I’ve generally enjoyed the
novels of Jim Crace, and was pleased to see from Adam Mars-Jones’ review in the
LRB that another is out, with a setting both atopical and anachronistic. One
feature of his invented village is (the reviewer notes) that nobody there owns
a mirror, and this made for me a pleasing little connection to a late 17th
century work that had actually reminded me (while reading it) of Crace’s
fiction, Martin Martin’s account of his incident-filled visit to the Isle of St
Kilda in 1694. Among the things Martin says about those male St Kildans who get
to larger, more inshore islands, is that “they admired Glass Windows hugely,
and a Looking-Glass to them was a prodigy”.
The text has the title, A
Late Voyage to St Kilda, the Remotest of all
the HEBRIDES, OR Western Isles of SCOTLAND. WITH A History
of the Island, Natural, Moral, and Topographical.
Wherein is an Account of their Customs, Religion, Fish, Fowl, &c. As also a Relation of a late IMPOSTOR there, pretended to be Sent by St. John Baptist (1698). The author
of the Preface to the book (who tells us that Martin was himself from the Western
Isles, went to university in Edinburgh and had met members of the Royal Society),
makes an entirely persuasive point: “Men have Travelled far enough in the
search of Foreign Plants and Animals, and yet continue strangers to those
produced in their own natural Climate”.
St Kilda in the late 17th
century emerges as an utterly fascinating mix of things: a
Gaelic-Polynesian-Christian-Animist community of one hundred and eighty people,
18 horses, and 90 head of cattle, plus two thousand sheep dispersed over Hirta
and the even smaller local islands. It’s a community so traditional in its ways
as in places to recall the weird rituals of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast – yet so
marginal, that you feel that had they dared deviate in the slightest from
customs handed down over generations, that abandonment of the rigour necessary
to survival in this place might have doomed their entire way of life. Secured
by their extreme isolation from most of the perils threatened by other people,
they lived a life that tolerated an astonishing degree of natural risk. Their
voyages on their one open boat to the other islands and sea stacks around
Hirta, the main island, involved life-threatening dangers both in launching and
landing, then from currents and storms. For a main part of their diet, they harvested
eggs and birds, suspended over the sea cliffs on ropes made of twisted hemp
bound in leather. These daily hazards were not enough, it seems, for their
courtship customs, like those of Easter Island, required foolhardy demonstrations
of nerve and agility in climbs that modern free climbers could emulate easily
enough, though Martin is hugely impressed:
“In the face of the Rock, South from the Town, is the famous Stone,
known by the Name of the Mistress-Stone; it resembles a Door exactly, and is in
the very front of this Rock, which is Twenty or Thirty Fathom perpendicular in
Height, the Figure of it being discernable about the distance of a Mile: Upon
the Lintel of this Door, every Batchelor-Wooer is by an Antient Custom obliged
in honour to give a Specimen of his Affection for the Love of his Mistress”. The young man who had managed the climb then had to
strike a time-honoured (and ridiculously risky) posture high on the exposed
pinnacle. I found the following images (Martin may have confused the Mistress
stone and Lover’s stone into one story).
Though cool-headed modern
visitors seem able to emulate this feat, the St Kildans were clearly, and
necessarily, expert climbers. Boys would, Martin says, begin by climbing the
walls of their houses, this from the age of three. One stunt by which
especially proficient climbers could show off was making climbs with their back
to the rock face.
The community gets by with so
little. There’s the one boat, with seating and stowage on board assigned and
restricted with utterly exact specification of each man’s allocated space. The
whole community owns just three ropes for the egg and bird collecting. “The
Ropes belong to the Commonwealth, and are not to be used without the general
Consent of all”. There is “one Steel and
Tinder-Box in all this Commonwealth”, and the guardian of this precious
equipment makes a small toll in goods for providing his services.
Every St Kildan is an expert
reader of the sky, and as the stark requirement of your life probably depending
on reading it correctly (if a boat was to be launched), it was imperative to
update your reading experience all the time. But nobody is (literally speaking)
literate. They can tell the time to an exactitude by the tide, and continuous
awareness of the phase of the moon.
When Martin was there, some of
the older people could still remember wearing nothing else but sheepskin
garments. Plaids have arrived on boats from other outer islands less wildly
distant from the mainland, and the odd pair of trousers abandoned by sailors
caught by the natives filling knotted trouser-legs with their precious
birds’ eggs. Their plaids and mantles are pinned together with bones from
fulmars. The island women wear little espadrilles fashioned out of the necks of
gannets: “the only and ordinary Shoes they wear, are made of the Necks of Solan Geese, which they cut above the Eyes,
the Crown of the Head serves for the Heel, the whole Skin being cut close at
the Breast, which end being sowed, the Foot enters into it, as into a piece of
narrow Stocking; this Shoe doth not Wear above Five Days.” There is no money in
circulation. Their rents to the laird, of the clan MacLeod, are paid in barley
grain, measured out in an immemorial grain measure which they will not change,
though its battered state makes it a regular point of dispute. In other acts of
trade they are implacable bargainers: “They are reputed very Cunning,
and there is scarce any Circumventing of them in Traffick and Bartering; the
Voice of one is the Voice of all the rest, they being all of a piece, their
common Interest uniting them firmly together.”
Occasionally alcohol is
brewed out of nettle roots, but mainly they drink water or whey – Martin
praises the superb water quality of some of the springs ( … but still).
These
people lived mainly on the sea birds that nested in abundance around them. The
map in this little book shows the many pyramids of loose stone that the St
Kildans built to store both eggs and dead birds: “They preserve the Solan Geese in their Pyramids for the space
of a Year, slitting them in the Back, for they have no Salt to keep them with. They
have Built above Five hundred Stone Pyramids for their Fowls, Eggs, &c. … scattering
the burnt Ashes of Turf under and about them, to defend them from the Air, driness
being their only Preservative”
Gannets, or ‘Solan geese’, were caught in profusion when they were nesting
on the island and adjacent sea-stacks. The birds were taken with horse-hair
nooses on long rods, or simply clubbed while trying to defend their young. From
the sea-stacks, bird corpses were thrown down from cliff-tops into the sea for
collection in the boat, until the islander in the boat declared the boat full
to capacity. Gannets were also killed by exploiting their methods of diving
onto prey:
“a Board set on purpose to
float above Water, upon it a Herring is fixed, which the Goose perceiving,
flies up to a competent height, until he finds himself making a strait line
above the Fish, and then bending his course perpendicularly piercing the Air,
as an Arrow from a Bow, hits the Board, into which he runs his Bill with all
his force irrecoverably, where he is unfortunately taken.
The gannets survived: St
Kildans still had the tragic Great Auk: “The Sea-Fowls are, first, Gairfowl, being the stateliest, as well as the
Largest of all the Fowls here, and above the Size of a Solan Goose, of a Black Colour, Red about
the Eyes, a large White Spot under each Eye, a long broad Bill; stands stately,
his whole Body erected, his Wings short, he Flyeth not at all, lays his Egg
upon the bare Rock, which, if taken away, he lays no more for that Year.” In
the crassly stupid human annihilation of this bird the St Kildans played a main
role. Flightless, the bird was unable to escape them, and the last great auk sighted
in the British Isles was collected by St Kildans, kept briefly in captivity,
then beaten to death for being a witch that had raised a storm.
The fulmar chick, which
protects itself by a projectile-vomit of its acidic stomach contents, was
(amazingly) exploited for those same nauseous ejecta: “the Inhabitants
and other Islanders put a great value upon it, and use it as a Catholicon for Diseases, especially for any Aking
in the Bones, Stitches, &c. some in the adjacent Isles use it as a
Purge, others as a Vomiter; it is hot in quality, and forces its passage
through any Wooden Vessel.” Yes, one can imagine how emetic that was.
Martin allows himself some sentimental
reflections on the people as noble savages: “The Inhabitants of St. Kilda, are much, happier than the generality
of Mankind, as being almost the only People in the World who feel the sweetness
of true Liberty: What the Condition of the People in the Golden Age is feign’d
by the Poets to be, that theirs really is.” But who wouldn’t? He saw a resourceful
and brave people, who possess next to nothing, but require nothing from anyone
else.
They carried on their
immemorial way of life on an island whose small area is diminished by its precipitous
nature, and swept by storms. Somehow they also managed the struggle against a
small gene-pool, with very careful consideration given to who might marry whom
(They are “nice in examining the Degrees of Consanguinity before they Marry”,
Martin says). In terms of not out-consuming
their resources, they had the conception-limiting practice of continued
breast-feeding (“They give Suck to their Children for the space of Two
Years”), while Martin gives the impression, without saying very much about it, that
they had an abstinence-based (yet successful)
management of sexual desire.
These other - (or
out-of-worldly) - people were as vulnerable as a rare species (and they would
finally follow the great auks into extinction). Every time a boat arrives from
the mainland, a cough goes round the entire community, Martin learns, though has
to be persuaded that this is true. Two families are struggling with leprosy.
Their other susceptibility was
that they were, alongside that conservatism which seems a survival mechanism, all
mad for novelty, any kind of novelty. Martin is followed about and watched
intently, for at any time he might do or say something that they have never
conceived of before.
Martin had been able to get
to the island because word had reached the mainland of the previous arrival on
Hirta of an imposter, one Roderick, who had found in this place possibly the
only community anywhere who could have believed his preposterous lies. Sent to
the island (he told them) by John the Baptist, Roderick seems to have been bent
on some improvised experiment in social control, yet managed it extremely badly,
improvising his way into trouble. The Ten Commandments have been replaced (he
told them), and he offered the updates. Roderick seems to have made the women
of the island his target, and they may have been his motive for the whole
imposture. Accustomed to a life in which a woman has to be frugal with her body
as with everything else, these island women on the island were absolutely
faithful to their husbands (Martin says). They could not be corrupted by money (if
sailors managed to make a landing from a ship during some rare moment of dead
calm), as money meant nothing to them. But Roderick was achieving seductions.
Discovery of these actions ran neck-and-neck in discrediting him with his other
crazy innovations, which all failed, as they were bound to do in a place that
could only function and survive in the one traditional way it could function.
Because of the imposter
Roderick, Martin got his dangerous voyage out to the island (with narrow
escapes from drowning, being swept away into the main ocean, and being wrecked
at landfall) in the same boat as a minister, who has been sent out to put the
people back to rights. Even Roderick seems relieved, while the St Kildans are
happy to be back to what they were.
Martin described this
remarkable island with the Royal Society in mind. He does not waste words on
its wild beauty. There’s a good map and some good photographs at the following
URL’s:
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