relief. I am not at home here. I don’t have the sailor’s ease. I look at each coming sea as a possible enemy. The sea surface is streaked white as if the fat in meat has been dragged downwind. Why did I think this would be a thing to do, to push myself out here on a slightly difficult day, with the wind rising and the passage untried? It was not wise, but I am committed now. It would be just as bad turning back as going on. The sea extends like a hostile crowd around me. I want to arrive. I want to be out of uncertainty. At least on the island, however much the sea might batter it, there is no fear of the ground beneath your feet breaking or of it somehow abandoning you. An island is loyal in the way that a boat can never be. A boat can go wrong, the gear can fail. The sheer solid stillness of the islands is not like that. An island is a presence, not a motion, and there is faithfulness in rocks.
I look for the Shiants but they have yet to appear. I am shut in the world of the boat and the compass. At sea, something sixteen feet long does not feel large.
I wanted to call her Maighdean nan Eileanan Mora, the Gaelic for ‘Shiant Girl’ until John MacAulay pointed out that saying that to the Coastguard over the VHF was not going to sound quite right. Besides, the name wouldn’t fit on the boat. So I have called her Freyja, after the Norse goddess of love and fertility, who could turn herself into a falcon and fly for a day and a night over the sea; who could shepherd the fish into the nets of fishermen; who could happily sleep with an entire family of elves, each one of which would present her with a link in an amber necklace after the night she had given them. One shape Freyja would never adopt was the chaste and abstinent virgin. She was always fully engaged with life, ripe in body and desire.
I love Freyja’s beautiful fatness around her middle. (I had said this to John. ‘Not fat,’ he said. ‘Full.’) She is uncompromisingly robust and strongly nailed for all the travails she will have to go through; nothing fey but nothing brutish. The Norse used to have both their houses and their graves made in the shape of boats, smoothly narrowing to the ends. It is the most accommodating form man has ever devised. I focus on that, on the coherence of what John has made compared with all the incipient anarchy of the sea.
A gannet suddenly slaps into the sea beside me. No warning. I start at it and remember this, the story of one of the stewards of St Kilda. At some time in the seventeenth century, (no date, because dates are rarely certain here), the steward, sailing out from Harris to his island responsibilities forty miles away across the Atlantic, found his boat passing through a shoal of herring so thick that the bodies of the fish lay like a pavement on the surface of the water. There was a silver skin to the sea and any man could have walked across it. A south wind was blowing and the boat was skimming through the bodies of the herring as if skating across them. All around them the gannets were diving, again and again, no hesitation necessary, no accuracy needed. It was the atmosphere of a tobogganing party. If the gannets had been children they would have been shrieking at the pleasure. The steward and his companions were gliding to St Kilda as if to Heaven.
A gannet, mistaking his moment, plunging for fish but ignoring the people, dived for his prey but missed his mark, his narrowed, darting body slicing down past mast, sail and shrouds, past the crew at the sheets, into the body of the open boat where its beak and head were impaled in the bottom strakes of the hull. The bird was dead on impact. Its enormous wings stretched across the frames and thwarts of the boat almost from one gunwale to another. Its perfect white body, six feet across from black wing-tip to black wing-tip, and a yard long, took up as much room as a man. The bubble of perfection had been pierced. The plank was splintered through. Twenty miles of the Atlantic separated the steward and his party from Harris and twenty from St Kilda. Could they mend the punctured hull? Would they drown here? Was water coming in faster than they could keep it out? Searching for the damage down in the bilges, the steward and his crew, scrabbling the ropes and creels out of the way, looked for signs of water bubbling in. There was none. Miraculously, the bilges were dry. The gannet’s head had plugged the hole its dive had made and its body was left there for the rest of the voyage, four hours to the bay on Hirta, with the enormous corpse beside them performing its role as feathered bung.
I was first told that story when I was a ten-year-old boy. I stood up with shock as the crisis hit and, of course, I have never forgotten it. I have learned since how prone to accident the gannet is. Every year in each of the great rocky gannetries around the Scottish coast, on Ailsa Craig and Bass Rock, in the stupendous avian city of St Kilda, hundred of gannets crash on arrival, breaking a wing or a neck, either dying then or over many weeks as their thick reservoirs of subcutaneous fat slowly wither in the breast, a pitiable death. Evolution does not create the perfect creature, only the creature that is perfect enough.
It is the one bird I wish would come to live on the Shiants. For a few years in the 1980s, the islands were the smallest gannetry in the world. Like a corporal among dukes, the Shiants made their glorious appearance in the ranks of the great: starting with St Kilda 100,100 gannets and Grassholm 60,000, the list ends with:
Shiants: 1.
He was to be seen for a few years perched solemnly on one of the north-facing rock buttresses of the islands, looking out woefully to the Lewis shore, hoping, I always imagined, that a lovely gannet girl might think this a suitable place to make her life. Around him, the guillemots stared and squabbled. Above them, the fulmars spat and cackled. No other gannet came to join him and by 1987, the Shiants, still listed in the wildly prestigious catalogue of British gannetries, now had an even more woeful entry:
Shiants: o
The mind is distracted for a moment and then returns to the foolishness of what you have done. It was not exactly the vision of the drowning man but I found myself thinking of the people I love and have loved. Do men drown regretting what they have done with their lives, all the stupidities and meannesses, the self-delusions and deceits? I was driving blind and it was not comfortable. I had been in the boat nearly three hours and even through all the layers of clothes I was getting cold. I had a hand-held GPS with me and it put my position at just about six degrees, twenty-seven minutes west, fifty-seven degrees, fifty-four minutes north. I should have been almost on the islands now but I could not see into the mist-bank to the north and east of me. I needed to come round to the north side of the Shiants to bring the boat into the bay between them, protected there from the southwesterlies. I had to overrun them and then turn for shelter. I hadn’t been here for a year and by now I was in a state of high anxiety.
This approach is larded with danger. Lying off the islands to the west is a chain of rocks and small steeply banked islets called the Galtachan or Galtas. No one knows what their name means but it may perhaps come from the Old Norse word, Gaflt, meaning the gable-end of a house. That, at least, is John MacAulay’s suggestion. It is a derivation which even now makes me smile. So much for these savage seas! So much for the tides that rip through the narrow channels between the Galtas! When the Ordnance Survey first came here on 27 October 1851, the surveyor wrote a hurried and unpunctuated description in his notebook:
Received Name: Galltachan
Object: Islands
Description: This is a range of Several [?] High and Low water Rocks extending from east to west three of which has a little of their top covered with rough pasture and surrounded by small but steep rocky Cliffs. there is a channel between each and every one of the High Water Rocks. at a distance they appear low but are no way inviting as at all times especially at Spring tides there is a rapid current about them the tide flows exceedingly strong flowing the same as a large River.
That is the modern voice; the survey officer, Thomas O’Farrell, measuring, estimating, a little fearful, unable to disassociate his description of the place from his apprehension over it. It could easily have been my voice, frightened now of being swept by the tide into the channels between the Galtas through which the deep-drawing Freyja might not have passed. Perhaps John MacAulay would have felt relaxed here, but neither I nor O’Farrell were Vikings. Would either of us so
