Eviction At Sea

On August 27, 1930, a small group of men, women and children began ferrying a few precious belongings down to the island’s jetty. They carried sentimental items, a family photo perhaps, a hand-stitched pillowcase, a favorite teapot, and they took practical things such as spinning wheels and big bales of wool. They rounded up the island’s 500 remaining sheep and put them in rowboats a dozen at a time, and then lured the small herd of cattle down the rocky pier using handfuls of soda scone for enticement. Young calves were loaded into the rowboat one by one while the rest of the herd was tied off the stern and forced to swim to the ship that lay anchored in the harbor.

 Soon after sunrise on the morning of August 29, the last resident of St. Kilda boarded the Harebell. In less than forty-eight hours, a civilization that had begun more than 2,000 years ago had virtually vanished. No more sheep, no more cattle, no more people—even the dogs that had faithfully tended the island’s flock were drowned in the harbor. There would be no one left to care for them. George Henderson, a member of Scotland’s Department of Health, waited until the Harebell was under way before going below deck to send a telegram to his office: “Evacuation successfully carried out this morning—left St. Kilda at 8 a.m.”

Most people have never heard of St. Kilda, a remote archipelago off the western coast of Scotland that erupted 60 million years ago when unceasing volcanic activity splintered land masses around the world, creating new continents and stomping out old ones. The four small islands of St. Kilda (Hirta, Soay, Boreray and Dun), along with several towering sea stacks (vertical pillars of rock) scattered in their shadows, are a mere suggestion of the once bellowing crater that lies silently buried in the sea below.
 

Though the archipelago has been uninhabited now for nearly eighty years, the importance of St. Kilda’s history is as critical as ever. With a frightening number of cultures disappearing from the incessant march of modernization, the history of St. Kilda provides a valuable look at a land where time all but stood still. It is where a community managed to survive in the most inhospitable of settings because the people were without ego; they were without visions of grandeur and getting ahead. They survived because they knew that working for the common good was what ultimately would save them all. Except in the end— when it didn’t.

St. Kilda is so small it is barely a speck on most world maps. It is plunked fifty miles off the coast of Scotland. It is the most remote place in the British Isles, with wind speeds reaching 200 mph and full-force gales blowing seventy-five days of the year. It has the largest colony of gannets in the world, and the tallest cliffs in Britain, and it also happens to be home to the largest flock of Soay—the oldest breed of domesticated sheep dating back to the Bronze Age. To understand life on St. Kilda is to understand the relationship between all of these elements; without any one of them life would not have been possible.

 Hirta, the largest of the island chain, is only one and a half miles long and no more than three quarters of a mile wide. Its landscape is as beautiful as it is haunting. Smoke colored cliffs shoot up from the sea like skyscrapers stuffed along an urban horizon. Fields of tussock and ancient stone spread across the island’s five main hills as flocks of dark and tan shaggy sheep drift from side to side. Of the four islands, Hirta is the only one that has a marginally protected harbor, enabling boats to drop anchor within close proximity to the shore. A few hundred yards away sits the town of Village Bay, a single “street” with a single row of identical stone houses. It is where the now deserted community of St. Kildans used to live and where centuries of them have been quietly buried.

 Very little is known about the early inhabitants of St. Kilda. One can still see the remains of beehive-shaped stone and turf structures from prehistoric times suggesting that they were possibly pastoralists. But who knows why they ultimately left; perhaps they were wiped out by disease.

 When the Norsemen invaded Scotland in the eighth century, St. Kilda was undoubtedly part of their conquest, but for the better part of the past four centuries the island has been under the ownership of MacLeod of MacLeod who required that the St. Kildans pay him an annual rent based on their harvest of seafowl and handwoven wool. Unlike much of Scotland that had long since transitioned to a cash-based economy, the St. Kildans were still earning their keep from the sweat off their brow—to say nothing of the edge of the cliffs.

The men of St. Kilda were bird people. Boys were taught how to climb cliffs, capture eggs and strangle birds, often by the age of ten. Fathers and sons would descend over 100-foot ledges tethered to each other by a single rope in order to teach the young boys how to navigate the lethal bluffs. With vast colonies of fulmars, gannets and puffins nesting in nearly every available inch, the birds were as important to the St. Kildans as the reindeer were to the Laplanders. Records indicate that during certain times of the year, the community of 180 St. Kildans consumed about 16,000 eggs per week. “They just eat as the peasantry eats potatoes,” said one visitor to the island.

 Because of the poor quality of soil, the islanders were limited in what they could grow and even further restricted by having to cultivate the land entirely by hand. There was not so much as a wheelbarrow to be found to help harvest the meager crops of barley, oats and potatoes, and the manure that came from the cattle the islanders shared their homes with was judiciously gathered and spread about for fertilizer. Nearly all the food on the island was boiled or stewed. There was only one oven and that belonged to the minister living at the manse owned by the proprietor. The St. Kildans preferred the taste of bird meat to fish and ate meat or mutton only as a last resort. A typical breakfast consisted of porridge and milk with a puffin boiled in a pot of oats to give it some flavor.
 

When John Macculloch visited St. Kilda in 1819 the cloud of feathers that cloaked the island overwhelmed him. “The air is full of feathered animals,” he said. “The sea is covered with them; the houses are ornamented by them, the ground is speckled with them like a flowery meadow in May. The town is paved with feathers … The inhabitants look as if they had all been tarred and feathered, for their hair is full of feathers and their clothes are covered with feathers … Everything smells like feathers.”
 

But despite both the abundance and the importance of sea birds, the island sheep served a valuable role as well. And if trying to survive on an island plagued with ferocious seas, deafening winds and impoverished soil proved daunting for humans, the sheep on St. Kilda didn’t fare much better.
 

By the end of the seventeenth century an estimated 2,000 sheep were spread out between St. Kilda’s four islands. With the exception of the flock of Soay (living on the island of Soay) owned by the proprietor, the domesticated sheep, which were not Soay sheep, were owned by individual families in flocks ranging from as few as eleven to more than a hundred. It was only after the crops had been properly planted, and the seafowl harvest temporarily put to rest, that the month of June ushered in long summer days and the commencement of the annual sheep roundup when virtually everyone got in on the act. With no fencing to use for containment or crowd control, and the menacing nature of the terrain, it took nearly the entire month to gather all the animals. Invariably there were casualties.

Because of their primitive nature, Soay are not flocking sheep; when threatened their response is to scatter. Occasionally the islanders and their mongrel dogs would come too close upon the heels of the sheep and drive them to the cliff’s edge. Between the heat of the moment and the length of the precipice, some of them kept right on running. Ideally, the animals were herded into one of the many stone enclosures built just for this purpose, and the dogs would be far enough behind to prevent anyone from making a panic-driven leap—but it didn’t always work out that way.

To compensate for their losses the St. Kildans developed a type of insurance system. Anyone who lost an animal was compensated by the other islanders either through direct replacement with another animal or by direct payment. And though the sheep were not communally held, everyone always helped with the roundup. Once the flock had been captured and contained it was time for shearing, or rooing as it is properly called.

If many of the St. Kildans’ daily activities seemed unconventional given the extreme nature of their surroundings, the method they employed for shearing was no different. Rather than use a sturdy pair of hand shears, the islanders preferred to remove the fleece with a penknife. They did so by laboriously combing through the fiber with their hands while gently cutting the wool as they went. Fortunately, shearing the Soays proved much easier, as they naturally shed their fleece every year. If it is not manually gathered in time, long snagged knots of wool begin trailing along the ground behind them.

There was one year when George Murray, the schoolmaster, apparently attempted to teach the St. Kildans how to shear the domestic sheep using regular sheep shears that had been given to one of the islanders as a gift. As the long sharp blades were offered forth for inspection a crowd soon assembled proclaiming them an object of wonder—a “great invention” they all hailed. As the schoolmaster brought the shears closer to the “demo-ewe,” suddenly there were cries from the onlookers of “Love, don’t cut the throat,” “Don’t take out the liver.” And after he had masterfully concluded the demonstration the St. Kildans unanimously agreed to continue as they always had with penknife in hand.

The St. Kildans processed all of the wool themselves. The wool they gathered from the Soay was brought back to Hirta by boat where the women did the carding and the spinning and the men did the weaving. They had their own tweed and much of the cloth they made was given to the proprietor as part of their annual rent. A generous amount of handspun, however, was always kept in reserve for knitting sweaters and socks. The St. Kildans were known for having their knitting in hand virtually everywhere they went.

But even without a modern eye trained toward comfort and convenience, life on St. Kilda was an endless challenge. Yet years—in fact centuries—of practice had successfully taught its people the necessary lessons of the land and the sea. So why in the end did it ultimately fail? What precipitated the downfall of this remote community that had managed to survive on feathers and wool seemingly since the beginning of time? Why on that foggy morning in late August long after the Harebell had left the newly deserted shores did Finlay McQueen, one of the elder residents, mutter “May God forgive those who have taken us away from St. Kilda.”

Finlay McQueen’s call to God may in fact have held an eerie note of irony as some believe that the stern dictates of the Free Church, which emerged after the Disruption in 1843 within the Church of Scotland, actually signaled the beginning of the end. Christianity most likely came to St. Kilda in the sixth century with the arrival of the monks who migrated from Ireland to Iceland, and for years the St. Kildans were reputed to be a “gay people, fond of song and poetry and playing games on the summer sands in Village Bay.” But all that changed as the new breed of missionaries brought with them the threat of the Seven Deadly Sins and a religious orthodoxy that altered their daily routine. Church services were conducted every day except Monday and Saturday and deemed compulsory for every islander over the age of two. At one time there were even three services held on Sunday and in view of their complete reliance upon the elements, the islanders soon discovered that the lengthy hours spent in church impeded their level of daily production. In 1866 after the Reverend John Mackay arrived at St. Kilda, the tenor of the island seemed to lose the last vestiges of happiness and the St. Kildans were described as a “troop of the damned whom Satan is driving into a bottomless pit.”

Given the amount of work involved in gathering the seabirds, planting the crops and tending the sheep, St. Kilda required a population of at least 100 to be self-sustaining. A certain number of men were needed to scramble about the cliffs while women were busy tending to the croft and the next generation. As disease began to rob more souls from the masses, the workload grew commensurately for those who were left, making everyday life just that much more difficult.

Another factor, however, levied an even heavier toll on the St. Kildans beyond the damage already wrought by religious dogma and disease. It was something so seemingly benign, particularly given the culture of the 1800s, it was not surprising that few if any envisioned the deleterious consequences it would ultimately bring—and perhaps in the end it truly was the lethal blow.

In June of 1877 the first steamship set sail for St. Kilda with a full complement of Victorians on board with the promise of a voyage to “the Romantic Western Isles and the lone St. Kilda.” As Dunara Castle came into view of the harbor with its billowing stack, many of the islanders were taken aback at the approaching ship “on fire.”

The tourists came in droves and were not only enchanted by the island’s geographical isolation, but also viewed the St. Kildans as something of a cultural anomaly: they spoke differently and dressed differently, few could read and write, their ideas of sanitation were defined by the space they shared with their livestock, and their day was planned according to the rising of the sun and the turning of the tides. They hung over cliffs, cooked on an open flame, and managed to survive through hard work and determination. But it was not the tourists’ intrigue that eroded their soul; it was the power of money the visitors brought that ignited the flame.

With no jetty on the island for docking, visitors needed to be ferried to and from the ship across waters that were invariably choppy and complicated by rocks. As a result, the St. Kildan men were all too happy to hop in their rowboats and bring their new guests safely ashore—for a price. They charged one shilling per person, but those shillings soon added up and became the ticket to a different way of life. Similarly, women would line up at the dock shaking hands with everyone who came ashore and soon began selling the visitors stockings and gloves they had carefully knit during the long winter months. Boys greeted the tourists with eggs gathered from fulmar and puffin nests, selling them for a penny apiece, and almost overnight an island that had managed so well without so much as a dime lost its innocence.

Granted, the available spending sprees were initially limited to what few items could be purchased from the steamer as it rode at anchor—a few biscuits, some sweets, even a little tobacco was all it took to whet their appetite for something more. But with the availability of regularly scheduled passage to the mainland during the summer months, the St. Kildans soon began making more purchases and before long they were making the journey themselves.

If the Victorians found St. Kilda fascinating, the mainland was also a panoply of novelties for the islanders who were seeing trees, squirrels, bicycles and toilets for the first time. There was no end to the sights and sounds that bemused them. Gradually, more and more men realized that employment on the mainland meant new economic opportunities, and an insidious migration off island began to take place. Although saddened to leave their homes and the unshakable interdependence endemic to an isolated community, the St. Kildans had lost the heart for the struggle to survive. By 1930 only thirty-six islanders were left, mostly women and children and a handful of the elderly. Certainly too few to have any hope of surviving in the traditional manner. At the urging of the village nurse during an intense and difficult meeting one night, the community agreed to petition the Scottish government to be evacuated knowing that if they did not leave willingly they would surely perish.

With the last departure of the Harebell from Village Bay in 1930 a long chapter in St. Kildan history came to a close. To everyone’s great surprise, however, it was the preservation of the sheep that would ensure the final chapter had not been written.

Two years after the last human departed, a flock of 107 Soay sheep were transferred from the island of Soay to Hirta. Because of the ancient nature of the breed, there was growing concern that an isolated flock might fall prey to disease or some type of cataclysmic event that could wipe out the entire population and its unique genetic code forever. It is because of the interest in this once small flock whose numbers now hover around 1,000 that the story of St. Kilda continues to be told time and again.

Not until 1954 did a group of scientists formally begin to study the Soays. The sheep have always lived as an unmanaged flock, allowed to breed at will, forage as they can, and ultimately survive or not. Most animals are captured and tagged, and monitored according to weight, fecundity and longevity. Some possess two horns and some have none at all. They have divided themselves into separate flocks on the island; four flocks live near Village Bay, but there are other flocks on the rest of the island that are not tagged or monitored and maintain distinctly separate grazing areas. Studies show that they not only possess critical information about their past, but also provide important genetic material for studying other herbivores in an uncontrolled environment.

In 1963, the first official flock of Soays was removed from Hirta by Prof. Peter Jewel and some of the sheep were taken to Holloway College, Egham, London, where further studies were conducted. Eventually a passionate interest in the Soay also began to develop among disparate folks who understood the importance of this unusual historic breed. Most people who see a Soay lamb for the first time can’t help but remark on its similarity to a tiny fawn. With absolutely no resemblance to the stereotypical fleecy white lamb cavorting through pastures with undocked tails, the Soay’s delicate face and fine-boned features appear decidedly un-sheepy.

Nearly seventy years to the day after the Harebell left Village Bay, severing relations that had existed for as long as anyone could remember, and silently ringing the death knell on a community that would inevitably be forgotten, a small but hardy boat called the Cuma dropped anchor by its shores. On board, a group of dedicated Soay enthusiasts from around the world had joined together for the first time for a visit to the “motherland.” Like any group connected by a common passion, whether it is collecting antique dolls or navigating the globe in search of rare birds, this group of dedicated keepers instantly recognized each other as next of kin.

It was also on that visit from the Cuma that two women found a common interest that has ultimately led not only to some of the most important advancements in preserving this ancient and beguiling breed, but also to the forming of a very special bond between them. Kathie Miller, a tireless farmer in Southern Oregon, who quickly admits her passion for Soay doesn’t just border on obsessive—it is—struck up a friendship with Christine Williams, a Londoner and retired teacher who moved to Wales to pursue her passion for Soay. Her farm, Gaelwyd, has grown far beyond its original hobby proportions and she now has one of the leading flocks of registered Soay in the UK. It was not long after the women met that the two began plotting.

Sometime after Prof. Jewel left Holloway, the college decided to sell the sheep and by great fortune, Christine knew the person who had been taking care of them and decided to buy the flock. Her animals have never been cross-bred and possess valuable true Soay genetics. When Kathie and Christine put their heads together they immediately knew the next step was to try to establish the first successful AI (artificial insemination) program between their two flocks and their two countries. The obstacles they have had to overcome make the success of Dolly the sheep seem like a footnote. Although AI is the norm throughout much of the livestock world, it is important to remember that

the wily Soay bears very little resemblance to the docile and domesticated modern day sheep. As a result, the Soay is much more apt to reject a procedure that is assuredly not how nature intended; the rams are simply reluctant to produce sperm in an artificial environment.

Reproductive challenges aside, the whole program was nearly extinguished during the foot and mouth epidemic in 2003. It was a time when few people who did not witness it firsthand could even imagine the daily horror of seeing entire herds set on fire, when “officials” could come onto a property and destroy both lives and livelihoods with little more than a passing nod. It was a time of great uncertainty for Christine (who also owns a large flock of Boreray sheep) who didn’t know from one day to the next if her entire flock would be decimated by the strike of a match. Once the danger had finally passed the episode served to deepen Kathie and Christine’s commitment to establishing an AI program.

The last eight years have also been witness to Kathie’s own struggle with leukemia, the death of her husband, a second diagnosis of cancer, and subsequent surgery that has left one side of her face partially paralyzed. It is no secret among her friends and doctors that the promise of a final trip with Christine to St. Kilda’s last August surely helped keep her alive.

On March 27, 2008, the first AI lamb was born on Kathie’s farm in Oregon. And yes, it was cause for great celebration, giving Kathie and Christine the peace of mind that the legacy of St. Kilda will not perish. For a community that had virtually vanished in a day, when a lone boat pulled out of its harbor, the undaunted spirit of this remote island is slowly reaching out around the world because of a dedicated group of farmers, and an ancient but not forgotten breed of very rare sheep.

For more information on St. Kilda visit www.kilda.org.uk

Originally published in Wild Fibers Magazine, Spring, 2009