In ancient wakes

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 9: Up North
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Creed O'Hanlon

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Creed O'Hanlon's biography and other articles by this writer

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Muckle Flugga: 60° 51.3'N, 00° 53'W. Sunset in summer, in the high latitudes of the Shetland Isles, is an uncertain hour the locals call "Simmer Dim". The sun touches the horizon at around 11pm, and as its lower edge is drawn into the bleak, gunmetal oiliness of the North Atlantic swell, the pale umber cast across the high seaward cliffs begins to recede into shadow.

The light dims, but if the moon is full, the stubborn gloaming refuses to surrender to darkness. A couple of hours later, the sun will rise again, although on many days it will creep above the horizon unseen, shrouded by leaden stratus clouds that descend with the deep depressions that track north-eastwards across the Atlantic to rile the fast, south-going current of the North Atlantic Drift.

We had set off three days earlier from Castle Bay, on Eilean Barraigh (Barra Island), in the Scottish Western Isles – my friend, Michael Moulin, and I, aboard a fragile 7.5 metre yacht more suited to inshore day sailing than the long sea passages that were necessary to get as far as the Western Isles, let alone the Shetlands. We had weighed anchor at dusk and drifted from the lee of the high stone walls of Caisteal Chiosmuil (Kisimul Castle), the 600-year-old water-bound redoubt of the Clan MacNeill that rises from a reef in the middle of the bay. Then we reached under full sail through the narrow, rock-strewn channel between Barraigh and the southern island of Vatersay to the white-capped swells of the Atlantic, before bearing away north-west towards St Kilda, the grim shark tooth of barren, uninhabited peaks and rocky skerries that forms the westernmost island group of Britain.

Our course was plotted in the wake of Viking longships that made their escape through these waters from raiding parties to Ireland and the west coasts of England, Wales and Scotland a thousand years ago. They ran for the safety of the open sea on homeward voyages that would take them either north-east to the wide channel between the Orkneys and Sheltands then east to the Jutland Peninsula and the Baltic Sea or, like us, even further north, past the small, rugged islands of Sula Sgeir and Rona – more isolated even than St Kilda – to a landfall on Unst, the most northern of the Shetland Isles, before rounding an outcrop called the Outer Stacks and laying a course to the fractured coast north-west of modern-day Stavanger, in Norway, where long, witch-finger fjords had been cleaved between high, sheer walls of rock by the stormy Norwegian Sea. Sailing deep within them, across sheltered waters as still and dark as molasses, the Norsemen would at last reach home – small, fortified settlements built close by the shore on rich grasslands coloured with star hyacinth and purple heather and backed by sloping stands of pine, spruce and juniper.

We had made our landfall off Gloup Holm, a small island off the north-west corner of Yell, one of the larger Shetland Isles. We had drifted a little further eastwards than we had planned. Two nights before, we had been forced to reef – and later, to hand – our sails in a rising south-westerly wind that veered westerly as we rounded St Kilda and became a severe gale. The steep following seas gained height and power as they rolled in without obstruction from the Atlantic and crossed the continental shelf. Solid water tumbled over the yacht's transom into the open cockpit, sweeping us from our seats. Steering by hand became too dangerous. We lashed the tiller to leeward and let the boat drift a-hull as we took refuge in the cabin. More than once, a breaking crest tipped the yacht onto its gunwales, laying its mast in the water. We held our breaths as the hull shuddered, then plunged, as if in slow motion, down four storeys through the wave's foam-streaked, perpendicular face. Only in the eerie, momentary windlessness of the trough did the righting moment of the vessel's lead keel assert itself to lever the rigging from the sea.

Now the wind had dropped. The grim scud had dissipated and the swell, tinged a muddy brown by the churned-up detritus of the sea bottom and run-off from the shore, was a long, gently undulating lope. In a dying breeze, we closed the cliffs of Herma Ness to round the rocky outcrops of Muckle Flugga and the Outer Stacks. Atlantic puffins, clown-like birds with unlikely white and black heads, orange and black striped beaks and squat, rotund black bodies that even penguins would find ungainly, bobbed at the edge of deeply serrated skerries atop which otherpuffins protected nests, each containing just one precious egg, from predatory gannets and guillemots.

Sixty metres above the rookeries, on a lump of black rock too small to be called an island, loomed the Muckle Flugga lighthouse – a whitewashed stone tower, the only man-made structure on that line of longitude between the top of the British Isles and the North Pole. It was built in 1858 by David Stevenson and his brother, Thomas, father of the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson,who visited the light with his father and later, it is said, used a map of the tree-less island of Unst, off which Muckle Flugga lies, as inspiration for his novel, Treasure Island.

LYMINGTON QUAY: 50° 45.2'N, 1° 31.7'W. Every summer, in every boatyard along the south coast of England, there was at least one crew preparing a yacht for a trans-Atlantic crossing. Most wouldn't be ready in time – some never would be – but those who managed to work through their endless lists of yardwork, everything from replacing running rigging and reinforcing sails to checking rudder posts, pintles and gudgeons and antifouling the hulls, might finally cast off in early autumn and make for the warm waters below the 35th parallel.

The usual track was south-west, passing well offshore of the fearsome reefs and tidal races around Ile D'Ouessant, at the south-western corner of the English Channel, to cross the unpredictable maw of the Bay of Biscay to Cape Finisterre (in English, "the end of the world"). From there, they would make either for Gibraltar, at the entrance to the Mediterranean, or, more likely, the volcanic Canary Islands, off the coast of southern Morocco, where, like Christopher Columbus's exploratory fleet 500 years before them, they would rest, make repairs and reprovision while they waited for the North Atlantic hurricane season to abate. Sometime in November, they would set off south-west again towards the Cap Verde Islands, standing well off the African coast. After drifting through the humid calms and sudden rain squalls of the region between the 35th and 30th parallels dominated by a sub-tropical high once known as the Horse Latitudes – according to tradition, ships often lay becalmed there for weeks and their crews, fearful of running out of water and victuals and, worse, becoming afflicted by scurvy, threw cargoes of thirsty horses and cattle overboard – they would pick up the north-easterly trade winds and, at last, alter course westwards, freeing their sails. A relentless wind off the starboard quarter and an easy following sea would carry them on an even keel all the way across the Atlantic to whatever islands in the Caribbean they might be bound.

I had lived and worked on the sea for half a decade. I had crossed the Atlantic twice, both times from west to east on a northerly route that took advantage of the Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies but was always hard, cold sailing, and never without a gale springing up within one of the low-pressure systems that followed one after the other with tedious frequency across the Atlantic's higher latitiudes. Once, during a leaden English winter, while I was helping a friend rebuild a 50-year-old Hillyard cutter in a cluttered boatyard on the Lymington River, relaying and caulking its timber decks in the few hours of rain-less daylight, I thought about sailing with him on the long, warm-water voyage to the southern Caribbean that he had planned for the following autumn.

And yet I knew somehow that I wouldn't. There were no clear skies, fair winds or landfalls on palm-fringed cays in the voyages I made in my imagination; instead, the coasts were tree-less, steep and rock-strewn, beset by fast-running tidal streams and angry seas the same colour as the slate-grey skies. I daydreamed of high latitudes, of retracing routes once sailed by Norse longships, Phoenician and Celtic traders (the Veneti, a Celtic maritime tribe, ferried tin mined in Cornwall to the Gallic mainland), imperial Roman battle fleets and and even the leather-hulled curraghs of fifth-century Christian monks. A trade-wind passage was dull compared with the demands of navigating the treacherous jigsaw of reefs, skerries and precipitous islands and the constantly changing weather conditions to the west and north of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, where tidal races tripped over jagged shoals faster than a small yacht could sail.

But there was more. In the north, every headland, channel, loch and narrows was haunted by legends – and a few, by dark superstition.

"Maybe one day you'll fetch up in Ultima Thule," my father would tell me. It was he who first told me about Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek who, in 330BC, set out from what is today the Mediterranean coast of France on one of the first recorded voyages to the far north Atlantic. In his book, About the Ocean, which has been lost for more than a millennium but is quoted in other ancient texts, Pytheas described landfalls on the British Isles and possibly Ireland, after which he voyaged northwards for six days to Ultima Thule, which he described as being at the edge of the known world – just a day's sail from what he called the Cronian (or Frozen) Sea – where the nights were very short and in the gelid mists, the earth, sea and air became indistinguishable from each other. The exact position of Thule was lost with Pytheas's work and although, over the centuries, famed explorers such as Columbus, Sir Richard Francis Burton and Fridtjof Nansen claimed to have found it on coasts as distant as north-west Norway, Iceland and the Shetland Isles, it's unlikely any of them did. As the contemporary author and Thule researcher, Joanna Kavenna, has written: "Ultima Thule was a land beyond the reach of humans, a place entwined with the outlandish – unipeds, the seven sleepers, a great whirlpool at the Pole, the ocean's navel."

Still, the iron-bound coasts and windswept seas that had to be negotiated even to have a chance of reaching it were the birthplace of many of our best-remembered legends, first told in millennia-old languages that still endure.