Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  By mid-afternoon, in terrific seas, I had worn around the westernmost of the Aran rocks, and was running free, under mizzen and working jib, at a great rate. As I reached the shelter of Inishmore Island, I looked to the north. The seas were moving mountains. I rounded up in the bay of Kilronan about six o'clock, dowsed sail, and motored up to the jetty. Cresswell was in good order; nothing had broken or been washed away. Everything had held tight and sea-manlike. When I tied the mooring lines, for there was no one around in the lashing rain, I stood back and looked at her. There was an indefinable something about her, something I'd not noticed before, an air, an ambiance. I stood there and stared at her. How many gales and storms had she tackled from 1908 onwards? How many hard, strong, hefty men had shoved her out into seas raging beyond belief to rescue the helpless? How much strong emotion had been broadcast in her hull over the years in innumerable dramas of courage and bravery, patience and perseverance; how many sacrifices had been made on her heaving deck? She looked absolutely content; and then I realized with a shock, as I stood there, wet through under my oilskins in the pouring rain out of the black sky of Inishmore, that the old girl had enjoyed herself! She had reveled in it. The bloody old bitch was a storm-finder who'd sulk like a child in calm, balmy weather and refuse to hardly move; but, by God, when it blew she loved it.

  I hit the side of the companionway as I climbed down the ladder. Nelson wagged his tail in anticipation of supper. "Old son," I said, "the old girl is as happy as a pig in shit out there. She's a cow in breezes or light winds, but, Jesus, she'll wear out the hammers of hell in a blow."

  I fried up some of the already prepared burgoo, while Nelson wagged his tail even faster, sniffing the aroma of the sizzling bacon, well laced with Johnnie Walker. "I bloody well knew it, mate," I murmured, as I patted him, "I sensed it. She's got a mind of her own most of the time, but, by Christ, when the odds get heavy, she's with us all the way." Nelson hopped up topsides to piss over the side, which he always did before meals. Must have learned that from Tansy.

  When the rain cleared, the first locals arrived on the jetty. They were mostly men, a crowd of about a dozen or so, all dark, with the long heads and prominent noses of the pre-Celts, all speaking Gaelic. The older men were wearing homemade tweed jackets and pants with slits up the legs about to the knee, so they could roll the pants up when they pushed their curraghs out. They also wore "pampooties," as they called the leather sandals worn rough side out and laced with cord.

  The brightly colored woven wool belts they wore were made in startling colors. These they called "criss," and years later I saw very similar belts among the Quechua of the high Andes, the fishermen of Lake Titicaca.

  Among the crowd were two or three small boys, wearing a kind of skirt, something like that worn by the Evzone soldiers of the palace guard in Greece, or like a plain Scottish kilt, only not pleated. When I remarked on this later, I was told that "the little people" always had a fancy to steal boy-children, though they never bothered with the girls. So until they were nine years old, the boys were dressed in skirts to disguise them and to keep the leprechauns from stealing them.

  Contrary to what the Freudians might think, the custom seemed to have absolutely no effect on the sex habits of the males of Aran. Still, they stay unmarried and continent until well on in life, the late thirties or early forties, and apart from husbands and wives joined in holy wedlock by the church, the sexes were separated rigidly from the cradle to (literally) the grave. On some of the islands, husbands and wives are buried in plots apart.

  The skirted lads grow up to be fine, hefty fishermen, though the losses through heavy weather and fog have always been grievous. The islanders, as do all true sailor-men, dread fog much more than storms. Over the centuries they have lost many of their menfolk by exposure in the open curraghs in thick fog, lasting for a week or more.

  Two things struck me about the Aranmen: the difference in their faces and features compared to those of the mainland Irish, and the almost clinical cleanliness of their cottages. Here again, as in the Blaskets, many islanders live in exile in England and America. They spoke with familiarity of Manhattan and Fifth Avenue, yet knew nothing of Dublin.

  All the fields in the Aran Islands are hand built—a painstaking task undertaken by men and women alike. When the Aranmen speak English, they call the fields '"gardens." The sod is built up with sand and seaweed set down in alternate layers, all carried up from the beaches in baskets by asses, along the small, rocky lanes which in Ireland are known as '"boreens." The islanders, besides being among the most devout people I ever came across anywhere, and besides being extraordinarily good boatmen, are also expert horse-riders. There was only one wheeled cart on the island, and that was used to carry the porter ale up to the pub from the jetty. All other transport was by a kind of sled about eight feet long, with runners of iron made from metal salvaged from the wrecks of that savage shore. The only other place I ever saw this was in Funchal, in the Madeira Islands, where they have been used ever since the first settlers arrived there in the thirteenth century. I have since often wondered, when I've sat drinking Bual wine on the main square of Funchal, if an Aranman had been among the Portuguese who found the Atlantic Islands, and if he thought that he had indeed arrived at Saint Brendan's "Isles of the Blest." There must be a connection. As far as I know, sleds are not used in mainland Portugal, or at least I have never seen any.

  The cottages on Aran are interesting. Like those on the Blaskets, they have no eaves, but the fireplaces in Aran do not stick out into the room; they are flush with the wall. Alongside the fireplace there is a little alcove where the broody hens are put. As there is no real soil on the island and peat brought from the mainland runs out often, the main fuel used was cow dung, which, as it had been dried, did not have a very offensive smell.

  Some of the cottages are extended when the family grows, but the fishermen told me that they never add on to a dwelling towards the west, "for he that builds towards the west is stronger than God." In quite a few cases I noticed that additions had been made to the little homes by actually cutting into solid rock to the east of the houses, rather than to the west.

  I stayed with the Aran Islanders for two days, listening to their tales of fishing. They were frightened of the basking sharks, which grow to about thirty feet in length and which, they said, sometimes chased their curraghs. They had every reason to be scared of these monsters, because, although, like the whale, the basking shark is not a man-eater, feeding only on small plankton and tiny organisms of the ocean, it could easily upset one of the twenty-foot-long, canvas-covered curraghs.

  At a gathering on the night before I sailed for Inishbofin, two of the older men and a couple of the younger ones performed what they called the "salmon-leap." They lay face up on the stone floor, with their arms held close to their sides and their feet close together, then, with a mighty lurch of the shoulders they threw themselves up into a standing position without using their hands in anyway. An extraordinary performance. I have never seen this anywhere else, before or since. They seemed to do it better with a couple of porter ales under their belts, and there was much merriment, especially from the girls and women, on their side of the room.

  The eternal separation of the sexes does not include division of labor. In all the Irish Islands the only clear-cut male job was fishing, and the only definite female tasks were washing, cooking, and wool spinning, at which the older women seemed to be engaged from waking to sleeping. This, again, was similar to the custom of some of the Andes Indians. Every other task—spreading the sand and seaweed, carrying great balks of driftwood miles from the beach, digging potatoes, even repairing the wind-torn thatch of the roofs—seemed to be shared alike by both sexes. Again, as with mountain Indians of South America, the females seemed to have much the heavier load of work. It was not unusual to see the women of a family hard at it in the fields while the men sat drinking porter and telling stories. The famous poteen, an illegal and highly dangerous brew distil
led from potatoes, is not made on the inhabited islands, nor, I was told, on any of the outlying islands. It is made on uninhabited islets close inshore and in the inland regions or desolate bogs and fastnesses of the rocky mountains. (Later, on the voyage north to Tory Island, passing dose to the shores of Connaught beyond Achill Head, I did indeed sight several times the brown smoke of the poteen-men on islets close inshore.)

  "Sure, now, in the old days before the Republic," said one of the Aranmen, "the Royal Irish Constabulary, they were fine men, with particular principles, and if it was a still they sighted with the smoke rising to heaven, why, they'd stand back for a pipe or two of good, strong tobacco, to give the poteen-men time to pack up and be off. But these Chic Guards of De Valera, why the fellows are so enthusiastic for the Republic they'd be down on you like a falling haystack, with no time at all for you to know they were there. Great men they are for lawful enthusiasm, but terrible men for patience. Aye, in the R.I.C., they were true Irishmen, and if they could help it, never brought the injustice of English laws onto our heads." All the other older men agreed with him.

  The next sail, from the Aran Islands, was to Inishbofin, eighty miles north, the westernmost part of county Galway. I left Inishmore to the farewells of the fisher-folk, late in the afternoon, for the weather was kindly. By the following dawn I was off Slyne Head, with the quartzite Twelve Pins of Connemara gleaming away under the morning sun beyond the misty, blue grey hills of Connemara. The ocean was still bumpy, but the wind was fresh enough to drive Cresswell through the cross-seas without too much discomfort.

  I was safe in the lee of Inishbofin by two in the afternoon, watching the lobsterboats being offloaded onto a French coaster. This is the main source of all the lobster and crayfish eaten in Paris, and they were sending out six or seven thousand lobsters weekly. The operation was run by a couple of Frenchmen who lived on the mainland. Each lobster had the sinews in its claw cut to prevent it from fighting with, and possibly damaging, the other lobsters. They are kept alive all the way to Paris, and even after, until they are ready for the customer's table. What a contrast, the tiny island of Inishbofin, on the wild, stormy, rain-lashed shores of Connemara, under weeping grey skies, with the Champs-Elysees!

  I went ashore in the afternoon to stretch my legs and, entering the pub for a pint of porter, met several of the local men. (No woman would be caught dead in a hotel bar in most parts of Ireland.) They were, as is usual among those folk, most courteous and accommodating to strangers, and especially to sailor-strangers.

  One old chap told me how the island got its name—"White Cow." He said that long, long, ago, even before the days of Lugh, the god of light, two Fomorgian sailormen were wrecked on the island. Sitting on the beach, they were approached by an old woman driving a white cow. When they tried to milk the cow, the old woman struck the cow and the men with her stick, and they all turned into white rocks. '"And, sure, they are still there, the big white rock and the two smaller ones, for all to see and to bear witness of the truth of this tale." To this day, no Inishbofin boatman will carry a white stone in his vessel. He will even pick out white pebbles from the loose stone ballast he might take on as cargo from the mainland.

  There's more to it than the old man's tale, though. The symbol of the dead in Celtic times and before, to the ancient Britons, was the white stone. In some parts of North Wales you will see people cross themselves when passing a white milestone on the road. In Spain, too.

  In 1959 there were about eight hundred people on the island, and a friendlier lot I've never met. When I explained that I was going for a walk across the island, three of the younger fishermen came along, and we spent the time naming all the birds we came across in English, Erse, and Welsh, laughing all the while under the lightening sky, with cumulus rearing up thousands of feet as the wind dropped. I never saw a place with such a variety of birds—wheatears, starlings, larks, wrens, stonechats, ravens, choughs, house sparrows, looking exhausted, as if they'd just arrived on a windward beat all the way from Trafalgar Square; swallows, wood pigeons, crows, herons, oyster-catchers, ringed plovers, curlews, terns, black-headed and herring gulls by the hundreds, and guillemots and the lovely fulmar petrels by the thousands. Down on the lee side of the island, the cormorants were busy at work fishing, while on the beach lay a hundred seals or more. The place was a living zoo.

  On the way back to the pub, along a rocky boreen, the fishermen, who to a man are great storytellers, told me of the Spanish pirate Bosco, who built the castle in the harbor and stretched a great chain across its entrance to prevent enemies taking him by surprise. A cruel despot indeed. He used to fling his prisoners, men and women alike, over the high cliffs to their deaths below on the rocks. And they told me of Grace O'Malley, the great woman pirate Grannuille, who was queen of all the islands in the days of Good Queen Bess, and how she levied toll on all ships that sailed the Western Irish waters, French, Spanish, and English alike. Queen Elizabeth offered to make her a countess. But Grannuille sent a letter to Her Majesty declining the imitation, because, she wrote, she held herself inferior to no woman, and especially an Englishwoman] When she did eventually visit London, it was with such pomp and show of power that even the court of the Virgin Queen was astonished.

  I spent one night in Inishbofin, refreshed by the walk across the island, the stories, and the porter ale. For the night I was invited to moor Cresswell alongside the French coaster, to avoid the worry of the anchor dragging; but after an hour or two of listening to the scrunching and screaming of thousands of lobsters and crayfish crawling over piles of mussels, scratching, with their sinewless claws, against the iron sides of her hold, I moved out again to quiet anchorage.

  From Inishbofin to Tory Island, off the coast of Donegal, is about 180 miles, and I covered this in four days of fine weather, dry, and with a good breeze from the southwest. For one whole day I was completely becalmed and sat it out in the ocean swell, fishing, but catching nothing. I spent two days in the shelter of the high cliffs of that desolate, yet interesting, island, with its tall tors, or rock pillars (whence the name). This was the home, in the legendary days, of the one-eyed god Balor, the grandfather of Lugh, the god of light, who killed the fierce old god of darkness with his sword of lightning, and after whom London and the cities of Leyden and Lyons, faraway in central Europe, are named. Saint Columba, who founded the great Christian refuge in Iona in 563, also lived here. The first Irish follower of Saint Columba was named Dhugan, and his descendants, the Dhugan, are still there.

  Because Saint Columba, or Columcille as he was called, banished rats from Tory Island when he landed there in 555, no rat can ever live there, and even the ones that survive shipwreck die only minutes after crawling up the beach or over the rocks. The elder Dhugan is always the guardian of the clay which is the specific, holy and anointed by Columcille himself, against rats. Under no circumstances, not if he was offered a million pounds for a spoonful, will he sell it. He will only give it, and the recipient must be worthy of the gift. I was honored indeed when Dhugan gave me a great handful of this magic clay to take onboard.

  I'd had a rat onboard Cresswell ever since mooring alongside in Falmouth, and it was misery to hear the thing scratching away where neither Nelson nor I could get at him. I had tried everything—traps, poison, even smoking him out. Five minutes after Columcille's clay was placed onboard, in a paper bag on the lower galley shelves, he was out on deck and Nelson had him in his teeth. Don't ask me how or why, I can only tell that it was so.

  Close by the landing jetty of Tory there is a Christian cross, but unlike any other in Ireland it is in the shape of a T. This is very ancient and most strange, for the only other place I ever saw it was in Ethiopia, where it is in common use by the Coptic church. It is the cross of Saint Anthony, who is held in great esteem in the Abyssinian church. Could it be that the same Saint Anthony who took Christianity into East Africa in the second century was also here in Tory Island? By what route could he have come except with Celtic marine
rs from Marseille or Cadiz?

  One of the fishermen I talked to showed me his curragh, which was different from those in the islands further south, because the canvas was fastened to the gunwale after being stretched over the oak frame. In the Blaskets and in the Aran Islands the tarred canvas is fastened to the actual frames themselves.

  Again, the number of birds in the sky above the island was limitless, as were the seals in the surrounding waters. In the evening, I retired to the old fisherman's house, for there is no pub on the island, and, over tea, listened to the tales of the Viking raids and how the monks used to handring the bells in the tops of the ancient round-towers so that the islanders could take refuge from the bloody swords of the Northern sea-savages. Again, he spoke as if it had all happened last week.

  This was the last of the Irish Islands, and from here I would plough into the plunging, plundering green seas of the Minches, the North West Approaches, 140 miles to the northward, to the Hebrides, over one of the roughest stretches of water in all the seas of the world!

  From the lone shieling

  on the misty island, Mountains divide us, and a waste of seas, Yet still the blood is strong,

  the heart is Highland, And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.

  "The Canadian Boat Song," Anonymous - c. 1845.

  12

  Behold, the Hebrides!

  I took my leave of Dhugan the Elder, of Tory Island, on the last day in May. The weather forecast was about normal for the next part of the world in that time of the year. "Winds southwesterly, force five, sea areas Shannon, Rockall, Hebrides." As I was anxious to reach Iceland before midsummer, so that I would have at least two months of reasonable weather before the equinoctial gales of September set in, I pushed off without delay, northward direct to the southernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, and the first port in the group, Castlebay, on the island of Barra.