The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel

Like Finlay’s, Wallen’s sea joins land masses. It’s a conduit between elements of her aquapelagic experience: ‘I often ask myself “how did I get here?”,’ she writes, ‘and I always answer “the sea”.’ The music of Black Apostrophe is united by the sense of a rolling swell, over which evocations shift between Belizian ‘lush tropics’ and Orcadian ‘bleak majesty’, the latter conveyed as much by complex harmonies as by rhythm: ‘it was the sense of crossing the water for a world “out there” that I … wanted to capture’. The sea is a site of possibility and longing, evoking her parents’ desire, in Belize, to cross the Atlantic, and her own wish, in Scotland, to feel the connection between archipelagos.

In listening to the same sea, Max and Wallen sensed different histories. Max heard centuries of explosive dissipation on the Orkney shore: his waves are at their moment of fulfilment, when switches are flicked between violence and silence. Wallen heard instead the sea’s slow accumulation: its transmutation in the long course of travel bringing countless echoes of elsewhere. The Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite calls the motions of connecting waters ‘tidalectics’: ‘tossings, across and between seas, of people, things, processes and affects’.

And it’s worth recalling that even the puffin – now emblematic of the north-east Atlantic – is a bird of the Pacific that, 50,000 years ago, crossed the cold waters that once parted North from South America before the Caribbean basin formed. Only with the birth of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea did the Atlantic puffin become distinctively Atlantic. Only then did the warm currents gather from which the Gulf Stream now surges: the gentle climate of Orkney is made by the shores of Belize.

The work of Finlay and Wallen is also a reminder that it’s misleading to think of Britain as a nation that had an empire or acquired an empire; Britain was born from an unequal union in 1707, when two colony-owning states – England and Scotland – were conjoined. From its beginnings, Britain was an empire and the sea was its medium. Money made from west-Atlantic slave plantations was used by British landowners to impose authority on Orcadian populations, and wealth made by those landlords from Orcadian kelp ran the machinery of slavery. Many families who owned Orkney land were connected as closely to India as the Caribbean. Indeed, the South Atlantic sea route, round the Cape of Good Hope, took ships to regions that had more places named after the infamous Traills than Papa Westray or Rousay where the family long held sway: Traill’s Pass, for instance, leads not through Orkney hills but above the Pindari Glacier in the central Himalayas. The elites of Victorian Edinburgh and Glasgow understood the specific textures of places in the East Indies and West Indies better than the diversity of Scotland’s seaboard and knew those places to be far more central to British fortunes than anywhere north of Scotland’s central belt. It’s no coincidence, then, that when Robert Rendall compared Orkney shores to the sugar candy of his childhood he unconsciously used a Caribbean staple to stand for the island nature of his home; in the sound of Rendall’s crunching candy, as much as in the music of Wallen, there echo a thousand stories of an ocean-wide, aquapelagic, world.

THE WESTERN ISLES (#ulink_57b690f0-cd7c-5bec-b0e8-02e2d16c0eca)

(September/October) (#ulink_57b690f0-cd7c-5bec-b0e8-02e2d16c0eca)

FROM THE SIXTH century to the twenty-first the long chain of Western Isles, which stretches 130 miles from the Butt of Lewis in the north to Barra Head in the south, has been pivotal to the formation of North Atlantic cultures. These islands are marked by their early-medieval role as sites where ‘thalassocracies’ – the sea superpowers of Norway and Ireland – competed for control. Lewis seems so much like a Gaelic-speaking twin to Nordic Orkney that my leap from Scotland’s east to west felt, but for the language spoken, like a short exercise in island hopping. Catholic Barra, however, is far more like an Irish island than anything that might be encountered in the north. The cultural difference between Lewis and Barra thus exceeds anything the distance would imply. But an outsider’s experience of travelling these diverse islands today is defined by language. As the only great expanse of land where Scottish Gaelic is the medium of life for thousands, this is the primary site in which the tongue’s future is defined. The isles, in all their contrasts, are thus united by a rich sense of history and a vigorous commitment to community and culture. This vibrancy has much to teach historians. The Western Isles in 1970 – hog-tied by national policies that paid no heed to local variation – were not the thriving place they’ve become. The last half-century has seen dramatic rejuvenation that makes this region a model for how peculiarities of place can be assets for modern, global life.

But the processes that shaped these cultures reach back beyond historic travels of the first Irish monks, and there’s no way to read the islands’ pasts without grasping the geographies that shaped the ebb and flow of local fortunes. This western geohistory is as different from the young, mutating archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland as it’s possible to be. Places such as Barra give the impression of impossible permanence: they’re entirely ancient bedrock that has lain, unyielding, since before the birth of the Atlantic. Large expanses feature few obvious glacial scars: these rocks seem barely to have registered a mile-high pile of ice grind over them. Seventy million years ago, volcanic chaos accompanied the opening of the Atlantic. From the traumas that separated Scotland from Labrador the laval fangs of the Inner Hebrides were born: the mountains of Skye, Rum and Mull are young rock cascades suspended in motionless pouring. But even ructions on this scale were too superficial to cause much change in the old, hard gneiss of Barra. The Outer Hebrides look on a geological chart like a timeless, providential flood wall, built to take the oceanic savagery that would otherwise shred soft tissues of the mainland.