He need not have worried. The owner himself greeted him in the lobby and, throwing a comradely arm over Para Handy’s shoulder, ushered him into his inner sanctum, sat him down, and offered a cigar from the humidor atop his leather-inlaid desk.
“We have been commissioned to undertake a rather unusual and challenging contract, Peter,” said the owner: “and it was at once clear to me that only the Vital Spark could be trusted to fulfil it satisfactorily.”
Para Handy positively glowed with pride.
“There is a vessel wrecked on the Burnt Islands to the west of Colintraive,” the owner continued. “Just a small schooner, but her cargo must be recovered urgently. The salvage team have reported to her owners that the only type of ship able to come near her is a puffer, which can get alongside and then ground on the shoals when the tide goes out.”
He spread out a sea-chart — one of the very few that Para Handy had ever seen — on the desk between them.
“A larger steamship would have far too much draft to come into this channel even at high tide, and of course no sailing vessel with any sort of keel would be able to ground on the ebb tides without heeling over to such a degree that she wouldn’t be able to work her derrick.
“It’s either a steam-lighter, or nothing.”
“Well you need have no fear at aal on that score,” said Para Handy confidently, “for the Vital Spark iss more than capable of doing the chob.”
“Good!” The owner smiled expansively. “I was sure that would be your reaction, Peter: and I am sure too that there could well be a modest bonus for her Captain once the job is complete.”
There was a pause as the implications of that last, and unrehearsed, statement sank in to both parties.
“So what iss her cairgo, then?” asked Para Handy — more out of a desire to fill that embarrassing silence than from any real concern about the matter.
“Butter,” said the owner after a moment. “Salted butter: from Islay, in barrels for export.”
At which juncture the owner shuffled his feet noisily under the polished mahogany desk, and twisted uncomfortably in his swivel chair before ringing the bell at his right hand and, when his clerk put his head round the frosted-glass door from the outer room with an enquiring glance, instructing that worthy to fetch the bottle of whisky from the safe and pour two generous drams.
“Are we no’ puttin’ in to Colintraive for the night?” queried Dougie with some surprise as the smartest boat in the coasting trade hiccuped past that attractive settlement at eight o’clock the following evening.
It was a pleasantly mild late September gloaming and the lights of the little Kyleside village twinkled invitingly in the gathering dusk, those of the Inns on the low ridge above the pier particularly conspicuous and especially promising of a warm welcome and good company.
“Owner’s orders,” said Para Handy. “He iss frightened that there could be something stole from the wreck — from her accoutrements or her cairgo. Remember what Hurricane Jeck got up to in the Kyles wi’ yon steam yat the Eagle that her owner abandoned at Tighnabruaich! He strupped her of efferything that wassna nailed doon — and maist o’ the things that wass as weel! So the owner wants us to moor chust off of Burnt Island ass a deterchent to ony o’ the light-fingered chentry, and then to go alongside her and ground on the ebb at furst light tomorrow to transfer the cairgo.”
Once they had dropped anchor 50 yards from the sorry-looking remains of the two-masted schooner Caroline Anne, her foremast broken off at deck level and lying athwartships with rigging and sails trailing overboard in a tangle of sodden rope and canvas, Para Handy — to the crew’s disgust — produced a piece of paper from his trousers pocket and recited a watch roster for the hours of darkness.
Sunny Jim, on the dawn shift, was astonished to see — as the light grew brighter — that there were crowds assembled on the water’s edge to either hand. Those on the Bute shore had had an arduous walk over rough country to reach their viewpoint, for this northern tip of the island was barren and normally without any human presence. Today however a goodly number of men, women and children were to be seen on the rocky beach, many of them (just like their counterparts on the opposite shore) studying the Vital Spark closely through binoculars or telescopes.
When the puffer was successfully beached alongside the stranded schooner the unloading process began, as a cargo consisting of small wooden barrels was transferred from the hold of one ship to the hold of the other in netting slings. From the shore came great whooping cries of “Oooooh!” each time the laden sling was swung between the vessels, and a hearty cheer once its load had been safely lowered into the mainhatch of the Vital Spark.
“Ah cannae think whit’s so interestin’ aboot a cairgo o’ butter firkins,” protested Macphail for the umpteenth time, as another whoop marked the progression of a fully-laden net from schooner to puffer: “and it’s no’ as if they havnae seen plenty o’ shups stranded on the Burnt Islands afore noo. There must be precious little doin’ in Rothesay or along the Kyles if this is seen as entertainment for a family day oot!”
“They iss a funny kind o’ firkin, forbye,” said Dougie, “for I have neffer before seen Islay butter packed in barrels wi’ a bleck Jolly Roger flag pentit’ on the lids — usually it iss the picture of a coo.”
“Naw,” said Macphail with a snort, “that disnae surprise me at all, that’s their trademark. Maist o’ the fairmers in Islay are naethin’ but a crew o’ pirates: they’d rook ye blind sooner than look ye in the e’e. If ye’d mind whit we wis payin’ for tatties in Port Askaig last month then ye’d hiv tae wonder that they dinna mak’ ony visitin’ seaman walk the plank aff the toon pier-heid as a deevershun for the lieges on a Setturday nicht.
“Onyway, if it’s flags ye’re on aboot, did you ever see wan as trauchled as thon auld rag hingin’ on the Caroline Ann?”
And he pointed aloft to the schooner’s masthead, where a plain red burgee, tattered at the edges and stained by a continuing exposure to the weather of many years, flapped idly in a light southerly breeze.
At which moment, the last load having been swung aboard the Vital Spark, Sunny Jim (acting on instructions given earlier by his Captain) launched the puffer’s punt and rowed off towards Colintraive and its well-stocked Inn with a pocketful of change and two large tin canisters.
At the same time Para Handy himself, overhearing his Engineer’s caustic remark about the schooner’s burgee, glanced up at it in curiosity — and saw something which made him draw his breath in sharply, and scurry off into the wheelhouse.
“No, no, put your money away, there is no charge at all,” said the landlord of the Colintraive Inn as he filled the second of the Vital Spark’s canisters and Sunny Jim, who had been rummaging clumsily in his pocket for the money, looked up in astonishment.
“Just tell Para Handy that he has given us more entertainment this morning than we’ve had for many a month,” continued the landlord: “and besides, I had a wee bet that you would unload the cargo safely — so I have won a few shullings for myself, as the maist o’ the folk thought that Peter would blow the shup to smithereens.”
Jim croaked wordlessly as the landlord concluded:
“Aye, it takes a strong hand and a sherp eye to trans-ship near on fufty tons o’ gunpooder just as calmly as if it had been barrels of herring — or butter, come to that.”
On board the puffer Para Handy, ashen-faced, appeared at the door of the wheelhouse with a copy of Brown’s Manual of Signals in his hand.
“Dougie, pit oot thon pipe this meenit. Dan, away you and dowse the fire in the enchine-room and the stove in the fo’c’sle and if either of you have matches aboot your persons then throw them over the side o’ the shup.
“We are standing on a floating bomb! A red burgee flies ower a ship that’s cairryin’ explosives. Butter firkins my eye — we’ve chust loaded up wi’ kegs o’ gunpooder. We canna unload them again and I wull not abandon shup: neffer let it be said that a Macfarlane flun
ched at the hoor o’ danger. But there iss only wan way this shup iss going upriver — and that iss under wind-power. Break oot the mainsail for there will be no fires aboard the vessel from noo on. I do not care how long it takes.”
It took three days — for puffers, while notoriously slow under power, are positively plodding under sail.
The passage of the Vital Spark up river started out in convoy fashion as Sunny Jim, refusing point-blank to set foot aboard the vessel till her lethal cargo was safely unloaded, followed her in the punt, maintaining station a hundred yards astern. He finally bargained with his shipmates for a tow-line in exchange for the two canisters of Colintraive ale, and slept through most of the subsequent voyage upstream.
News of the puffer’s condition and cargo spread like wildfire before her and, sporting her red burgee (a warning as potent as the handbell of a medieval leper) she was given a wide berth by all the traffic on the river. But she was cheered to the echo by the curious crowds on the bank — crowds which became denser as she neared the centre of the city, lured to this most unusual spectacle of a floating bomb by the reports carried in the Glasgow Evening News.
Her owner, uncertain whether to be outraged or flattered by the attention focussed on his wayward craft, met Para Handy on his eventual arrival at Finnieston with cautious cheerfulness.
This was only slighty diminished when it was made clear to him that the promised bonus, now that the entire crew of the puffer were privy to his deceptions should — far from being split four ways — now be multiplied four times. He cheered himself up with the thought that the original Gunpowder plotters had paid a far higher price for their deception.
FACTNOTE
The Cowal peninsula and the shores of Upper Loch Fyne seem to have been singled out as highly convenient dumping grounds for undesirable military activity for more than a century.
The US Navy has only recently withdrawn its Polaris Submarine Base from the Holy Loch just a couple of miles from Dunoon — a presence which made not just the adjacent, innocent villages of Kilmun or Sandbank but the entire Central Belt of Scotland one of the most obvious potential targets for a primary pre-emptive strike by the former Soviet Union throughout the uneasy decades of the cold war.
Our immediate forebears maybe did not have the misfortune to live with that particular threat hanging over their heads, but they were certainly no strangers to an unwanted military or armament facility deployed into their midst without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
Thus at otherwise idyllic locations such as Furnace on Loch Fyne, Clachaig in Glen Lean west of Dunoon, and Millhouse, just inland from Kames on the Kyles, gunpowder and other explosives were manufactured over a period of close on a hundred years.
Operations at Furnace (where the established presence of a huge granite quarry had produced generations of locals inured to the thump and the threat of daily detonations) closed in the 1880s after a horrendous explosion left more than 20 dead.
The black powder manufactory at Clachaig lasted a decade or two longer and some of the original worker’s cottages, renovated and restored, are happy homes today.
The Millhouse works were shut down only in the 1920s, despite a series of catastrophic accidents over the previous century which resulted in heavy loss of life and (if the contemporary newspaper reports are to be believed) were sometimes to be heard — and even felt — as far away as Rothesay and Inveraray.
The finished products from Millhouse ware indeed shipped out on schooners from a private jetty at Kames, to which the kegs were transported on horse-drawn carts — their wheel rims at first cushioned by leather and, later, by rubber.
Anyone who has seen that classic edge-of-the-seat 1950s French film Les Salaires de Peur (The Wages of Fear) about truckers offered premium payment to drive potentially lethal loads of nitro-glycerine several hundred miles across unsurfaced roads in mountainous terrain will have some idea of how the drivers of those carts may have felt as they went about their duties!
55
Nor any Drop to Drink
In the balmy, early evening of midsummer’s day, the Vital Spark lay against the inner face of Inveraray pier. In the afternoon the thermometer had touched 80 degrees fahrenheit, without so much as a whisper of wind, and even now, at six o’clock, there was not the slightest promise of any freshness in the air and the heat remained overwhelming.
The puffer’s crew were spreadeagled on the mainhatch: Para Handy, vainly seeking some shade in the wheelhouse, leaned his elbows on the sill of its opened fore-window and surveyed the crowds thronging the pier and its approaches with a somewhat jaundiced eye.
Preparing to board the steamer Ivanhoe were the several hundred members of a special charter party. Special in more ways than one, for this was a strangely silent crowd. Though it included scores of children of an age-group which would normally be expected to be of a boisterous and undisciplined disposition, these particular youngsters were marshalled into subdued groups under the watchful eye of straight-backed ladies of an angular build, a frosty mien and a certain age — and all apparently sharing a taste for unseasonably drab and voluminous garments.
The balance of the company was comprised of perhaps one hundred couples, presumably the parents and grandparents of the silent children, conversing in small groups in a whisper, their heads down: occasionally, just occasionally, a few of the menfolk glanced wistfully towards the frontage of the town, dominated by the prominent white facade of the Argyll Arms Hotel. The last components of the party were about one hundred younger men and women who were also gathered in supervised clusters, all men in this one or that, all girls in these others.
Gliding through the crowd with beady eyes which seemed to peer everywhere and take in everything were a dozen or more stiffly erect figures in black frock coats, high-buttoned waistcoats, and tall, shiny-black stovepipe hats, and carrying tight-rolled umbrellas, the glint of white dog-collars (largely hidden behind full sets of Dundreary whiskers) the only departure from unrelieved black in their whole attire.
“A Good Templar’s summer ooting,” said Para Handy with a degree of acerbity, to nobody in particular: and he shivered in spite of the heat. “Now there iss a sight to mak’ the blood run cold! There is chust aboot as much spurit of happiness, goodwull and harmony in that gaitherin’ ass would fill an empty vestas box!
“They’ll have been at the Cherry Park for a tent-meeting and a picnic, and then a march back doon the toon to the pier. Cheery days! Look you at aal they bible-thumpers wi’ the chuldren, and aal they spunster wummen chaperonin’ the lasses, crampin’ their style and makin’ sure they keep them awa’ from the lads and dinna let ony couples go wanderin’ off into the woods or up wan o’ the closes. Then there’s a wheen o’ bleck-coated meenisters to stop the menfolk from sluppin’ off to the bar of the Argyll Arms or the George Hotel for chust the wan wee Chrustian dram and a necessary refreshment on a thirsty day like this!
“I am thinking they would be better to hire in a whole pack of collie dugs and drive the puir duvvles through the town ass if they wass a flock of sheeps, for if you ask me that iss what they aal are, and that iss surely how they are treated by their weemen and their meenisters: if Dougie wass here he would tell you that himself.”
Indeed the thronged pier dispersed an aura of gloom totally at odds with the brightness of the day, and in dismal contrast to the cheery joie-de-vivre and bonhommie which were dispensed in large measure to all and sundry by the typical excursion party.
Certainly the crew of the Vital Spark, and perhaps the whole of Inveraray as well, breathed a sigh of quiet relief when, at half past six and with the boarding process completed, there was a toot (even that a subdued one) on the Ivanhoe’s whistle and the paddler moved out into open water and headed off back towards Ardrossan.
“In a sense,” observed Para Handy half-an-hour later, as the crew settled onto a bench in front of the Argyll Arms Hotel and contemplated the play of light on the trees of Duniquaich over the top of a pint p
ot, “in a sense they only have themselves to blame, puir craiturs, but at the same time there iss many of the menfolk chust bludgeoned into the Templars, or maybe the Rechabites forbye, by their wummenfolk, wi’ no chance at aal to mak’ an escape. I mean, would you want to argue the rights and wrongs wi’ maist o’ the wummen we saw on that pier today? They certainly pit the fear o’ the Lord in me. I am thinkin’ that maist men would simply do what they wass told ass long ass the wummen wass around, and do what they wanted to do themselves ass soon ass they were on their own.
“And when you get them on their own, the maist o’ the Templars men are chust ordinary mortals like the rest o’ us.”
“I’m sure an they didna bring mich business to the Inveraray Inns today, though,” observed Macphail. “The Licensees’ herts must sink to their boots when they see the Ivanhoe offshore. If she had been the Lord of the Isles wi’ a works’ ootin’ frae Fairfield’s yerd that wud hae been different, Ah’m thinkin’.”
“You would be surprised, Dan,” said Para Handy, “at chust how profitable a temperance excursion can be for the licensed trade if aal the arrangements are in the right hands.”
Sunny Jim sensed a story.
“Go on, Captain,” he prompted. “What d’ye mean?”
“It wass many years back,” said Para Handy. “Hurricane Jeck and me wass crewin’ a sailin’ gabbart that turned a penny for a man in Saltcoats.
“We were to load a cargo o’ bales o’ wool from Lochranza, and we arrived there late one Friday evenin’ and went ashore for a gless of something at Peter Murdo Cameron’s Inn, chust along the road from the head of the pier.
“Cameron was in a bleck mood, that wass plain to see, and Jeck asked him what wass the matter.
“ ‘Chust my luck,’ says Cameron, ‘you can imachine how very few excursion perties we get comin’ to Lochranza, the maist o’ the steamer passengers we see iss those aboard the Kintyre goin’ to or from Campbeltown. Precious few effer comes ashore here for a dram. If it wassna for the likes of you, Jeck, and the herring boats in season, and the workers on the big estate, there would be little point openin’ a bar in Lochranza and little chance o’ makin’ a livin’ from it.
Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 41