‘And at the flood it’ll be running through the other way?’
‘That’ll be right. The ebb is taking you out and the flood is taking you back. The ebb starts about an hour and a half before high water in the Sound. That’s how you need to be planning it. But sometimes that’s hard to get right with the daylight – no one would be doing the trip in winter anyhow, I’m thinking.’
‘So the lightkeepers have to be supplied for a whole winter?’
‘Yes indeed, sir. And there’s many a day at any time of year you’d not be wanting to be out here.’
‘Well, at least it’ll be better than the Bell Rock,’ called Ben cheerfully from the bows.
‘At least at the Bell Rock they had a decent port to go back to.’
‘I wouldna ken, sir. I only drink ale myself.’
Mr Watterson grinned, and the boy Juan stifled a snort which might have been the beginnings of a laugh.
‘Now you have to be watching the cletts off the Burroo. See ahead there?’ – Finn pointed out a great stone stack at the southern tip of the Calf – ‘We’re steering well clear of her just now. You see that arch opening up just now? That’s the Eye. You can see that from just by Castletown. The Burroo’s a dangerous place, dangerous awful. If you’re ever bringing a ship into these waters, you’ll be wanting to keep full clear of the Burroo, if you’re valuing your lives, especially at the spring tides. And if there’s any southerly wind you get the waves coming very steep. There’s seven or eight cletts – you’ll know what cletts are, Master Benjamin, seeing you’re an Orkney man – so you’ll be keeping well clear. With a flood tide taking you the other way, you could be finding yourselves on the rocks before you’re knowing it, and that’s the end of you. Oh, it’s a fiendish place. Some of the trickiest waters in the world, off the Calf here, indeed.’
In his leather case with his notebooks, Archie had a tracing of the 1815 map of the Calf made by his predecessors when they’d surveyed that island in preparation for the new lights. The Burroo and the cletts around it had been named and marked with great emphasis. Archie would have liked to look at the map again now, but he could see choppy water ahead: this wasn’t the place to unfold a plan. He knew the map of the Calf by heart now anyway. No one had ever surveyed Ellan Bride before. He’d be the first.
‘Ay well. Some say that about Orkney too,’ said Ben.
‘Ah, but this is a trickier sea. Waves thirty feet high, and the current going about ten knots, when the sea gets up, in no time at all. And no distance at all between the crests: they’ll be coming in so close together a ship will be having no time to make a recover. And once you’re driven close to these islands, and you’re finding yourselves on a lee shore … well, Master Benjamin, you just don’t want to be there.’
‘Ay well, they say the Irish Sea is a tricky spot. We were working at the Mull of Galloway. I saw some big seas there.’
‘Ay. It’s the whole of the Atlantic you’re getting, pouring into the Manx Sea twice every day, and nowhere to be putting itself. So it’s tricky water. The keepers on the Calf, now – Scotch, like yourselves – they’re saying they’ve never seen such desperate seas as they’re seeing here, in these waters.’
‘And for better for worse, we’ve got to work in them,’ said Ben cheerfully.
It was choppy off the Burroo. Ben pulled his boat cloak tightly round him as gouts of water came flying over the bows. The boy beside him turned his back to the bows and hunched his shoulders. With the wind on the port beam they were making good time. They steered well clear of the stacks, and the wicked cletts, which showed long trails of white where the tide parted around them. Ben had seen what the Irish Sea could do from the Mull of Galloway. Finn was right, he thought: this was indeed a fearsome place.
They rounded the Burroo at a respectful distance. A new stretch of water opened up ahead.
‘I can see the lighthouse on Ellan Bride, sir,’ called Ben.
About ten points to starboard, Archie saw an obstinately vertical mark in the distance, as if someone had jabbed a lead pencil against the horizon.
‘Those rocks yonder,’ Finn was saying, ‘we’re putting the name Chickens on them. That’s because you’ll be seeing the stormy petrels flying about here – what they call Mother Carey’s chickens. Now the Chickens’ll be the most desperate rocks in the Island. The ships are thinking they’re well clear of the Calf, and they’re running straight onto the Chickens. There’s no mercy for them then. It was because of the Chickens they were building the Calf lights. You’ll see, if you’ll line up the two towers yonder, on the Calf: from the Chickens the one light is straight above the other – you keep them well apart and you’ll not be in any danger. Before them lights this was a terrible place for wrecks, dangerous awful. I was going out there with my father after the Sally was lost – twenty years that’ll be now – smashed to bits she was. And she was a Whitehaven ship that was knowing these waters as well as anyone. She was headed for Ireland, but the Chickens out there was as far as ever she was getting. Now if anyone could be building a lighthouse there …’
White water was breaking over the Chickens rocks. Archie thought of Dulsic, off Cape Wrath, which had the same configuration: a wicked skerry, right in the path of any unsuspecting ship that thought itself well clear of the headland. Like the Chickens, many a ship had been wrecked there for the lack of a light. Hard to imagine a wreck on a day like this: the noise, the terror, the chaos, the sheer power of the sea when it was roused. On rocks like these, no man or ship could withstand a big sea for more than a moment once they were caught.
The first time Archie had seen the Dulsic skerries was from the Cape Wrath headland. He’d stood with Mr Ritson – Archie had only been the under-surveyor then – looking down on a furious sea. Huge plumes of spray broke over them, nearly three hundred feet up. When he’d come back to Cape Wrath by sea a week later, Mr Ritson had gone ashore at Sandwood Bay, and sent Archie ahead in the ship to take sightings from the sea.
Archie had found the Cape transformed. They’d sailed out of Loch Laxford and edged their way north. When dawn came the sea was calm and milky. The sun slowly rose and tinged everything pink. All day he’d stood in the bows, watching that wild coastline unfold. At the Cape there was only an easy swell. The skipper said he’d never seen it as calm as this. A little crown of breaking waves, barely tinged with white, marked the fearful skerries. On a sudden impulse he’d strolled aft and told the skipper what he wanted to do. Perhaps the man was too surprised to say no; in any case he’d had the boat lowered, and sent three of the crew along with Archie.
Down in the boat the swell seemed a lot bigger. They’d come close in to the skerry. McGill was at the tiller. He couldn’t time it right; a wave caught them, threw them forward, then pulled them back, a yard short of the rock. Then Angus took over. If Angus couldn’t do it, no one could.
‘Now!’ They came in on the top of the wave. Water churned in the two-inch gap between boat and rock. ‘Now, sir, now!’ Archie scrambled over the gunwale. He was standing on the biggest Dulsic skerry. It was just a rock, flat and wet, ringed with seaweed. Only a sailor, or a lighthouse surveyor, could have any idea what it meant to stand here. He’d stood for fully two minutes, half-scared that Angus wouldn’t be able to get him off. When the boat came in with the next wave, he’d launched himself clumsily headfirst over the gunwale, and had had to scramble up through the legs of the oarsmen. But he’d done it. He’d stood on the notorious Dulsic. He’d been a young fellow then. The skipper had not reported him to Mr Stevenson. It was all of five years ago.
Finn Watterson altered course, so that the Ellan Bride lighthouse was directly on the bow, leaving the Chickens half a mile to starboard. He watched this Master Buchanan thoughtfully. There was something he was needing to say, but he hadn’t quite got the man’s measure yet. Master Buchanan looked pleasant enough, dark-haired and dark-eyed – the