confidence and abilities acquired by seamen returning from war, but also due to growing international demand for white fish which swam in grounds so far offshore that, in the words of an eighteenth-century commentator, distance ‘sink[s] the land’. Boatmen began to take the extravagant risks associated with travelling to the edge of the continental shelf and spending nights on the wild fishing grounds known as da haaf. With lines up to three miles long, bristling with a thousand hooks or more, they fished after rowing or sailing thirty to forty miles from home.
The boats that answered these demands were known as sixareens. They were as large and muscular as little wooden rowing boats can get. The width of Norwegian precursors was expanded dramatically, because the new, stupendously long and heavy lines would have dragged a yoal over. Space onboard was such that once lines were laid, fishermen would make a fire in the middle of the boat: they’d light pipes, brew tea, perhaps cook some of the herring caught for ling bait, and pass the time until they began the four-hour task of ‘hailing the lines’. Yet lightness had not been entirely sacrificed: even the most robust sixareen could be carried by its crew of six. Twenty-five to thirty feet from stern to bow, the biggest of these boats was less than double the length of my eighteen-foot kayak. While kayaks are designed to pop back up if submerged and overturned, sixareens were open-topped and undecked. If tipped or swamped they were lost: no one has ever righted a sixareen at sea.
To attempt to comprehend the Shetland experience of the Atlantic I returned to Unst on the first day of really rough weather. By chance, I arrived at the Unst Boat Haven on the same day in July that, 135 years earlier, a storm took fifty lives. Most accounts from survivors of the 1881 storm were chilling but similar word-pictures of still waters turning quickly violent, so that ‘the sea commenced to rain over us’. But one document was different: it asked searching questions about how the characteristics of Shetland sixareens had shaped the tragedy. This text was notes taken in a 1979 interview with Andrew and Danny Anderson who had rowed sixareens in their youth: their father had survived the 1881 storm, but their uncle was killed by it.
I asked a custodian of the Boat Haven, Robert Hughson, whether he knew any more about the family. He recalled Andrew, in his nineties, telling a tale of being caught in sea fog (haa) with his father. As they fished, none of the six on board mentioned the haa or said anything about navigation. But when they completed their tasks, the older men just set to rowing and cruised straight into their noost on Yell. Andrew had a long career as master mariner and captain of one of the first supertankers, but insisted that he never discovered what skill allowed his father’s generation to navigate fog without so much as a compass. Such are the stories the sixareens inspire.
But Andrew wasn’t entirely dewy-eyed for the previous generation of boatmen and boats. In the 1979 interview, he explained why he thought late nineteenth-century changes in sixareen construction magnified the storm’s impact. The heaviest and longest sixareens, he claimed, had lost their key advantage: the lithesomeness of the small Shetland boat. It was impossibly gruelling to prevent these boats being caught side-on to a rough sea. And when a boat plunged into troughs between waves (or ‘seas’ as the brothers always call them), even the best crews lacked time and strength to turn its helm upwards and make it what they called ‘sea loose’ for the next barrage. Andrew and Danny detailed the actions required of boatmen during the phases of a wave; they described main swells forty feet high and the complex action of the intervening lesser swells, as well as how to deal with each. Their imagery is rich: boats reaching messy peaks were ‘running through a sea of milk’. And they detailed the nature of the dangers: a sixareen could take a breaking sea filling it to the gunwales, but failing to clear the boat of water by the next such crest spelled ruin.
Andrew described how in a gale, every captain had a choice. They could raise the sail and run, risking ruin on skerries and being pushed into unsafe landings. On the night of 1881 almost all sixareens took this option because skippers knew they were too heavy to manoeuvre under oar: ten were wrecked. The alternative was what the brothers called ‘laying to’. The smallest sixareen at sea on the night of the storm was the Water Witch, an older boat exactly the same length at the keel as my kayak. This was the only boat whose six oarsmen dared confront the weather. The crew fought a war of attrition with the storm, rowing solidly into the oncoming sea all night to keep the boat from ever yawing side-on to breaking swell. They won a battle with the winds that no other crew could have taken on, and they rowed safely into harbour next morning.
Lying in the path of deep depressions that sweep the Atlantic, Shetland regularly sees beautiful weather for a few short hours, sandwiched between storms and blanket fog: the crew of a sixareen rarely had the luxury of knowing what seas they’d confront. That they risked everything in small wooden craft for modest hauls of fish demonstrates their intrepidness, but also indicates the harsh conditions – both climatic and political – in which islanders often found themselves during times of oppressive governance before the present era of oil-driven affluence. As the Shetlander John Cumming put it,
The boat as transport and fishing tool has shaped so much of Shetland’s history and its culture. We worked the land, true, but all too often a poor, thin land, and in desperate times fishing kept us alive. It made us who we are, a virile, confident, skilled and highly adaptable people with many stories to tell and a unique tongue in which to tell them.7
I had assumed, when reading all the admiring writing on the age of the sixareen, that the narrative of Shetland fishing must be one of decline from a golden era when saithe or ling could be plucked from the sea at will, so was surprised to find that the catches of Shetland ships have never been greater than they are today, the technological skill of earlier boatbuilders growing through the age of nets and herring (rather than lines and ling), then steam, motors and engine grease. The question of whether such innovation has been wholly positive – saving lives, but devastating sea life while reducing the number of livings to be made from the sea – is a different matter altogether.
In the serene conditions of the first few days, I felt distinctly un-intrepid, with Shetland’s boating tradition a constant reminder of what humans are capable of when confronting the profound forces of the ocean. I moved slowly on, finding kayaking most pleasurable at night, when winds were lowest and the light dramatic. Between spells of paddling I worked through books I’d picked up in Lerwick, discovering more about the traditions and stories of these islands. Much of this reading was done in the boat, rocking gently on the swell as I rested. Without the splash of constantly rotating paddles, birds and animals often popped up close by, some reacting with surprise but others with curiosity at this bright intrusion in their midst. One gannet appeared within touching distance, allowing me immersion in the infamous ice-blue eye. Like a salt-rimed sea swan, it arched its wings defiantly, but made no sign of moving off. Seated on the waves, the bird’s white tail feathers and black wing tips stretched a surprising distance from its bill (which, slightly hooked, resembled interlocking plates of some long-tarnished metal). Minutes later it launched itself past my bow, bouncing repeatedly on the water and coating my camera lens in sea spray: as elegant as a camel on ice. When I landed, I couldn’t resist a look at the Shetland dialect ‘wird book’ I’d brought along, in case this maritime language had words to evoke things I’d been seeing. To my pleasure, sea spray was brimmastyooch.
It took three leisurely days to pass down Unst then Yell and reach the Shetland mainland. The crossing from Yell to the mainland was the most challenging hour since Unst. With tidal streams running along the sound, around the imposing Ramna Stacks to its south, and then across Fethaland (the finger thrusting out from north mainland), there was no possibility of tackling the whole crossing during the brief slack water between the incoming and outgoing tides. Today, the overnight cloud refused to lift quickly, and a few gusts from the haaf helped amplify my trepidation. But if I had one regret about my paddle down the difficult stretches of Unst and north Yell it was that I’d been too cautious in taking photos: however unsettling it proved to be, I resolved to use my camera even when among the contorted waters at
