Seasons on Harris (32 page)

“So, did you get caught?” asked Anne.

“Och, no, no. The gamekeeper couldn't keep up. I told you—I never got caught. Ever. Not like poachers today. Let's just say…they give poachin' a bad name. They're just young hooligans. We respected the law
and we respected the people who owned the place. We only took what we ate. But I stopped it ages ago…in an interestin' kind of way. Would y'like to hear 'bout that?”

“Of course!” we said, almost in unison.

Sammy paused to refill our cups with the last of the now lukewarm tea. And then he was off again, smiling and chuckling as we settled down for a long, laughter-filled evening…

I
AM A GREAT ADMIRER OF
John Fowles's book
Islands
—and this collage of quotes in particular:

Islands do indeed possess strange and intriguing qualities. They lure you in with their uniqueness, captivating you with their history, people, and folklore. And while lulling you with the pleasures of enticing isolation, they also spur the very spirit that brought you to them in the first place. They succor the lust for more searchings—more explorations—of island places even farther out. Far, far beyond the sea-hazy horizons…

Which is exactly what happened to Anne and me on Harris. Hardly a month or so after we'd happily settled into our dune cottage, we heard a series of folk songs one evening at the Clisham Keel. They were different from the usual minor-keyed Scottish ballads and they told of an island, far to the west of Harris, way out in the Atlantic, where a small
community had once lived lives of great peace and harmony, well removed from the evils and secular temptations of the mainland. This island, so the singer explained, was St. Kilda, one of the world's loneliest outposts, home to vast flocks of seabirds but now abandoned by its people, leaving only the echoes of their lives and the ghostly remnants of their little civilization.

After the concert we talked to the singer and he told us he had been there only once but had found the place to be “one of the most beautiful parts of the world I've ever seen. Imagine soaring, green-sheened precipices exploding out of the Atlantic, wrapped in ghostly hazes, the air full of wheeling birds, with crashing waves fifty feet high, carving the cliffs, gouging out the sea caves, and great ocean winds howling around the peaks and cutting away at the stony remnants of the old community…set in a huge grassy bowl with all the ancient crofting walls still intact. Like they were waiting for the people to return” (very poetic, these island folk singers).

We drove home that night with one thought in our minds. We had to know more about—and see—this island. This St. Kilda.

 

F
ROM ANCIENT PLACE NAMES—
Rueval, Oiseval, Boreray, and Soay—one can assume this remote cluster of islands was well known to early Norse sailors, although no records of actual habitation here exist until the sixteenth century. However, a famously colorful legend of early conflicts over land ownership describes a boat race between the MacDonalds of Uist and the MacLeods of Harris to claim the island. Realizing that his crew was losing, the crafty (or suicidal) Colla MacLeod proceeded to lop off his left hand with his claymore sword in the final moments of the race and hurl it ashore ahead of the MacDonalds' boat and thus win the place “by a fist” for his clan.

After that, it all gets a little vague and folklorish until a few visitors braved the journey here in the seventeenth century and waxed lyrical over the utopian qualities they perceived in the two hundred or so residents on the island. Most notable among these explorers was of course the irrepressible Martin Martin, one of the first traveler-writers to jour
ney extensively through the Western Isles and record his experiences in his famous work,
A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland Circa 1695 and a Voyage to St. Kilda.

Martin Martin seemed to have only words of glowing praise for the St. Kildans on his first visit here in 1695. He saw in their “simplicity, purity, mutual love and cordial friendship…a new Golden Age” of societal mores and traditions. He notes that they appeared to be “free of care and covetousness, envy and dissimulation, ambition and pride and…altogether ignorant of the vices of foreigners, and governed by the dictates of reason and Christianity.” Martin was also impressed by their physical prowess: “Anyone inhabiting St. Kilda, is always reputed stronger than two of the inhabitants belonging to the isle of Harries.” His only criticism—in actuality, a high compliment—was that “they themselves do not know how happy they are, and how much they are above the avarice and slavery of the rest of mankind.”

Other traveler-writers followed, equally convinced of the paradise-on-earth qualities of the tiny St. Kildan society, at that time fewer than a hundred and eighty inhabitants. The Reverend Kenneth MacAulay claimed in 1764 that “the St. Kildans possess as great a share of true substantial happiness as any equal number of men elsewhere.” And fifty years later Duncan MacCulloch waxed even more fervently:

And then came the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century poets with their glowing epiphanies. First, David Mallet:

St. Kilda—Village Bay

And later came William Collins, who was particularly impressed by the St. Kildan ability to live almost solely on the flesh and eggs of gan
nets lifted, at great danger to themselves, from the towering vertical cliffs of Hirta (aka St. Kilda).

One of the most intriguing episodes in St. Kilda's history—an ironic blending of utopian elements with testosterone traumas of decadence and debauchery—was the reign of Roderick the Imposter, a young, charismatic island-born preacher who claimed to be in constant contact with John the Baptist. In most communities, particularly on the mainland—where religious and political scams, peddler-thieves, spell-weaving gypsies, and counterfeit “gentlemen of position” were commonplace and more easily spotted—Roderick would not have survived his first blasphemic utterances. But in that small, intimately homogenous, and isolated community of St. Kilda, which according to one visitor had experienced a somewhat “checkered kind of religion—a mixture of Druidism and popery,” a little wile and guile coupled with a generous dose of “the gift of the gab” could go a long way to achieving prominence. And dominance.

Which is precisely what young Roderick set out to do. And what a splendidly bawdy and ribald film or musical his story would make. For Roderick was barely eighteen when he claimed that he was meeting John the Baptist face-to-face on a regular basis and being given personal instructions for major religious reform among the islanders. Now, it's quite possible that the islanders were ready for a bit of a shake-up, and embryonic leaders and “reformers” often quickly spot a need of this kind and proceed to satisfy it. Or maybe they were just bored to distraction with their “utopian life” of egg gathering, bird catching, potato planting, halfhearted fishing, and endless knitting—and turned to this young, red-haired, and immensely strong young man for new order and direction.

Whatever the circumstances, it appears the eloquent and statuesque Roderick, whose bravery and prowess as a wildfowler on the island's soaring cliffs was renowned, found a most receptive audience and discovered, much to his delight, that his pronouncements and edicts were carried out to the letter. These included a substantial rewriting of the Ten Commandments, the banning of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, strange new interpretations of the Gospels that gave special privileges and power of authority to “direct descendants of the holy ones” (which Roderick, of course, claimed to be), and the authority to proclaim new religious edicts and initiate bizarre rites at will.

According to records of the time, these included the imposition of “fasting Fridays,” when nothing, “neither meat, nor grain, nor flesh of fowl, nor drink of any kind,” could be partaken from Thursday evening to early Saturday morning. Other requirements included obligatory and regular “confessions” by all islanders to Roderick, which gave him immense power and influence over his unsuspecting congregation. Then came a number of other more pernicious requirements especially created for “the edification of island women.” These included, most notably, the teaching of special hymns to protect the young wives from death during childbirth. But these were not the usual communal hymns. Each woman had to learn her own special hymn and it was often a rather long and complex litany that, of course, required “individual tuition in isolation” by the saintly Roderick himself. Who, it turns out, practiced far less saintly activities with each lady once they were left alone in a special “teaching cell” built by the island men for his “tuitions.”

To gauge from accounts of the time, Roderick created for himself a virtual harem in his cozy cell. The men of the island at first were pleasantly surprised by the remarkable increase in fertility of their wives until it slowly became evident to them that many island offspring bore remarkable resemblances to the potent Roderick himself. The rumblings of dissent began to arise.

Roderick was ready for such backlash and met each accusation with tirades of rhetoric and new, ever-stricter behavioral edicts that he claimed to still be receiving on a regular basis, following his ongoing conversations with St. John the Baptist.

And so it went on for several years, with Roderick gaining even more control of his flock and condemning, as ordered by the Baptist, any contravening behavior or even scintilla of skepticism and “traitorous thought” on the part of the confused islanders. Not only condemning but threatening that such activities “would incur eternal damnation in a future world, and be overtaken by some signal judgement!”

Thus Roderick continued to conjure up terrible tribulations for any who disobeyed his increasingly strict and self-serving laws and regulations. The women suffered most of all. Not only were they ordered “to conceal everything that happened to them at their ‘tuitions' under the pain of hellfire” but if any one of them “rejected his addresses and debauches,” he immediately commenced a criminal prosecution against her. The Baptist had, it seems, told him that one particularly rebellious woman had committed some flagitious action…and was made to walk over a beach made up of loose round stones. Kenneth MacAulay, in his fascinating 1764
History of St. Kilda
, describes this inquisition-like ritual:

Nor, apparently, had the men. If any one of them became outspoken or in any way displeased Roderick: