I have often wondered exactly where the Neda struck. There is no easy place for which Clark could have aimed on that south-western shore of Eilean an Tighe. The whole extent of it is a series of craggy little inlets and intervening shards of rock. The reporter from the Oban Times had heard that the Shiant shepherd, Donald Campbell, was instrumental in saving the lives of all on board. He noticed the barque coming to a place where she would have been dashed to pieces and all lives lost, and from the shore he waved to those on board and guided them so that they were able to run the vessel ashore, clear of sunken rocks.
Wherever it was, it can have been no gentle landing. The huge seas driving in from the south-west picked her up and slammed her on to the rocks. Her masts collapsed forwards and the rudder was soon gone. The keel soon broke and the decks, as they always will in a ship whose whole frame and body is rupturing, began to ‘start’ – the planks springing away from their housing. The ship had gone ashore starboard side to, and the hull was soon stove in on that side in the bilges. The hull, which had been insured for £2,500, was later sold as a lump of partially salvageable timber, for £68 and its contents for £246.
All thirteen of the lives on board the Neda were saved. One of the crew swam ashore through the surf as soon as the ship struck, the other twelve remained on board until the tide fell and ‘were lowered over the said ship’s side on to the rocks by means of a rope and were afterwards sheltered in a shepherd’s cottage.’ As the Oban Times said, ‘To the shipwrecked crew – especially to the captain’s child, who was much injured – the shepherd and his wife showed every kindness and attention, and all speak highly of the efforts which this poor and lonely couple made for their comforts.’
On Friday 28 January 1876, the attention was drawn of a Harris boat out fishing on a still-wild Minch and the Master was taken to Stornoway. His wife, child and the rest of the crew stayed with the Campbells until the following Thursday, when the storm had abated.
The wreck of the Neda is still remembered in Harris. Uisdean MacSween once described to me the moments after the ship had gone ashore. He thought that the Campbells had been alerted by the single crewman who had swum through the surf. They hurried down to the western side of Mianish and stood open-mouthed at this sudden irruption into their lives. Once the tide had dropped, most of the crew were indeed happy to leave the splintered ship for the security of land, however windswept. But Mrs Clark, the Master’s wife, was not keen. Sheltering her child in her arms, she looked at the Shiant Islanders, monoglot Gaelic speakers, the men vast and hairy, with their beards, Hughie said, ‘reaching down to their waists’, drenched in the rain and wind, their hair plastered to their heads, their feet probably naked, and thought of her parlour in Wallsend, its polished iron range and cretonne furnishings. Mrs Clark screamed above the wind, ‘I’d rather stay here than put myself into the hands of men such as those!’ Her husband was having none of it. He ordered two of his crew to tie up his wife and have her carried ashore, in Hughie’s words, ‘like a bale of ticking’.
Without question, there would have been people living here when the Bronze Age torc somehow arrived off the Galtas. It is not inconceivable that the same kind of welcome might have been extended to them.
But there is another possibility. The torc may not have come to the Shiants from a wreck. It might have been deliberately dropped into the sea here. This is, perhaps, at the outer reaches of speculation, but it is not outlandish. There are arguments to be made, and precedents to be brought from elsewhere towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, which suggest that this piece of gold may indeed have been deliberately thrown away.
The Bronze Age, beginning in Britain at the start of the second millennium BC, had marked a change in human consciousness. No longer the giant communal monuments, the New Granges and the Stonehenges, nor the communal graves in which individual bodies were dismembered and all parts of all people scattered together. In one of the neolithic tombs of the Orkneys, at Isbister, the remains of the people were mixed with the bones of another animal: at least eight and maybe ten white-tailed sea eagles were also buried there. This may be chance; the eagles may have used the tomb as a cave-like eyrie. But it has also been suggested, more intriguingly, that it is the eagles whose grave this is, a place which the human beings were allowed to share as a privilege. At the time, with the average height of men no more than five feet, six inches, and the average life expectancy in the mid-twenties, the eagles would have been both larger and longer lived than almost every person. The human bodies may even have been exposed at death for the sea eagles to consume as their royal food.
That frame of mind, a certain Neolithic humility, disappears in the Bronze Age. The hero arrives. Agamemnon and Achilles are the Bronze Age archetypes and hubris becomes their governing sin. The human person is glorified and with his egotism comes his guilt. He carries remarkable weapons. He wears jewellery. His body becomes the arena of his glory. Bronze itself requires travel, exchange and communication because tin and copper are only rarely found together in nature. The idea of the exotic – amber from the Baltic, faience beads from the eastern Mediterranean, silver from Bohemia – becomes the individual’s mark of splendour. In the Bronze Age, with his marvellous things alongside him, the individual man is buried alone.
Metal was the means for this glorification of the person. Its emergence from rock to burnished strength was itself marvellous and that transformational quality, that birth of the precious from the dross, was symbolic of potency and magic. This material was not for use but for beauty. It was a jewellery culture. The standing of important people was bound up with it. The tiny socketed bronze axe heads that have been found in Scotland, the symbolic spears and shields, too thin to be used in battle but as perfect in their making as the breastplates now worn by the Household Cavalry, or those tiny medallion hints at a breastplate which officers wore throughout the nineteenth century, a hint of manhood in the candlelit halls: this is an understanding of metal not in the huge material sense of the Victorian engineer, but in the amazed and delighted vision of the jeweller. That is why this torc is more important than it seems. It does not matter because it is pretty. It matters because in its incorruptibility and rustlessness, the very qualities which drew Kenny Cunningham to its value, it is a denial of death, a sketch of perfection and eternity.
Conditions started to decline towards the end of the second millennium BC. The weather worsened. The land which had been taken in for agriculture throughout this Atlantic fringe of Europe started to become difficult. And in difficulty, life became violent and frightened. The amount of metal, whether bronze or gold, that was in circulation on the European web of connections, along the river valleys and the western seaways, began to decline. But this was no democracy. There was no trimming of the top end to help the people at the bottom. Far from it. The number of pieces whose purpose was elegance and display actually increased. Beautiful shields, large cauldrons made out of sheet bronze, gold torcs: as the weather thickened and the crops diminished, more and more of these nearly useless objects were made. Social stress produced not an arms race but a beauty contest.
Slowly, one needs to approach the idea of the gold torc being thrown into the sea off the Galtas. And to do that one needs to understand the idea of the gift. It remains true that the giver of a gift exerts power over its recipient. The recipient remains in debt to his benefactor. And he can only absolve himself of that debt by giving in return. This leads without much interval to a generosity contest. Give and you shall ordain. Give back and you shall conquer. In pre-capitalist societies, it is not the accumulation of wealth which is the mark of standing but the ability to dispose of it in the form of gifts.
Consider for a moment that the torc might be a gift to the world. If it had been thrown into the Minch, it would be, as Trevor Cowie, its curator in the National Museums of Scotland, has written, ‘a means of accumulating prestige without the risk of the original gift being returned or “trumped” with the loss of status that would
ensue.’ If you can give something of such enormous value to the Minch, the Minch will be forever in your debt. Such gifts to the world are found all over Europe in the Bronze Age and later. The hoards, which earlier generations of archaeologists interpreted either as the hurried concealment of treasured goods or the nest eggs of travelling merchants who failed for some reason to collect them, are now starting to be seen in this different light.
The golden torcs are often found with other precious objects. The one in the fen at Stretham in Cambridgeshire had with it a golden bracelet, some rings and human bones, although that is exceptional. Another in the Fens was accompanied by some bronze adze-axes called palstaves. The one in Calvados had with it a bracelet, a spear, a razor, a small anvil and a hammer for working the metal. In Lewis, such a hoard was found in 1910 at Adabrock, in Ness, just beyond the Shiants’ northern horizon. Bronze axes, a gouge, a spearhead, a hammer, three razors, two whetstones and some beads, one of glass, two of amber and one of beaten gold, were recovered from under three yards of peat. The Bronze Age acts with unparalleled generosity to the earth as the earth grows meaner.
The Shiant torc fits. It is on the very margins of the Europe in which these practices occur. The place in which it was found is as dramatic as landscape comes. Intriguingly, another torc, similar to this one in its tapered terminals but without the twisted decoration, was found at the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim, the columnar dolerite sill whose structure so closely resembles the geology of the Shiants. That is perhaps no more than a coincidence, but it is a suggestive one: the brightness of the gold against the dark near-architecture of the columned rock, a bringing together of opposites which once seen would not be forgotten. The Shiants are also the most northerly example of this sort of rock. Is it a coincidence that the most northerly golden torc was found at this most northerly extension of the British volcanic landscape? Was there a Bronze Age recognition that the Shiants marked a sort of frontier? Certainly no rock is more easily identified by a non-geologist than columnar dolerite. It continues to have the air of divine or diabolical sculpture. And the Norse may have recognised this too. Another possible derivation for the name is Galt, the Old Norse word for ‘magic’ or ‘charm’.
The northern boundary of their world would have been important to the middle and late Bronze Age. As the weather worsened, it would have been seen to have been coming from the north. Looking from the south, was this, I wonder, the outer margin of the world as it was known, the frontier between what was theirs and what they feared and needed to resist and control? The Galtas, the most sculptural of all the columnar formations in the Shiants, are like a giant’s causeway that has been set adrift, afloat on the tide. As Thomas O’Farrell, the Ordnance Survey man, saw in 1851, the tide run is savage between them ‘at all times especially at Spring tides there is a rapid current. About them the tide flows exceedingly strong, flowing the same as a large River.’
The gift of the torc here – and perhaps of other objects which have yet to be found – was an act not of propitiation but of dominance. The Bronze Age chieftain gave away what was most precious to him and in doing that showed his standing in the world and his control over its nature. The Shiants marked the frontier of that golden world and the throwing of the torc into the teeth of the Galtas was an act of symbolic empire.
I have often taken boats through there. You need a quiet day but, however quiet the weather, the sea still bumps and ripples around you. Small spiralling eddies break off from the corners of the stacks and for a few seconds adopt a life of their own. Little insucking constellations of bubbled water waltz and veer across the liquid floor. Sometimes there is a succession of them, a troupe of whirling water-dancers strung out before you, making their way from rock to rock, formation-dancing in the tide. The hull tips with the turbulence as you squeeze past them. Some of the channels are no more than ten or twelve feet wide, and as deep as that, square beams of running water below you, as wonderful as liquid steel for their concentration of energies. It is a place which can never be the same however often you return and I have gone back there for year after year. If there is any kind of swell you have to be careful with the boat, holding it back on the surge, pushing it forward as the swell sucks away again, choosing the moment to be swept on through, suddenly leaving the Galtas behind, out again in the widths of the Minch. Occasionally in a corner between the rocks you can find a still backwater pool where the boat can rest and slowly turn and you can watch, beside you, the long fronds of the kelp billowing in the channels like hair. Underwater, it is a swept world. No sediment, but a place of endless movement, recognised as magical three thousand years ago, still magical today.
7
THE GEESE LEAVE AS the spring comes. Their absence marks the opening of the days. I have never seen that visionary moment, as the flock heads north, but whatever it is that the geese sense in the air, I know it too. Crossing the Minch with Freyja again in early May feels like my own migration to summer pastures. John MacAulay had given me at first too small a sail, reluctant to overpower a boat in the hands of a novice, but I had put it to him that she needed and could carry something bigger. He had a larger one made for me, at a sailmaker’s in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, and its clew now reached back almost to the stern. Filled with wind, the fabric made a sickle curve three-quarters the length of the boat itself. I could sit back in the sternsheets and look up at the wide scimitar of my sail above me. Freyja thrived with the new potency, lifting to the lighter breezes, heeling a little under them, so much at home, and so motherly for me, that I felt I had never been happier on sea or land. Seas which had always alarmed me in smaller dinghies now felt like Freyja’s natural element, and mine.
Crossing from Scalpay in May, the Minch was sparkling in her spring-time clothes. The water lay glittering around the boat as though sugared, a frost of beneficence across its surface. You had to squeeze your eyes against its little shafts of sun. A pair of white-headed Risso dolphins, moving south, passed me off the Sound of Scalpay, arcing together, breathing twice. Twenty yards from the boat, a Minke whale slid its long black back above the surface for a moment, as seamless and as faceless as a U-boat, before easing away again as the sea washed over its tiny fin and water-swept stern. A great skua flashed its two white-wing streaks overhead and went on. The Shiants were in the distance, ten miles away, just big enough for different weather to fall on the three islands, and I watched the slow, soft stroboscope of sun and shadow moving on their greenness.
One enormous swell after another, each a hundred yards long and about six or eight feet high, was creaming into the Minch from the north. It made a billowed downland of the sea. From the crests, all of Lewis and Harris was visible, and its troughs cut off the shore. The sea ridges were so long and certain in their movement that there was nothing alarming here, just a steady breathing of the water, as if the Minch were buried in sleep.
The tide, at springs, was running at the flood, perhaps as much as three knots in places, bubbling occasionally in one of those flat mushrooms of upwelling sea, breaking into unexpected riffles as the submarine topography disturbed the flow. The sea itself was sliding and sidling me to my destination. It was my travelator, and the winter Minch was nowhere to be seen. Pick your moment and the sea will do what it can for you, however small the boat and however unpractised the helm. The wind was steady on the beam, and as it says in an old Gaelic song, it felt as if Freyja ‘would cut a thin oat straw with the excellence of her going.’
This moment of ecstatic ease is the significant historical fact. Anywhere that can be reached on a calm day will be reached. What matters is the invitation, not the threat, and if there is an opening, people will take it. That is why the Shiants are as much part of the human world as anywhere else. The entire population of Europe is descended from a maximum of ten people, some arriving thirty thousand years ago, others arriving perhaps from the Ukraine only after the end of the Ice Age, thirteen thousand years ago. Those late arrivals, five or six of them, brought with them the
ancestor of the Indo-European languages we now speak. The children and grandchildren of those ten filtered along the capillaries of Europe and filled it. In five hundred generations we have spread everywhere.
Seen on a planetary scale, it is an extraordinarily short and rapid event, a peopling of a continent as quickly as weeds can colonise rough ground. The movement for a while comes to a halt at the Atlantic shore but resumes a couple of thousand years later, when the technology is up to it and first the Norse and then the other Europeans continue to spread westwards and on around the globe. There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide is running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of all historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is its colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring. The Minch is laced with the wakes of the ancestors and this wonderful, easy-limbed stirring of Freyja on the long Atlantic swell is a stirring of the past. I smile in the boat now and open my face to the warmth of the sun and the shining of the sky.
Sea Room Page 12