I was told a story later by an engineer in Tobermory of a certain man who had bought a motor boat from a landed proprietor of this part of the world and on coming at full speed to anchor for the first time, went to pull the lever into neutral at the appropriate moment and while still a considerable distance from shore. But the lever, to his amazement, wouldn’t budge. It is all too easy to imagine him tugging at it and tugging at it in an ever-mounting wrath while the smart craft sped on. Easier still to say afterwards that he might have done this or that. I, mercifully, had always closed the throttle. He forgot so simple an expedient, and his vessel charged up the distillery burn and became a total wreck. That he tried to get redress from the previous owner proves that he had a sanguine temperament. At least I could avoid the burn—and there it was (for Tobermory is tucked round a corner) with the distillery (now a wreck itself) beside it. And the houses along the front, and the two piers; but, by the grace of God, no yachts. A schooner lay at anchor off the inner or old pier and I made to pass outside her. Now for it! and I went to put the engine into neutral. At the third tug the lever came. And in the same moment it was as if a machine gun had gone mad in the cabin. The rat-tat-tatting at a terrific velocity was deafening. I shut her off. And she shut, and was quiet, and nothing more came from anywhere.

‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘The whole bag of tricks, by the sound of it.’

A fellow on the schooner was idly watching us. I shouted, asking him if we would do where we were. But he cried us to come in. I got into the dinghy, tied the end of a rope to the seat I sat on, while Maurice got a hold forward, and rowed away. She came like a penitent lamb. Not that that softened me. She had taken us here. She had never let us down. What if she had gone phut off Ardnamurchan? I was not interested. When the man on the schooner indicated that we were right, I got on board again and we let go the anchor. ‘You’re fine there,’ he shouted. ‘Thank you,’ I acknowledged, and dried my sweat. We had arrived once more.

X

An t’Eilean Muilleach

We had anchored about fifty yards inshore from where the Spanish galleon had been sunk, and when we landed and went, by chance, to the Mishnish Hotel on the front, the proprietor showed us a piece of African blackwood which had once been part of the sea-going might of Spain. For after the defeat of the Armada in 1588 many galleons had come up the west coast of Scotland, and in certain outlying islands there are supposed to be discerned in some of the inhabitants to this day physical characteristics of a somewhat Spanish cast.