On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Day by day, season by season, the familiar rhythms of island life played out. Smoke curled up from the hearths of the village’s felt-roofed stone houses. Young girls gathered turf. Boys played football with old socks stuffed with hay or straw; or they’d steal out from school for a swim, charging down to the slip, throwing off their clothes, and hurling themselves into the sea. Women met around the well at the top of the village, bantering, exchanging news, their jugs slowly filling. Men in threes and fours hoisted atop their heads the black beetlelike naomhógs, carried them down to the slip, and headed out to sea to fish. The island king rowed to the mainland twice a week to pick up letters and parcels; the villagers gathered round him on his return. Once a year, the priest would be rowed into the island to take confessions and say Mass. There’d be dancing at An Dáil, the village’s “parliament” of a house, or at Peig Sayers’s. There was no doctor on the island, no proper nurse; a Massachusetts-born woman reared in her grandparents’ house in Dún Chaoin and married into the island in the 1890s, Méiní Dunlevy, served as midwife. There was no plumbing; when you felt “the pressure,” you went outside by a fence to relieve yourself, men and women alike. From time to time, the islanders made forays to the mainland and into Dingle to pick up provisions.

  Dún Chaoin and the nearby mainland towns—Ventry, Ballyferriter, and the western peninsula’s market center, Dingle, population about eighteen hundred—were tied to the island by bonds of marriage, kinship—and misunderstanding. Mainlanders sometimes saw the islanders as wild tricksters; islanders were apt to see the mainlanders as money-grubbing. Dún Chaoin, directly facing the island, was less a village than a collection of houses spread across the sloping highlands that stood back from the sea; it was more rural, really, than the island itself, whose compact village asserted an almost urban density. Years later, a filmmaker contemplating a documentary about western Ireland came away discouraged that “hardly any of the villages had a close clustering of houses that could look like a village” on film. Local jurisdictions were many and overlapping. Corca Dhuibhne was the broad ancestral region, the western part of County Kerry. Then there were parishes, and named towns, and the little townlands that made them up, which rarely appeared on any map. The puffs of white that were sheep ranging over the West Kerry hills were more numerous by far than people.

  A big moment in the year came in November, with the Dingle Fair. Island sheep were fattened; the villagers rounded them up, brought them down to the slip, loaded them into naomhógs, and rowed them across to Dún Chaoin. There, they’d tie them up two-by-two, walk them up the path to the top of the cliff, and then the dozen miles to Dingle, where they’d often spend the night. “You’d have a drink,” Seán Ó Criomhthain remembered, “and when that went down you felt as happy as if you never had a poor relative.”

  Near the center of Blasket village stood the island school. It was one of the larger buildings, about twenty-five feet long, set, like most of them, so its long axis followed the slope down the hill; its short northeastern wall was common to the house next door, belonging to one of the Kearneys. Beginning in the fall of 1927, Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, straight from teacher-training in Limerick, became head teacher: “I was young and light-hearted,” she remembered. About a quarter of the island’s population—forty-two by her memory—were students there. Attendance was no problem, “because there was nothing to keep them at home,” and because no one had to come very far. “Even if a gale of wind was blowing they’d still have to come to school.” In fact, her own attendance proved more the problem. Friday afternoons, she’d be rowed back across the sound, intending to return to the island on Sunday, but sometimes a storm marooned her on the mainland; the authorities in Dublin were not sympathetic. In time, she took to staying on the island.

  In the decades before this picture was taken in about 1930, as many as fifty students attended the island school; by 1941, when it was closed down, there were just three. (Illustration Credit ill.15)

  At school, there was no place to hang coats, and the children would sometimes run in drenched. “They’d shake it off like ducks,” said Ní Shéaghdha, “because they were accustomed to having the salt water blowing into their faces every day of the week and every day of the year.” She and the assistant teacher seated them at long benches, in two groups, the younger children toward the fire, the older ones toward the door. Her pupils, she remembered, were all “very keen on English. Who could blame them? [Even] if they only went down to Dingle they’d need it, and at that time there was nothing in their heads but America.” That and poetry. “They were extremely interested in English poetry just as they were in Irish poetry. They had poetry in their blood, I suppose, and they found it easy to learn.” Seán Ó Criomhthain recalled from an earlier period that he and his classmates had studied Macbeth, and loved it, and were always more interested in learning English than Irish. “We were thinking of another country and of life beyond the Island. It was then the intention and plan of everyone on the Blaskets to go to America.”

  During the summer, the men would fish five or six days a week for lobster; during the winter, for mackerel. After a night’s fishing, the crew would row over to Dún Chaoin, stow their boats, and carry hundred-pound sacks of fish up the cliff path from the slip; what they got for their trouble was at the whim of the market. The early years of the century, when Synge and Marstrander visited, were good ones. But now, big French trawlers, which could fish farther out to sea, were competing more successfully with the little island naomhógs. And in 1927, the United States imposed a tariff on salted mackerel. The market softened. The hard lives of the island fishermen grew harder. “It was our business to be out in the night, and the misery of that sort of fishing is beyond telling,” wrote Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who up to about 1926 was still sending his perfectly penned epistles to Brian Kelly. “I count it the worst of all trades.”

  The naomhógs, bow and stern lifting high above the water, were instantly recognizable. On land, perched upside down on wooden posts flanking the path up to the village, black-bottomed, thick with repeated tarrings, they looked like works of nature—truly like the giant beetles visitors reliably said they resembled. Yet turn them over and slip them into the sea, and the human artifacts they were became apparent. Four bench seats were spaced along their twenty-six-foot length. The tight wooden latticework visible from inside looked like nothing so regular and measured as an engineer’s graph paper.

  They were in many ways better than the big seine-boats they’d replaced in the 1880s, which had been seized for failure to pay rent and, Seán Ó Criomhthain would report, allowed to rot away on a quay in Dingle; the little naomhógs, on the other hand, weren’t worth a rent collector’s trouble. They could be fitted with a single sail, but were more often rowed by three or four men using peculiar small-bladed oars. A Norwegian fisherman “would laugh at this little toy,” noted Carl Marstrander. But the life of the island depended on them; a census counted four hundred of them west of Dingle in 1921, the island itself good for several dozen.

  It took a lot to sink them—heavy seas, gross overloading. They were remarkably maneuverable, easy to slip into the gap between the sea-splashed rocks, tucked away at the base of the cliff, that passed for a harbor. The men would bring the boat to an almost braked sudden stop as they approached shore, manage a graceful little 180-degree twirl, step lithely out, pass up the oars, turn the boat upside down in a single swift, graceful movement, their heads disappearing in the beetle’s carapace, and march it up the hill in stately procession. Stored bottom-up, the boats obligingly presented cuts or other damage for repair.

  Of course, the seeming vulnerability of the little craft was not all illusion. The crew might carry a wooden bowl to bail water, a sock to plug a leak. Visitors found passage into the island memorable, thrilling—or downright terrifying. Robin Flower’s son Patrick remembered how as a boy, probably in the late 1920s, he was literally tossed from shore to a big islander in the boat, his mother “huddled in a lump in t
he well of the boat,” the two of them ill the whole way across. “All I could hear was the roar of the wind and [the crew leader’s] called instructions as we breasted each wave.” It was daytime, Patrick knew, but it felt like darkest night.

  A striated checkerboard of arable field above the White Strand, about sixty acres of the island’s eleven hundred, constituted the island’s farm. Oats and rye, along with potatoes—planted in ridges, each furrow dug, each sod turned, by hand—were the chief crops; in 1925, a hundred pounds of potatoes might be worth six shillings, but the islanders normally consumed all they harvested. Cabbage, turnips, and carrots were also grown. The sheep that grazed the green island slopes supplied wool for clothing, mutton for food, and a little ready cash when taken to market; in winter, island women cleaned, carded, dyed, and spun the wool that they later made into jerseys and shawls. Another source of income was rabbit pelts, which islanders sometimes mailed off to Cork or Dublin, maybe three dozen at a time, fetching perhaps three shillings.

  Another “crop” was the peat (the first stage in the transformation of vegetation to coal) used to heat every house on the island. Some years later, Mary Kearney’s younger brother, Seán, would demonstrate for the cameras just how you harvested it. Wearing boots, pants with turned-up cuffs, a thick open-necked sweater, and wielding a long-handled bladed implement, Seán cut straight down into the turf. Each piece was about a foot square. Cutting out the top layer, vegetation still attached, he turned it over with the same tool and tossed it aside. At the next layer down, he did much the same, the clumps of peat liberated this time resembling squares of dark, moist cake. These would be collected and left in small stone enclosures on the far side of the island to dry. In winter, when storms made fishing impossible, the islanders would recover them and bring them down to their houses.

  Accounts of objects and materials of value washing up on the Gravel Strand, to the north of the village, or on the White Strand, or elsewhere around the island, occur often enough in local lore to suggest a surprisingly reliable source of village livelihood. Driftwood shaped by island carpenters became part of many a window frame or naomhóg. Shipwrecks, too, contributed to the wealth of the island, enough to galvanize the whole village when they were reported. U-boat sinkings during the Great War were, during the 1920s, objects of recent memory. “Thanks to the submarine campaign,” an islander told one visitor, “the Great War was a prosperous era.” Crates of oranges. Canadian potatoes. Onions from Spain. Barrels of wine. Linens and porcelains: “You see these cups that are so pretty? They came to us like that from the sea.” Perhaps the biggest haul came with the running aground of the Quebra in 1916, which left long stretches of shoreline crowded with “wreckage and wood and chests and barrels and cotton,” recalled Méiní Dunlevy, with “flour and meat and fat stranded on the beach for us.” The islanders gathered up all they could. “It wasn’t the Island of Hunger in those years, but the Island of Plenty.”

  The island endured. Its people endured. “The world is said to change every twenty years,” Seán Ó Criomhthain said when he was in his sixties. But all through the late 1920s, the island stayed much as it had long been. The hill rising above the village remained, and the ever-shifting play of light, and the grand views, and the growing green. Year by year, the tide streamed through the narrow rock-encumbered channel that was Blasket Sound. The waves ran up on the beach, wore away at the ancient cliffs. Trees, as always, were nowhere—hard to accept for those from milder and more familiar climes, but true: no trees. No river, either, and no lake. There were no hares, no stoats, no weasels, no frogs, no foxes, no badgers, no hedgehogs, no newts. Plentiful were seabirds; an 1880s naturalist counted 174 species on the Blaskets, including puffins, razorbills, guillemots, storm petrels, and gulls. From the heights of the village—or most anywhere on the island, really—they were forever swooping above or beneath you.

  Constant, too, in their inconstancy were irresolute skies that changed with astonishing frequency, the west wind blowing in something new every time you looked up. It rarely snowed on the island, and the cold never grew bitter, thanks to the Gulf Stream. It didn’t even rain that much, not if you were totting up annual inches of precipitation. But it rained often. And when not raining it was misty, foggy, or gray, the sun at best irregular. In December, high up north as the island was, at the latitude of Labrador, islanders got an average of less than one and a half hours of sun out of the twenty-four.

  Still, the familiar comforts of nature offered balm. “You’d go back the hill, yourself and another lad or two, looking at sheep,” Seán Ó Guithín, who was seventeen in 1928, would remember. “A rabbit might jump out and the dog would chase him and if there was anything troubling your mind, that would help you to forget it.”

  Did the islanders live in poverty? Was this the precise and responsible word to describe their condition? Asked many years later, Nóra Ní Shéaghdha couldn’t quite settle on how to answer the question. Well, yes, she concluded at last, some “were certainly poor and could have done with more if they had it.” After all, the harsh life of the island was one reason they left. Emigration sapped the island community, yet enriched it, too; many families lived better thanks to money from America. In the end, marriage itself became problematic, for there was almost no one left to marry. Tomás’s son left. Mary Kearney’s older sister left in 1925. Mícheál O’Guiheen emigrated in 1928, though he returned the following year, close-mouthed about his bad time in America. “My two eyes were red from crying,” he wrote later about leaving the island. “Son of my heart,” said his mother, “it is a poor place where you wouldn’t be better off than here. Don’t you see that everyone is running away from it if he can?”

  The young people left. A trickle of visitors arrived.

  Almost invariably, like George Thomson, they came for the Irish, but found much else to occupy them and enjoy. “They had dancing and music and fresh fish and every sort of sea-food to munch,” recalled Seán Ó Criomhthain of this period, from the early 1920s on, so “they felt they were in heaven.”

  One visitor, for about two weeks in 1920, was forty-eight-year-old Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow, who wrote of the islanders, “They can’t speak English, and they are renowned for the beauty of their Irish”; this was already something of a formula. Earlier, on the mainland, he’d stayed at Willie Long’s place in Ballyferriter, the two of them discovering a mutual interest in botany. On the island, he stayed with the brother of the king, shared a bed with a schoolteacher from Cork, heard folktales from Peig Sayers, met her son Mícheál, became friendly with Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and took lots of pictures. In 1924, he was back, taking more pictures, including one of Tomás, bundled up in wool without his familiar porkpie hat, standing in the doorway to his house. Von Sydow was recording what would prove to be this last quiet time in the life of the island. When he left the second time, George Thomson was on hand to snap a picture of him as he was rowed away.

  At least twice before 1922, Seoirse Mac Cluin, a young Catholic priest, visited the island. Compiling an Irish phrase book, he put islanders to work on his behalf, asking them to use odd or distinctive words and phrases in sentences. Soon, the island schoolchildren were busily beseeching the old people for words. The biggest help, of course, came from Tomás. They worked together, morning and afternoon, for most of a month.

  In 1925, after a decade away, Robin Flower began returning to the island for vacations. The end of the war in 1918 hadn’t itself been enough to bring him and his wife back to the island, probably because they were busy making babies—four of them between 1912 and 1921. “Talk Irish to Barbara,” Tomás wrote to Flower in 1912, soon after her birth; Barbara was the first of the four. Nine years later, in 1921, Flower wrote Richard Best, his colleague at the British Museum, “We have a real boy baby at last, of name Patrick and of disposition angelic. He is to go to the font next Sunday, and will you be his godfather?” Patrick was the last. In between came Síle and Jean. All had Celtic-studies masters as their g
odfathers; Barbara’s was Carl Marstrander.

  Beginning in the mid-1920s and on into the ’30s, the children regularly accompanied their parents on their four-week August vacations; indeed, vacations they were, as much as research trips. “The girls,” Flower wrote Best from the Blaskets in 1929, “are having the time of their lives here, running about and dancing and picking up bits of Irish. The weather has been wonderful this last fortnight and now with sun all day and a full moon over the island at night it is a heaven to be here.” Each year, they’d stay briefly in Dún Chaoin, Patrick would remember, then cross to the island the next day, their big clan spread between two island houses. Soon, the children would be running around barefoot as if they always had. Barbara, who picked up the language easily, sometimes went along with Síle to the island school. “We children had the most idyllic time those summers,” Patrick would recall. One photo of him at six or seven shows him with his father and sisters, leaning against a sheer rock precipice. Flower’s wife, Ida, befriended Cáit, daughter of the king. “It was an incredibly primitive life compared to what she must have been used to,” Síle said of her mother, “but she loved it.” As for Flower himself, islanders sometimes spotted him sitting alone against a bank, hands cradling his knees, staring across to the mainland, lost in reverie. His Blasket holidays, according to Celtic scholar Seán Ó Lúing, were the happiest times of his life.

  His Irish was good by this time, though he always spoke it with an English accent; sometimes he had trouble getting his mouth around particularly stubborn Irish phrases. But in returning to the Blaskets after the war, he felt almost like an islander himself, the émigré restored to his roots. He grew into a familiar figure, like a lovable if not rich uncle. He’d come with sweets for the children. He’d read stories to them. He mixed with everyone. He was known as a great scholar, yes, but he was light and easy company. At Tomás’s, he’d eat roasted mackerel with his fingers, lick them contentedly, then toss the bones to the dog.