The severity was a guarantee of his seriousness. I met him for the first time when the boat was almost finished. His workshop is a Nissen hut on the shores of Flodabay. A curling strip of tarmac makes its tortuous way across rocks and around inlets down to the settlement. Nowhere in the British Isles that has been long inhabited can be bleaker than this. The ice-scraped gneiss shelters little more than dark peat hollows and sour grass. The houses of the people who live here are scattered along the road. There is no visible sign of community. It looks like a barren world.
That is certainly how outsiders have always seen such places: as an environment and a people in need of improvement and enrichment, a place of material poverty and actual sterility. But come a little closer and the picture turns on its head. A richness flowers among the rocks. John met me in front of the boat he had made. He stood four square, legs apart and shoulders back, resting a hand on the gunwale. His long, grey hair was brushed back from his temples. He wore a small grey moustache and looked me straight in the eye: a straight, calm, evaluating look. ‘Are you up to the boat I have made?’ it said. Could the shipwright trust the client? But instead, he said, ‘Welcome, welcome.’
We went over it together for two hours, inch by inch. Although I had paid for it, and I was to use it, I was to trust my life to it, there was no doubt whose boat this was. John was describing his world. The boat to my eye was extraordinarily deep and wide for its length: sixteen feet long but six feet, two inches in the beam, and drawing at least two feet below the water line at the stern. ‘Take me through it,’ I said. Little spits of rain were coming in through the open doors of the workshop. ‘This boat is for the Minch,’ he said. ‘She is not off the shelf. She knows the conditions in which she’ll have to work. And she’s within your capabilities for handling. Twelve feet would be too small and anything bigger would be too big for you.’
John enlarged on the difference between this and ‘most boats’. ‘Most boats are a tub’ – he outlined the body of a pig in the air – ‘and a keel. A tub for buoyancy, a keel for lateral stability. Easy to make, cheap to build. This boat is different. It’s the hull planking itself which makes the keel. It is a highly complex and integrated form, and that integral keel running the whole length of the boat gives you directional stability as well as lateral stability.’ The form he was describing clearly derived from the deep-draughted birlinn. There was ‘more boat in the water’ built like this. You might see her afloat and think, just from the shore, that she was a slip of a thing. She wouldn’t show a great deal. The meat of the boat was unseen, in the water, and it was that which made her a good sea boat and a good sailing boat. She had a better grip in the water that way and you wouldn’t get anything like the rolling effect you would with ‘most boats’.
Everything was precision here. The language John was using was scientific in its exactness. The saws, drawknives, hand-drills, chisels, disc-grinders and hammers were hung cleanly and neatly, ranged by size, along the corrugated metal walls of the workshop. A mallet and a measuring tape lay on the work bench. Timber was stacked on shelving in the roof and one of John’s padded checked shirts hung from the end of the baulks. The wind coming in from the large open garage doors was the only thing unregulated here. ‘Where did you learn to be so neat, John?’ I asked him.
‘I can’t bear untidiness of any kind,’ he said.
I felt a little fat in his presence, mentally fat, from the world beyond here, the world of cheap options and short cuts, the world of ‘most boats’, where the rigour of this man and his workshop was not applied. I slowly came to understand something: this was not a very large dinghy. It was a very small ship. This was the birlinn translated for me. All the principles of sea-kindliness, of robustness of construction and yet lightness of form, of a craft designed to protect its crew and save their lives, miraculously transmitted to this man and his meticulous workshop, had been poured into the boat which he would allow me to call mine. John himself, and the boat he had made, were a transmission from the world of the Shiants’ past.
But there was more to it. ‘The entry is fine’ – it comes to a sharp and narrow point at the bow – ‘which makes her easy to row. And the underwater lines are clean: a clean fine exit.’ Underwater, the stern sweeps to as narrow and subtle a point as the bow. Seen from astern, the boat’s form is a wineglass. I – the crew – would inhabit the bowl, but the sea would come into contact only with the stem of the glass. As far as the sea knew, the boat gradually slipped away to nothing. Smooth, laminar flow along the hull would allow her to slide along, no eddies, no drag. Only ‘amidships’ – John’s word, all the implications of this tradition buried in it – does she fill out. But again the middle path must be chosen. She is not so fine that she will roll too quickly, but not so full that the drag is too great. The mast and yardarm, cut and planed from lengths of Scottish larch, the oars (larch) and rudder (oak, bound and tipped with galvanised iron) had all been made by John without compromise or trimming. Everything was as full and robust as it needed to be, but not more than that. This was no butcher of a thing. It had a slightness for all its strength. He had forged the iron for the mooring rings, the eyebolts and hooks for the halyard, the upright pins for the rowlocks and the gudgeons and pintles for the rudder. Everything was fully itself, designed not only for appearance but to last and to work in difficult and harsh conditions. Nothing was too heavy or too massive. Accommodation was all.
‘A boat for the Shiants then?’ I said. John nodded silently. ‘I think she’s beautiful,’ I said. He said nothing, but shrugged.
‘How long will she last?’ I asked him.
‘It’ll last longer than you,’ he said, and then turning away, ‘There are boats at Geocrab, the next bay up, that are more than a hundred years old and they’re still sailing.’
‘And do you think I’ll make a good sailor of her?’
‘If you had another life,’ John said.
‘Ah yes,’ I said, reeling a little, ‘I suppose one needs to know these things instinctively.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You need to be entirely conscious of what you are doing and why you are doing it.’
Sharp, educative, exact: the mind was as clear and as precisely arranged as the tools on the workshop wall. John uses words like ‘declivity’, ‘counteraction’, ‘silicon bronze’ as if they were chisels. One of his saws was stamped with its date of manufacture: 1948. It hung on its hook in as clean a condition as the day it was made.
It was not hostility. Far from it. He had done his extraordinary best for me. He had wetted the keel, as one should, with a glass of whisky when it was first laid. He had buried deep in the woodwork at the stern a threepenny bit from the year of his birth, 1941. He had given the stern his own signature, a little ‘tumblehome’, a slight curving of the hull in towards the gunwale ‘because it looked right.’ He had poured himself into this beautiful thing for me. But this is not a sentimental tradition. This was a man who had grown up with boats. He had been sailing his first small boat like this when he was a teenager. His grandfather and great-grandfather had big herring drifters, fifty, sixty, seventy feet long, built in Stornoway, with which they had followed the herring on its seasonal migration around Cape Wrath, through the Pentland Firth, down the east coast of Scotland and on as far as Yarmouth. The herring have long since gone now and that is not an option.
‘Is there much fishing in this loch now?’ a Lewis crofter was asked by one of the investigating Commissioners in 1894.
‘There used to be when herring came into it,’ he said. ‘There is very little fishing except when there are herring.’
‘Do you know the reason why the herring are not coming