We waited for the 10.30 a.m. broadcast to shipping—some day a great or simple man will give the B.B.C. its high due—and were told that the visibility would grow less and the wind freshen. So by eleven we were trying to disentangle the anchor chains in the midst of a nest of boats, for a pretty red sailing yacht had come to rest dead astern, blocking the north passage. The sixty-pound anchor I managed single-handed to break out, haul over the bows, and stow astern; then, with the engine running, I felt for the small anchor, waited for the swing round of the boat, hauled away rapidly, and dived for the engine. Mercifully, she took the load and we threaded our way for the south channel against the tide. I had lost a good hour and a pint of sweat, but we waved to our friends gaily and so bade farewell to the bright island of Eigg.
We had already seen that there was a bit of a sea running outside, but in a rash moment we had arranged to meet friends at Arisaig, and go we must, while going was possible. A squall struck us as we came off the south corner of Castle Island and we rolled heavily, shipping some water over the high deck. The wind was certainly freshening and there were white caps ahead. This was the first time we had encountered a heavy sea, and as we came broadside to it, the Crew had to hold on with both hands. For a time the plunging roll was fairly violent, and I had to crawl forward on hands and knees, warily, to lash the anchor, while the Crew struggled valiantly with the tiller. It was then I got the feeling that she was a good sea boat. Subsequent events proved this, but even on that day if I helped her at all she rose up and bowed as pretty as you like. And she needed help sometimes, for we did, in truth, get a bad tossing. The rain showers came in squalls from the south, not only whipping up the seas in an ugly way but blotting out the mainland, until at last we lost altogether the landmarks by which we were to know the entrance to Arisaig. I suppose I kept nosing up to heavy seas more than I was quite aware, and when the Crew had performed her trapeze act past the engine into the cabin, and returned with the compass, I saw we were heading considerably south of east instead of points north of it, as we should be doing by the chart—though it was now not an easy matter to consult it properly, for we had no shelter and the helm required all my attention. There had been one very alarming moment, when I had heard a rush of mechanism and felt a sudden vibration under my feet. But before the trip was over I got used to this racing of the propeller, and the old engine refused to take the prank seriously.
The rain set in steadily and the mainland was almost continuously blotted out. It got very cold, too, and the water looked anything but an inviting element. I had one or two nice problems set me for the first time. For instance, I felt I was going in the right direction, and wondered if the compass was being affected by the near vicinity of the heavy anchor and chain. I tried vainly to test this by shifting the compass, but it was hardly the moment for experiment. I trusted the compass, of course, and presently satisfied myself that we were heading for Loch nan Uamh, south of Arisaig Point, between which and the island of Luing Vore lay our entrance. And here the Sailing Directions had one of its capital little notes, for it said of this island that it was ‘the only one in the vicinity which shows trees on its summit’. We therefore simply could not go wrong.
But we soon realised how different is an indented mainland coast, with islets and rocks off it everywhere, from an island in the ocean! We held north but could neither be certain of Arisaig Point nor of any island conforming to the size and appearance of Luing Vore. Yet by our time, we should have had the Point abeam before this. I was completely baffled and stood along the coast, with masses of floating seaweed here and there, and, rising out of the obscurity ahead, a nest of large rocks spouting spume. I could doubtless make Mallaig or Loch Nevis but I wanted to make Arisaig, and none the less so that the Sailing Directions considered a detail chart essential! ‘Written instructions would only confuse, as the coastline is so broken up, and the rocks and islets are bewildering. The detail chart 2817, is the only sure guide, and it would be well to make this harbour for the first time at L.W. or soon after, when the reefs are showing.’ But it also mentioned the trees on the island and said there were poles to mark the ‘very narrow and winding’ channel to Arisaig, even if ‘the marks are on the highest parts of the rocks and not on the shoal water’. Which sounded clear!
Though it was impossible to stand without holding on, the Crew was doing her best with the glasses, but in the rain and haze they were useless. However, suddenly she drew my attention to some Scots firs on a low summit well behind us. I was now quite certain that we had passed Arisaig Point, even if we hadn’t seen the island. I had yet to find out that when a coastal island lies between you and the mainland, it is generally impossible to distinguish it from the mainland. I had observed those trees before coming to them, but, as they had seemed to be well inland, hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, however, as we glanced back, they at least appeared somewhat isolated, and as the engine was behaving very well, I decided to have a proper look at them.
I watched my chance in the seas, and she came round beautifully. I was delighted with this manoeuvre, and though there was a mighty difference between running before the sea and plunging into it head on, I found the difference very exhilarating. The spray came flying over her bows, but actually we shipped very little. She really had a gallant way of going into it, and when she heaved and plunged and did a complicated rolling-sliding movement as well, you never doubted the central stability, just as you never doubt it in an acrobat, even when the heart is in the mouth. And an extra good effort did call for applause! ‘A pretty good boat, this of ours!’ I shouted to the Crew. She smiled, clearly at the stage of nearly believing it, but still with a certain pale reserved judgment. I was surprised to find that my own lips were a bit dry and sticky; but then added to the excitement of the boat’s motion was, I suppose, a deep-seated anxiety as to reaching our anchorage, while if anything went wrong with the mass of mechanism, minus its splitpins, we should certainly now be in a nice plight. Yet somehow this state of exhilaration produces an unconquerable optimism, and all one’s muscles are alive to the last cell. I had heard of staid phlegmatic fishermen, in an all-in fight with the sea, develop an incredible activity and instancy, become truly inspired. In the end, the skipper does not speak: he moves a hand.
We came abreast of the trees, still looking as if they were on the mainland, and kept going, always with enough room about us in which to manœuvre, for I had to bear in mind the possibility of having to set our small sail and run before everything for Sleat Sound. At last I stood in for the place with the trees, keeping about half a cable length off some rocks at the south corner, where the chart (assuming this was Luing Vore—or as the chart spells it Luinga Mhor—for the variety of Gaelic spellings in the Sailing Directions and Admiralty charts must be enough to make a real Gaelic scholar forever despair) shows seven and eight fathoms, and then made over for the opposite shore, where the sailing depth ran inland from what was presumably Arisaig Point. After going for a mile or so, the place with the trees did begin to look like an island and I felt convinced that we were right. It must have been about half tide or more, for much of the shoal ground was covered. And so began the hunt for the guiding poles—those with a cross for our port side and with a circle for starboard, after first of all picking up a plain perch.
But we never picked up that plain perch—and we were now on the inland waterway, with rocks and shoals and land everywhere. We could not keep going full speed ahead, and I did reduce our way a little by retarding the spark, but I feared as yet to touch the throttle. When we saw a house ahead of us and a hill behind it, we searched despairingly for a pole or even any decent sign of a continuous passage, but could find none. We must stop. Which meant trying to get her into neutral until we should have time to see properly where we were. Which might mean—resort to the brush handle, or worse, in a narrow tidal way. I did actually dive to the engine, put my hand out to the throttle and then draw back, deciding on a further hundred yards and one last look around. It was a successful look, for I picked up a perch with a cross on our port bow. It was a pleasant moment, and a complete triumph over the Crew, who prides herself on a true far-sightedness. ‘They’re no use,’ she said, putting the glasses away.
It was great fun after that, picking up pole after pole—for they are widely spaced—on the three-mile channel winding its narrow way amid innumerable rocks.
When at last we emerged, the rain gone, and saw the houses and trees of lovely Arisaig, we felt masters of the situation. The sheltered waters were little more than darkened by the wind and we began looking for some sort of harbour. The chart showed ‘Arisaig Harbour’ right in on the starboard hand, but we could not even see a jetty. However, when we picked up a red buoy lying well inshore, I put her at it, and in due time I resigned the helm to the Crew, reduced the throttle speed nonchalantly, pulled the lever without any difficulty into neutral, ran her on the last of her seaway up into the wind at a reasonable distance from the buoy, while the Crew took a sounding of nearly two fathoms, dropped the anchor carefully, paid out chain at my leisure, then stopped the engine, as if we had been doing this sort of thing perfectly all the days of our lives! It was worth some laughter and, in truth, we were as delighted with ourselves as children.
There is, by the way, no pier or jetty. You go ashore in your dinghy and scramble up over the weed. But there is an excellent shop where you get everything, except perhaps two of the most indispensable of all things—fresh vegetables and eggs. In any case there were none for sale when we were there, but this was a lack that dogged us all over the West, even in busy tourist places. No wonder the Crew had exclaimed, like a traveller in a desert, at sight of the oasis of cabbage lettuces in Eigg! And such lettuces, with such hearts! Is there any place in the British Isles—excepting certain areas of Ireland—where more succulent vegetables or sweeter flavoured berries can be grown than in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland? And is there any place where they are grown less? But one would at least expect in a normal tourist centre, such as Arisaig, that some local gardener or crofter would try to meet a seasonal demand, even if he was not partial to such cow fodder (as I thereabouts heard it called) himself. Apparently not, for when we accidentally encountered some Glasgow friends, they said they had hunted green food in vain. We never did manage to buy West Coast fresh fish on the West Coast—but then there may be no fresh fish there (apart from those that deliver themselves up to trawlers). But of that again, for meantime I had got in touch with the hotel keeper, a true host, who made no more difficulty over cashing a cheque than over providing a large tankard of true and frothful draught. He had lettuces for table, too—and grown, I should say, in his own garden. May it increase. Then I wired an old friend, Maurice Walsh, news of our landfall, as we had had a few adventures in our day together, and he and his wife were anxious to see what ploy we were up to now. I had no sooner done that than we ran into a poet and his wife, who entertained us right splendidly. Had we met Mr. L. A. G. Strong? He had a house thereabouts. Oh, a real writer’s haunt. And artists, too. . . .
After the few nights on a shore bed, it was surprisingly pleasant to be back on the water again, feeling the swing of the boat, hearing the night birds cry, and watching the glass falling. The rain was terrific that first night, and at 3 a.m. I was back at the old game of stopping a leak and making a hot drink (and liking its flavour no better). We both slept profoundly and awoke to a windy sea.
Presently a ship’s dinghy, bobbing like a cork, was discerned making its way towards us, and when I was handed a telegram, I only thanked the thin dapper grey-clipped man, with the yachting cap. He saluted and swung away again, shipping little more than a broken wave-top, and so danced back to land. Quite a remarkable performance, and in my astonishment I had shown a lamentable lack of hospitality. ‘Pretty smart postal service!’ said the Crew.
But I discovered him again on the beach, whittling a wooden stock for a small anchor, and we had a real sea talk. He asked me, in the usual Highland way, where I had come from. I told him and said it had been blowing pretty hard.
He agreed, adding, ‘But of course you would know the passage in?’
‘No, I came in on the chart—and was troubled a bit because the scale was small.’
‘The Ardnamurchan to Small Isles chart?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me. ‘You’ll have a good crew with you?’
‘Just my wife.’
The hands with the stick dropped a foot. ‘You are the hardy gentleman,’ said he. And even if he had meant foolhardy (which he didn’t quite), I was still prepared to extract flattery out of it!
He had once been yachtsman to a certain gentleman on this coast, he told me, and had got him to build a special craft for it. She was fifty feet long but with no greater draught than three feet six inches. The right thing for some of these lochs with their shoal water, as I would understand. ‘Well, one afternoon along he comes and says we were leaving for Oban at six o’clock that night. I told him we couldn’t leave because it was blowing too hard. He laughed at me. So he was thinking I might be frightened, perhaps? I said no more. Very good. We set out. But rounding Ardnamurchan in the dark she would go over so far that you couldn’t see in the world how she would ever right herself. . . I am glad to say it wasn’t me only that was frightened then.’
This was very encouraging, but better was to follow, for he told me that when he himself was in doubt or difficulty over an entrance or picking up a perch or a buoy, the strain upon him became such that he could not speak to anyone. As my sympathy was very real, he there on the foreshore relived the very mood, until words failed him, and half-turning to the sea he made a gesture with the wooden stick and shook his head. How I wished the Crew had been there!
But these men know the sudden moods of that western sea. And when he finished up with: ‘You should have one other man aboard whatever’, I realised, I think, the experience out of which he talked.
When we met Maurice Walsh and his wife at the railway station, they were enchanted with their trip across country from Fort William, surely one of the finest pieces of natural scenery to be encountered anywhere. And in sun and cloud and a healthy wind, Arisaig was looking very well indeed. They were on their way back to Dublin, and I hoped to take them as far as Oban. But clearly we could not tackle Ardnamurchan Head—the storm centre of all this land—in this wind, so in due course we set off to explore the country between Arisaig and Mallaig.
As you leave Arisaig and come over the hill looking down on Back o’ Keppoch, the view is very striking, not only of the mainland but of Eigg with its thousand-foot cliff, Rum of the mountains, and, far to the north-west, the headlands of Loch Bracadale, which we now knew so well, with all Skye northward and the Cuillin and Red Hills in purple. Everywhere white caps were racing on a glittering blue-green sea. We were gaining a little knowledge of this magical corner of the world, and inwardly I knew that months should be devoted to it. The restless desire to keep on visiting one island after another was wrong. No corner of the earth yields its secrets to the tripper. There is the first dramatic look, exquisite and forever memorable, but the crowding of one such moment on another is a form of cinematic debauch that in the end kills the deep motive powers of wonder and curiosity and puts a surface taste for crude sensationalism in their place.
How lovely that Morar country is! I don’t mean merely the famed sands—though we counted every variety of sea-colour over them, from a real yellow, through browns and greens, to a sparkling blue—but the moors, the turns and twists of road or path, the canna blowing in the wind, the wealth of wild flowers, the little strange intimate corners of peat bog; there, a red cow eating can convey the idea of Egyptian timelessness. And the hills, their lines flowing and merging. Morar River has its spell where the green water breaks into white over the cascading rocks. To spend a day there on one’s back, with sun and warm wind for happiness, or grey gloom for strange thought, might be an experience worth having stored away against the day when life seems drab and mechanical.
The herring nets, set to dry on the roadside fences, met us about four miles from Mallaig. I have heard Mallaig spoken of as an end dump. And it can look uninviting enough on a wet day, and such architecture as it has may not be exactly a tribute to its situation; but still it deals with the sea and deep-sea fishing boats and is a depot—a famed name—for fishermen in these western seas. They can ‘make for Mallaig’. Which should be enough for anyone. The miles of net guided us all the way in till we saw the town down below, the water breaking green round the rock off the harbour entrance, a few small yachts at anchor in the basin, in front of them two drifters with mizzens set, the Lochmor at the pier, a train engine puffing, a crane cranking, and a great crowd of screaming gulls. There was something very bright about it. Our friends were delighted with this sudden evidence of life and work at the end of so lovely a road. A man was packing mackerel in boxes with ice so busily that he had no time to speak to anyone; clearly the mood of one avid to make money out of a not very hopeful speculation. There was a gutting machine that could gut and wash and split over sixty herring a minute for kippering; a very neat piece of mechanism, though I prefer the product smoked rather than dyed in vats. Then I ran into the engineer whom I had met in Eigg and he took me to a marine shop, where I got a supply of splitpins, sparking plugs, and two holding-down bolts. Thereupon we adjourned to where many seamen were gathered together, and I discovered the other side to the bright picture.
For the herring fishing was a failure. At this time of the year there should have been fifty or sixty drifters lying out there instead of two. Mallaig is an all-the-year depot for deep-sea fishing.
You could feel this lack of life, this concern with a box or two of mackerel, where there should have been a throb of life round gutting stations overflowing from good shots of herring, everyone working at high pressure with the excitement of taking part in a magnificent game of chance. In the old days of the sailing boats, what a nimble-footed throng, what jostling and rustle of women gutters’ oilskins, what gaiety!
‘Aye, and there were the local seasons, too. Think of the Tiree fishing bank itself, for cod and ling. The East Coast boats used to go through there, even from small places in Caithness. They had little huts and lived there while the season lasted, catching their fish, splitting them, and drying them on the rocks. Nothing of that now. They say the trawlers have cleaned the banks out.’
‘They say anything, but dammit if the West Coaster had any spunk left in him, he wouldn’t go blaming the trawler. The only thing he’s good at is getting the dole, and he’s a dab hand at that.’
There was a short laugh, for stories of ‘wangling’ the dole by a clever ‘faking’ of insurable employment provided a touch of humour in most places, though one could always feel the underlying spirit of condemnation.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said an old fisherman, whose sea days were manifestly over, ‘but it was a hard life in the old days. We had our good times, but the life was hard. Take the small line itself. You were no sooner home than you had to start in to redd the line, then to put on tippings and lost hooks, then to shell the mussels, and then start in to bait the six hundred hooks. And after that a few hours in bed—and off again. You have your engines now—no calms, no hanging on the oars, no head winds. And not a hook to bait. It’s fair pampered ye are, if you ask me.’ And his old eyes twinkled.
‘God, I don’t know,’ said a fine limber man of about forty-five, obviously a skipper, with the grey salt of the sea on a fold of his blue jersey. ‘Even the seine net is as hard work, and more constant, than the old winter-fishing small line. You’re at it the whole time. The engine merely compels you to work the harder. You’ve got to keep going. Why? For a reason you never had in the old days: overhead expenses. The Bank won’t let you off your interest. And it sees you pay your insurance company. And your gear—it doesn’t stand up to the wear and tear long. And if you run an engine, you don’t run it on air. You had hard times in the old days certainly. No one is denying that. But you hadn’t this—threatening thing—behind you.’
‘That’s so,’ said the old man quietly. ‘But we often had our own debts and they seemed heavy enough sometimes.’
‘That’s so,’ said the skipper soberly. ‘When things are going against you, it’s bad enough, whatever the age. We’ve got to do with it as it will do with us.’
‘Unless you go in for the dole,’ said the man who had already referred to this topic. He was a youngish, red-necked, strong fellow, and obviously had a story to tell. He did tell it, too; about three fellows who were employed to barrow stones, so that when their wealthy employer decided to build a dyke round his house the stones would be all in one place.
‘Digging the old hole to fill it up again!’
‘Never mind. Their employer—’
‘Who was their employer?’
‘Their employer was an Old Age Pensioner.’
There was a hearty laugh at that.
‘Come on, you’ll have another glass of beer,’ added the red-necked man, who had clearly a humour of his own.
‘No, no, Dan,’ said the skipper. ‘It’s high time we were off, boy.’
‘Where were you shot last night?’ asked the old man.
‘Off the north end of Skye,’ answered the skipper. ‘Three baskets of mackerel—that was all. I have never seen the herring scarcer.’
‘Oh, man?’
‘Yes. And I have never seen so many squeeb about.’
‘Ah, that explains it,’ said the old man. ‘I remember. . . ’