Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  Sometimes the words have survived unchanged. Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in Norse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag now is made with sugar and cream. With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used. A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse. The smock worn by fishermen is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse. Sgaireag is the Gaelic for ‘seaman’, skari the Norse word. And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation. The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for a hammock. Norse for ‘strong’ becomes Gaelic for ‘fat’. The Norse word for rough ground becomes ‘peat moss’ in Gaelic. A hook or a barb turns into an antler. To creep – that mobile, subtle movement – translates into Gaelic as ‘to crouch’: more still, more rooted to the place. A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide. ‘To drip’ becomes ‘to melt’. A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

  But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago. There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion. Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning ‘a trap’), nor for ‘strife’, nor ‘a faint resemblance’ – the word it took was svip, the Norse for ‘glimpse’. The Gaelic for ‘lullaby’ is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning ‘allurement’, ‘seduction’.

  The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment. Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale. Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer – all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships. Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

  I was steering west of the Galtas but I had to make sure it was a long way west. The water had turned, as it does sometimes with the tide, into strange, long slicks, each slab of water as smooth as a hank of brushed hair. It is a horrible sensation in the mist, a strangeness at sea, when all you want is normality and predictability. Was this the effect of a rock ahead of me which I couldn’t see? About five hundred yards off the westernmost Galta was the most dangerous rock in the Shiants: Damhag, perhaps meaning ‘ox-rock’ in Gaelic (no one knows why) or more likely ‘a rock awash’. It is pronounced ‘Davag’. O’Farrell had heard of its terrors:

  Received name: Damhag

  Object: Rock

  Description: This is a Small low water Rock seen only at Spring tides which makes it very dangerous to mariners, lying about 15 Chains west a Group of high and low water ones, the tide flows so Strong and rapid here that unless Mariners were aware of its Situation it would often become fatal. there has been not long ago a large vessel wrecked on it the vessel and crew were all lost. at neap tides if the wind is high there is always Breakers seen on it.

  That ship was in fact the Norwegian schooner, Zarna, of Christiansund, which was wrecked here on 13 February 1847, en route to Norway from Liverpool with a cargo of salt.

  None of this is pleasant in a small boat in a rising sea. If the GPS could be relied on, I was well clear but I didn’t want to overrun too far. The long slicks of water were giving way to a broken, pitted surface like the skin of an orange.

  North-west of the islands is the Sound of Shiant, separating them from the bulk of Lewis five or so miles to the west. The Sound is a place of deep discomfort. I have never been in there in a small boat and the fishermen in Scalpay have warned me away from it. Donald MacSween (another Viking name, Sveinson), whom I have known since I was a boy, and who, for a few years after his cousin Hugh MacSween gave up, was the tenant of the Shiants, told me only that I had to respect the Minch. ‘Pick your day and pick where you go and you will be all right.’ After supper in Rosebank, his house in Scalpay, in the sitting room, with the coal fire burbling beside us and Rachel, his wife, looking through the packets of seeds she was to plant that spring, from time to time telling me that I was a disgrace, ‘walking around the way you do with holes in your socks the like of which I have never seen in my life’, Donald and I sat over a chart together.

  He is a strict churchman, a man of immense propriety and overwhelming charm. ‘What do you talk about all the time on the radio to each other when you are out at sea?’ I asked him once. Channel 6 on the VHF is solid with Gaelic chat, day and night, between the fishermen. ‘Local talent,’ he said, with a face like a gravestone. Rachel told me that in three decades of marriage she has never once seen him angry. ‘He must be a saint then,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he’s a saint to me.’

  Donald knows all there is to know about the Minch. Without a second thought I would trust my life to him. He has fished it since he was a boy and he knows every one of its ‘dirty corners’. ‘Oh yes,’ Mary Ann Matheson, the mother of John Murdo, the present shepherd on the Shiants, said to me once, ‘you need to listen to Donald. He knows all the crooks and crannies of the wind.’

  With his glasses on and his enormous, scarred hands feeling their way across the figures and the submarine contours, he went through the chart with me. Off the mouths of Lochs Seaforth, Bhrollúm and Cleidh there are big riffles on the ebb as the lochs drain out. There is a bar across the mouths of each of them so that the draining water has to rise from something like sixty to twenty fathoms as it emerges. That does not make for an easy sea and in my boat I should avoid them.

  But the real danger was in a triangle of sea between the Shiants, Rubha Bhrollúm, which is the nearest point of Pairc on Lewis, and the mouth of Loch Sealg, five miles or so to the north. I was not to enter it. The sea there was not, Donald said, ‘very pleasant’. Heavy, fast tides ebbing down from Cape Wrath or flooding up from the southern Hebrides are squeezed by the islands here into a narrower channel. At the same time, the water is forced to run over a knotted and fractured sea-bed.

  A huge ridge of rock, three miles long and more than three hundred and fifty feet high, coming within seventy or eighty feet of the surface, stretches most of the way across the Sound, a sharp-edged submarine peninsula reaching out from the Shiants towards Rubh’ Uisenis on Lewis. It makes that short passage on which the Admiralty chart-markers print an innocuous-looking set of wrinkly lines, meaning ‘tidal overfalls’, the equivalent of a set of rapids in a river. But the river coming up to them is five miles wide and four hundred and fifty feet deep, that enormous mass of water running at the height of spring tides at almost three knots, the speed of a fast walk. Any idea of a river is of the wrong scale. This is the equivalent in tonnage and in volume of an entire range of hills on the move. At certain states of high wind against spring tide, the sea here can turn into a white and broken mass of water, a frothing muddle of energies stretching across the whole width of the Sound, a chaos in which there are not only steep-faced seas coming at you from all directions, but, terrifyingly, holes, pits in the surface of the sea, into which the boat can plunge nose-first and find it difficult to return.

  The Sound of Shiant is also known as Sruth na Fear Gorm, the Stream of the Blue Men, or more exactly the Blue-Green Men. The adjective in Gaelic describes that dark half-colour which is the colour of deep sea water at the foot of a black cliff. These Blue-Green Men are strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who come aboard and sit alongside you in the sternsheets, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same metre and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew.

  The Reverend John Gregorson Camp
bell, Minister of Tiree from 1861 to 1891, and a renowned collector of folklore in the Hebrides, claimed to have met a fisherman who had seen one. It was, Campbell reported, ‘a blue-coloured man, with a long, grey face and floating from the waist out of the water, following the boat in which he was for a long time, and was occasionally so near that the observer might have put his hand upon him.’

  Something about the Blue Men has attracted one folklorist after another. Donald A Mackenzie, author of Scottish Folk Lore and Folk Life, published in 1936, even claimed to have preserved a fragment of verse dialogue between skipper and Blue Man tossing beside him in the billows. Both had, it seems, been studying the verses of Edward Lear and the rhythms of Coromandel and the Hills of the Chankly Bore were still ringing in their ears:

  Blue Chief: Man of the black cap, what do you say

  As your proud ship cleaves the brine?

  Skipper: My speedy ship takes the shortest way

  And I’ll follow line by line.

  Blue Chief: My men are eager, my men are ready

  To drag you below the waves.

  Skipper: My ship is speedy, my ship is steady.

  If it sank it would wreck your caves.

  ‘Never before,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘had the chief of the blue men been answered so aptly, so unanswerably. And so he and his kelpie brethren retired to their caverns beneath the waves of the Minch.’

  Mackenzie went on to describe how ‘Once upon a time,’ – a giveaway phrase, if ever there was one, for non-first hand information – ‘a ship passing through the Stream of the Blue Men came upon a blue coloured man asleep on its waters. The sleeper for all his nimbleness was captured and taken aboard.’ The crew bound him hand and foot but were appalled to see two of his friends following. Mackenzie then reports the conversation between the pair of Blue Men: ‘One said to the other: “Duncan will be one man.” The other replied: “Farquhar will be two.”’

  This was clearly a threat to the crew but luckily, before disaster could strike, the Blue Man they had captured ‘broke his ropes and over he went.’

  Is there anything more serious one can say about this? TC Lethbridge, sailor, archaeologist, savant, Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge for much of the twentieth century, who believed that Druidism and Brahmanism were the same, had an intriguing theory about the Blue Men. In The Power of the Pendulum, his final, eccentric and free-spirited book, published in 1976, he touched briefly on the survival of beliefs such as these. Making connections which more strait-laced archaeologists are wary of, he identified the Blue Men with Manannan, the Celtic sea-god remembered in the place-name of Clackmannan, meaning ‘Manannan’s stone’, and Manannan with Poseidon. The seaways around the shores of Europe bring stories, and ways of looking at the world, as well as goods. He plunged on into dangerous territory. A ditty had been recorded in the early twentieth century that was still being said or muttered among the fishermen of Mallaig:

  Ickle Ockle, Blue Bockle

  Little youthful Blue God

  Fishes in the Sea.

  or

  Of the fishes of the sea

  If you’re looking for a lover

  If you’re looking for devotion

  Please choose me.

  Please choose me.

  It is a charm-cum-game-cum-riddle for Poseidon, of whom the Blue Men in the Minch were the last, rubbed-down remnants. ‘How would you describe a god of this kind?’ Lethbridge asked. ‘As a cloud of past memories, to some extent animated by the minds of those who retained it.’

  John MacAulay as a fifteen-year-old boy forty-five years ago, spending a season ‘at the fishing’ on the Monachs, to the west of Uist, heard stories from fishermen who had been out in the Sound of Shiant. On a wild day, they had hauled something or other very strange from the sea. They had no idea what it was. Other creatures of the same sort seemed to be visible in the surf around them and they didn’t like it. Nothing is easier than being spooked at sea in a small boat, and the Sound of Shiant seemed to be turning into that horrible continuity of white and broken water. All sense of one’s own fragility; the thumping of the hull against each new wave, the distance from shore, one’s own pitiable progress to windward, the sheer size of the cold, hateful sea, the knowledge of all the others that have been drowned here before you: your throat constricts, you feel it in your chest and the stories start to turn real.

  The fishermen, rather than carry their mysterious catch back home in triumph or as a curiosity, threw it back into the thrashing water among its companions, and it was lost to sight. Surely not a Blue-Green Man? John MacAulay guesses that it might have been a walrus, of which one or two occasionally wander south from their Arctic breeding grounds, appearing here as enormous mustachioed aliens to Hebridean eyes. Donald MacSween is scepticism itself: ‘How have you got on with your investigations into the mermaids?’ he asks from time to time.

  I wasn’t interested now. I was straining for the sight either of a Galta, a blessed gable-end, or of Damhag in front of me. Some of the swells were just breaking under their own weight. Behind me, the little grinning teeth of the breaking seas were scattered across the whole visible width of the Minch. Downwind I couldn’t see them. If I looked ahead of me, it was like a crowd from behind, a sea of wind-coiffed heads. The slick black-grey backs of the waves moved on in front of me. Scarcely any whiteness was apparent. It was like two different seas.

  The wind was coming and going around me. I called the Coastguard on the VHF, Channel 16. ‘Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard, this is Freyja, Freyja, Freyja.’ My eyes were on the sea ahead for the white on Damhag, the appearance of a Galta, the radio in its waterproof case in one hand, the tiller in the other communicating the quiver of the sea to my hand. Out of the radio a voice:

  ‘Freyja, Freyja, Freyja, this is Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard.’ A young woman in a calm, warm office twenty miles away, grey carpet on the floor, magnetic charts of the Sea Area Hebrides covering half of one wall, men and women in their blue uniforms at the desks, coffee there on plastic coasters, a normal call on a normal day.

  She gave me the forecast but we exchanged no names. She was the Coastguard, I was Freyja. She was providing a service. I was on my own. The weather would stay as steady as it was for the next twenty-four hours, south, southwesterly, four to five, with the wind dropping away after that. There would be something like calm for a day or two.

  I was cold. I reached down into the bag at my feet for my own coffee in the thermos. My hands fumbled with it. Sandwiches in the plastic bag. I checked my position on the GPS again. It all feels a little absurd, to think that I might ever reach the condition in which it would be natural to call those rocks ‘The Gables’. I am in my own world of bags from the Stornoway Co-op, the VHF in its ‘Aquapac’, the GPS locating me through the American military satellites orbiting above. They tell me that I have passed Damhag and the Galtas. It is time to turn east.

  It’s a relief. I must be nearly there. Simply taking the stern of the boat through the wind and gybing, moving the sail over to the other side, it feels better. That is a sign of arrival, or at least of near-arrival. I have got that amount of sea under my belt. All that strange width of sea has now, oddly, changed in my mind. Uncrossed, it felt terrifying. Having crossed it, I feel as if I could cross it any number of times. I sense John MacAulay at my shoulder. Is this all right John? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you’re not doing too badly.’

  Now, though, I was moving into the shadow of the known, the sea around the Shiants. Because the Shiants are themselves such a disturbance to the flow of the tide, for others this would seem like the most hazardous and hostile section of the passage. But I’m familiar with the sea here. It is like knowing an old ill-tempered dog. I know how to get round him. Moving across the swell, a different pattern, Freyja was making a rolling barrel along the crests and then slewing into the troughs behind them. Looking up, back in the stern, with the boat unde
rway, I saw that things would be all right. The sky was lifting. From a satellite, I would have seen the shifting of an eddy, the slight revolution of some huge cloud crozier turning on the scale of Europe, the planetary mixing of Arctic and tropical air. This was the southeastern limb of a giant depression rolling in out of the Atlantic and on to Scandinavia. It had blown me here. I felt a little sick but I could see where I was and it was where I had hoped to be. The seas breaking on Damhag were a mile to the south-east, that silent flinging of spray into the air above the rock, like a hand repeatedly flicking out its fingers, signalling ‘Keep away, keep away!’ I was well clear of it. The broken line of the Galtas extended for a mile beyond the rock, black and bitter, the knobbled spine of a half-submerged creature: one like an old woman with a bonnet, called Bodach, or Old Man; others blocky, fretted.

  Beyond them, arrival, emergence, home. Coming out of the mist, draped with cloud ribbons like feather boas across their shoulders, were the islands, my islands, my destination. The Shiants are the familiar country, the place around whose shores I feel safe. Even in all its masculine severity, I know where the tide rips and bubbles, exactly where the rocks are, and the known, however harsh, is the safe and the good. Even though the sea now was more uncomfortable than anywhere on the journey, I started to feel easy. A small wave slopped aboard and I pumped it out. A shearwater cut past me and the birds were hanging around the Galtas like bees. But the relief, as ever, was ambivalent. It’s always like this. I never quite feel the comfort of arrival that I expect. It is enigmatic. This is the longed-for place, but it is so indifferent to my presence, so careless of my existence, that I might as well not have been here.