The gugas had to be killed at night, when the birds would be on their nests. Usually a dozen men were involved in the trip – seven would land on Boreray and the other five would stay in the boat and row and drift round the island all night. ‘This island’, wrote George Atkinson, ‘is more universally precipitous than St Kilda, and to a timid or awkward person would be really difficult to land on.’ Before a landing was attempted each man would remove his boots and don a pair of heavy woollen socks.
‘The St Kildans’, continued Atkinson, who went with a party of islanders to Boreray in the summer of 1831, ‘are very dexterous in landing or embarking on, or from, a rocky shore, where the long, heavy swell of the Atlantic keeps the boat rising and falling by the side of the cliff, a height of fourteen or fifteen feet, even when the sea appears quite calm. The boat is placed with her broadside to the rock and kept from striking by a man in the head and stern, each with a long pole for the purpose. One of their barefooted climbers stands ready in the middle with a coil of rope on his arms, and seizing an opportunity springs on the rock and establishes himself firmly on some rough projection. He then hauls on the rope, the other end of which, I should have observed, is held by some in the boat, or attached to it, and giving way when the boat falls, tightens the rope at its rising. Another companion joins him and standing three or four feet from him employs another rope in a similar manner, so that together they form a firm and safe gangway or railing, for an inexpert person to spring to land by.
‘When this is attained, however, a most arduous ascent of the precipice is to be accomplished, which is here of the height of six hundred or seven hundred feet, and quite difficult enough for the most indifferent climbers, though unembarrassed by any load, and we were told the women often ascend and descend this with a sheep or a couple of lambs in their arms.’
The colony of gannets on Boreray would be asleep on their nests, but one bird would remain awake and would give the alarm as soon as his suspicions were aroused. The ‘sentry’ bird always had to be killed first, then the fowlers could slaughter the unsuspecting birds at will with the aid of a small club. ‘After working for an hour or two,’ wrote George Murray in 1886, ‘we rested and three of us sat down on the bare rocks with the ropes about our middles, the cloudless sky our canopy, the moon our lamp, and had family worship. The scene to me was very impressive. The the ocean still and quiet far below, and offered praise and prayer to Him who was able to preserve us in such dangerous work.’ Before catching a few hours’ rest, some of the night’s catch would be gutted and stored in the cleits built on Boreray, to be eaten on further expeditions to the island. At daybreak, hundreds of gannets would be loaded into the boat and the crew would return to Hirta. At the landing-place the women, relieved at the sight of their returning men, would carry the catch after it had been divided out to their cottages.
A large bird with a five-foot wingspan, the gannet could be ferocious when disturbed on its nest. Although the birds would not intentionally attack the fowlers, they could and did hit them a hard blow with their powerful wings and sharp beaks as they attempted to flee. On the great stacs, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin, there was always the danger, in the dark particularly, of losing footing and falling off. ‘They used to go at night time’, recalls Neil Ferguson, ‘and climb the rock [Stac Lee] at night when the gannets were roosting. But there was always one on watch and that’s the one they made for first in the dark and broke its neck. They then killed all the rest one after the other and left them lying there till daybreak and then threw them out to the sea for the boat to pick up.’ On Stac Lee, the St Kildans stood on a promontory, called the Casting Point, to throw the gannets to the men in the boat below. The point overhangs the base of the rock, so there was little danger of the night’s kill being blown and crushed against the rocks.
A landing on Stac Lee was always dangerous. ‘As we approached the stacs,’ wrote Lady Mackenzie in 1853, ‘the gannets came to meet us in their thousands, and one could hardly see the sky through them. There is no possible landing place on the stacs where a boat can be drawn up, as they rise sheer out of the ocean. At one place for which we steered, there had been an iron pin three feet long let into the rock perhaps ten feet above high-water mark, and from the boat a rope with a loop at the end of it was thrown over this pin and the boat drawn in near enough for some of the best of the St Kildan climbers to spring on to a small ledge. Then they ascended very carefully and very slowly with their rods, with the nooses at the end, and soon they had caught and killed a large number of the solans.’ As with the fulmar, the St Kildans would use fowling rods to trap the less accessible gannets.
When the gannets had been killed, the ropes and rods could be put away for another year. The St Kildans could face another winter confidently. Supplies of food were assured and the feathers and oils extracted from the fulmar and gannet would pay the rent.
The feathers of both birds fetched a fair price on the mainland. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the factor sold most of the fulmar feathers to the British government. Once fumigated, they were impervious to lice and bed-bugs, and as such were much favoured by the army. The amber oil of the fulmar was said to have many of the properties of cod liver oil. Rich in vitamins A and D it was sold on the mainland as a medicine. The St Kildans claimed it helped soothe rheumatic pains and in London and Edinburgh it was sold in bottles to the public as the perfect remedy for tooth-ache. ‘Can the world exhibit a more valuable commodity?’ remarked a St Kildan in the eighteenth century. ‘The fulmar furnishes oil for the lamp, down for the bed, the most salubrious food, the most efficacious ointments for healing wounds, besides a thousand other virtues of which he is possessed, which I have no time to enumerate. But to say all, in one word, deprive us of the fulmar and St Kilda is no more.’
From time immemorial people could only live on Hirta at the expense of the fulmar and the gannet. Year after year the sea birds managed to survive the massive onslaught made by the St Kildans upon their number. Despite the decimation, the colonies were never to desert the stacs and cliffs of the archipelago. St Kilda was first to be deprived of men.
5
Life on the croft
To all outward appearances, life on Hirta changed little over the years. ‘If other countries are furnished with a variety of luxuries,’ concluded the Reverend Kenneth Macaulay in 1756, ‘St Kilda possesses in a remarkable degree the necessaries of life.’ Sixty years later, MacCulloch wrote in a similar vein: ‘The men are well-looking and better dressed than many of their neighbours of the Long Island; bearing indeed the obvious marks of ease of circumstance both in apparel and diet.’ Even by the end of the nineteenth century, when times became harder for the St Kildans, John Ross wrote, ‘On the whole the people live well, all that is wanted is a greater variety and more vegetable food. A Skyeman who had been often on the island for various lengths of time gave me his opinion in these terms. “They are the best fed people in Creation. I speak the truth, master”.’
The St Kildans were cragsmen first, crofters second. The remarkably high standard of living they enjoyed was based primarily upon the sea birds which provided so many of the islanders’ wants and supplied the proprietor with a profit that enabled him to be generous to his remote tenants. The scant land available to them on Hirta was never a source of wealth. The St Kildans worked hard to grow essential crops and probably put more hours into their crofts than they spent fowling, but the yield was slight.
Despite native prosperity the village on Hirta in the seventeenth century must have appeared very mean and small to the outsider. One hundred and eighty islanders, according to Martin Martin, lived in twenty-five black houses. The homes were of dry-stone construction, roofed with turf and hay and lay above the line of the later nineteenth-century village, to the west of Village Bay. The chief attraction of the site was that the homes received the most hours of sunlight and that the land was relatively dry and well drained. It was the most sheltered area available: the hills that surrounded the scattered houses broke the main force of northerly and westerly gales, and the southern shoulder of Oiseval deflected winds from the east.
Inside the houses, all was black with soot and the air hung heavy with the perfume of rough peat. There were no windows and no chimney: the fire smouldered in the middle of the floor and the smoke escaped by way of the door. The furniture