The islanders were intensively religious. Their fervour was in part induced by their physical situation. A sea-girt isle, rising almost perpendicularly from the sea, with nothing save the often fierce Atlantic in sight, St Kilda presented man with almost insurmountable odds. Under such conditions of geography and climate, Man became even more infinitesimal before the Infinite. The people took for their own a harsh, puritanical religion, which gave them a peace of mind and offered them, if not a future on this earth, at least a pattern which they could follow and a promise of a more certain life in the next world.
As contact with the mainland increased during the nineteenth century, the St Kildan character developed in some respects detrimental to the reputation of the people. ‘A St Kildan woman’, wrote Kearton in 1886, ‘always regards everybody with suspicion, and does not hurry over a purchase, thinking that she is being cheated.’ The islanders were a simple, honest people: the tourists were more sophisticated and from a society in which it was the common thing to seek to take advantage. The St Kildans were incapable of adapting to a more complex set of rules of behaviour and became introverted. Nor did they distinguish between tourists and those who came to their island to do genuine good. Doctors found themselves faced with resolution and stubbornness. ‘There is no need’, wrote Norman Heathcote in 1900 of the St Kildans, ‘for them to go through the form of saying that they are conscientious objectors. They simply refuse to allow their children to be operated on, and there is no more to be said.’
To the end, the St Kildans possessed a simplicity that was at once attractive, if infuriating. When Emily MacLeod, the sister of the then proprietor, told the St Kildans in 1877 that she like Queen Victoria was a plain old woman, she was sternly rebuked by the islanders, who informed her that she must not refer to Her Majesty in such a way, as the Bible said that subjects must honour their monarch. When a supply of cement was sent to St Kilda so that a proper aisle could be laid in the Church, the ‘bags of dust’ as the islanders called them were stacked outside the Church to await a time when the men could see their way to doing the job. The following summer a friend of the proprietor arrived to ask how the work had gone. The ‘bags of dust’, said the men, had by a miracle all turned into lumps of rock before they had got round to using them.
Whatever their faults, the St Kildans led an unenviable way of life. The provision of food was their major concern year in and year out. They were forced to make good use of everything that their poor island could offer them in the struggle for survival. Moreover, they lived in the knowledge that any part of the provisioning process could be disrupted at any time by weather and illness. Isolated from the rest of humanity, only the laird of Dunvegan was there to protect them from starvation.
4
Bird people
Boys on St Kilda were taught to climb cliffs as soon as they were able. ‘The first thing to attract our notice’, wrote John Ross the schoolmaster of an August day he spent in a boat at the foot of the cliffs of Conachair, ‘was one of the men and his little boy on a rugged but fairly level piece of ground rather down near the sea. One end of the rope was tied round the father’s waist while the other was tied round the boy’s waist. Most probably, lest he being young, rash and inexperienced, might slip into the sea. There they were all alone then, killing away at a terrible rate, for the boy was collecting while the father kept shaking and twisting.
‘The man removing himself from the rope shouldered a burden of dead fulmars and made for a cutting in the rock, too narrow one would think for a dog, and too slippery for a goat. Along this he crawled on hands and knees. A single slip in the middle would have hurled him at least eighty feet sheer down into the sea. But he landed his burden safely and returned for the boy. The rope was tied as before, but only about a yard was left between them this time and that brave little fellow of only ten summers fearlessly followed his father and reached safety without a hitch. This is how the St Kildans train their young to the rocks and what a dangerous life it is.’
The St Kildans learnt how to climb from childhood. Most of them remember playing on the cliffs of Conachair when they were young and thinking nothing of it. They grew up to be short, stocky, agile men, natural climbers. The bone structure of their ankles differed from that of people born elsewhere. The ankle of a St Kildan male was practically half as thick again as that of a mainland person, and the toes were set further apart and almost prehensile.
The slaughter of sea fowl for food was essential to life on St Kilda. What the reindeer is to the Laplander, so the gannets, fulmars and puffins that each year made their nests on the cliffs of the rocky archipelago were to the St Kildans. Due to the poverty of the soil, other forms of subsistence were incapable, on their own, of maintaining human life on Hirta. The islanders had their sheep, a few cattle, and a meagre crop of potatoes, barley and corn, but without the flesh of the sea birds they could never have survived. Totally cut off from the rest of society, they were only able to live on their island by denying themselves the way of life common to crofters in other parts of Scotland and becoming, as Julian Huxley remarked, ‘bird people’.
‘The air is full of feathered animals,’ wrote John MacCulloch when he visited St Kilda in 1819. ‘The sea is covered with them,’ he continued, ‘the houses are ornamented by them, the ground is speckled with them like a flowery meadow in May. The town is paved with feathers…The inhabitants look as if they had all been tarred and feathered, for their hair is full of feathers and their clothes are covered with feathers…Everything smells of feathers.’
The sea birds and their eggs were jealously guarded by the St Kildans. In 1695, a boatload of strangers attempted to steal some eggs from the cliffs. The St Kildans fought off the intruders and put the precious eggs back in their nests. For good measure the islanders confiscated the pirates’ trousers before sending them on their way. During the nesting season, the single egg laid by the fulmar was not allowed to be removed for eating. Steps were taken to prevent the sheep and dogs from worrying the birds. Every June, the St Kildans fenced off the cliff tops with ropes made from hay with feathers stuck into them, so vital was it to the community that the eggs be allowed to hatch. When Parliament at Westminster passed an Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds in 1869, acknowledgement was made of the islanders’ dependence upon their feathered itinerants. A clause was inserted excluding St Kilda from the provisions of the Act because of ‘the necessities of the inhabitants’.
For nearly nine months of the year, the St Kildans were preoccupied with the killing of sea birds. ‘From their dependency on the capture of sea fowl for their support,’ wrote George Atkinson, ‘all their energies of body and mind are centred in that subject and scarcely any of their regulations extend to anything else; from the period of the arrival of the fowl in the month of March, till their departure in November, it is one continued scene of activity and destruction.’
Puffins in their hundreds of thousands were the first birds to return in March after a winter at sea. Most of them made for the island of Dun, and the St Kildans lost little time in seeking out the first fresh meat they had had the opportunity to taste for nearly four months. The adult gannets would begin to come back at the end of January, but it was not until April that the islanders would launch the boats to go to Stac Lee and Stac an Armin to kill the birds. During the month that followed, gannets and puffins continued to provide the people with food, and the fulmars nesting on the ledges of the cliffs of Conachair offered a welcome change of diet. Although the fulmar eggs were never taken from the nest because the female laid only one, those of the gannet and the guillemot were taken in their thousands. The St Kildans ate them fresh, or preserved for consumption at some