of transport:
Take time; name dy boat weel,
fur du’s
naming a wye o life.
Du’s
naming a attitude.6
Most families in nineteenth-century Shetland had a ‘fourareen’: a small, wooden vessel for inshore fishing and ferrying supplies (known as ‘flitting’). Shetland’s ‘national poet’, Thomas Alexander Robertson, who wrote under the name Vagaland, popularised an old Faroese proverb to sum up the ethos of this family vessel. This is now well known across Shetland:
Fragments of battered timber:
teak, larch, enduring oak,
but from them may be fashioned
keel, hassen, routh and stroke.
A homely vessel maybe,
we build as best we can,
to take us out of bondage:
bound is the boatless man.
Vagaland was born in 1909 in Westerwick, a tiny village on the Atlantic coast. Around this settlement are impressive drongs (the Shetland term for sea stacks). These are tall needles and prickly ridges, forming cauldrons in which the incoming Atlantic beats and swirls. Vagaland had reason to hate the sea: his father drowned here before young ‘Tammy Alex’ was a year old. But, like so many Shetlanders, he found poetry in boats, coasts, and rows or walks along the cliffs of the ‘wast’ side. Vagaland’s verse is full of evocations of small boats in driving gales on ‘da wastern waves’, of constellations reflected in still seas, and of rhythmic songs of sailors and fishermen.
Boats were essential to a family like Vagaland’s because Shetland life and laws necessitated coastal and inter-island links. An inhabitant of tiny Out Skerries, for instance, had rights to flay the peat from the more fertile island of Whalsay: like the people of most small islands, Skerries folk would regularly ‘flit da paet’. This didn’t just imply a single journey, but weeks of seasonal back-and-forth for cutting and turning to prepare the fuel for use. Provision boats, postal boats, fishing boats and social boats negotiated tidal channels in everything but the fiercest storms: many routes I took, between islets and along coasts, were once widely travelled in those ways.
Elegant Shetland-style boats now rest onshore in coves of the Atlantic coast, some in use and others in decay. But their distinctive form has a long and illustrious pedigree. The famous Gokstad ship, excavated in Norway and dated to AD 850, was accompanied by two small vessels that differ little from later Shetland examples. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, parts were bought from Norway to be pieced together on the islands. These Nordic kits made light, narrow and double-ended vessels. They ‘pranced’ on the water; their gunwales (the top edges of a boat’s sides) tapered before the bow and stern so the ship would flex and twist, dancing with the waves in ways that few boats can.
Yet each part of Shetland had different ocean-going needs, so the Shetland style developed local variations. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, three things accelerated this divergent evolution. First, the supply of Norwegian kits was interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, giving Shetlanders new impetus to build for themselves. A generation later, the advent of steamers to the Scottish mainland allowed access to Scotland’s oak and larch, reducing the reliance of this treeless archipelago on Norwegian pine. Between these two changes, the need for vessels more suited to Atlantic conditions became horribly clear: in June 1832, thirty-one boats were wrecked in a sudden storm that lasted five days. A hundred and five fishermen drowned.
Soon there were boatbuilders all over Shetland, experimenting with styles suited to local waters. Of all the islands, Fair Isle – twenty-five miles south of Shetland mainland and twenty-four north of Orkney – maintained Norwegian design features such as the narrow beam and short gunwales most faithfully. Fair Isle craftsmen could rely on tides and isolation to bring enough drift- and wreck-wood to construct much of their yoals. The most specialised and distinctively shaped parts of the boat, however, had to be recycled from old boats into new ones. This explains why Fair Isle vessels were conservative in form.
In the rest of Atlantic Shetland, lightness was slowly sacrificed for ocean-going heft. Adaptation was modest in the south, and more dramatic in the north. At Sumburgh Head (the mainland’s southernmost headland) an extraordinary tidal splurge known as da roost provided excellent fishing, particularly for pollock (called piltocks by Shetlanders). Saithe boats stayed close to shore, but needed to hang on the edge of the tide, controlled by two skilled rowers, while two others ran lines through the racing sea. These boats were shallow and manoeuvrable; each could run da roost more than once a day.
A little further up the Atlantic coast, around the islands of East and West Burra, fishing grounds were sheltered, so there was no need for long, deep or beamy (wide) boats to carry large cargoes on heavy seas. Jetties were rare so boats were dragged up beaches to be kept in noosts (hollows in the ground). Short overland carries could help avoid tidal streams around these small islands and peninsulas. The result was that lightness remained a priority even as boats widened and lost their prancing flex.
The seafaring traditions further north were different. The demands placed on Unst boats grew rapidly after the Napoleonic Wars, partly because of the new confidence and abilities acquired by seamen returning from war, but also due to growing international demand for white fish which swam in grounds so far offshore that, in the words of an eighteenth-century commentator, distance ‘sink[s] the land’. Boatmen began to take the extravagant risks associated with travelling to the edge of the continental shelf and spending nights on the wild fishing grounds known as da haaf. With lines up to three miles long, bristling with a thousand hooks or more, they fished after rowing or sailing thirty to forty miles from home.
The boats that answered these demands were known as sixareens. They were as large and muscular as little wooden rowing boats can get. The width of Norwegian precursors was expanded dramatically, because the new, stupendously long and heavy lines would have dragged a yoal over. Space onboard was such that once lines were laid, fishermen would make a fire in the middle of the boat: they’d light pipes, brew tea, perhaps cook some of the herring caught for ling bait, and pass the time until they began the four-hour task of ‘hailing the lines’. Yet lightness had not been entirely sacrificed: even the most robust sixareen could be carried by its crew of six. Twenty-five to thirty feet from stern to bow, the biggest of these boats was less than double the length of my eighteen-foot kayak. While kayaks are designed to pop back up if submerged and overturned, sixareens were open-topped and undecked. If tipped or swamped they were lost: no one has ever righted a sixareen at sea.
To attempt to comprehend the Shetland experience of the Atlantic I returned to Unst on the first day of really rough weather. By chance, I arrived at the Unst Boat Haven on the same day in July that, 135 years earlier, a storm took fifty lives. Most accounts from survivors of the 1881 storm were chilling but similar word-pictures of still waters turning quickly violent, so that ‘the sea commenced to rain over us’. But one document was different: it asked searching questions about how the characteristics of Shetland sixareens had shaped the tragedy. This text was notes taken in a 1979 interview with Andrew and Danny Anderson who had rowed sixareens in their youth: their father had survived the 1881 storm, but their uncle was killed by it.
I asked a custodian of the Boat Haven, Robert Hughson, whether he knew any more about the family. He recalled Andrew, in his nineties, telling a tale of being caught in sea fog (haa) with his father. As they fished, none of the six on board mentioned the haa or said anything about navigation. But when they completed their tasks, the older men just set to rowing and cruised straight into their noost on Yell. Andrew had a long career as master mariner and captain of one of the first supertankers, but insisted that he never discovered what skill allowed his father’s generation to navigate fog without so much as a compass. Such are the stories the sixareens inspire.
But Andrew wasn’t entirely dewy-eyed for the previous generation of boatmen and boats. In the 1979 interview, he explained why he thought late nineteenth-century changes in sixareen construction magnified the