Teko’s pool burst on the first day that it was filled with water, and, being immediately outside my ground-floor window, it flooded the house with all its four thousand gallons. It did more, for it laid flat the wooden paling of the enclosure, and had Terry, who was standing beside the pool, not seen the metal beginning to bulge, he might well have been killed. The containing wall of the pool burst on that side only, and I think my calculations are conservative when I say that the metal sheets must have been slammed down by not less than twenty tons of water. A week later we replaced the wreckage by a sunk fibreglass tank sixteen feet by eight by four-and-a-half feet deep. This object, looking like a giant’s washing-up basin, arrived by the usual combination of rail and boat travel, and was delivered in Camusfeàrna south bay by a hired launch. (The Polar Star was absent, as so often that summer, undergoing some minor surgery to her fuel system.)
Edal’s pools were partially sunk, and boarded outside to resemble huge vats; in their case there was no such disaster as had occurred with Teko’s, but she began early to take a mischievous delight in ripping the PVC lining with her teeth, so that the level of the water could never be relied upon, and the complicated system of syphon and waterfall that we had devised was rarely in working order. We had, nevertheless, solved the problem of her continued existence at Camusfeàrna.
4
The Wreck of the Polar Star
Saturday, 7th October 1961, began in a calm and orderly manner and ended in chaos. The events of the evening formed one of the chain of disasters, greater or lesser, that have punctuated the attempt to make Camusfeàrna, in all its isolation, a place of semi-permanent residence. At some time in the morning Miss Jean Alexander, who manages the Invermoriston Hotel, telephoned to say that she had staying with her Mr Lionel Edwards, known to several generations as a painter of hunting scenes, together with his daughter and son-in-law. Mr Edwards was particularly anxious to visit Camusfeàrna and see the otters, but he was by now a man in old age, and the long, steep track between Druimfiaclach and Camusfeàrna was beyond his capacity. The visit was possible only if we could take the Polar Star to the village pier four miles away and collect him there, returning him in the evening to the same place where his car would be waiting. There appeared no possible reason against this; the weather was flat calm with intermittent light rain and we had nothing on hand but the normal routine of the household. We arranged to collect Mr Edwards’s party from the pier at about two-thirty.
Everything went smoothly until the visitors, who had lingered long watching Edal and Teko disporting themselves in their respective pools, began their homeward journey in the evening, and even then I was unaware of anything amiss. We cast off the Polar Star’s moorings at about a quarter past six; it was a dull grey evening with heavy rain hammering down on to a completely smooth sea, and there was not a whisper of wind from any quarter. There were some parcels to be fetched from the village, and it was dusk before Jimmy, Terry, and I set out again for home, the beginning of one of the worst nights I can remember.
The very high speed of the Polar Star reduces the time necessary for the journey to a little over ten minutes and we used all her speed because I thought that the very poor visibility might make it difficult to find our moorings; I was the more concerned when as we approached the Camusfeàrna islands I saw patches of dense grey mist. There was still no breath of wind to disperse them, and still the vertical rain streamed down and hissed into an unmoving sea; it was with real relief that I saw the big white buoy loom up through the mist no more than ten yards ahead. Jimmy and Terry lifted it aboard. I saw from their gestures that something was wrong, but the continuous rasping screech of the clear-glass circle in the windscreen made it impossible to hear their voice. Then Jimmy came down through the wheelhouse hatch. ‘There’s no dinghy on the moorings – just a cut end of rope!’
It was clear to me at once what had happened; I had been careless for the first time, and must have cut the rope with one of the Polar Star’s propellers as we left for the village. The full gravity of the situation did not immediately strike me; in that dead calm sea it seemed easy enough to calculate the drift of the dinghy during the hour of our absence and to recover her by one means or another. The only real trouble at this stage was the mist and the increasing darkness in a spot so strewn with rock and reef. The tide had been ebbing for nearly an hour and a half, which meant that in the absence of any wind the dinghy should have drifted southward and come ashore somewhere on the lighthouse island, whose dark bulk was by now only faintly discernible against the clouded night sky. The only point on the whole island where it might even theoretically be practicable to land one of the boys was at the lighthouse itself, where two L-shaped lengths of heavy-gauge piping led down into the water to form a rough-and-ready pier usable at any tide higher than three-quarter ebb springs. On one engine and minimum possible revs I crept cautiously round the north end of the island; the searchlight lit only a solid wall of rain, and as the lighthouse came into view its flashes seemed like torchlight shining on fountain spray, lighting nothing below them. We were no more than five yards from the pipes before I could make them out in the thin light of Terry’s torch, and it was a tribute as much to his agility as to my manoeuvring that he contrived to scramble ashore while with enormous relief I put the engine astern. It was about then that I realized that this was the darkest night I had ever seen.
Terry’s task was tough even for one who had not had two fingers amputated only a few weeks before. He was to search the northern shore of the island with its thousand weed-covered outcrops and treacherous crevices, and if he found the dinghy he was to bring it where we would lie at anchor as near to our moorings as we could judge. If he found nothing, he was to wait until nearly midnight, wade waist-deep to the next island in the chain, and so to Camusfeàrna south bay, where the tiny pram dinghy was drawn up on the sand beach. From there it would be a two-mile row right round the south side of the islands to reach where we lay at anchor, but at least the sea was so far in our favour. We had chosen Terry for this role because his hands made it difficult for him to handle anchor or rope, while his rowing was little affected.
Jimmy and I returned to the north side of the island and dropped anchor, though by now the darkness was so total that, with the lighthouse obscured by the headland, we had little real idea of our position. At first we thought we could make out the faint flicker of a torch from time to time on the island shore, but then everything was black outside the lit cockpit of the Polar Star and the only sound was that of the rain. So it was for an hour or more; then came the first whine of wind in the rigging of the wireless mast, and a little later the first slap of breaking water on the ship’s side. The wind was southerly and we were lying in shelter; it was plain now that Terry’s alternative course, to row the pram round the lee shore of the islands in pitch darkness, would be little less than suicidal. Jimmy and I conferred, and decided to take the Polar Star round to the south bay and anchor her there, so that Terry, if he could launch the pram at all, would have but a short row out to us. It was then a little after half past nine.
We weighed anchor and very gingerly we set off again. It was as if one were deprived of all one’s useful senses – the utter enveloping blackness and the deafening scream of the clear-glass combined to produce a sensation of claustrophobia such as I have never before experienced. I wanted to shout ‘Let me out of here! Let me out of here!’ We passed well to the west of the lighthouse and kept on southward for what I thought an amply safe distance before turning up for the south bay; but, no doubt subconsciously accustomed to the Polar Star’s normal high speed, I overestimated the distance we had covered. The lighthouse was obscured by the headland, and the only visible thing outside the wheelhouse was the intermittent pinprick of another lighthouse miles to the south-west.
I did have a split second of warning, but it was too brief to be of any value. The searchlight had shone only upon the unvarying wall of rain; now, only feet from our bows, I had a sick
ening camera-shutter image of solid rock. Then we struck and struck hard, and the bows reared. Both engines full astern produced only a hideous grinding sound, and after a few seconds we stopped them.
The worst of it was that we had no clear idea of our position, nor whether we were aground on an island or a reef. The whole of the area of the Camusfeàrna islands is a death-trap, even in daylight, to any boat unfamiliar with it; now, with more than four hours ebb tide, we might be on any one of fifty rocks. The West Coast Pilot with an inspired typographical slip, describes the south side of the islands as ‘foul fround’, and never had the fround seemed fouler than now with the Polar Star hard aground in the middle of a black night and a rising wind.
When I went aft I thought the hull was holed, for the floorboards were awash, but then I saw that the angle at which her bows had reared must have sent all the bilge water to the stern and that this might be no more than the accumulation of rainwater over many hours of downpour. We decided to try to explore our surroundings, and we clambered overboard, Jimmy holding the head rope and I the stern. The rock shelved steeply and it was slippery and weed-covered; feeling upward in the darkness there was only more weed. We did little speculation aloud as to our whereabouts, for the evidence so far pointed to a reef, and neither Jimmy nor I could swim. There was one life-jacket in the Polar Star, and Terry had the other.
The wind rose steadily and the waves came out of the dark and broke over us, and as they grew greater they broke, too, over the Polar Star’s starboard quarter, so that she began to ship green water into the after cockpit. Then she began to bump and slam upon the rock that was holding her, and it was clear that she would break up if she stayed where she was. We went back aboard her and tried the engines again; she would not move, but there seemed a faint chance that if we were both ashore on the rock we might push her off on the crest of a wave to take her chance of finding sand or gravel. We pumped her bilges, and for another despairing half hour we struggled in the slimy seaweed and the breaking waves until at length a slight veer in the wind did our work for us and suddenly she was free. All we had salvaged from her was a boat-hook. Our watches had stopped owing to immersion, but I think it was then about eleven o’clock. As the Polar Star drifted away from us we both felt very desolate.
We were surprised by how quickly her mast-light was obscured – no piece of rock formation that we could visualize could have hidden her so quickly, but by now it was almost dead low tide, and this was no guarantee that we were not on a reef. We could explore only by touch, for the blackness was utter and complete; passing one’s hand before one’s eyes they registered no faintest change of shade. Jimmy said: ‘This is what it must be like to be blind, stone blind.’
The first thing seemed to be to get above the waves; this was no very logical process of reasoning, for we had no inch of dry clothing between us, and the rain was now lashing in on a force six southerly wind. The first ten feet were almost vertical and all weed-covered, and we could only raise ourselves almost inch by inch. More weed and more; I began to have a chilling certainty that we must be on a reef and not an island, and high tide would be before dawn. A small glow of hope warmed us when my hand touched the roughness of rock for the first time, but it was barnacles that I felt beneath my finger-tips. Jimmy found bare dry rock first, but it was smooth and sheer and he could find no fingerhold. He felt out to the left with his foot and there was nothing there; I did the same to my right and found nothing either. We were evidently climbing some sort of narrow buttress. I remember saying: ‘There just isn’t a piece of rock like this anywhere round Camusfeàrna.’
That first twenty or thirty feet until we came suddenly on rough, tussocky grass must have taken us more than half an hour. We went on climbing, grass, rock, then grass again. Jimmy said suddenly: ‘There’s only one piece of ground like this – we’re at the gull colony on the south face of the Lighthouse Island. I bet that in another quarter of an hour we’ll see the lighthouse.’ We did, and we were safe, but our troubles had only begun.
Even in the best of daylight conditions, the traverse of the half-mile length of the Lighthouse Island is no easy matter, for it is one of the roughest, toughest pieces of ground that may be conceived. Its uneven, rocky shore is split by deep fissures many feet deep, and these are camouflaged, as are pitfall traps for wild animals, by a rank growth of heather and briar. Above the shoreline the surface is never even; it is as though a truddle of big boulders had been flung together by some giant and then roughly coated over with the coarsest vegetation available to the climate. There are patches of dense, waist-high scrub willow through which it is entirely impossible to force a passage; ankle-twisting areas of tussock grass where each football-sized clump is as hard at its base as a stone; rooty heather growing three feet and more from treacherous holes and gulleys; and, worst of all, bramble thickets like barbed-wire entanglements. When in summer we would come here to count the eider ducks’ nests or harvest herring gull eggs we would pick our way with difficulty though this defensive jungle and often have to retrace our footsteps and seek a new path through the undergrowth; now we were confronted with the whole length of the island without even the use of our eyes. Also we were in a hurry now, both because of the urgency of calling salvage to the Polar Star, and because soon the depth of water would increase between us and the next island of the chain.
We joined hands like children, and with Jimmy in the lead with the boat-hook we began to feel our way forward foot by foot. We stumbled and fell and swore, the briars tore at our legs and we bruised our shins and twisted our ankles among the rocks, and our teeth were chattering and all the time the rain came deluging in on the south wind; it ran in at our collars and trickled out into our shoes, and there was no speck of illumination in all the black night. Before each step forward Jimmy felt ahead of him with the boat-hook; it was fifteen feet long, but often it touched nothing and we had to skirt our way along the edge of a long rock-fissure only to find ourselves brought up short again by the density of undergrowth. At some point in this nightmare journey, we came into sight of a small white light that could only be the mast-light of the Polar Star, it seemed stationary, but we found it impossible to estimate the distance or judge whether she was on rock or soft beach. It must have taken us the best part of an hour to reach the north-eastern tip of the island, from which by wading we might gain the next, and by that time both of us were very near to the stage at which it seems simpler to lie down and give up. Of Terry we had heard nothing, and it would be superfluous to add that we had seen nothing.
The water between the islands was chest-high; sometimes, when our feet slipped deep among the weedy rocks, it was head-high and we were floundering. Jimmy led me on by the hand, feeling his way before him with the boat-hook, and it struck me what a bizarre spectacle we would present if some miracle could suddenly lift the darkness and leave us flooded with light.
‘Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea’, and it was where the Camusfeàrna burn does this that there occurred the artistically climactic incident of the night. We had been on flat grassy ground for some minutes when I heard in front of us the familiar sound of the burn running over shingle and boulders; I forsook Jimmy’s guiding hand, and shouting: ‘We’ve done it! We’re saved!’, I stepped briskly forward. Never had pride a swifter fall; I had been at the very brink of the low sand cliff where the sand martins breed, and I stepped straight into space to fall ten feet and land on my head. For the first time that night I was truly unconscious for a little while, to be brought round by the full weight of Jimmy’s boot on my face.
Terry reached the house perhaps half an hour after we did, and he had passed as bad a time or worse; for he had been for even longer without light. All hopes of finding the dinghy had ended abruptly and painfully after the first ten minutes, when a long slithering fall among the slimy rocks of the tide-line had smashed the torch and hurt the newly healed stumps of his fingers. He went on searching in the dark, hoping to stumble on the dinghy
by accident, but he only stumbled on everything else. He saw us begin to move the Polar Star from where we had her anchored, and feeling the freshening wind he guessed our purpose. He began to cross the island to put his alternative plan into action, but without the aid of the boat-hook that had saved us from broken limbs, he fared worse and his progress was even slower than ours. When at last he was on the south side of the island he saw the mast-head light of the Polar Star, stationary perhaps a quarter of a mile from him, but no port or starboard lights. At first he could not bring himself to believe that she had been abandoned; then he tried to visualize her position, and realized that she must be aground. He had a life-jacket and he tried to swim to her, but he was exhausted and beginning to feel the effects of exposure, so he dragged himself ashore on the first piece of land he could reach. This was another island, if possible rougher and more inhospitable than the Lighthouse Island, and it took him some time to recognize where he was. By the time he reached Camusfeàrna he was far gone, but still as indomitably cheerful as his chattering teeth would permit him.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 24