We had anchored about fifty yards inshore from where the Spanish galleon had been sunk, and when we landed and went, by chance, to the Mishnish Hotel on the front, the proprietor showed us a piece of African blackwood which had once been part of the sea-going might of Spain. For after the defeat of the Armada in 1588 many galleons had come up the west coast of Scotland, and in certain outlying islands there are supposed to be discerned in some of the inhabitants to this day physical characteristics of a somewhat Spanish cast.
A legend of grandeur and knightliness centred round that old Spain, and you can see the process of transition into the folk conception in the song The Spanish Lady, which I had heard only in Ireland—until, the night before I bought my boat, Eoin had sung it in Skye with all the Irish vivacity. Curiously enough he had first heard the song sung by his mother in Skye when he was a little boy, and she certainly had never been in touch with Ireland.
Now to give a true scholar’s interpretation of this word ‘folk’, I should like to quote from the Introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands, orally collected by J. F. Campbell, himself a great traveller and student of the folklore of many lands.‘. . . it may be said that there are hundreds of other books as well known in England as those mentioned above, of which neither I nor my collectors have ever found a trace. . . . There are no gorgeous palaces, and elegant fairies; there are no enchanters flying in chariots drawn by winged griffins; there are no gentle knights and gentle dames; no spruce cavaliers and well-dressed ladies; no heroes and heroines of fashionable novels; but, on the contrary, everything is popular. Heroes are as wild, and unkempt, and savage as they probably were in fact, and kings are men as they appear in Lane’s translations of the Arabian Nights.’
Mr. Campbell collected his tales round about 1860, so he did not know of our fashionable novels which do in fact attempt to bring to life well-known figures from the past, and even to translate them into the present, whereby, say, Helen of Troy may be readily understood in Mayfair. But being done in an ultra-smart fashion and with the witty idea of debunking greatness, the result is perhaps a trifle anaemic; certainly nothing like this:
The Spanish Lady
As I walked down through Dublin City
At the hour of twelve of the night,
Who should I spy but a Spanish lady
Washing her feet by candle light.
First she washed them, then she dried them,
O‘er a fire of amber coal,
In all my life I ne’er did see
A maid so neat about the sole.
Whack for the too-ra loo-ra lady
Whack for the too-ra loo-ra lee,
Whack for the too-ra loo-ra lady,
Whack for the too-ra loo-ra lee.
As I came back through Dublin City
At the hour of half-past eight,
Who should I spy but a Spanish lady
Brushing her hair in broad daylight;
First she tossed it, then she brushed it,
On her lap was a silver comb,
In all my life I ne’er did see
So fair a maid since I did roam.
Whack, etc.
As I went down through Dublin City
When the sun began to set,
Who should I see but a Spanish lady
Catching a moth in a golden net;
When she saw me then she fled me,
Lifting her petticoat over the knee,
In all my life I ne’er did spy
A maid so blithe as the Spanish lady.
Whack, etc.
The galleon had sunk in Tobermory Bay after an explosion, and was believed to hold treasure to the value of well over a quarter of a million sterling. Three hundred and fifty officers and men are said to have gone down with her. She settled in clay to a depth of thirty feet, and many abortive efforts were made to recover the treasure, until, in 1912, modern salvage gear did fish up some goblets, dishes, and coins, if not the vast treasure itself.
The landlord being not only a good host but a very knowledgeable one, Walsh and he were soon deep in a discussion concerning the disposition of the Highland clans in this part of the world, Macleans, Clanranalds, an’ all. Mull is Maclean land and, besides its interesting history, is reputed to be one of the most beautiful of all the western islands. Many a time in a spirited céilidh had we roared out the chorus of
An t’ Eilean Muilleach (The Isle of Mull)
The Isle of Mull is of isles the fairest,
Of ocean’s gems ‘tis the first and rarest;
Green grassy island of sparkling fountains,
Of waving woods and high tow’ring mountains.
Tho’ far from home I am now a ranger,
In grim Newcastle a doleful stranger,
The thought of thee stirs my heart’s emotion,
And deeper fixes its fond devotion.
Dr. Johnson: ‘A most dolorous country.’
For ourselves, after spending many days on its coasts, we sing the song with greater fervour than ever, even if we missed the fountains.
The water front of Tobermory, with its sickle of houses, has a slightly foreign appearance—but this may be due to no more than that it was deliberately built as a fishing station in 1788. The streets on the steep slopes above the front are well laid out and very clean, with red postal boxes and tidy gardens. Trees are everywhere around the bay, which is wide and spacious and an excellent anchorage, being protected on its exposed or eastern side by the island of Calve. By the northern entrance yachts and steamers of all sizes come and go. Our concern over our guests reaching Oban the following day was immediately dispelled when we discovered a twice-daily steamer service to that town—on one trip the twenty-four miles being covered in about an hour and a half. So we stretched our legs on the steep slopes of the town and, proceeding inland, discovered an undulating wooded country not unlike that of the south-west of Ireland.
We had some excellent fresh fish for supper, and congratulated the landlord on such evidence of local enterprise, telling him of our difficulties in this respect on the West. He smiled. ‘Unless a trawler drops in, we get all our white fish from Aberdeen. That’s from Aberdeen.’
So he had the laugh on us. Once up in Kinlochbervie I explained how I had seen crofting housewives buying Aberdeen fish from a roadside van, while some friends were out in a boat in the bay getting quite a good catch. ‘How nice it must be’, said the Crew wistfully, ‘to have plenty of money.’
Towards evening several yachts came in, all under auxiliary power, white, blue, lovely craft. They floated in with assurance, took soundings, slid ahead, found the desired spot, dropped anchor, and, with a boil of reverse, paid out chain. So quietly, so efficiently done! I felt we had no right to be here at all. What to us was a long-drawn-out anxiety and excitement was to them a normal performance, like taking a booked seat in a theatre. And when at night they lowered their flags and hung out their riding lights, humiliation could do little more than have an amused smile to itself. Having seen a three-light navigation lamp on board, I had in these early busy days possibly assumed the existence of a riding light. But there was no riding light. We had, however, a three-and-sixpenny storm lantern (or so it was called) and about eleven o’clock at night, when I thought nobody was looking, I stole out and hung it up on the forestay. There was a thick smirr of rain, a heavy sky, and a moderate wind. I watched the wick flutter till my head got wet. Then I ducked into the cabin and with an electric torch—the only other light on board—saw the Crew’s concern for my difficulty; whereat we both laughed, and the water being hot in the kettle—it had a habit of being hot about this time—I brewed such a soothing draught as no other craft could produce in that bay, and we drank it as we lay in our bunks looking out through the grey light of the open doors.
This last hot drink with a slow cigarette was the day’s luxury, its perfect all-reconciling end. We envied nobody anything. We realised, in the warmth of that beneficent concoction, that yachting with two or three white-capped professionals, who know every anchorage, was doubtless very pleasant, but also very easy. God bless them, we were doing grand! And we had lured our two friends through some of the finest scenery in Scotland in order to take them round one of its stormiest headlands, killing in the process any tendency towards either boredom or museful rhapsodizing by making them hunt rocks and buoys, study charts, and hope for the best. The engine lay in a bad, perhaps a ruinous, condition, and the boat was making far too much water for comfort, but, after all, we were here, and with luck and decent weather we might go farther. The weather had certainly been broken, so there was always the chance it might mend. On Eigg last year they had had months of perfect weather, blue skies and sparkling seas, until they had thought it was never going to end.
I went out for my last look around. The lights were still bright in the Mishnish hotel, where our friends were safely housed. Farthest out in the bay, the S. Y. Killarney was a blaze in every porthole, and as I stood there the orchestra played ‘God save the King’ to its army of trippers. Very wonderful she looked in the grey night light with its smother of fine rain. Not far from her a puffer had come to anchor. A sailing yacht of ten to fifteen tons, all white and beautifully lined, lay light in the water as a seabird; and in from her, a blue yacht of about the same size, was already asleep. Other craft, larger and smaller, swung to their riding lights; and our friend the schooner, a dark hulk on the grey water, lay in a friendly way close to us. The contrast between puffer and schooner on the one hand and the pleasure craft on the other was strangely marked, and one’s heart went out to those toilers who do so much to keep the whole show going. I glanced at our own light, an uncertain feeble flicker, but burning still. ‘What are you smiling at?’ said the Crew. No one could see anyone smiling in the dark. But there are moments when she is like that.
I ran into the skipper of the schooner the following morning. He was a disappointed man, though with the undemonstrative toughness or endurance that goes with the Glasgow accent. In such an encounter, you can read the whole history of the Clyde. The accent may not have what is deemed polish or suavity, but it has pith and nearly always a natural gaiety or optimism. It is the speech of men of brains who make things with their hands. Fine obliging men to meet, too, prepared to be friendly, and at their best doing you a good turn. There is a similar sort of gaiety or optimism in the Cockney, perhaps; though he may have lost that toughness of fibre that naturally enough characterises the engineer, for metropolitan shopkeeping has other needs. The schooner carried a hundred tons of coal and supplied lighthouses and odd merchants in outlying places. The previous Saturday, when I knew there had been a good swell running, she had actually gone into the narrow rocky fissure that is the harbour for Ardnamurchan lighthouse.
‘Surely you had difficulty in getting in?’
‘No. There’s a foot or two to spare on each hand.’
‘But the swell?’
‘Ay. Ye’ve got to watch that.’
That wasn’t his trouble now. At six o‘clock this morning he had set off for Kilhoan with a few tons of coal for a merchant—to find that the puffer had beaten him to it, and as two vessels could not unload at the same time, there had been nothing for him to do but come back and wait. The loss of a whole day! ‘If only I’d guessed, I’d have been off at four,’ he said, a philosophic grudge in his voice. He had a 40 h.p. Kelvin engine, reconditioned four years ago. ‘No; no trouble,’ he assured me, ‘and it has done thousands of miles now.’ He deserved that piece of luck.
Lying at the jetty was an old smack with the lovely name of Anna Bhan (Fair Anna). She was being tarred all over before running forty tons of gravel to Coll.
So Tobermory presented its contrasts.
Altogether it was an island of contrasts. Once Mull carried a population of 8,000, I was told, whereas now it is little over 2,000 (2,388 in 1931), and of that total Tobermory itself accounts for 800. How did the population diminish? I wish I could think of some new answer. And the attitude of the inhabitants themselves? Those of the older generation will tell you that the young will not stay. It is not only now an economic problem, but a defeatist or psychological problem. And that lands us back in history again.
For Mull is indeed a self-contained island garden when compared, say, with the Faroes, a group of a score of islands lying away towards the Arctic Circle some two hundred miles north-west of the Shetlands. But in these treeless isles with their deep fiords and dangerous currents, there is an industrious and thriving population of nearly 26,000. Yet their total area is only 540 square miles against Mull’s 350. In the last ten years the increase in the population of the Faroes is about 50 per cent. greater than the total Mull population. It is the sort of sum in arithmetic that those forever crying for outside aid might ponder before delivering themselves positively of the right answer.
Our visitors departed at four o’clock for Oban by the S.S. King George V, and once the vessel had slid from the pier, the Crew turned away saying it was not lucky to stand and wave. Perhaps it is not very easy, when you are sorry to see good friends going.
So I tried to get hold of the mechanic who had been recommended to me, and, by one of the coincidences that are stranger than fiction, discovered it was he who had sold the Thistle to the man from whom I had bought her in Skye. Incidentally I found out a great deal more, in particular the date of the sale, the price paid, and the age of some of the gear. I felt a bit of a fool. Though, after all, I had no one to blame but myself, for I could have checked up details before concluding my bargain. But that would have been tedious, and life is short.
The engineer and I spent a day and a half on the engine. He was trained in a Glasgow engineering shop, and it was interesting to see how he set about the work. What had been done and what had not been done were made perfectly clear. He remembered the very bolts he himself had put in and demonstrated how they had been misplaced. The chain on the reverse gear was so stretched that it was inclined to hit the casing. He had a good second-hand chain, and in his workshop he made a bolt for it, threaded the bolt, holed it for a splitpin, and fitted the lot satisfactorily. With rusted bolts, he had a slow persuasive way, and they all obeyed him. Our ultimate fear was the discovery of a broken ball race, for in such a case we should undoubtedly be held up for many days, as Glasgow was our nearest depot.
At the end of ten hours’ concentrated labour on that first day, with most of the engine adrift, we discovered that the terrific machine-gun racket which had heralded our arrival had been caused by the flywheel hitting a small projecting part of the tin pan underneath it and could have been put right by a decent kick!
However, we also discovered so many things done badly that the long labour was worth while. I was feeling pretty tired from the continuous cramped stooping, and, on tightening the coupling bolts of the shaft, let the spanner slip under strain, and so came full tilt against the engine, splitting a temple and piercing my left ear. After a time I got the bleeding stopped and felt that now that the brute had had blood, she might behave more reasonably. On the trial trip, the following afternoon, she again stopped suddenly on coming to anchor. The engineer took the pilot jet adrift and underneath the gauze found the accumulated dirt of years. No wonder slow-running had been difficult!
I paid my bill with pleasure, and would suggest to any yachtsman in trouble with his engine in Tobermory that he need not despair so long as Mr. Ogilvy is there to assist him. With sufficient time and scrap, he might even build him a new one!
So we were due a day or two’s holiday. I felt like going to sea with the lobster fishers, but the time was unfortunate, for they were ‘making nothing of it’. They were fishing from beyond Ardnamurchan to well down the Sound of Mull, and one man, to whom we spoke, after a last fruitless round had taken all his creels home with him in despair.
The weather worsened, too, and the bay was soon filled with yachts. The Highland voices of the crews came across the water as they made all shipshape and here and there put out a second anchor. As we lay inactive in a downpour that lasted nearly two days, the sight of such wealth somehow became depressing. A thousand insignificant strokes etched the picture of contrasts. The island gulls were in great evidence; scavengers waiting for the buckets to be emptied. Whenever one dived by a yacht’s side, even at an empty match box, all the others were upon it. You could see their constant eager watchfulness lest they miss anything. A mute swan, also on the watch, would eat out of your hand. The black eye, snail-black boss on the beak, the reptile-like fringe at the sides of the mouth—a scavenger, too. Dependent on the tourist industry. I thought of the puffins and guillemots heading out of Loch Sunart in formation as of a life swift and clean and fearless.
An honest Glasgow voice told a story with simple wonder of an Islander who was so overwhelmed with pleasure when he saw his chieftain-landlord coming that he would throw his bonnet into the ditch and, bowing low, run eagerly to meet him.
‘What ye’d call a serf?’ he questioned.
‘It’s more complicated than that,’ I suggested. ‘Serfs don’t usually run to meet their masters.’
‘Unless—they think they’re going to get something?’
‘They didn’t get much.’
‘No, but—ach t’hell, anyway.’
‘Quite so.’
And there followed a passage or two of history. The Scots are pretty good at history. Which, perhaps, is why most of them mistrust it. For it is full of facts, most of them ugly.
It is full of other things, too, but they tend to get lost or mislaid. Descendants of the MacVurichs, bards to Clanranald, may still be found in Tobermory, and a very intelligent merchant assured me that there is one who still extemporises poetry and recently produced a broadside of satiric contemporary verse that split his sides. Also one who knows all the history not only of this part of the world, with its clans and chiefs and battles long ago, but also of Ireland, thus uniting in himself the old seanachaidh, the complete Gael. But the true inwardness here is difficult to penetrate, without time and some knowledge, particularly of Gaelic. For the normal tourist, it is impossible to penetrate, being beyond picturesqueness or the presence of unusual personal attributes, good or bad. For here, I suppose, nothing less than a whole way of civilisation got lost or mislaid.
When the rain ceased I picked out all the putty round the skylight windows with a chisel, while the Crew followed me, cleaning and reputtying. With the sun shining, the bay, tricked out in wooded slopes and shimmering yachts, looked a lovely sight, and life a dancing holiday. Gloom and sunlight: perhaps you need the one for the other, and whenever you get too much of the one, the other seems very precious. The Crew, with shattering extravagance, presented a young lettuce to the swan. ‘After all the dry biscuits and things,’ she explained. The swan agreed. Then she drew my attention to the beauty of the gulls, as they circled and heeled, very white in the sun. ‘You had better give them some of your “Macnair’s Crax”’, I suggested, referring to a private hoard of very special biscuits. But she only laughed. If she did not care so much for things that crept or leapt or flew or grew it would make life simpler often.
She had a new oilskin cloth sort of decoration for the cabin walls behind the bunks. ‘Its pure white tones with the pantry box,’ she observed. ‘It will keep away any drips, too.’ Clearly she had not been idle ashore while we had slaved away at the engine. If only we had been able to get the boat on to a slipway, we should probably have found the offending nail or two responsible for the bilge leak. However, the amount coming in was not alarming and the new pump was working effectively. Actually the boat had been very little used in her long life—apart from the last two or three years in Skye—and under Mr. Ogilvy’s ownership she had been oiled and varnished so thoroughly that I at last understood why paint chipped easily off her hull. A simple all-round overhaul and she would still be an excellent sea boat. When my brother arrived for ten days, we were ready to give her a further trial.