-chilling reports in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, for example, were written by the victims, and there are no independent views from the other side.
Were the Vikings born to be cut-throat terrorists, or were they really humble farmers seeking to export their skills to a wider world – a sort of educational crusade with added emphasis in the form of aggression? The attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne was, it is argued, not an anti-Christian act from the Vikings’ point of view. Although they had no religions, they did have beliefs and worshipped many gods; they saw no problem in adding another to the list, or ignoring Christ completely. They were happy either way. No, it was the riches of the churches they were after, not the faith that offended them. In fact, they considered themselves to be honourable people with a wide-ranging code of ethics and a complex but effective form of government, the first rule being that everyone, from kings to commoners, should respect the law. This generous appreciation of the Vikings by modern scholars was probably not that of the innocent monks who looked out to sea that day and observed the high prows of the longships coming over the horizon, hearing the chants of war, seeing the glint of swords and axes. I doubt they saw the honourable side of things.
***
With the English/Scottish border behind me, the sun lowering in the sky, and a hearty supper taken, I wondered how I was going to pass a long night’s solo sailing. I was now heading a further 80 miles northwards, making for a 20-hour passage at best in light winds. Normally, I would doze at sea if I judged it safe to do so, but I was crossing the Firth of Forth, bound for Peterhead, and there might be fishing boats, military, cargo, all manner of hazardous craft to be avoided. Despite that, it often makes sense to sail by night. You have a day resting, shopping and idle fiddling beforehand, then clear off in the evening while there is still daylight and arrive at your destination when the sun is up and you can see your way in. This avoids the fumbling around in the dark of a night-time arrival. The theory is a good one.
But how to keep awake? In rough weather it’s no problem, for there is always that sixth sense that keeps you alert to changes in the motion of the boat, or a change in the note of the wind in the rigging to tell you that the wind is rising or falling, and the boat needs attention. But with the promise of gentle breezes I was worried that a deep and dangerous sleep might come all too easily, probably just at the moment someone decided to drive their aircraft carrier across my path.
I anchored for a few hours off Eyemouth and promised myself I wouldn’t leave till about five, after tea, but as usual impatience overcame me and I pushed off at three on to a flat blue sea with the sun still high in the sky and just enough breeze to fill the sails and push us along, a now familiar state of meteorological affairs. I lifted the floor of the cockpit and dragged out a billowing green sail, made of light fabric, to capture every last bit of energy the wind offered. The faithful self-steering did its job and when I finally collapsed, sweating, after sail hauling and course setting, I felt the deep heat of the sun on my face and dived for the sun cream for the first time that season.
This triggered a most unusual reaction and propelled me straight back to my days in the tropics when sailing alone from South America to England, trapped in the windless equatorial regions of the Atlantic. For so many days did I struggle through those regions, working hard like a prisoner digging his escape, that eventually I came to terms with its restrictions and invented ways of getting by. If you can’t do that, then certainly insanity would follow. You feel so helpless, so alone, so incapable of doing anything that will speed you homewards. Eventually, though, some kind of acceptance takes place and you find you have invented yourself a whole new life – it’s the only solution. And that was what was happening here under the unusual heat of a Scottish sun. I started to wash socks, even though I had plenty of clean ones. I thought about baking bread, which is always cheering on a long passage, even though I had three fresh loaves in a locker. That sensation of hot sun, the aroma of greasy sun cream, had transported me back to that profound ocean sailing experience a few years before. Can you believe that in the middle of the Firth of Forth I got out my sextant and started to take sun sights? I actually took sun sights! I marked the time with my wristwatch and then sat at the chart table with a Nautical Almanac and a set of Sight Reduction Tables – impenetrable, don’t ask – and after an hour’s close calculation assumed I was probably not far from the Isle of May. Had I looked up from my figuring I could have confirmed this, because the island was clearly in sight. The afternoon passed.
But I wasn’t in the tropics, I was in the North Sea and getting further north by the hour, and whereas in the tropics the sweat would still have been pouring off me even after the sun had long gone down, here it became chilly and a quick shiver brought me back into my real world.
But the question remained: how to keep awake over the coming night? Still 50 miles
to go, so another 12 hours at least in a breeze now fading. I switched on the radio for the ten o’clock news. It was European Referendum result night and I had completely forgotten. Did we want to stay in Europe, or not? I wasn’t too bothered about the result because it was clear to me that we were going to vote to remain part of Europe, and once that was confirmed there wouldn’t be much else to stay awake for. There was little evidence that a major upset was on the way. So I took up a horizontal position on the bunk, popping up every 15 minutes to scan the horizon, and waited for that all too predictable referendum result.
But it didn’t work out that way, did it? By one in the morning, pundits were hinting that things might turn out very different. By three o’clock they were pretty certain, and then round about five…
Fog!
I switched off the damned radio, suddenly finding I needed all my senses around me. A dense fog had closed in with less than half a mile to Peterhead harbour entrance. The radio had just spoken of uncertainty, of having to find a clear way ahead. All this resonated with me now, stuck as I was with a strange harbour to enter in visibility I guessed at less than 20 yards. Mutterings from the political pundits of ‘sailing into uncharted waters’ might have summed up the situation for the listeners, but it was all too real for me. I fired up the radar, got out the pilot book – which gives detailed descriptions of the harbour – so I could at least imagine what it might look like, and went to the wheel, now clammy with foggy condensation, and steered by hand with the engine running. Before long, above the thrum, I heard a fog horn bleating a mournful, depressing gasp – one grunt every 30 seconds. I knew it was positioned on the end of the northern breakwater, so I reckoned that if I steered directly for where the sound was coming from I might be able to see the stone pier before I hit it, then quickly turn a bit left and I would be through. Hardly textbook stuff, more a make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of navigation, but I thought it would work.
I had to call the harbourmaster on the radio before entering, which meant leaving the wheel to go below. Watching the radar also meant leaving the wheel, which I felt was unsafe, so I abandoned that particular aid and felt more confident with my eyes peering into the fog rather than sitting below glued to a screen.
‘Aye, come on in.’ The radio crackled with the first heavy Scottish accent I had heard so far. ‘But there’s a wee yacht on the way out,’ he warned.
That’s bad luck. Half past five in the morning and I am about to bump into another damned sailor who ought to have more sense than to be out in weather like this. I could now hear the fog horn quite loudly, almost painfully close enough to rattle the cups in the galley. Then the sound started to come from higher and higher until it felt as if it was directly above me, booming down at me like that sailor on the Bridlington Queen all those years ago with his forceful message of ‘get out of the way!’ Then the grey slabs of granite appeared like a cliff face over the bow – the harbour wall! I swung the wheel to port, to the left, trying not to lose sight of that wall, which seemed so high that it might rise up to the clouds.
The radio crackled, ‘Wild Song. It’s Peterhead Harbour Radio. That wee yacht is just in the entrance now.’
I kept that granite cliff to my right and saw nothing but murk to my left. Then a hint of some lightness broke the gloom, slowly solidifying into the shape of another yacht. I could see him! A slight change in course and we would be clear of each other. We both raised a hand in greeting, as if there was nothing wrong in the world and being together in the harbour mouth at dawn in the thickest of fogs was the most natural thing. The end of the pier became clear now and I declared myself to be within the harbour. And what did I find inside? Visibility enough to see a five-pound note at a hundred yards! I sometimes hate the bloody weather because it so enjoys taking the piss. I groped my way into a corner of the vast harbour and found the marina. I was tied up in time for an early breakfast. I’d forgotten about the referendum. When I finally switched on the radio, Prime Minister Cameron was resigning. I decided to do the same and crept into my bunk and stayed till 11.
I awoke to the realisation that we had voted to leave Europe. Now the whole country was plunged into a thick fog, wandering, wondering, fearing the nation was about to sail into a brick wall, uncertain what might be coming at them out of the mists of confusion. As I write, that political fog bank persists, possibly heavier and thicker than before, obliterating all decent debate, shrouding once reasonable views. No clarity, nothing, other than the fear of the looming brick wall, and the mournful notes of caution from the fog horn on the end of the pier. Like the moist air that brings the fog, the discussion drips and drips on, to the point of insanity.
Would everyone in Peterhead be talking about it that morning? Absolutely not. Not a word. Not in the grocery queue, the bakery queue, at the bus stops or in the car parks. I think the people here in this grey little town had become used to being left in the fog. Some will remember when this coast had a vibrant and prosperous fishing industry, till another of those European fogs robbed it of its fishing rights decades before.
I sat in a cafe with a cup of tea, overlooking the harbour, glancing down at a lonely egg on toast smiling back up at me, and wondered why, in a town where there seem to be more seagulls than people, you’d go to the trouble of having one stuffed and hang it from the ceiling of your cafe? Nobody loves them, except people who don’t have to live with them. They are the villains of the seabird world, with filthy habits and a criminal approach to life – a bit like Vikings. They have no grace like the gannet, no charm like the puffin, no sweet song. Apart from the brilliance of their whiteness, they have nothing going for them at all. I once met one of the very last of our lighthouse keepers, who had served on the Longstone off the Farne Islands, as it happens. He hated seagulls with more intensity than you would think one man could contain. Every morning, being a dutiful lighthouse keeper and taking great pride in his light, he climbed to the top of the building, went on to the outer balcony in all weathers, and wiped away the salt spray collected overnight. He polished the glass with as much dedication as a royal servant giving a shine to the Queen’s own knife and fork. A clean glass transmits more light, of course, and more light was what his lighthouse was all about. Imagine his anger when, after a solid half hour of enthusiastic polishing, the first seagull lands and starts to open its vile bowel across his perfectly buffed glass. He said to me, ‘I hate seagulls. Two holes with an acid bath in between – that’s fucking seagulls.’
I remembered his words as I gazed up at the stuffed creature, the two holes to which he referred hovering directly above me, ready to shoot with force. I left shortly afterwards and wandered, but found little apart from charity shops aplenty, a bakery with poor choice, and everything at rock-bottom prices. There was not much joy on any face I saw. The people here have lived too long in a contagious fog that blinds everyone to the possibility of any sunshine in their lives.
***
And can you believe that my next harbour, Wick, 70 miles further to the north, did exactly the same thing to me when I almost had it in my grasp? I chose to make a night passage of it again, arriving at dawn when the way in should become clear in the growing light. The crossing of the Moray Firth presented no problems and dawn arrived with clarity until I was once again a couple of miles from the harbour entrance, and then a familiar dollop of drenching fog once again dropped on me from a great height. How I cursed. Out came the now well-rehearsed ‘groping-in-fog’ routine, radar, echo sounder, chart, eyes and ears, all running on high alert. Then, once inside, I found the early rays of the sun bouncing off the flat water of the peaceful inner harbour and a clear berth ahead to which I could tie up. Just the weather’s little games.
There was fresher air here, not detected on my nose but certainly sensed by my spirit, for when I had chance to take in fully my new surroundings, my mood lifted immeasurably. This was a quite different place to the one I had just sailed from, and in a good way. Sure, it was clearly no Monte Carlo, b
ut you can taste a hint of residual pride in Wick just by walking its streets. Even if they weren’t completely succeeding in making this the buzzing place they wished it to be, it soon became clear that they were at least trying. The welcome in Morag’s Diner on the narrow High Street was a warm one, and thankfully devoid of stuffed seagulls. The chat was about the weather, not Europe, and the remarkable fact that they hadn’t had rain for seven whole days – headline news hereabouts. Even better news was that the Harbour Chip Shop, which I passed by as I walked from the harbour to the town, was open tonight. A simple-fronted shop, with two blue doors – one in, one out. And a simple name with no pretence. Workmanlike, like I imagined the people here.
That short walk from harbour to town started to reveal an immediate story. This place had once had great prosperity and you could tell it from the solidity of the proud buildings (the dignified and somewhat monumental three-storey granite telegraph office is now a branch of Wetherspoons). Such buildings are strong clues to money having been spent from the big money that was earned. There were sturdy granite houses and behind them heavy granite sheds, which would once have stored fish or nets, and any of the apparatus of the fishing industry. But on a giant scale. Not just a few sheds, but lots of them, which must have meant loads of fish. Now there’s just lots of ‘heritage’ and a top-class museum where the glory days of this lonely little town, once the world’s largest herring port, are revealed.
Tribute must be paid to Sir William Pulteney, immortalised in the name of the local whisky, who joined forces with his protégé, Thomas Telford, to build a town and a harbour in order to make the best of a 19th-century boom in the herring industry. That’s why Wick is built on a grid system, doubtless to satisfy the eye of an engineer like Telford, who liked things to fit together and interlock, creating elegance such as Argyle Square, one of the finest I have seen in a place so small. Pulteney poured money into the project but he had plenty to swill around, owning half of Manhattan at the time. The town was soon overtaken by its own success and the harbour was at bursting point, so Telford was forced to add an outer harbour. He had better luck with that project than Thomas Stevenson, who also tried to build a huge breakwater, the remains of which I must have sailed past, unseen in that treacherous clump of fog. He had several goes, starting in 1863, and his harbour wall was capped with a thousand-ton lump of concrete. The sea wasn’t impressed and soon saw that off, so he replaced it with a larger cap, weighing in at over 2,000 tons, and the sea saw that off too in another storm. It must have been enough to turn anyone to whisky, which they were by now brewing with great success up the hill. What’s left of that failure of a harbour wall is still to be seen but is hardly noticed.