A Rock in the Ocean

On Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish Islands, and Earthsea

Kathleen Jamie, On Rona: “Daily, our sense of time slowed, days expanded like a wing. The days were long in the best, high-summer sense; at night we put up storm shutters on the bothy windows to make it dark enough to sleep. Time was clouds passing, a sudden squall, a shift in the wind. Often we wondered what it would do to your mind if you were born here, and lived your whole life within this small compass. To be named for the sky or the rainbow, and live in constant sight and sound of the sea. After a mere fortnight I felt lighter inside, as though my bones were turning to flutes.”

Sun-halo at sunset

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I picked up the book¹ because it had takapu / gannets on it, a bird I see around occasionally. The cover photo showed a scatter of flying gannets against bright blue, and a drift of others sitting on a rock at the bottom left corner: a colony. I drank the whole book up in two days. Afterwards, looking properly at the cover, I saw that rather than the photographer looking down on the birds from a clifftop, as I’d first thought, the gannets were flying overhead; that I was looking at their undercarriages. It should have been obvious, as gannet’s backs are as crispy black and white as an orca’s livery, as if their wing-tips have been dipped in Indian ink.

I see takapu sometimes cruising the coast. Their size, their cruciform outline, and the white middle of their backs distinguishes them immediately from the more common black-back gulls. To see them fold and dive is to watch Nature’s arrow, like iron rain from the yew longbow. (Once I met a man who was modelling the gannet’s skeleton as a paper pattern: his idea was that you could acquire and fold the components one by one. The most-finished part, the bit he was working on when I talked to him, was the skull.)²

The book is Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, a Scottish poet who I’d never heard of. When I turned to the author photo, it was honest.³ She was backlit, slightly frowning, with red cheeks from the wind. She reminded me of my Mother’s side of the family, I think because of her colouring, and her nose. It makes sense, because that branch of my lineage is from Scotland: my Mother’s Mother’s Mothers, the distaff side.

My Mother’s Mother’s Mother’s Mother, Louisa Hutton, born 1856

Sightlines is a book of essays about nature. Simple, descriptive, attentive. Dotted through it— like islands in the sea— are a series of essays set in the Scottish islands: the Hebrides, the Shetlands,⁴ St Kilda, Rona. This landscape is purely imaginary to me. Though I know it’s real, with real people, these places figure in my imagination as something like the edges of Earthsea: last, loneliest.

The main island of St Kilda is Hirta or Hiort in Scots Gaelic, the language that was spoken there. Hirta is famous partly because of the movie made about everyone leaving the island. I watched the film a few years ago: The Edge of the World, 1937, black and white, directed by Michael Powell.⁵ (There’s a pivotal scene showing an island food-harvesting practice— going down the cliff-faces on ropes to steal seabird’s eggs.)

For the last year or so in my old house, I often thought of this film. When the house went on the market, I knew that what I’d long suspected would come to pass: I would be its last inhabitant.⁶ So I thought of myself as the last one off the island, closing my front door for the last time and stepping onto a ship.

This is Jamie describing the mate on the yacht Annag,⁷ taking her to St Kilda: “Iain was Hebridean, an engineer. I liked his calm presence, his measured Gaelic speaker’s accent…

When he saw me looking, Iain shouted the litany of the islands’ names: ‘That’s Hirta! That’s Stac Lee. That one’s Boreray. Stac an Armin.’…

Iain came and stood beside me and together we looked at this sorry outpost⁸ as the boat rocked. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then he said, ‘Do you know, in Gaelic there is a phrase: “Nach du bh’an a Hirst!”— “I wish you were on Hirta!” You say it when you want rid of someone.’…

Iain had said that Hebridean people don’t come out here now. His own swift Gaelic phrase would be the only words of the native language I’d hear.”

It’s also, apart from place-names, the only Gaelic in the book.

At the Gaelic Club ceilidh, I met a firey old chieftain, over 80, with a scarred nose, who told me fiercely “I’m the only Gaelic speaker in the Gaelic Club!” After commanding three of his young-adult grandchildren to stand up and sing together, he sang me part of a song in Gaelic. He told me how he had a very special bottle of whisky that he was saving for a suitably momentous occasion. I said “How about your 85th birthday?” He glared at me and told me that wasn’t important enough. (Maybe he thought he’d live forever.)

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In A Wizard of Earthsea, there’s a part where Ged is briefly marooned on a tiny islet where two old people live, a man and a woman. (I quote at length because Le Guin can’t be paraphrased: even cutting bits out feels like a kind of butchery.)
“It was a rocky sand-bar a mile wide at its widest and a little longer than that, fringed all about with shoals and rocks. No tree or bush grew on it, no plant but the bowing sea-grass. The hut stood in a hollow of the dunes, and the old man and woman lived there alone in the utter desolation of the empty sea. The hut was built, or piled up rather; of driftwood planks and branches. Their water came from a little brackish well beside the hut; their food was fish and shellfish, fresh or dried, and rockweed. The tattered hides in the hut, and a little store of bone needles and fishhooks, and the sinew for fishlines and firedrill, came not from goats as Ged had thought at first, but from spotted seal; and indeed this was the kind of place where the seal will go to raise their pups in summer. But no one else comes to such a place. The old ones feared Ged not because they thought him a spirit, and not because he was a wizard, but only because he was a man. They had forgotten that there were other people in the world…

Seeming to gain courage, she went to the hut and came back with something again in her hands, a bundle wrapped up in a rag. Timidly, watching his face all the while, she unwrapped the thing and held it up for him to see.
It was a little child’s dress of silk brocade stiff with seed-pearls, stained with salt, yellow with years. On the small bodice the pearls were worked in a shape Ged knew: the double arrow of the God-Brothers of the Kargad Empire, surmounted by a king’s crown.
The old woman, wrinkled, dirty, clothed in an illsewn sack of sealskin, pointed at the little silken dress and at herself, and smiled: a sweet, unmeaning smile, like a baby’s…

He guessed now that these two might be children of some royal house of the Kargad Empire; a tyrant or usurper who feared to shed kingly blood had sent them to be cast away, to live or die, on an uncharted islet far from Karego-At. One had been a boy of eight or ten, maybe, and the other a stout baby princess in a dress of silk and pearls; and they had lived, and lived on alone, forty years, fifty years, on a rock in the ocean, prince and princess of Desolation.”

I was thinking on this passage recently, and when I try to remember why, I think it was something to do with reading shipwreck narratives. I’d read The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, about the wreck of the whaleship Essex, stove by a sperm whale (an inspiration for Moby-Dick). In that true tale, the sailors in their three small whaleboats also come upon a tiny island: Henderson Island in the Pitcairns. Like the lighthouse-keeper’s cat that single-handedly slaughtered the Stephens Island wren, the 20 starving sailors eat almost everything on the island— crabs, birds, eggs— in the space of a week.⁹

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Interestingly, these Scottish islands in the Atlantic have similar animals to here, where I live in the South Pacific on the South Coast of Wellington. Seabirds, seals, orca, the sheep on the hillside. It’s far less of a mind-stretch for me to imagine what Jamie describes in Sightlines than it usually is for me to envisage the places and animals described in British nature writing.¹⁰ I know wild seas and rocky shore. I know these birds, I know orca. (Jamie sees the same five-orca pod twice in the book, 180 miles apart: from the Shetlands, and then a year later from uninhabited Rona. Killer whales, she calls them, and she describes well how they electrify the landscape they move through.)

There is something magical about the idea of an island. Like a crucible, boundaried. Matter changing and recombining inside the geological container, nature’s bubbling alchemy intensified by limitation. Spilling over at the edges onto the sea. Linked to other islands by spiderwebs of boat-voyage. Isness— specificity of place— is in matter. Rock, turf, sleet, fish. Unlike in the Pacific, no trees. Houses made of stone, and peat fires.

Barry Lopez, deep-lover of the Arctic, says that outsiders find the landscape of the tundra empty, naked, terrifying, because they don’t understand it (and, I suppose, because it can easily kill you).¹¹ Absolute wildness. What those old Romantics loved in a landscape: the Sublime, that which inspires dreadful awe.

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As Darwin observed, island ecosystems hothouse evolution: tiny elephants, giant tortoises. There are rare sheep-breeds on the Scottish islands, hefted to a single island.

Sofi Thanhauser, in Worn, tells about Woolfest in Cumbria: “At the Rare Breeds Parade… sheep were displayed whose breeds had been preserved from extinction. In the 1830s, when islands in Scotland were cleared of their traditional sheep, and larger sheep breeds like Cheviots and Leicesters were brought in, some of the native species disappeared entirely. But on North Ronaldsay, the northernmost island of the Orkney archipelago… a drystone wall was constructed around the circumference, above the high-water line. The wall, which became known as a ‘sheep dike,’ was completed in 1832, and it confined the local sheep to the beach. There, local sheep adapted to a diet of seaweed. And there they remain for all but a few months each year, when the ewes and lambs are brought inland to graze. These little sheep— the top of the back of one of the sheep reached just to a woman’s knee— resemble the fossil remains of sheep from the Iron Age, and indeed dental traces of seaweed have been found on these four-thousand-year-old sheep…
Shetland sheep. as shaggy and small as Shetland ponies… were selected to be small, the announcer told us, because they were often carried on rowboats, and larger species might have upset the boat.”

North Ronaldsay sheep

I think of the small book of tweeds in the tailor’s shop:¹² the quality of them, the craft— like single malt whisky, a distillation of place. Terroir. Traditionally, the music of looms and songs¹³ are in that cloth, salt, what the sheep ate, the lichen dyes.

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My favourite essay in Sightlines is The Woman in the Field, about Jamie’s teenage experience of working on an archaeological dig at a Neolithic henge, and the uncovering of a grave there, containing the skeleton of a young woman and a beaker that had held mead. It moved me to tears. Jamie says that the young trowel-labourers on the archaeological henge-dig were closer to experiencing Neolithic life than the archaeologists running the show: “It was a bit of a golden age; life as an itinerant ‘digger’ was not impossible, and not intolerable for a while, especially for the young, and we were all young. Every site was an information exchange. In that, the henge probably functioned as it had 4000 years ago. Whatever it was for, it was also a place for romances, graft, parties, huge pots of food and good-natured resentment of the bosses who seemed to know what they were doing. Our off-duty lives probably got us closer to the Neolithic or Bronze Age than any analysis of post-holes and bones.”

It’s strange to write second-hand about places I’ve never seen. I drink people’s work, and turn over the thought-artefacts that sift down to me, here at the bottom of the world. My circumstances are more house-plant than wild animal;¹⁴ I know only my own small corner. Maybe that intense localism makes my life more like the life of an island villager than that of most writers— roving travellers offering philosophical commentary. (But I know I’m not like a villager. I have electricity, and more than 150 people¹⁵ to talk to. I’m childless. I buy my food from the supermarket, and God doesn’t strike me down if I work on a Sunday.)

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Midway through writing this, I read Will Dowd’s Full Moon post. He says “While models of other lunar homes boast interiors that look like Swedish saunas, [British aerospace engineer Mark] Hempsell reduced the number of wooden fixtures. (Imported wood would be incredibly expensive on the Moon—just think of the shipping fees.) Instead, he imagines furniture would be fashioned from metals and other materials derived from the lunar soil itself. If a metal kitchen table sounds less than cozy, at least it’s fireproof.

According to Hempsell, the inside and outside of lunar homes would be largely made from the cheapest, most ubiquitous material available—moon rocks.”

Dowd then compares the dimensions of Thoreau’s cabin interior to the Orion crew module, and to his own bedroom. Crofts. Ships. Overwintering. Imported wood would be incredibly expensive on the Moon. Is the Moon, then, a kind of ultimate island? (Only if space is the sea.) How would it be to live without animals, without anything green?¹⁶ Would we even be human, there?

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Jamie ends her essay about Rona with a coda, a small linked essay about a bird she found there, a long-dead storm petrel: a clump of desiccated feather and bone, with a tiny ring on its hooked-up leg. Walking home from the café I found this— a dead petrel.

Jamie: “Smell of bird? — mysterious, musky, like an unguent.” The same smell that’s still on my fingers now, from carrying this light body home to photograph for you.

1. Salvation Army, $3

2. Searching for him throws up, firstly, a 3D-printed Northern gannet skull on Etsy, made from recycled corn starch; a museum catalogue entry from Taranaki, with a photo of beige bones laid neatly out on a white background, and the description “Complete skeleton of an Australiasian Gannet (Sula bassana serrator) contained in a clear plastic bag. Note inside bag reads as follows: "Sula serrator ...”; a paper titled ‘Design and Experiment of a Bionic Gannet for Plunge-Diving,’, with the description “A bionic gannet was developed based on the analysis of the body configuration and skeleton structure and the motion pattern of wings of a gannet in ...”
And then this, which may very well be the guy: https://www.academia.edu/40690635/T%C4%81kapu_Australasian_Gannet_Morus_serrator_1_1_scale_card_model

3. One can tell a lot by an author photo. I try not to look at it until I’m finished, just as I try not to read the back of the book; I prefer pure mind-meld.

4. The New Zealand Government recruited settlers during the clearances of the Shetlands, so a lot of New Zealanders have Shetland Islands ancestry.

5. Could be my cousin’s name, if we were named for our Mothers.

The Edge of the World was not actually filmed on Hirta, but on Foula in the Shetlands.

6. In this phase of the house’s life, anyway— that is, as a flat. There’s strong reason to suspect that it will be demolished, though, in which case I will have been its last inhabitant of all.

7. A Gaelic diminutive of ‘Anna’

8. Not the deserted village, but some prefabricated buildings: a missile-tracking radar base.

9. Three of the sailors, however— men not from clannish Nantucket, who didn’t like their chances in the likely cannibal lottery to come— elected to stay behind on Henderson island, and survived a year before being rescued.

The Heart of the Sea is based upon the discovery of an unpublished book, The Loss of the Ship "Essex" written by cabin boy Thomas Nickerson that somewhat contradicts the very well-known story told in the book Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, by first mate Owen Chase (the book Melville read).

They don’t want to go to Tahiti, which is quite close, because they fear getting eaten by cannibals; so they aim for South America, and end up eating each other. (This was the main fact Owen Chase had fudged in his book: the Captain, George Pollard Jr., wanted to go to Tahiti but was dissuaded by Chase.)

10. I’ve read a lot of British nature writing, although I’ve never been to the U.K. or Europe. It took me a while to understand that what I like about the genre is the particular blend of history, natural history, philosophy, archaeology, etc. that comes from immersion in an ancient landscape.

11. Barry Lopez: “Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land, however, no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression—its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.”

12. As described here: https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/benjamin-bowmaneer-bespoke-tailor

13. Women sang waulking songs, wool shanties, as they fulled the tweed: Waulking song from the Outer Hebrides - Alan Lomax collection

14. https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/of-hopeful-green-stuff-woven

15. Dunbar’s number: loosely, the number of people it’s possible to actually know.

16. Le Guin explores a similar moon as a setting in her Anarchist novel, The Dispossessed.