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.’

Gunn’s flair and subtlety in expressing his feelings are not confined to subjective descriptions of mountains and island landscapes. They are also put into play in response to the element that perhaps fascinated him most of all—the sea. Here there is a mixture of allusions to what is concrete and defined in terms of charts and sailing directions and the sense of utter captivation created by the capricious nature of the sea. He captures the spirit of Joseph Conrad when he writes: ‘The wind became intermittent and the colours in the sea varied and fascinating. Towards the west, where the blue sky was widening, the water was living amaranth; east and south it was a leaden rolling waste. The cloud formations were of great complexity, from pure white puffs in the distant blue, airy as meadowland dreams, through snarls and wind-drawn angers overhead, to the sombre pall that lay on Skye and the inky gloom that blotted out the south west.’

Descriptions of the present are often inter-woven with musings on the past. Reference is made to the spot off Earraid where Robert Louis Stevenson has his Alan Breck and David Balfour shipwrecked. Allusion is also made to Boswell and the worthy Dr Johnson, not the best or appreciative of travellers. But it is the continuity of life, traditions and customs on the islands that clearly mean most to Gunn. His receptiveness to feelings is powerfully evoked by the sight of people on a landscape and this confirms within his mind the close relationship that exists between reality and legend. ‘. . . . my mind goes back to Benbecula, to a picture of great waves on its Western strand, a herd girl sheltering against a stook of corn, wild geese in a stubble field, in a grey day of small rain. What virtue there is in that picture I cannot tell, but it has already much of the force of legend. . . .’

Juxtaposed with sentiment and feeling and running through the book is a distinct vein of humour. There has to be as the crew cannot be described as being professional. They, like so many, derive unconcealed pleasure from messing around in boats. Their lack of experience removes none of the excitement from this strange voyage, which the author describes so succinctly and humorously in his dedication to his wife. ‘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’.

Dairmid Gunn
1988

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
I - How not to Buy a Boat
II - Fitting Out
III - Cutting the Painter
IV - Out to Sea
V - And it did Blow
VI - How we Arrived at Eigg
VII - Egga, Ego, Ardegga, Egea, Eiggie, or Eigg
VIII - To Arisaig and the Sands of Morar
IX - Round Ardnamurchan
X - An t’Eilean Muilleach
XI - Round the Caliach
XII - The Ross of Mull
XIII - Hii, Hy, I, Ia, Io, Y, Yi . . . or Iona
XIV - The Torranan Rocks
XV - Oban
XVI - Glen Etive, where she ‘builded her bridal hold’
XVII - Landlord Rampant
XVIII - Farewell to Deirdre’s garden
XIX - ‘I dislike being long at a time’
XX - Homeward Bound
XXI - Liberty and Property
XXII - The Last Trump

I

How not to Buy a Boat

Eoin is the sort of friend who can always do ‘the very thing’ for you. If you have a vague idea of buying a motor-car or a house or any other little luxury beyond your means, it is unwise to mention it to him. One night as he was going out the door I said, ‘By the way, Eoin, you don’t know of a smart little craft, something about thirty feet, with cabin to sleep two, a sound engine—sort of boat a man and his wife could work around the West Coast and the Islands?’

‘Man,’ he said, turning with his dark smile, ‘I know the very thing for you. I saw her last week in Skye. She’s mahogany from the keel up and she has the lines of a girl. You could dance in her cabin and she has a wash-basin you tip up and a lavatory that cost over twenty pounds.’

‘Sit down,’ I said, and I got hold of his glass again.

We left Inverness at six in the morning and were at Dornie Ferry before half-past eight. It was a lovely cool April morning and the Kyle was a grey shimmer. The ferry-boat was on the other side, and Eoin, stretching himself after the keen run, filled his breast with all the West. This was his own land, and, having reached it, he left haste where it belonged.

‘I want to introduce you’, he said, ‘to a friend of mine.’

So I followed him until he found his friend, who from the byre took us into his parlour, where he was very hospitable, early though it was. Through the window I presently saw the ferry-boat coming across for us. When it could wait no longer it went away with the postman. But later on it came back, and, after a last round of words, we went with it.

In Kyle of Lochalsh the fishing boats—smart Loch Fyne craft—were coming in, and we arranged to buy two cod of next day’s catch to take home with us.

The business air of hurry and responsibility is difficult to maintain in the West; and when Kyle was behind us, and Broadford, and the small new bungalow with the boarded windows that no one will inhabit because it is haunted by a woman out of the stream behind, we decided that the day was opening up very well. Then the hill beyond Loch Ainort, with its striped tawny skin, and beyond that the round summit of Ben Glamaig, white with snow.

I have so many happy memories of Skye that its bareness has an intimate attraction. Peat smoke was ascending from the small hamlets by the sea. Folk were stirring here and there. The Island of Raasay, with its sugar-loaf hill, lay ahead of us, small Paby far behind, and Scalpay over from us on our right. The seaways between were quiet glimmering channels.

‘Think’, said Eoin in the drowsy voice of legend, ‘of sailing down them.’

I had been thinking of it for some time. To be passing out there, where no craft was visible, would be a sailing out of time. To cast our warps, not for escape, but for adventure—into that which all our moorings have kept from us.

‘That is the life I would like,’ he told me confidentially. Behind his tone was the echo of what may never be won—but for the hope that comes again on such a morning in the West.

The business he had in Portree was probably in his mind as well, for it was of an intricate nature—nothing less than attempting to get a drinking licence for an hotel which he had rented in the north end of the island.

But if he knew little about hotel-keeping, he certainly knew most of what any one man may know of the complex Gaelic mind. And here was occasion for exercise of the astutest in all the devious ways of its courteous diplomacies.

For the motives that move the licensing authorities of an island like Skye may appear on the surface bland as Ah Sin’s face but in reality are deeper far than Shakespeare’s well. This is no simple affair of a popular vote; no question of elected representatives carrying out the will or desire of their constituents. At one point I was called into an office, charged around with black deed boxes like children’s coffins, and asked to vouch for Eoin’s character (to a man who knew of him and his antecedents far better than I), so that he might be deemed a fit and proper person to hold a licence. This was a thing I could do, with my bonnet off, for if there is one matter that should be sifted out beyond all others it is the character of the man in whose company a drink would retain all its friendliest, most refreshing, and inspiring properties.

‘But wouldn’t the folk in his hotel area like him to get the licence?’ I asked innocently.

‘No doubt.’

Whereat I all but blushed.

Landowners, female teetotallers also landed, ministers of the Gospel, bankers, retired gentry—from such as these are the company of licensing authorities gathered together. And each in the light of his or her peculiar beliefs decides what is good for the commonalty.

When Eoin said he was not going to ask any favour from anyone, I saw the matter was getting too complicated for me, so I left him and went down to the harbour, and there saw a converted ship’s lifeboat about thirty feet long.

I had a prejudice against conversions and the sight of this one deepened it, for all her new paint. She looked top-heavy and swung to the fitful airs in a way that made it easy to visualise her flat bottom. Bravely tricked out, too, with her high cabin, brass portholes brightly polished, and small windlass forward. But the game of pitch and toss in a western sea needs more qualities than a stout stomach. So I left her and climbed the hill behind the harbour.

Portree is finely situated overlooking a noble anchorage. The town itself is not very interesting architecturally, and the new bungalows on the heights behind could hardly be said to have improved the scene. But perhaps it is all too easy to vision what might have been, for here surely is the very situation for the queen of the whole north-west. Certainly nature did her best. And man with his limited resources, harried by barbarians out of the south, doubtless did his best too—just as he did with the lifeboat conversion in the harbour, though that was a neat job.

But what I was looking for was the black reef—and when I saw it, out beyond the harbour to the left, I got a touch of the old thrill. I had gone across to Raasay with a girl in a row-boat, leaving another couple on shore, and on the way back a growing wind very nearly beat us. Feeling gone from wrists and arms and pulling with the dead weight of the body, I was lucky at last to beach on Skye, where all four of us managed to heave the small boat beyond high-water mark near An Tom Point.

Presently we saw a fishing boat leave Portree. It was now blowing half a gale and getting dark, so she could never be going to sea. At last, three of us got on board her in the shelter of a headland, and I went back along shore to launch our boat to be taken in tow. In the midst of this manoeuvre, the fishing boat’s engine broke down. Mast had to be stepped and canvas rigged. And then right in the teeth of it, we tacked back into Portree harbour.

The exhilaration of a sea-storm turns dull men vivid, dumb men into a shout, and slow men into the leap of a sword. There is no intoxicant to be compared with it.

As the skipper went for the black spit of rock, his two sons stood ready. At his quiet word, they leapt. She came up towards the eye of the wind, hesitated for one long desperate moment, then fell away again, defeated. The yawing swing of her head was a strange living gesture, like the movement of the head and neck of a horse I once saw drowning. Quietly, without word or movement, the skipper gave her defeated head its way, the canvas all the wind it could carry, and made straight for the root of the reef. When the last moment seemed long past, he spoke again. Bravely she came up from her steering way, strained through the desperate moment, then fell away on the new tack and passed the reef’s point with a plunging forefoot.

So naturally I should like to praise Portree, its people, and their kindness.

But the country folk feel that the inhabitants of their capital look down upon them as provincials and barbarians, and in heated argument they will damn the town as ‘a drunken hole’. But then Portree basks in the sun of the licensing authorities and city men do have their superior ways.