Sea Room. Adam Nicolson

      ‘Do you know him well?’ I asked Nona later.

      ‘No, I’ve never met him before,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to be diplomatic.’ There is no sense of anyone’s isolation being invaded. Sociability has always included the Shiants. But it can only be presumed on to a certain extent. The Lemreway boys brought their own provisions with them, some oatmeal and perhaps some of the cod or ling they might have caught on the way down.

      There is a patch of sandy grey mud on the sea-bed a hundred yards or so offshore in front of the house, and in a northerly it is protected from the worst of the sea. A cairn high on the hill may well be a mark of this anchorage. Its stones are hairy with a long-bearded lichen, and because lichen takes a long time to grow, that alone is a mark of its age. Although people are always ready to attribute seamarks in the Hebrides to the Norse, there is no real way of dating them. The boys would have dropped anchor, unstepped the mast, furled the sail and would have come ashore in their dinghy to the beach next to the Campbells’ house.

      The time of birds is the time of abundance, the season of summer-time adventure but the expedition to the Shiants of the Lemreway boys ended in disaster. Their boat, ‘an Orkney-type boat, a double ender, a stout boat’, Dan Macleod calls it, eighteen feet in the keel, a little longer than Freyja, had been safe enough overnight, protected from the northerlies by the bulk of Garbh Eilean. It can be quite still in there even on a wild day. While you hear the groaning of the breakers on the other side a mile away, plunging their long tongues into the caves at the cliff foot and exploding inside them – a heavy, quarryman’s boom reverberating through the island, at your feet, in the lee of the vast, whale body of Garbh Eilean, the water laps on the rocks and the eiders paddle from one inlet to another as if asking for bread in St James’s Park.

      The boys spent the night with the Campbells and were due to return home the following day – it was a Wednesday – but they never arrived. That evening, as Dan Macleod has written,

      their families, neighbours and friends gathered around scattered vantage points anxiously scanning the surface of the water to see if they could detect any sign of their loved ones’ boat coming home. Alas, there was none and the young men’s fathers resolved to sail out to the Shiants at first light the following day.

      The party of fathers arrived at the shepherd’s cottage, and Domhnall nan Eilean told them that the boys had stayed with him on the Tuesday night but when the wind changed direction on Wednesday morning, they had decided to move the boat to a more sheltered spot.

      The wind had gone round to the south-west and stiffened. In that wind the anchorage off the house was the most exposed place on the Shiants and there was no way they could leave it there. In a southwesterly, the only usable place is in the shadow of the giant boulder screes that run along the eastern side of Garbh Eilean. Looking down from the cliff-top there on a sunny day, at low tide, with the light driving down through the twenty feet or so of water, in which the puffins and the other auks dive and dart for food, you can see the pale turquoise patch of sand into which boats can drop their anchor. All around are boulders, in which an anchor would get caught and could never be retrieved; or cobbles, through which the anchor would slither in a wind. That sandy patch is well tucked in, sheltered from the west by the block of land above it, and sheltered from the north by a narrow arm of the island which stretches out eastwards towards Eilean Mhuire.

      It would have been tricky work, getting the dinghy away from the beach, with the sea coming straight on to them, then sailing the boat away from the now aggressive and surf-lined shore. These long-keeled, broad-beamed boats do not point high into the wind. You are lucky if you can bring the boat to within sixty degrees. The wind that day had become a gale. The seas as they arrived at the Shiant shore were kicking up into long, whitened combers, driving into the notches and crannies of the coastline where they burst into plumes reaching fifty or sixty feet on to the grass. But the boys knew what they were doing. Keeping just out from the shore, with the boat on a broad reach, they could make their way to the far corner of Garbh Eilean. Donald Campbell told their fathers that he had watched them get away, pulling with the oars to begin with and then hoisting the sail, covering the mile or so westwards at a fair pace, reaching the far point of Garbh Eilean, the headland called Stocanish, before disappearing around the corner.

      No one can know what happened next. Out there, beyond Stocanish, in a southwesterly gale, with the tide ebbing southwards, can be as good a version of hell as the Hebrides can offer. I have taken Freyja in there on a bad day; not a gale but blowing perhaps Force 5 or 6 with the ebb coming down from Cape Wrath. The sea picks up. When you are in among it, there seems to be no pattern. It stands in little peaks all around you, like the points into which the whipped whites of egg can be made to stand. Or more like that miniature thorny landscape which is left behind if you pick one recently glued plank away from another. As the two separate, the glue is pulled up into little pinnacles with sharp, cup-shaped valleys between them. There is no structure to this form, no readable order, just a little world of mobile chaos, a dancing three-dimensional spiky surface through which you can only hope to make your way. It is disconcerting even in a slight wind, the randomness of it, the unpredictability of those mobile pin-ranges, the lurching and jumping of the boat from one side to another, the steep little walls of sea that the wind makes against the tide, the picture of anarchy and its primordial threat. If you increase the energy in that system, if you turn a gale on to it, if you make these water pinnacles eight rather than four feet high, this stretch of sea would be unsailable.

      After an hour or so the Campbells started to get worried. The Lemreway boys had not come back to the house. Donald sent his son John, a blond giant who was deaf and dumb, down to the beach connecting Garbh Eilean and Eilean an Tighe to see if he could make out what was happening in the bay. John returned, highly agitated, somehow communicating to his father the fact that the boat was not to be seen. It had vanished. The Lemreway boys had left their provisions in the Campbells’ house. Clearly they had been intending to stay. Where were they now? The Campbells guessed, or so they told the Lemreway men the next day, that once the boys had got round the corner at Stocanish, they had thought they had better run for home. As soon as the fathers heard this from Donald Campbell, they knew the boat was lost, and without pause set off for the Lewis shore. They searched loch after loch there, hoping to find the boys sheltering from the storm, or driven in there perhaps with their gear broken. They nosed into all the corners of Loch Claìdh, into Bagh Ciarach, Loch Valamus, Loch Bhrollúm, at Camas Thomascro, at Mol Truisg and in the further reaches of Loch Sealg. Their sons were in none of them.

      It wasn’t a stupid exercise. The Lewis coast has always provided shelter from the Stream of the Blue Men but in 1881 the boys from Lemreway were never seen again. The rudder of the boat was found a little later washed up on the Mol Bhan, the blond beach, near Orinsay, a few miles west of Lemreway. Timber was scarce in the Hebrides and the rudder was used for more than forty years as a foot-bridge across the stream that runs down over its pale pebbles on to the beach there. It was the way people took back to the village from the peat-bank and nothing was more welcome, when loaded down with peats, than to find the stream properly bridged, an easy step or two across a difficult passage.

      A few weeks later, a rudderless Orkney-built boat was found drifting around Cape Wrath, seventy-five miles away to the north. It was recognised by the Lewis fishermen who came across it as the boat that had been lost at the Shiants. There were sickles stowed away in the gunwale. Shortly before the boys had taken the boat to the islands, it had been used for gathering the seaweed that was to be spread on the fields just before the spring sowing of the oats and the barley. The sickles had been left aboard, jammed between the gunwale and the stringer. The sea had clearly turned the boat over twice: once to drown Murdo Macmillan, John Macinnes, Angus Ferguson and Donald Macdonald, and once to set it on its way again to Cape Wrath, with its cargo of sickles intact.

      In 1910, another generation of boys, this time from the village of Gravir, just north of Lemreway, set off on the same summer expedition for the Shiants. The party included fourteen-year-old Donald MacPhail. It was the ‘last sad summer of my boyhood’, as he wrote as an old man, before he was sent away as a scholar to the Nicolson Institute, the secondary school in Stornoway, to fulfil his father’s ambitions for him to have ‘a gentleman’s job, chained