Last Tuesday, the fishing-smack Kilda ventured out from Brevig, a little Broad Bay port some miles north of Stornoway, to lift crab-creels from the sea-bed just north of Port of Ness, a pretty village near the Butt of Lewis.
The forecast was frightful, the light already fading, and the sea around the Butt — where the Atlantic collides crossly with the Minch — always uneasy. The MFV Kilda, too, was a borrowed boat, unfamiliar to her crew — older, smaller, heavier, starboard-listing.
She was expected to make harbour that evening. But the Kilda never showed. From five pm no one heard from her — and, inexplicably, all three mobiles aboard were going straight to voicemail.
The alarm was raised about twenty past nine that night. Police raced to Port of Ness. An HM Coastguard aeroplane materialised, in close surveillance. Six Coastguard rescue-teams were called out, and two Coastguard helicopters.
Swift all-weather RNLI lifeboats, from Stornoway and Lochinver, soon joined the hunt in increasingly dreadful conditions, as word fast spread and we anxiously checked the news or clicked on social media, as the growing gale rattled our slates, the rain came in rods and you groaned when the wee dog wanted out again.
They discovered Douglas Craigie’s body around quarter to three in the morning. The skipper. Thursday would have been his fiftieth birthday. A gracious man, a mainstay of his Carloway community. In his day a widely regarded local footballer; recently, an elder of the Church of Scotland in a strongly evangelical island where that means serious Christian commitment.
Norman “Tam” Murray, 40, from Knockaird, and Murdo Morrison, 23, from Barvas, have yet to be found. Both were eager participants in the annual guga hunt — the August harvest of gannet-poults from the distant crag of Sùla Sgeir and of late, confected controversy. Permission for this year’s expedition, which Tam had led for years, was denied, as he and his community were vilified online by the nutters of cancel-culture.
Nor is there any trace of the Kilda. On Thursday evening, with heavy hearts, the ongoing and intensive search was stood down. Police Scotland divers will arrive this week. Meanwhile many, locally, will be combing the beaches.
Can you imagine the anguish of the wives? The mothers? The children? Murdo’s cherished girlfriend? The still more racking horror when there is no body, and when there are no answers, you cling against all reason to hope. And, with no funeral with all the vital rites of reversal, how can you ever find closure?
My father remembered a neighbour, a godly woman, who had lost a beloved son at sea during the war. She was devastated. Somehow, though, she coped. But she grew old. To the increasing alarm of her family, she began stealing out of the house, late at night. Invariably found on the beach, distraught, searching and clawing for the remains of her boy.
I can glance at the sea and tell you immediately if the tide is going in or out. Where is north, south, east and west. If a shower or squall is approaching. If thunder is in the air.
Spot the excited, converging birds that suggest shoaling mackerel or herring. At night, know my constellations. Once, many years ago, I had the privilege of helming a traditional Lewis sgoth Niseach, a traditional clinker-built fishing skiff with a dipping lug-rig and of obvious Viking heritage. The tiller tightened in my hand, the great sail filled, and we surged across the Sound of Raasay without noise or pollution of engine.
I also have excellent negative-instincts: when not to do something. But, then, all my great-grandfathers were fishermen and I seem to have inherited some degree of their sense.
Fishing was for a long time a big part of our economy — even the identity of this island nation. It was also of some political clout. Our “Cod Wars” with Iceland, when I was a little boy, headlined the news. When the Scottish National Party, in an early electoral surge and when it alone vocally opposed the Common Market, won eleven Parliamentary seats in October 1974, eight of them had a significant fishing industry.
Fishing is also, statistically, among the most dangerous jobs in Britain. The freak wave, a fateful slip, a careless mistake, an engine-failure at the worst possible moment, a rope curling unseen about your ankle as the fleet of creels topples into the sea astern, your craft eagerly surging forward…
Three Harris lads I personally knew were so sucked Neptunewards; all, mercifully, survived, though one lost several fingers. There is supposed always to be another man close to hand and an axe or knife immediately available to slash that rope.
But there is fatigue, and pressure; sometimes urgent financial need. Familiarity breeds contempt, and corners are cut. Few years pass in the Outer Hebrides without one fatality. Our last disaster, a decade ago, in April 2016, shook the community — not least as the sea, for once, was not to blame.
In April 2016, the crew of the MFV Louisa awoke to find their anchored craft foundering by the bows off the uninhabited island of Mingulay.
Everything that could have gone wrong for those fishermen went wrong. The boat was flooded by its own hosepipe, inadvertently left on. The bilge-alarm that should have wailed in raucous warning had been switched off. The electronic distress-beacon directed HM Coastguard to the wrong spot.
The life-raft would not inflate; the subcontractor handsomely paid for its annual service had failed to replace the CO2 cylinder.
Inadequate life-jackets had not kept men upright, face-up in the water. Only one, Lachlan Armstrong, 27 — who swam to safety — survived. Chris Morrison — also 27 — drowned, as did Martin Johnstone, 29, and skipper Paul Alliston, 42. His body, slipping from a helicopter-winchman’s grasp, was never recovered.
Armstrong lives in Florida these days, runs a joinery business, and will have quite the tale for the grandchildren. Fishing has arguably become still more dangerous in the Hebrides because, paradoxically, the further you get from shore the safer you usually are.
In Scotland, from 1889, we had the “cannon shot rule” — a 3-mile offshore limit in which a bottom trawler could not legally operate. This was expressly to protect local fishermen — who in that era fished sustainably, with drift-nets or baited long-lines and short-lines — but was abolished to bitter controversy in 1984.
By that time, thanks to the marauding trawlers from north-east Scotland or the likes of Fleetwood, Grimsby and Hull, the traditional fishery around Lewis had been all but destroyed.
The fat haddock of Broad Bay, the lucrative ling of the deep sea-lochs to the south east-and, above all, the shining, shoaling herring had been obliterated. Our last drift-net fishermen had implored the Scottish Office for years to stop all the purse-netting and seine-netting in island waters.
Experts assured ministers there was not a problem. But, in 1977, herring-fishing had to be banned. Stocks had collapsed. They have never recovered. That the drift-netters had been proved right, and the experts wrong, was scant consolation.
What survives of the industry in the Western Isles today is a static-gear one. It calls for keen local knowledge and operating, in most instances, quite near shore — laying baited creels for lobster and brown crab, velvet crab, langoustines and squat-lobster.
These are shipped alive to distant markets. The bulk of it ends up in Spain. If the weather allows the boys to venture out, and if the ferries are running — not, these days, a given. A huge anxiety just now, too, is the murderous price of fuel.
The great risk for these little creelboats, if you are careless, is capsize; the other is proximity to rock. If you fetch up in the sea, and even if you do not panic and can actually swim; it is remarkable how many fishermen cannot — you have about twenty minutes to live in the chilly West Highland water. In the conditions in which Douglas Craigie fetched up in the Minch on Tuesday night, he never stood a chance.
Nor, on 26th September 1996, had Donald John Macleod, 45, and his son Calum, 24, from Marivig in the Park district of Lewis.
Out lifting creels between Marivig and Gravir in an open 19-foot lobster-boat, a Force 9 gale set in and they never came back. Compounding the agony, their bodies were not recovered for weeks, and were found weeks apart. Calum had been engaged to be married.
But fishing even here — and more broadly in the United Kingdom — has greatly declined. Stornoway’s inner harbour, chockers with smacks and trawlers when I was a child, is now largely a marina, glamorous yachts and launches putting one in mind of Bergerac.
The fleet harvesting our home waters is a whisper of what it was. In cold Whitehall numbers, fishing is today but 0.03 per cent of the British economy — and barely 6,500 people now work on our fishing boats.
By contrast, close to 100,000 people are employed — directly and indirectly — in professional football. Small wonder that, in 2019, as some French Eurocrat preened, Boris Johnson made “huge concessions on fish” in Brexit negotiations or that, in May last year, Sir Keir Starmer sold Britain’s fishing community down the river in a EU deal for very little in return.
Further, at least in the Western Isles, recruitment has been a mounting problem. Few young men want a life of murderous hours, pre-dawn starts and arduous physical toil — often sodden, with crude bucket-sanitation and frightful food. (One Harris skipper thought cold mince ideal fare for his crew.)
On top of that, since the 1990s, has been the growing pressure from “feart wives.” Every Lewis mother has a living dread of the sea. There is ample folk-memory of past disasters that dwarf the tragedies of the Kilda or the Louisa.
In the “Great Drowning” of 1862, thirty-one Ness fishermen perished, leaving twenty-four widowed women and seventy-one fatherless children.
Between 1834 and 1900, ninety-six men of Ness were lost at sea, from a coastline smaller than the Gaza Strip. The President of the United States and I can both claim descent from drowned Lewis fishermen.
Donald Trump’s great-grandfather, and indeed a flame-haired great-great-grandfather too — Alasdair Ruadh, “Red Alasdair” — were lost off the Lewis shore.
All pale, though, behind the HMY Iolaire horror of 1st January 1919, when the Admiralty steam-yacht, packed with naval ratings looking forward eagerly to their first New Year home after the Great War, ran aground in furious seas at the mouth of Stornoway harbour.
Rescuers did not materialise for hours — in the town, after all, it was party-time — and over two hundred men drowned. It is still Britain’s worst peacetime disaster at sea since the Titanic: you have probably never heard of it.
Not till 2015 did that night finally pass from living memory. The last Iolaire mother died in 1961; the last widow in 1980; the last survivors in 1992. On a chill day in January 2012, I stood by the fresh-dug grave of its last orphan.
Mòr MacLeod, ninety-seven, was a second cousin of my mother: daughter of that last widow. Once, in 2008, I asked her what her mother had shared of the Iolaire disaster.
Mòr gazed back as if I were slightly mad. “I never asked her about it, my husband and I never discussed it in front of her, and our children knew it must never be mentioned if she was in the room.”
If there is one thing we do handle well in Lewis, it is death.
Elders will hold nightly worship in the family home. Neighbours will converge with food and home baking and unfeigned sorrow. Funerals in such circumstances will be considerably attended; the coffin processed down the road, many men in pairs taking their turn to carry the bier in an island where we bury everyone like Churchill.
As I lived two decades ago in one of the last communities not to have a waged cemetery-attendant, and there were by then few able-bodied men free during working hours, I often helped to dig a grave — and still help to fill them in; it is thought unseemly to depart until this has been completed.
And all the while — most of our cemeteries are coastal — the sea roils and rumbles and foams within sight and earshot. The same ocean that has thundered lifelong in your ears; the same billows that will break to the end of time — as a minister exhorts us by the maw of the grave as to our own spiritual state and the resurrection of the dead.
The sea, all the while, baiting and questioning. As the chill Gaelic proverb goes, Tha beagan tròcair aig an fhairge, ach chan eil tròcair aig na creagan. “The waves have some mercy, but the rocks have no mercy at all …”