Farewell Mr Puffin

by Paul Heiney

  Fulmars derive their name from the Norse words ‘fúll’ and ‘már’, which means ‘foul gull’, and this refers to a charming little fluid that these birds are able to regurgitate and expel at high speed with the intention of gumming up the wings of other birds and causing them to drop from the skies. This stomach oil, consisting of half-digested sea creatures, also carries the foulest of smells and despite its apparent toxicity can be used as a supplement while in flight, or for feeding young. None of this adds to the culinary charms of the fulmar and this alone should guarantee its safety from ambitious chefs, if not Elizabeth.

  Fulmar-catching, by the way, is not for the sentimental either. At the end of the summer, baby fulmars fall out of their nests and tumble down the sheer cliff faces of the fjords then bob about on the water, unable to save themselves because they are too fat to fly. That fatness is their guarantee of survival when their mother leaves the nest, but it is also their downfall. From the sea they are simply scooped up by fishermen and cooked, and the fatter they are, the more delicious. Nilsson speaks of fulmar as having a ‘mackerel-like’ flavour and the chicks are best slow-roasted and eaten with Faroese rye bread. With fulmar eggs he is more ambitious, and offers a curry sauce as an accompaniment. But don’t work up too much of a hunger – fulmars only lay one egg a year.

  The consumption of seabirds is only the first ethical dilemma you have to face when you start to closely examine the history and traditions of the Faroe Islands. The second is the killing of pilot whales. Critics called it a mass slaughter; the Faroese say it is tradition. There’s not a lot of common ground.

  How it works is like this: by encircling shoals of pilot whales, which are quite small and the size of a chunky dolphin but with a blunter forehead, they are driven ashore towards a beach at the dead end of a fjord. This ritual is known as the grind. A grind starts when a gathering of pilot whales is spotted offshore. As many fishing boats as are at sea will then encircle them till reinforcements arrive, at which point the pilot whales are driven towards the shore with no means of escape. Once they are stranded and are within human wading depth, they are killed by a swift severing of the spinal cord, which, it is claimed, induces instant death. Arteries are severed at the same time, blood flows like a river and for a while the entire sea around the dying whales becomes a ruddy lake.

  I haven’t seen it, and to a bystander with no cultural connection it must look horrendous, horrific, sickening. It would be easy to call for an instant ban, call the killers savages, shun the Faroe Islands and everything to do with them. Storm them to death on Twitter, rise up in internet indignation.

  But there’s another way of looking at it. At least this modest killing of fewer than 30 creatures is happening where we can all see it. We do not know how much destruction of pilot whales takes place in the nets of industrialised fishing boats, unseen and unrecorded, while the ships plough the seas to catch cod for our much-loved fish fingers. Around a thousand pilot whales are killed in the grind every year, which is less than 1 per cent of the world’s total stock, and even organisations that campaign for the preservation of marine species claim that pilot whales are under no threat. Be clear, this is not sport – they don’t do it for fun. The government regulates it and even defines the weapon that can be used to kill the whales to ensure a swift death, and there is always a veterinary presence. But more important is that the whales are killed for food, cut up and frozen and eaten through the long, dark winters. The meat does not go to waste. Whale meat has always helped sustain communities like these when conventional farming cannot feed them.

  But here’s another paradox. The consumption of whale meat as food here is declining through health concerns about the level of mercury it contains, and we must look to ourselves as polluters of the oceans to see who is the guilty party in all this. So, the argument seems to go, it’s OK to slowly kill the ocean’s whales, out of our sight, by allowing them to ingest our discarded mercury-based pollution, but to draw a small handful of them up on a beach and bring their lives to a swift and supervised finale is wrong. We are silently killing more ocean life than the Faroese are. As for the blood, which makes for horrific pictures, the stuff of nightmares, compared to the amount of animal blood spilt every hour in a modern abattoir this is just, well, a drop in the ocean.

  But it will come to an end, of that I’m certain. New tourist opportunities will embrace whale watching and not whale killing, and the grind will become as unfashionable as those St Kildans eating raw puffins for a snack. But because it drifts out of fashion it does not make the Faroese guilty for what they have done in the past. It’s easy to be a Home Counties warrior and condemn them, but I don’t. I don’t want to see the grind, or be part of it, but if we preach respect for other species we must respect other cultures too, for our cultures are just a manifestation of the species to which we belong.

  ***

  The wind was down, the sun was out. I asked Malcolme to cast off the lines and point us roughly north-west. I left the Faroe Islands feeling ever so slightly put out that not one puffin had made an appearance. There’s half a million pairs, somewhere. And to think I had so generously curbed my appetite. They are just not grateful.

  10

  The elves work their mischief

  The distance from the Faroe Islands to the first decent, and possibly most intriguing, refuge off the south-west coast of Iceland is about 400 miles and takes us through that corner of the Atlantic Ocean that is defined by the shipping forecast as ‘South East Iceland’, often married with sea area ‘Faroes’, where doom-laden warnings of gales seem a daily occurrence. ‘Fair Isle, Faroes, South East Iceland… gale eight to severe gale nine, imminent.’ I’ve heard those words so often, pouring out of the BBC, every syllable steeped in threat. I was therefore expecting a wild ride to the Vestmann Islands, knowing that this is not a part of the Atlantic you come to for a holiday. In anticipation of rough seas, I asked Malcolme where he had stuck his seasickness patch this time. On the bottom of his shoes again? Or perhaps on another part of his anatomy? I made a suggestion that didn’t go down well.

  It was time once again to face the fearsome tidal atlas showing the swirling waters of the Faroe Islands; more warnings of tide races and, who knows, the opening up of dark vortices that might suck us to the bowels of the Earth. Again, there were none evident as we sailed away that day; admittedly it was choppy at times, but always with sparkling sunshine reflecting like diamonds on the water.

  The landscape of the diminishing islands occupied us for most of that day: the sculptural quality of the mountains, the precision of the sheer cliff faces as if split with the sharpest of chisels, like the work of a diamond cutter; the dappling of the light, all creating the impression that these chunks of rocks were hewn through the efforts of a delicate artist. We saw villages, or possibly settlements, clinging to the hillsides looking as if, like fulmar chicks, they might drop into the water when the wind blows and then be lost forever. They looked so remote, lonely, yet so perfectly evolved for survival against the elements. It was so difficult to remind myself when presented with such a vista of rock-living isolation that just across the island, out of sight now, was the town of Tórshavn with its BMW dealer, spanking new hospital, sweeping bridges and tunnels speeding cars between islands, leading to the airport. The sun was dipping and the islands looked intoxicating in the golden evening light.

  The weather was on my mind, as it always is at the beginning of a new passage. Weather forecasting, these days, is hugely reliable, certainly out to four or five days ahead, which was roughly how long this passage would take. The horizon looked clear, the sea was free from anything other than a slight swell, there was hardly a cloud in the sky and it was reasonably warm. I had checked the forecast before I left and it promised a decent breeze and a fair one, both of which were my prayers answered. But just as the islands were about to dip beneath the horizon I quickly checked my phone before the signal disappeared and it was showing winds of 40 knots – gale force �
�� a couple of days hence! Where the hell did that come from? How do these things appear out of nowhere? How crude must meteorological science be, to be so much in error in such a short time frame. Of course, we would survive it. But at the expense of comfort, not to mention dry clothes. Such a forecast focuses the mind considerably. I counted every one of the 48 hours till the forecast blow was due to arrive. I spent two nights waiting for it. Would it come with a bang, as such winds often do? I gave some time to checking the lashings on deck, making sure the anchor could not shift, putting hot water into thermos flasks so we wouldn’t have to fiddle around with boiling water on a dancing stove, glancing at Malcolme’s neck to make sure his seasickness patch was in the right place before checking my own. But no wind came – at least, not 40 knots of it.

  I went back to the phone after two days of fretting to have another look. Bloody fool that I am! Somehow, possibly due to the flailing of wet, fat fingers, the settings had been changed and I was being shown wind speeds in kilometres per hour. Twenty knots of wind on the beam was the real forecast – pretty much a walk in the park. I debated whether I should tell Malcolme, aware that in doing so I would have to live with it for the rest of my life. By the time he was awake I’d forgotten about it, so he never knew.

  With less than a hundred miles to go, I was able to convince myself that we might actually get there. I never take anything for granted until we are finally alongside and tied up. But it seemed likely that within the next 24 hours we would have sight of the Vestmann Islands, and I felt confident enough to start reading about Iceland, which superstition had prevented me from doing up till now.

  The first thing I discovered is that Icelanders believe in elves! They really do. I read it in this book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People by Michael Booth, who writes about all the Nordic races and paints an entertaining picture of these often crazy, mixed-up people. Elves are not ghosts, nor necessarily evil creatures; they seem to be neither good luck nor bad but simply there, all the time, exerting an influence and demanding respect. They think of them as the ‘hidden people’. And what’s amazing is that they really do believe this and treat the elves as if they were mobsters you crossed at your peril. How else can you explain the fact that they changed the location of an entire opera house because they sensed the elves wouldn’t like it? Or moved a major new road because on the original plan it would have required the removal of rocks on which it was believed the elves lived? I was shouting all this out to Malcolme, who was dozing below. He bellowed back, ‘If you see any elves, can you ask them to come and put the kettle on,’ betraying the limits of his belief.

  Booth reports a survey: in 1998, 54.4 per cent of Icelanders said they believed in elves. Half the population! But doesn’t belief in elves, fairies and things that go bump in the night usually end up with a visit to the doctor, unless you’re under the age of six? Could half the population of this island I was sailing to be insane?

  I spoke in this mocking tone for a little while, then all of a sudden things turned less than funny.

  I looked up from the book and glanced towards the bow.

  Then I looked again.

  ‘Bloody hell, Malcolme,’ I shouted. ‘Come up, quick! The headsail’s gone!’

  And it had, tumbled over the side while I was mocking the elves. Serve me right?

  We scrambled to the foredeck and found it hanging on, just, but being dragged along beneath the water. It had dropped from the top of the mast after some kind of failure up there and this had resulted in the sail collapsing into the sea. Worryingly, the vital rope that hauls it to the top of the mast was now out of reach and the sail couldn’t be reset.

  With a bit of grunting and a good soaking, we got the sail back on board but now had no means of doing anything with it. We sat for a while trying to dream up a solution. None came. A youngster would have climbed the mast, I suppose, but Malcolme and I are of advancing years so instead of aerial acrobatics we went below and had tea and a lump of fruit cake.

  ‘What are you going to do, skipper?’ Malcolme asked.

  ‘Ask the elves for help?’ I replied.

  ***

  We were sailing to what can honestly be described as the New World. The Vestmann Islands formed as recently as 20,000 years ago. By contrast, on the Faroe Islands you might find venerable rock 55 million years old. Those who were around in the early 60s will remember the excitement when the island of Surtsey appeared out of nowhere off the coast of Iceland following an underwater volcanic eruption, which broke surface late in 1963 and bubbled away till 1967 when it blew its last. The highest point ended up almost 600 feet above sea level. And guess who were among the first to move in and colonise the cooling lava? Once plant life became established, the pushy, greedy gulls soon made it their home. But who was waiting in the wings, so to speak? Atlantic puffins, of course, who pitched up in 2004. This is serious puffin country.

  To be honest, the puffins didn’t have far to come. I suppose Surtsey was no more than a new Vestmann island to them and it must have seemed like adding an extension to their crowded home. Given that one-fifth of the world’s total puffin population lives on the Vestmann Islands, you can see why a bit of elbow room might have been welcome.

  ‘There are going to be puffins, lots of them,’ I said to Malcolme. ‘There are supposed to be eight million of them.’

  ‘As many as there were on the Faroes?’ he remarked, knowing full well we hadn’t seen so much as a single striped beak anywhere. But my luck was about to change, I felt sure.

  And it did, sooner than I thought, and somewhat for the worse.

  The wind started to freshen, the sky clouded over, the air filled with damp and the visibility fell just as we were within 50 miles of the harbour. In clear weather we would have already had a sighting of at least the tops of the volcanic mountains. No chance now, not with the murk descending. It was breakfast time and we reduced our only sail, the mainsail, to the increasing wind. Being there for supper seemed a possibility, which would have made for a creditable passage of five days despite a day and a half with no working headsail.

  There are 15 Vestmann Islands, but only one is permanently inhabited. Heimaey is where the population of roughly 4,500 people earn their livings from offshoots of the vast fishing fleet that is based here. This is where you come to observe deep-sea fishing at its most modern and sophisticated. And to watch puffins.

  The harbour entrance is narrow but easily recognised, and a light buoy – the first we’d seen since Orkney – flashing a red light every three seconds, and standing off a spit of land on the southern side of the approach channel, has a remarkable story to tell. It marks the limits of a major volcanic eruption in 1973 that produced a huge and largely unstoppable lava flow, which headed northwards, threatening to completely close off the harbour entrance. This would have been an economic disaster, given that this is home to 10 per cent of Iceland’s fishing fleet.

  But how do you stop a volcano in its tracks? Isn’t it one of the most powerful phenomena the world ever sees? Isn’t an impatient volcano more terrifying even than a tsunami, or an earthquake, for although both are hugely destructive, they are short-lived? Volcanoes can burp up lava at up to 2,000ºC for weeks, months, even years on end.

  The culprit was Eldfell, which means Hill of Fire, and it proved its name by erupting without warning and flinging ash and lava high in the air for no less than six months. Houses were smothered to their rooftops and photos of the eruption show a township bordered by a violent, smoking, encroaching black landscape of meandering hot lava determined on destruction. The population was evacuated by the fishing fleet, who headed for safety in mainland Icelandic harbours. It was not recorded where the puffins went.

  A heroic battle ensued to prevent the lava from closing the harbour mouth completely, although there was no hope of saving all the town, which, due to an unlucky change in the wind, ended up with half a million cubic metres of ash being dumped on it.

  The only way to halt the lava was
to cool it and this they did by the relentless spraying of sea water. Even so, the sea around the harbour rose in temperature to the mid-40s centigrade. A year later, with the lava stopped in its tracks and the harbour saved, the population started to return. Only one life had been lost. Never say the Icelanders indulge in self-pity, for they quickly harnessed the heat from the cooling lava to heat water, and even used the ash to extend the airport’s runway. The flashing red light marks the place where the runaway lava was finally stopped in its deadly tracks. We gave it a nod of respect as we passed and noted, as the locals admit, that the lava spit, once seen as the enemy, in fact makes for a safer harbour than before by keeping out a lot of the swell.

  We came alongside a wooden pontoon and once we were secure, and the kettle was on, there was time to look around. Our eyes widened at the close-up sight of the massive fishing machines with which we were surrounded. Have you ever seen American long-distance trucks? They shine in the sun, the chrome is polished, no splash of mud remains for long. Well, the Icelandic fishing fleet is like that. The paint looks fresh, the gear looks clever and purposeful, the ships have style and grace and are somewhat attractive if you discount their potential to do damage on a huge scale if improperly used. There was a time when it was a fair match between the fish in the sea and those who went out to catch them. When fish were caught on hooks strung in long lines, there was only so much cod that could be captured because it simply took so long to lay the lines and haul them. Then fishing advanced, electronically assisted, and we seemed to be able to catch as much fish as we wanted, and probably more than we needed. And so the cry goes out that fish stocks are threatened. These beautiful monsters lining the shore of this harbour, ready to scoop all life out of the oceans, must take some of the blame.

  We went ashore. I asked Malcolme if he fancied a bowl of soup, not from a rusty Heinz tin of which I had several rolling around in the bilge, but at what appeared to be a workman’s cafe. It turned out to be just that, packed with blokes in working clothes and boots. I was totally seduced by a sign outside that read ‘Traditional Icelandic Meat Soup’. The saliva formed. In we marched to find men with elbows on the table, newspapers being read, hot drinks swigged from mugs – our kind of place. I asked the woman for two soups, in English, helped along by a bit of pointing. Two decent-sized bowls were filled from a large urn. Then she went to the till. I read the final figure and produced from my pocket some Icelandic krone I had optimistically brought with me. I gave her a few notes, she gave me change, not much of it, and a receipt.