Off in a Boat

First published 1938 by Faber & Faber, Ltd.

Foreword copyright © by Dairmid Gunn 1988 All rights reserved.

New Amsterdam edition published in 1990
by arrangement with Richard Drew Publishing, Ltd., Glasgow.
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOKS
171 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

9781461718611

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America.

★ For the Crew ★

This simple record of a holiday in a boat, bought in ignorance and navigated by faith and a defective engine, knowing she will be happy if it inspires others to find themselves further at sea

Foreword

‘Off in a Boat’ marks an important turning point in the writing life of one of Scotland’s greatest novelists of this century, Neil Gunn. In 1937 Gunn decided to become a full time writer. He resigned from his post in the Civil Service, sold his comfortable home in Inverness, bought a boat and set off on a three month voyage that was to take him and his crew of his wife Daisy and one of his brothers John, my father, round the Inner Hebrides. In his spiritual autobiography, and last book, ‘The Atom of Delight’, Gunn writes of the boyhood delight of being off and away. ‘To run until you forgot what you were running from until the running itself became an exhilaration. . . .’ When Gunn made his momentous decision, there was little about which to enthuse on the national and international scenes. Unemployment, the polarisation of politics in Europe, wars and the ever present possibility of a universal war were the standard fare for both press and radio. Yet he did not see this voyage round the islands as an escape from all this; he saw it rather as something valuable in itself, a chance to stand back, view the scene, find himself and achieve the exhilaration of being off in a boat. And so the book was born.

‘Off in a Boat’ does not have the epic proportions of Homer’s Odyssey, although reality and legend are often subtly inter-woven; nor does it possess the sustained humour, levity and quixotic adventures of Neil Munro’s Para Handy stories. It is more of what could be described as a ‘sentimental journey’ in the sense of Laurence Sterne’s great 18th century book of that name. Sterne’s Yorick, however, was venturing into a country that was foreign to him and fascinating because of its differences from the England he knew. The perfect backdrop for an indulgence in sentiment. Gunn’s voyage round the Inner Hebrides was also full of sentiment, but of a different kind. The journey was more of a homecoming as the islands bore the imprint of both Celtic and Norse civilizations, civilizations that had left their mark on the author’s own county of Caithness. The return to roots was part of the author’s process of standing back, finding the stillness at the heart of things and getting everything into proportion. It was not the adventures or sight-seeing that mattered, although they were important; it was the feelings that they engendered and the author’s ability to express them. His description of the Red Hills of Skye has the vividness and immediacy of a late Turner water colour. ‘By the time we came in sight of the Red Hills the sun was rising beyond them and turning their hollows into fiery chasms. The hills seemed to emit a red granite dust that splintered the white shafts of light and dissolved them into molten air. . . . The chasms, too, seemed to be of an immense size and the hills themselves heightened and etherialised. . . . Rarely does the witchery of light perform so astonishing a miracle. . . . But that is the gamble of sight-seeing in Skye. The miracle is come upon unexpectedly and is seldom if ever repeated.’