Even in June, the waters of Loch Scridain are cold.
Hem knotted between his legs, Iain MacDubhshithe[i]’s sark soaks up the brine as he wades out beyond the tideline until the waves lap against his bare hurdies. His privates have long since shrivelled to a wrinkled knot. The empty wicker creel seeps chill into the muscles of his back.
Since seven this morning, Iain has waded back and forth from the foreshore of their lot near Tapul, carrying loads of dripping seaware[ii] up onto the beach above the high tide mark. He is hungry and cold. His back aches as the bends again, stretching his bare arms oxter-deep into the clear dark water. He seizes a clump of seaware close to the holdfast then shears the stipe with his heugh, a single, flowing cut, like shearing oats. Cold brine drivels and splashes from the frond as Iain slings it across his shoulder into the empty creel. He stoops again, his nose close to the wavelets, straining to see against the glare beyond the vignette of his own shadow. On the bottom, a small green partan clambers sideways across the basalt boulders. The black rock is pimpled with barnacles. Nests of mussels crouch in the gap.
Mostly this is a matter of touch, feeling his way down the slippery frond to find the stipe. Taking firm hold before the cut. In time, his hands grow numb and he must warm them before he can continue and anyway, the weight of seaware and seawater on his back restricts the size of each wet harvest.
It is easier when Mairead is here to carry the seaware up onto the shore. But wee Màiri, their daughter, is ill and she must tend her, leaving Iain alone to this miserable task[iii]. If God wills, the bairn will be better by the time it comes to roast the seaware into kelp. If God wills.
Two years ago, Màiri and her parents had survived the influenza which afflicted the whole island in the summer months. Many, young and old, poor and rich, died of the fever and only Iain and his family’s isolation – and deliberate quarantine – preserved them.
Having carried the seaware above the high tide mark, the seaware must be dried – if the weather lets it. The year has been stormy, just as the winters have been cold. The waters of the sea-loch are colder, the old folk say, than in earlier times. Last year and the year before, the fishing was poor and many pods of whales appeared in the Minch[iv]. The storms restrict the days Iain and his neighbours can harvest seaware and the wet weather delays their drying in the sun. The occasional bounty of uprooted seaware cast up by the tempests does not make up for the days lost.
Since the wars with France had begun again, twelve years before, it had been made clear to Iain and his neighbours that the seaware on the narrow sea-frontage of crofts, belonged to the proprietor, not the tenant. The previous proprietor of the Loch Buie estate, Murdoch MacLaine[v], incorporated the obligation to manufacture of kelp into the leases of each of the meagre lots along the North shore of Loch Scridain. This year, the factor announced, Iain will get £2 5/- for a ton of kelp[vi]. Loch Buie’s factor fixes the price each year: the cottars may sell their kelp to no-one but the laird. They are, after all, only tenants at will[vii].
It takes twenty tons of seaware to manufacture a ton of kelp. When she is well, wee Màiri, barely five, spends her days, turning the damp weed over and over, the wind and sun squeezing the seaware dry until it crackles. If and when the seaware heaped upon the shoreline was sufficiently dry, Iain and Mairead will pack their U-shaped kiln with peats and, when sufficiently hot, pile the dried ware onto the fire.
All along the coast, in suitable weather, the steamy plumes rise up from the kilns as families heap on their ware and turn and poke the roasting weed with iron clatts, hot, smoky work through the summer months.[viii] Eventually, as the seaware turns to ash, a bluish residue, like molten glass, collects in the bottom of each kiln – the kelp each tenant must produce to retain his lease. Left to cool, the alkali becomes a crystallises into brittle lenses which, smashed and crushed and heaped into creels, must be carried the miles to Moy for delivery to the factor.
Iain dumps another load of seaware at the end of the row. Straightening the ache in his back, his belly grumbles, he looks up the path which follows Allt na Criche up towards his cott. To the West, Bearrach rises up, the dull blunt layered prominence at the end of Ardmeachan. Behind the mountain, the skies in the West are darkening.
The estate is now managed in trust on behalf of the previous proprietor’s son, of the same name. The boy was still at school in Edinburgh. His father, Murdoch MacLaine, had inherited from Baldy MacLaine after the wastrel died in a drunken brawl aboard ship returning from Jamaica with his gold-digger wife. It was Baldy who had signed up a great number of Ardmeachan men to fight for him in America. But Baldy absconded to America himself, leaving the enlisted tenants behind. It was then that the colonists in America rebelled against the British, a war the British lost. A lucky break, for otherwise those men would probably have suffered the same fate as the men who followed Torloisk to America twenty years before.
But the world was changing. The proprietors have for a decade being clearing tenants from the better land onto smaller uncultivated lots on the coastal strip on either side of the loch. Though Loch Buy has had his part in it, trying, they say, to sell of part of the estate to pay off the debts Baldy and his father’s predecessor, Lachlan the Prodigal, ran up, as usual it is the Campbell’s who are leading the way in brutality and betrayal.
Three years ago, Campbell’s factor began to survey lots on the North side of the loch. Now he is clearing tenants and sub-tenants from their leases and letting their properties to sheep ranchers. The new lots to which the Campbell tenants are being evicted are narrow strips, each with a little sea-frontage. A tenant-crofter is allotted 10 acre plots, a cottar’s plot is four acres. No man can feed his family on four acres of good land let alone on a patch of poor uncultivated moorland[ix]. Each new tenant receives clear instructions on how their lot was to be arranged. Targets were set for houses, barns and byres erected, the yards of dyke and ditch constructed. Argyll’s superintendents reported twice a year to Inverary on progress and failure to ‘improve’ the land in the required manner results in summary eviction. Houses, byres and dykes must be built of stone, not turf but, as a kindness they say, each tenant taking on a virgin plot was granted a sledgehammer, crowbar and sufficient timber to build a sled in order to quarry or prise the rock for their buildings from the earth[x].
What Campbell does, Loch Buie’s trustees will not be long in following, anxious that their young laird is not outstripped in the race to improve his fortunes.
But worms turn: Iain and the sons of the men who signed up for Baldy’s American adventure are less willing now. The principle of dùthchas has been betrayed and Iain and the other Ardmeachan tenants are less willing to kill and die in the proprietors’ interest. When Murdoch tried to enlist sixty Ardmeachan men to the Argyllshire Fencibles to fight the French, Iain’s father, and others, rebelled, all of the tenants, cottars, crofters, followers and their families threatening to quit their leases on the Whitsunday following unless their sons’ enlistments were revoked[xi]. Faced with the loss of his kelping revenues, the proprietor backed down.
But the war goes on in Europe. They say there are 150,000 soldiers on the coast of France preparing to invade England. And here is Iain, up to his nuts in freezing brine, collecting seaware to pay off MacLaine’s debts.
As he straightens for a fourth time to wade back to shore, Iain sees Mairead walking down the path towards the shore, the bairn on her hip and a creel on her back. She is barefoot, dressed in a dubbing dress, her plaid wrapped around herself and the child.
Feeling his way, barefoot, over the barnacled boulders, he wades towards the shore.
Màiri looks feverish still, her cheeks flushed red. Mairead sets down the child and then the creel.
“Starving?”
“Aye.”
Standing soaking wet and almost naked, Iain begins to shiver. Mairead takes off her plaid and throws it around him, tugging him close.
“You’ll get wet.”
“Aye.”
“My own plaid’s up there beneath the tree.”
“We’ll swap.”
Màiri is tugging at her mother’s skirts, a stream of snot dribbling from each nostril. Beautiful green eyes.
“I have a bannock, some potatoes and a bit of cheese, “ Mairead says. “I thought that you should eat.”
Potatoes[xii]. Though their supplies are running low. A new crop planted but still months until harvest, after the kelp season ends. In these summer months they must glean what they can from the foreshore and the woods, making the proprietors alkali whilst last year’s tatties grow rubbery and green. Ravenous, Iain takes a huge bite from the boiled potato, relishing the powdery bland pulp, feeling its sustenance sizzling into his blood. Mairead brings him fresh water from the burn to drink. He squats down on the black sand beside the child, still shivering, devouring one and now another potato. Across the loch, a plume of smoke rises from the shoreline. The smoke seems white and steamy. The seaware not yet dry. Someone has decided not to wait.
[i] McPhee
[ii] Kelp
[iii] Contemporary accounts remark that ‘the state of our negroes is paradise’ compared to the life of a kelper.
“If one figures to himself a man, and one or more of his children, engaged from morning to night in cutting, drying and otherwise preparing the seaweeds at a distance many miles from his home, or on a remote island: often for hours together wet to his knees and elbows, living upon oatmeal and water with occasional fish, limpets or crabs; sleeping on the damp floor of a wretched hut ; and with no other fuel than twigs and heat: he will perceive that this manufacture is none of the most agreeable.” Hunter.
[iv] A strong El Nino event started in 1803 bringing stormy weather to the North Atlantic.
[v] Died 1804
[vi] The alkali derived from processed seaware – kelp – was used in the bleaching of linen and the making of glass and soap. The Napoleonic blockade of traditional sources of alkali from the Continent drove the price of processed kelp to £20/ton. Buying prices from tied tenants remained around £2-£3 per tonne. After shipping costs, proprietors were typically garnering £16 8/- in profit on every tonne (2022 prices).
[vii] Originally, factors set the rate at which they would purchase kelp from their tenants (on a monopoly basis) at around £2-£3 per tonne. When this purchase arrangement proved unmanageable, however, rents were simply raised to reflect the factors appraisal of the economic potential of the croft for kelp-production. The cost – in rent – and therefore the obligation to produce – became unavoidable. [Hunter]
[viii] The kelping season was May-September
[ix] His policy was to maximise the revenue generation of his estates, through rents and other profits, whilst retaining the local population as a source of cheap labour in various economic projects.
[x] The policy ‘enabled’ the ‘improvement’ of hitherto uncultivated, marginal land.
Tenants were faced with the challenge of building their individual homes (from stone: sod or turf were forbidden in the terms of the lease) and enclosing their leased property with dykes. The communally managed runrig system of inby and outby fields were replaced with single tenant plots, generally insufficient for subsistence. This strategy enabled the estates to create a labour force to exploit a further economic opportunity.
[xi] In 1795, Murdoch was petitioned by “tenants, cottars, crofters, followers and ‘all other inhabitants’ refusing to give consent to their sons’ enlistments , and pre-empting the laird’s response by offering to give up their possessions and remove at Whitsunday”[xi] Jo Currie, Mull:The Island and its People
[xii] The introduction of potatoes enabled a rise in population.
The potato’s high calorific yield made it a far more nutritious staple than the oats, pease and barley previously cultivated: The yield from seed potato in Mull was reckoned at 12:1. A family would require a bucket a day to survive. Moreover, the cultivation of potatoes, planting in Spring and harvesting in late summer, freed families for work on the foreshore during the kelping-season – May-September.[Hunter]
The combination of potatoes and kelp, however, but resulted in a shift to a mono-cultural dependence on the crop among the cottar class.
Moreover, the shift to a crofting lifeway where rents were primarily generated by labour for the proprietor in kelp farming, decoupled the ability to start a family with direct access to land. As a result, folk married earlier – sons not having to wait to acquire a plot – and the increase in the period of married fertility resulted in an increase in family sizes. Early marriage and increased nourishment resulted in an increase in population on Ardmeanach with the population of Kilfinichen parish rising from 3001 in 1791 to 4,102 in 1841(Ardmeachan: A hidden corner of Mull, Jackie Le May ): this despite the continuous emigration of families to North America.