The whirlpool runs between the islands of Jura and Scarba and is formed both by the pressures of a 9-knot tidal bottleneck and by two significant underwater obstructions. The flowing tide pulls water northwards from the Clyde estuary and the Irish Sea into the narrow gap of the Sound of Jura. As all the accumulated weight of water races north-eastwards up through the Sound, it gathers pace. By the time it enters the channel between the two islands, it is moving at 9 knots or more, and as it rounds the corner into the Gulf it runs directly into four major opposing forces: the two islands themselves (no more than two-thirds of a mile apart at their narrowest point); a large submerged rock stack to the north of the channel, smoothsided and vertical on its eastern edge and rising up to within 29 metres of the surface; the current running in the opposite direction round the coast of Scarba, and lastly, a deep sub-aquatic pit hollowed out by the movement of water reaching down 219 metres below the surrounding sea bed and known as the Gateway to Hell.
The pit sucks water down and the stack throws it upwards, creating vortices which rise to the surface as pulses. In a heavy wind, the standing waves directly above the stack can reach 10 to 15 feet high, and during the autumnal equinox, when the whirlpool runs in fullest spate, it can revolve at up to 10 knots, pushing the water up at the sides to 30 foot above the surrounding sea level. In those conditions, the water roars. They say that Corrievreckan’s thunder can sometimes be heard ten miles or more inland. As the old Statistical Account of Scotland put it: ‘Three currents, formed by the islands and mainland, meet a fourth, which sets in from the ocean. The conflux is dreadful and spurns all descriptions. Even the genius of Milton could not paint the horrors of the scene. At the distance of twelve miles a most dreadful noise, as if all the infernal powers had been let loose, is heard.’ Those who do emerge—including Orwell—have earned the right to call themselves lucky. Pilot books warn sailors to avoid the area if possible and to venture into Corrievreckan only at slack water. The Royal Navy judges it to be entirely unnavigable except by vessels over a certain tonnage and horsepower.
Alex Renton, a journalist who knows the western sea well and who has sailed through the area several times, observes that Corrievreckan has a strange effect on the mariner’s psyche: ‘You first realise what’s happening because the coast is moving far faster than it should be—the knot meter will still be showing you whatever leisurely speed you were at, but if you check the GPS, you find that you’re going two or three times faster in real terms. It begins to dawn on you what’s going on, and you become instantly aware of the fundamental misconception about what you and boats do at sea. Usually you think of yourself in a boat as progressing over the surface of a stable planet as you do in a car or on your own two feet. This is of course completely wrong. The surface you are on is not stable at all. You’re a very small force hitching a lift on something with infinitely greater energy and purpose. Where the water wants to go, so will you, like a clockwork toy in the bath. And at the mouth of the Corrievreckan you get a very clear demonstration of what happens when the plug is pulled out. Very soon after this rather challenging notion settles, you begin to realise, physically, just how powerful the force is. Though it’s talked about as the great whirlpool, I’ve never been conscious of there being a single monster ready to suck you down. But the boat will suddenly spin 60 degrees before you can regain control—and you’d have to wrestle the tiller to do it. The water looks like it’s being stirred from below. The best effect is the swellings that come up, as big as the boat; muscles of water thrown up to the surface. The boat will lift with the water lumps, shudder a bit, and spin again. Out of control is quite relaxing—you’ve got on the fairground ride and there’s no point fussing until it stops. There’s no way out except the way out.’
Since Corrievreckan is such a narrow channel, and since there are alternative routes up the Sound of Jura or the Firth of Lorn, the whirlpool is comparatively unfrequented. Those vessels that do use the route are generally local with knowledgeable crew. One of these is the Sea Leopard, skippered by Lindsay Johnson, who has sailed this part of the world for over thirty years. And so, on a balmy day one spring tide away from the vernal equinox, a small group of day trippers collect on the pontoon at Ardfern. Johnson greets us and gives a quick safety drill: keep hold of the guard rails, expect to get wet and if you’re daft enough to fall overboard no-one’s going to bother coming back for you. He also assures his passengers that the Sea Leopard is both more powerful and more skilfully skippered than Orwell’s little clinker-built boat. It is capable of a maximum speed of 18 knots, which should in theory be strong enough to outstrip even the worst of Corrievreckan’s races.
We gaze down at the water. It looks exactly as it should do: slack and placid, as untroubled as the sky above. Over our heads, an occasional lonely cloud passes by and the sun beams down like mid-July. Johnson’s dire warnings of races and capsizings sound overdone; surely on a day like this nothing can go wrong. We can hear no watery roarings, no Miltonian hordes. By the time the boat leaves the dock, most of the passengers have begun wondering if all this maelstrom stuff is no more than tales for the tourists. Besides, I had read the other day that Corrievreckan has even been swum. In 1981 Orwell’s brother-in-law, Bill Dunn, who once farmed Barnhill and who had lost a leg during the war, decided that he would attempt the crossing to raise money for charity. He chose the calmest possible conditions: a neap tide with the flood running from east to west. He made the crossing in August, dressed in a sleeveless wet suit, a woollen semmit, and as much lanolin as he could smear on his exposed skin. Watched by a crowd of 300 or more, he swam slowly across the Gulf on his back. ‘The swim itself was uneventful,’ he wrote later. ‘In fact, it was rather boring.’
We motor down towards Crinan, watching the slow play of shadows over the mountains. The sea remains calm, no more than the occasional ruffle of wind darkening its surface. But once the boat turns the corner and heads into the Sound of Jura, things begin to speed up. The water coming up the Sound is moving fast, and where it meets the opposing currents travelling south and eastwards, there are signs of disagreement. To begin with, the change doesn’t look that profound: a few small overfalls, a patch of peaky water to starboard, an area full of small circular boilings up ahead. Then suddenly, something plucks at the rudder. The boat turns 90 degrees or so, spinning slowly on its axis. The passengers catch an unasked-for panorama of the further sea isles and stop talking for a second or so. The engine, untroubled by the interruption, chugs onwards towards the Gulf. Everyone starts talking again.
A couple of yards farther on the odd circular tugging begins again, almost like something rather large beneath us has reached up and given the hull a quick turn between forefinger and thumb. The sensation makes the sea seem slippery, as if we’re sailing not on water but on something more tenuous. Not that the Sea Leopard seems much bothered by these subterranean proddings. She rights herself and we sail on. The northern coastline of Jura looms up ahead, Barnhill and Orwell’s nearnemesis down to the left.
Lindsay steers the boat northwards, right in close to the coast of Scarba. In a couple of minutes we are no more than a few metres from the shore. ‘You’ll notice,’ he says, ‘that on one side of the boat, the current is moving one way and on the other side, it’s moving the other way.’ He’s right. On the starboard side, the water is travelling eastwards. On the other side, it’s going west. On both sides, it is moving fast, the pace not of a normal sea current but of a river in spate. And that water doesn’t look like any water I’ve ever seen before. It’s completely flat and it shines with a bright reflective calm, like beaten panels of tin. Parts of its surface have acquired an odd ripped edge, as if each section of ocean had somehow separated itself out into different liquid islands. Around the borders of each island are hundreds of small plughole eddies, endlessly forming and vanishing as they pass by. The water on the Scarba side gets glassier, smoother, brassier. The little plugholes expand. When I look straight down at them, there is nothing a
t their centre but blackness.
And then the bumpings start. For a second, it feels as if the hull has hit a small submerged log that then rolls under the boat: a faint but palpable jerk. The tiller twitches. A second or two later, there’s another one, a bigger log this time. Again that sense of something absolutely solid underneath, thumping against us and rolling down the boat from bow to stern. As the logs roll by, there comes from time to time that odd lazy tugging at the keel again, the twitch of something plucking at us from below. It feels exactly like the first faint tremors of a fish on the line. Except that this time, we’re the fish, and something else is controlling the line. Abruptly, the boat starts to spin again, turning away from the coast of Scarba and towards the Gulf. As we move, the tugging continues, harder this time, as if whatever’s there beneath us has stopped being mildly curious and is now actively interested. Johnson guns the engine and we speed up, trying to outstrip our underwater inspector. We roll over a few more logs, each a little heftier than the last. Bump. Bump. Bump. By now, I’m gripping the guardrail as though my life depended on it.
Then—and Jesus this is weird—I look at the land, and I realise that some parts of it are higher away from the water than others. The water is not all at the same level. The tidemark on the rocks directly ahead is around a metre high. The tidemark a little further away is 4 or 5 metres high. The sea is rolling like a lowland hill. This particular patch of ocean has hummocks and contours, and a one-in-four gradient. At the moment it is also doing its very best to carry us somewhere where we do not want to go. To distract myself I look westwards to where the islands separate out. Rolling in from the Atlantic are waves: big ones. Waves breaking with the same force and weight as if they’d just come all the way from Canada and hit the solid granite walls of Jura. But they’re not breaking on land. They’re breaking on . . . well, nothing. Breaking on water. On themselves.
A couple of hours ago, I thought I understood the laws of physics. I thought I understood that water remains level, that waves do not appear without wind, that boats cannot hit liquid obstructions, that cold water cannot boil. But Corrievreckan is taking everything I know, and rendering it wrong. Normal laws do not apply here, because there is no normality. The water in Corrievreckan is not normal water. This is not a normal place.
Someone who knows Corrievreckan as well as Lindsay Johnson had told me earlier that he’d been out on the whirlpool one day, and a pit had opened up in the water ahead. There was no other way to describe it; one minute he was sailing across level water and the next minute he was staring into a 10-metre abyss. Small wonder that the whirlpool has taken its own dark place in local legend.
But Corrievreckan is not alone. There is something about the western sea which fits comfortably into a world of myth and fable. Fingal’s Cave, Cape Wrath, the Torran Rocks, the cavern on Eigg, part-time islands, the Dutchman’s Cap, Suilven, the abandoned island of St Kilda; this is a place where every stone has a name and a tale attached. That legendary edge is due in part to the shape of the landscape. This place is not the comfortable, domesticated shape of the lowlands, but is formed on a more inhuman scale—a place of cloudy mountains, monstrous geology, wild exaggerations. It can be both beautiful and hostile, but it is never ordinary.
Even a glance at a map shows the west’s peculiarity. Here, the coast does not follow the tidy line of the east, but takes a ragged meander from one side of the country to another. Some parts of the shoreline point in for miles, some stab outwards, blocking the path of what would otherwise be a safe passage. Some parts of the coast turn almost invisibly into islands, some ought to be islands but have stayed as peninsulas instead. What should be land is water and what should be water turns out to be a reef, a sandbank or a wreck. Look at the place, and it dissolves; a ripped confusion of earth, rocks and water. It seems impassable, uninhabitable, unnavigable, ‘a region without people, disquiet without cause, a road without a goal’, as the writer Karel Capek put it. Scotland has 5 million inhabitants and more than 10,000 kilometres of coastline, half of which is either part of the sea lochs or skirting the country’s 790 islands. Small wonder that this place has always been notorious, or that even now it remains impossible to effectively light or police.
Which, predictably, makes the west perfect for wreckers. To start with there has always been plenty of traffic through the Sea of the Hebrides, and much of that traffic has been valuable. These seas have seen everything from Clearance ships carrying reluctant emigrants from the Highlands to the New World, to cargo vessels laden with tobacco, cotton, sugar and manufactured goods heading back from America to the Old Country. Whether it be shipping on its way from Scandinavia to Newfoundland, liners running the transatlantic race between Liverpool and New York, or merchant vessels with their armed escorts on the North Atlantic convoys during the Second World War, this stretch of water has seen a greater variety of traffic than almost any other area of Britain.
But if the surrounding seas were cosmopolitan, the islands within them were not. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travel to the Western Isles was still perceived as a risky business. Until Queen Victoria popularised the idea of the tartanised Highlander, very few Englishmen had ever travelled north of Perthshire for pleasure. Those who did make the trip did so either for professional reasons or for the advancement of science. Defoe’s journey in 1700 was intended as part of a wider intelligence-gathering mission, while Martin Martin’s trip in 1695 was made in order to search out new material for science and anthropology. According to James Boswell, even Samuel Johnson’s trip to the Highlands in 1773 was designed as a kind of patent cure to Johnson’s anti-Caledonian prejudices. (Even after Boswell had persuaded Johnson to make the journey northwards, their friends regarded both of them as mad. ‘When I was at Ferney, in 1764,’ Boswell noted, ‘I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, “You do not insist on my accompanying you?” “No, sir.” “Then I am very willing you should go”.’)
Unsurprisingly, those travellers who did make the trip returned with stories which made Scotland and the Scots sound as aboriginally exotic as shark-eating Eskimos or man-eating pygmies. Their accounts of ‘seal people’, second sight and old women who sold winds to sailors perpetuated an image of Highlanders as wild seafaring men with an aptitude for survival and an almost total indifference to matters of personal hygiene. Most travellers were simultaneously disgusted by the crofters’ living conditions and astounded by their scholarship. Almost all usually returned to their native lands with a fondness for Gaeldom’s greatest liquid export, whisky.
By the late nineteenth century, Scotland had crept closer to England. Better transport and communication between the countries had lowered the image of the Highlands from being one of heather-clad savagery to something closer to a bunch of ginger-haired trolls with a fearsome interest in sheep. Writers, however, still found the place fascinating. The west’s stock of ready-formed stories enchanted everyone from Sir Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf, Stevenson to Orwell. The west left its mark on them, and their writing has left its mark on the west. Much of the tartan-and-teacake tourism around the Highlands is still based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s image of Argyll in Kidnapped—an image which was, in turn, based on his own time as a reluctant apprentice engineer on the isle of Earraid. And Compton Mackenzie’s tenure on Barra led to the ultimate wreckers’ text, Whisky Galore.
Briefly, Whisky Galore is the comic tale of two small Outer Hebridean islands during the Second World War. Great and Little Todday live according to the timetable of the sea, in which everything—birth, death, work, relationships—is dictated by the ferry schedule and the intermittent arrival of supplies from the mainland. Like most islanders, the inhabitants of the Toddays have also become skilled at making the best of unscheduled deliveries. ‘There was hardly a house on Little Todday which did not contain a certain amount of undeclared treasure trove from the sea,’ Mackenzie writes. ‘Turpentine, cheese, lard, ti
nned asparagus, salt (very salt) butter, tyres, pit props, paper, tomato juice, machine oil, lifebelts, in fact almost everything that could be thought of except spirituous liquors.’ This being wartime, the island’s inhabitants are subject to the same strict rationing as the rest of the country, and despite their desultory attempts at temperance, are now down to the last few drops of whisky.
Matters on the island have reached crisis point when, fortuitously, the SS Cabinet Minister runs ashore in the Sound of Todday while en route to America. On board are 50,000 cases of whisky for export. The islanders react predictably, working night and day to ‘liberate’ the whisky before either the official salvors or the mainland customs officers can stop them: ‘It may be doubted if such a representative collection of various whiskies has ever been assembled before . . . there were spherical bottles and dimpled bottles and square bottles and oblong bottles and flagon-shaped bottles and high-waisted bottles and ordinary bottles, and the glass of every bottle was stamped with a notice which made it clear that whisky like this was intended to be drunk in the United States of America and not by the natives of the land where it was distilled, matured, and blended.’
Some they drank immediately, some got sold off to friends on the mainland, but most was hidden around the two islands: ‘Peat stacks became a little larger than they usually were at this time of year. Ricks suggested that the cattle had eaten less hay than usual this winter. Loose floorboards were nailed down. Corks bobbed about in waters where hitherto none had bobbed. Turf recently disturbed was trodden level again as carefully as on a golf-course.’ Meanwhile, the island’s sole law enforcer, the humourless Captain Waggett, did his utmost to ensure that the looting was stopped and the offenders prosecuted. Sooner or later, the peat stacks had been drunk dry and Captain Waggett had exacted his legal hangover.
The Wreckers Page 17