The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (14 page)

Eleven miles to the east is its partner island of North Rona,
yang
to Sula Sgeir’s
yin
: a tilted slab of green pasture which has been inhabited on and off for thousands of years by saints, farmers, shepherds and naturalists. St Ronan, one of the early Celtic Christian monks who travelled by the seaways, is supposed to have been the first dweller on North Rona, arriving there as part of his search for ‘a place of his own resurrection’ (in the phrasing of the
peregrini
). Ruins of a chapel supposedly raised by him remain.

Journeys of varying purpose have been made for thousands of years on that northerly bearing, along that sea road leading up from the Butt of Lewis to Sula Sgeir and North Rona. On first sighting the two islands from the south, it feels as if you have sailed into a parable. There they are, forty or more miles out in the Atlantic and eleven miles apart. It’s implausible enough that land should exist there, in the empty water between Scotland and Iceland, and then surprising that the contrast between them should be so strong: green fertile Rona, black hostile Sula Sgeir. At a distance they appear more allegorical than real: the Pasture and the Rock – a choice offered to the seafarer. The earliest seafarers understandably chose the Pasture. St Ronan’s sister, Brenhilda, is alleged to have tried to live on Sula Sgeir: she was found dead with a seabird’s nest built inside her ribcage. Lesson learnt. Since Brenhilda, Sula Sgeir has been mostly left to the seals, fulmars, puffins, gannets – and, briefly each summer, to the men of Ness in North Lewis who come to the island for a fortnight to hunt the
guga
, the gannet chicks.

The first record of the
guga
hunt dates to 1549
, when the men rowed out in an open boat to cull the gannets and brought the bodies back as ballast. The tradition continues today, with very little change. Numbers vary: there are usually ten men, sometimes a dozen. But landfall is still made in the one possible landing place, in the main
geo
(bay) of Sula Sgeir, where the rock drops in a chute to the water. It’s still a perilous landing, but it’s the best on offer. When there’s any swell the
geo
becomes a choppy mass of waves moving in cross-directions, bouncing off the walls and mashing together. These days the bothies are covered with plastic, then tarpaulins, then netting, then weighted down with more stones. But the men still share the bothies with the petrels who nest in the crannies (charcoal-coloured birds with white-flashed tails, who spend all day at sea and come ashore with high cries at night). The men still wrap rags around their heads at night to stop the earwigs that infest the bothies from crawling into their ears. The two weeks on the island itself are still dangerous; the Sabbath remains a rest day.

The first day on the Rock is spent setting up, and then the cull begins. The men are tasked with different jobs: there are catchers, killers, scorchers, scrubbers, pluckers and pilers. The cliff-men head down, roped, on ledges slippery with guano, with long nooses on poles and cudgels in hand.
Reach, noose, grab, crack
. The corpses are returned to the summit of Sula Sgeir, where ‘the Factory’ has been established. The birds are plucked, singed, seared. Then their wings are chopped off, they’re scrubbed again, split open and emptied of their innards, and their evacuated bodies are placed on ‘the Pile’ – a great altar-cairn of
guga
corpses. So it proceeds. On the middle Sabbath comes rest, prayer and song. If summer storms blow in, the men sit them out in the bothies, for there’s no working the Rock in big wind or big waves. Once the effort is over, they sail south again for Lewis. Crowds await their landfall at the Ness harbour, eager to buy and eat the birds. On a
guga
hunter’s last visit to the Rock, before he becomes too old to return, he builds a cairn to mark his relationship with the island. Seen from the sea, Sula Sgeir’s outline is prickly with these cairns.

The
guga
that survive the harvest will, eventually, stagger down the cliff ledges until they fall off and splash into the sea. They are water-bound for a couple of weeks, riding the waves and fasting, until they are light enough to take flight and make their maiden voyages: winging down the west coast of Britain, the north-west peninsulas of France, through the Bay of Biscay, along the Atlantic facade, following their own sea roads – their migration paths – until at last they reach their winter home off West Africa.

For centuries the men reached Sula Sgeir by open boat, rowing or sailing. ‘There is in Ness a most venturous set of people who for a few years back, at the hazard of their lives, went [to the island] in an open six-oared boat without even the aid of a compass,’ wrote the Reverend Donald McDonald in a 1797 census report. The last group of
guga
men to reach Sula Sgeir under sail did so in the summer of 1953. Since then they have travelled in fishing trawlers: still a hard five-hour journey. The precise time of the
guga
hunters’ departure each year is, by tradition, a well-kept secret.

‘Time for an hour or two of the dark arts,’ said Ian, a few days after we had got back from the Shiants. He went upstairs and returned with three charts, a tidal atlas and what looked like a brass gannet’s skull with a wine cork on the end of its beak. He unrolled the charts on the kitchen table, opened the tidal atlas, popped the wine cork off the gannet’s beak and squeezed the skull’s hinged circle, such that the points of the dividers – for this is what they were – first crossed and then became legs, with which he could stride across the charts.

Sea charts, even more than land maps, can lure you into hubris. All that featureless water – what could possibly go wrong? On maps of mountainous terrain there are warnings: the hachures showing cliffs, the bunched contours indicating steep ground and fall-lines. Charts record headlands, skerries and mean depths of water, but because most sea features are volatile – temporary functions of wind, tide and current – there is no way of reliably charting them. The act of chart-reading, even more than the act of map-reading, is part data-collection and part occultism. Sailors, like mountaineers, practise their map clairvoyance based on intuition and superstition as well as on yielded information.

I watched Ian run his fingertips over the chart, tracing possible paths of sail, fathoming the future conditions of the sea based on memory and inference.
Given this wind, this boat, this crew … given that tide, given this tack …
The further you get from land, the longer you get into the journey, the more rapidly the hypotheticals multiply.
If we’ve failed to make this channel, that headland, by still water, by the turn of tide, we would have fled for here, or perhaps for there …
He read down through his fingertips, the chart’s flat blues and greens popping up into relief in his mind.
The waves here, at this time, in these conditions, will be unproblematic;
but here they will stand up straight and hard like a wall
. Wind-histories as well as wind-futures need to be taken into account, for the sea can have a long memory for past agitations. If a wind has blown strongly from a certain quarter for days, the sea’s motion will continue to register this even once the wind has dropped. It takes time to settle itself, to revise its inclinations.

The question preoccupying Ian was which sea road to follow next. The plan was, for sure, to sail out of Port of Ness on the far north of Lewis. From there, we would go either east round Cape Wrath and ‘across the top’ – the Pentland Firth – to Orkney: a thirty- to forty-hour continuous sail, one way. Or we would head due north, away up to Sula Sgeir and Rona. Ian placed one hand on top of the other and laid them on the chart, then looked off into mid-air. The shipping forecast murmured in the background:
Malin, Hebrides, Minch
.
Light southerly, 3 or 4. Cyclonic veering
south-south-easterly for a time.
‘Good wind strength for a small boat,’ he said. ‘Just a touch light, if anything.’

It took ninety minutes of assessing and second-guessing for him to arrive at a decision. Then he pinched the legs of the dividers together, pushed their sharp points back into the cork and laid them with a clunk across the chart.

North to Sula Sgeir, the Gannet Island, it was – and in
Jubilee
.

Jubilee
was a
sgoth Niseach
: a class of Lewisian working open boat, lug-rigged, clinker-built and double-ended, designed for sturdy seaworthiness up there off the Butt of Lewis, where the Atlantic currents meet the currents of the Minch. Twenty-seven feet long, she had been built in 1935 by the MacLeod family from Ness and had remained a Ness boat for decades, before being re-registered to Stornoway. She was, really, a larger cousin of
Broad Bay
, and she was the boat in which the last
guga
hunters to reach Sula Sgeir under sail had travelled. ‘I’ve spoken to one of the men who took
Jubilee
to Sula Sgeir,’ my Lewis friend Finlay MacLeod told me before I left for Ness, ‘and he described being in the
geo
there in bad weather, and seeing her sides literally squeezed inwards by the pressure of the waves bouncing around there.’

It was
Jubilee
that Ian wanted to sail to Sula Sgeir and back in this, her seventy-fifth year. He was eager to make this historic voyage, following the path of the
guga
men and the line of a gannet’s flight, out to Sula Sgeir and back again.

We caught the afternoon tide from Port of Ness harbour. The aim was to sail without stopping through evening and night, and to raise Sula Sgeir around dawn. The harbour: turquoise water over sand, the smell of diesel, sun hot on the concrete, rusted ladder rungs. Kelp popping, the squeak of buoys and fenders, old Ness men fishing off the pier.

As we loaded up the dry-bags and sea chests, people began to gather to see
Jubilee
safely away, for word had got round North Lewis that she would try for Sula Sgeir.
Jubilee
herself was beautiful, a gleaming red hull, with black-and-white checkerboard markings around the side and black-stained interior timbers. She was heavy, solid and loved as a craft. We stepped the mast, a pole of Douglas fir which took four people to lift and secure it. Then we slid out of the harbour by oar and engine, threading a series of breakwaters, through the mess of waves at the cliff’s nose and into open sea.

Raise the sail, shake out the reefs, haul on the halyard, tighten the sheet. A little kick as the wind takes her northwards over high humping swells, lifting and dropping. People on the headland waving us off. Sun glint on blue water. Long fallows between the waves.

Ian had sailed out of Lewis for more than forty years, following his sea routes to and from St Kilda, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Norway, the Baltic and Brittany. But he had never before got out to Sula Sgeir: the weather had always foxed him. He was excited, but wary. The forecast had showed a weather window – light airs, sunshine – but it was due to close in two days, with big westerlies blowing in. In a small open boat in big open seas, care needs to be taken. So another boat was sailing with us as our good shepherd: an ocean-going yacht called the
Hebridean
, which would keep a weather eye out for us.

On the morning of our departure, I’d met a friend of mine called Steve Dilworth in Stornoway. Steve lives on the south-east coast of the Isle of Harris, and is one of the most interesting sculptors currently at work in the world. He had something for me – an object to carry on the Sula Sgeir voyage. It came in a Tupperware box, was packaged in newspaper and bubble-wrap, and was shaped like a big flattened egg, which sharpened to a point at one end. Black in its centre and white-edged, it was the size of my fist and very heavy. It reminded me of a guillemot’s head.

‘It’s a
kist
,’ Steve said cheerily, ‘a chest. Its main body is dolerite. I cored out the centre of the dolerite and put a glass phial in the hole. The phial contains seawater I gathered during a big storm twenty-five years ago. I used bronze wire to bind the phial in place, and then I capped the sides of the dolerite with some old ivory.’ The surface of the kist was cool and smooth, even where the ivory met the dolerite.

It was, he explained, a votive offering: a storm charm. All maritime cultures have lore about objects and substances that are thrown into the seas to calm them when a craft is in danger. Ale, oil or blood are poured overboard to soothe the waves. Coins, bodies, swords, screeds of wool or
gansey
are yielded to sate the maelstrom. There are two kinds of offering: placatory and sacrificial. The placatory is assuaging (oil on troubled waters); the sacrificial is substitutionary – a minor loss sustained in the present (the object lost to the sea) replacing a future greater loss (the boat lost to the sea). Steve’s kist was sacrificial in kind.

‘I reckoned that these objects, these offerings, would have to be beautiful if they were to be offerings,’ he said. ‘Something it would pain you to lose to the waves.’ I felt reassured to have the kist, and knew that if the seas rose I would have no hesitation in slipping it over the checkerboard side of the boat.

‘Take care not to eat any
guga
if you’re offered some,’ Steve warned me just before we parted.

‘Is it considered bad luck?’ I asked.

‘No’, he said. ‘It just tastes awful. Oily and chewy and acrid. I have no idea what all the fuss is about. I know a Lewisian crofter who, when I asked him whether he liked gannet meat, replied, “I gave a piece to the dog and it spent all week licking its arse to take away the taste.” ’

There were five of us in the crew. Ian. A young Lewisman, David, who had just joined the Merchant Navy at the age of sixteen. Colin, the shipwright from the Shiants trip. Diyanne, who sailed community boats over at Ullapool on the mainland. All of them loved the sea and loved old boats. Four highly able sailors – and me.

Another minke whale saw us off from near the Butt of Ness, feasting through a surface shoal of sand eels, gannets rocketing down around it to surface with bills full of silver.
Jubilee
wallowed northwards in light air, over high hills of swell. The sea resembled a shaken tablecloth, rippling humps of blue water up which the boat climbed and down which she ran. A sliding bump beneath the nearby water, raising it without breaking it, like a tongue moving under a cheek, then a sharp fin seen: a single dolphin.