Stromness on Sunday is quiet. Very quiet. In another era one might imagine the whole town to be at prayer. The cobbled main steet is deserted. We glimpse the harbour in splashes of vivid blue at the bottom of wynds and vennels. Clouds dance shadows across the water. There’s a steady slap of rigging in the wind.
‘Hello again,’ says the smiling volunteer on the ticket desk at the Stromness Museum. It’s Rachel, a retired teacher, who had been on duty as a warden at Skara Brae, which we had visited the previous afternoon. Orkney’s a place to get your teeth into the wide arc of history.
The museum is an echo of salt water, of sting and abrasion, wash and undertow; of buoyancy, too. From stuffed seabirds to model sailing ships, tales of exploration to naval tragedies from two world wars, everything speaks to the presence of two great bodies of water – the North Sea and the North Atlantic – swirling around the archipelago, mighty natural forces reminding us of our smallness.
Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter is there, stern in his high collar and trim moustache. It was he who gave the coded order for German commanders to scuttle their own ships in Scapa Flow, in June 1919.
Fearing that the Armistice was about to expire, when in fact it had been extended, he believed that the interned German High Seas Fleet would either become spoils of war for the Allies, or be used against Germany should the war resume. At his command, 52 of the 74 ships were sunk. Amongst the salvaged objects are a pocket watch and a porcelain latrine.
Also present is John Rae, son of Stromness, surgeon and explorer, who discovered the Northwest Passage – the last link in a navigable passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – in the late 1840s. On one of his journeys Rae received credible information from local Inuits about the whereabouts of his predecessors in the quest, the missing Franklin expedition.
When news of this, along with reports that the marooned seamen had resorted to cannibalism in their attempts to survive, reached Lady Franklin, widow of the missing explorer, she enlisted the help of Charles Dickens to blacken Rae’s reputation. She claimed the discovery of the Northwest Passage for her husband, and placed a bust of him in Westminster Abbey.
Despite never receiving due recognition, John Rae continued exploring and surveying. He is modelled in the museum paddling a Halkett boat, a lightweight inflatable craft made of cloth. He reclines more splendidly in marble, rifle at his side, in the twelfth century sandstone cathedral in Kirkwall, its patron – Saint Magnus – bearing witness to the Norwegian earls who sailed the northern seas to make Orkney their home from the late ninth to the early thirteenth centuries.
Opposite John Rae in his inflatable, there is a yellowing advertisement for recruits to the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which Rae himself had served as a young man. There, in Ontario, he integrated with the indigenous people, learning to live off the land in the harshest conditions, and travelling great distances on snowshoes of his own design.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had been formed in 1670, during a drop in the already-freezing temperatures of the Little Ice Age, when Europeans were seized by a desire for warm hats. North American beavers obliged, and the company was granted a charter by Charles II. Tough, sea-faring Orcadians were greatly prized as boatmen and trappers in the vast arctic wilderness of north-eastern Canada.
Across the cathedral chancel from the resting figure of John Rae is the large, brass ship’s bell of HMS Royal Oak, torpedoed in October 1939 while at anchor in Scapa Flow, with a loss of 835 lives. A rogue submarine managed daringly to slip between the ‘blockships’, vessels deliberately sunk in the channels between the smaller encircling islands. These, along with other forms of barrier, had led the naval authorities to believe Scapa Flow was impregnable.
The U-boat commander, Günther Prien, was hailed in Germany as a hero and became the first submariner ever to receive the Iron Cross. A book of remembrance to his victims stands beside the bell, the names of the dead recorded in a fine italic hand. It’s open on the day of our visit at the letter W. Among the stokers and able seamen is: Webb, DH – boy. Royal Oak was at that time a training ship. Many of the dead were in their teens.
Walking back to the car we spot a couple of blue plaques. Mrs Humphrey’s House, declares the first. Temporary Hospital, 1835-1836. For scurvy ridden whale men who had been trapped in the ice for months. The second says it is the Home of Eliza Fraser who in 1836 survived shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef and capture by aborigines to become a legendary figure in Australian history.
We drive off with the sea ringing in our ears. Out in Scapa Flow stands a solitary oil rig, its rust-coloured legs echoing the sturdy sandstone columns of St Magnus Cathedral. We are heading inland, to the heart of this soft, green, watery place and a journey through fifty centuries to the scene of a different, perhaps gentler, human endeavour – the great neolithic chambered cairn that is Maes Howe.
To be continued …
A Few Kind Words 