the North Sea meets the Atlantic, sailors face riptides, cross winds and breakwaters on the water, and sandbanks, skerries and reefs underneath. Often, the competing tides set up currents that run at ten knots or more, each of which is troublesome enough to have earned its own title: Duncansby Bore, the Merry Men of Mey or the Swilkie. The Pentland Firth itself is still known simply as ‘Hell’s Mouth’. The names that still speckle marine maps represent more than just picturesque history. The Black Deeps and Blackstone Banks took their percentage of dead, year after year. Farther south, the Solway Firth is riddled with quicksands and the Firths of Tay and Forth are notorious for rocks. In the 1870s, Thomas Stevenson, a man not given to hyperbole, calculated the pressure of the breakers on the coast at up to 6,000 pounds per square foot.
Even when captains were confident they were clear of the cross-currents near the isles, there were reefs and rocks – Sule Skerry off Cape Wrath, the Torran Rocks off the coast of Iona and Skerryvore beyond Tiree. The entrance to the Forth is guarded by three separate obstacles – the Isle of May, the Bass Rock and Inchkeith – all of which stick directly in the path of shipping on its way to the port of Leith. A little farther northeast, there is the infamous Bell Rock, submerged at high tide and a confusion of serrated rocks at low tide. Round on the west coast, the entrance to the Clyde is calmer but prone to shallows and awkward weather patterns thrown off by the surrounding islands. Where the placid Gulf Stream soaks into the Atlantic, the area is notorious for races, currents and ‘standing waves’ (water flowing over submerged objects which gives the impression of immobility), while the whirlpool of Corrievreckan between Jura and Scarba is considered the most dangerous tide in Europe. Even on a clear day, crossing Corrievreckan involves careful calculation. Boats making the passage cling nervously to the shoreline only to find themselves speeding through at fifteen knots or more. In a dirty sea, the gully resembles Scylla and Charybdis, sucking boats down into the eddy or spitting them out to the shores on either side. Sailors who know the area well enough to avoid the centre frequently wreck themselves on the nearby coasts trying to escape.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, navigation remained a ramshackle skill. Sailors within sight of the shore depended on being able to recognise the coastline. A church roof, a solitary copice or a coastal hamlet were reference points as dependable as any more thorough knowledge of the sea’s geography. In England, Elizabeth I had made altering or dismantling the most significant coastal landmarks a criminal offence. The law had little effect. After dark, without lights, landmarks were of only the most limited help. Many accounts of shipwrecks from the time note laconically that the pilot had mistaken one bay or harbour for another, and ended up paying for it. Even when the first primitive fires were lit on headlands to mark the way, they could easily be confused with stubble fires or temporary beacons. Nor was it possible to rely on written evidence. Even now, with the benefits of sonar and satellite surveying, there is no such thing as a definitive chart. Some parts of the Scottish coastline have not been surveyed for 150 years or more; others could be surveyed till the end of time and still not keep pace with the shiftiness of the sea. In the late eighteenth century, charts, maps and pilot books were drawn up by trial and painful error, and they were as often produced by merchants or traders as by any regularised state system. It was not until 1750 that Murdoch Mackenzie published a sea chart of Orkney and Lewis based on a rigid triangulation framework. Farther south, the situation remained poor for several more decades. In 1788, Murdo Downie, the Master of HM Champion at Leith, was complaining to the government that he could find ‘no chart published of the East Coast of Scotland that could in any degree be relied upon’. The old cherub-covered maps, with their foreshortened coasts and squint-eyed headlands, might look endearing now, but for several long centuries they were the only detailed information on the British coast available. When Daniel Defoe made his tour of Scotland in the 1720s, he discovered that the Forth and Clyde did not, in fact, run into one another, as his map suggested. ‘When I came more critically to survey the ground,’ he complained, ‘I found the map-makers greatly mistaken, and that they had not only given the situation and courses of the rivers wrong, but the distances also.’ Farther north, in ‘that mountainous, barren and frightful country’, the Highlands, things were even worse. ‘Our geographers seem to be almost as much at a loss in the description of this north part of Scotland, as the Romans were to conquer it,’ Defoe noted disconsolately, ‘and they are obliged to fill it up with hills and mountains, as they do the inner parts of Africa with lions and elephants, for want of knowing what else to place there.’
Matters improved erratically, if at all, in the nineteenth century. In 1837, an indignant committee of Edinburgh societies complained to the Treasury that even the best maps and charts of Scotland were so inaccurate that ‘in some charts, the large island of Arran is laid down as six miles from Bute, in others as nine miles, and in a third as 12 miles distant from the island. Pladda Island light in charts is placed at 16° north of Ailsa Craig, where its true distance is only 10°20’. These last are serious errors at the entrance of so important a river as the Clyde.’ Many of the roughest hazards remained unmarked, those that were noted were often wrongly placed, and the pilotage rules, with their ‘Fifty fathoms black ooze and black fishey stones among’, could often be more poetic than practical. Areas given as ‘safe anchoring’ were revealed to be notorious shipwreck spots; ports and harbours were awkward to approach and littered with the bones of old ships.
Not that adversity deterred Scotland’s swelling population from turning away from the land and onto the sea. Like the rest of Britain, Scotland needed it, fed off it, took employment from it and profited by it. From the sixteenth century onwards, the nautical traffic around Britain increased steadily, while the numbers of shipwrecks and groundings rose in tandem. Aside from farming and manufactures, the sea provided one of the principal sources of employment for a large swathe of the population until well into the nineteenth century. Directly, it provided subsistence, fish and ™ indirectly, it provided strength, funds and political muscle. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was also spending a significant amount of her time and money waging wars across it. The navy grew threefold, and with it grew the pirates, privateers and press gangs of legend. Though the end of the Napoleonic wars meant the dwindling or abolition of all three, for the moment they remained a constant threat. The escalation of trade meant the escalation in war to protect that trade. In the century between 1650 and 1750, England was engaged in six major European wars. Old routes were travelled more frequently; new ones were marked out. By the 1750s, Scotland and England had separately built up a regular trade in subsistence goods – corn, coal, livestock – with France, Scandinavia and the Baltic. The French, meanwhile, were involved in so many wars at the time that they were forced to scale down their navy and resort to privateers instead, many of whom spent their time raiding the British coast. At the same time, Scotland in particular depended on the Scandinavian countries as trading partners and maritime allies. The traffic between the two places, always constant, escalated with the growth of industry and the spread of free trade. From the Clyde ports there was the journey to the New World, which by the 1750s was providing a useful new source of tobacco, sugar, manufactured goods and slaves. To the north and south, there were the whaling grounds and beyond the Continent there were the exotic dangers of a new empire. In each direction, there were prizes to be taken and claims to be staked.
Scotland contributed her own heavy percentages to the traffic in other ways. Union with England had brought benefits, albeit slowly. Immediately after 1707, the changes were mainly internal: cattle sales to English markets, corn to English mills or men to English employment. But after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Scotland’s trade with Europe accelerated and the age of the Great Improvers began. Landlords in the Highlands cleared the straths for sheep, packed off the protesting population to stony coastal settlements, taught them how to fish and left them to make a life for themselves. Some of the settlements died quietly, others took root and became export centres for wool, flax or fish. The subjugated regiments joined English wars and British battles or went south to the new shipbuilding yards in Glasgow or Greenock. Several thousand Highlanders left for the New World on leaky ships, some of which did not last the journey. Edinburgh functioned as both Continental trading post and garrison town, providing goods for export and men for war. When the press gangs sought fodder for their frigates, they looked first to the Scottish capital. For whatever cause, the population of Scotland was on the move
