Sea Room. Adam Nicolson

1891, and a renowned collector of folklore in the Hebrides, claimed to have met a fisherman who had seen one. It was, Campbell reported, ‘a blue-coloured man, with a long, grey face and floating from the waist out of the water, following the boat in which he was for a long time, and was occasionally so near that the observer might have put his hand upon him.’

      Something about the Blue Men has attracted one folklorist after another. Donald A Mackenzie, author of Scottish Folk Lore and Folk Life, published in 1936, even claimed to have preserved a fragment of verse dialogue between skipper and Blue Man tossing beside him in the billows. Both had, it seems, been studying the verses of Edward Lear and the rhythms of Coromandel and the Hills of the Chankly Bore were still ringing in their ears:

      Blue Chief: Man of the black cap, what do you say

      As your proud ship cleaves the brine?

      Skipper: My speedy ship takes the shortest way

      And I’ll follow line by line.

      Blue Chief: My men are eager, my men are ready

      To drag you below the waves.

      Skipper: My ship is speedy, my ship is steady.

      If it sank it would wreck your caves.

      ‘Never before,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘had the chief of the blue men been answered so aptly, so unanswerably. And so he and his kelpie brethren retired to their caverns beneath the waves of the Minch.’

      Mackenzie went on to describe how ‘Once upon a time,’ – a giveaway phrase, if ever there was one, for non-first hand information – ‘a ship passing through the Stream of the Blue Men came upon a blue coloured man asleep on its waters. The sleeper for all his nimbleness was captured and taken aboard.’ The crew bound him hand and foot but were appalled to see two of his friends following. Mackenzie then reports the conversation between the pair of Blue Men: ‘One said to the other: “Duncan will be one man.” The other replied: “Farquhar will be two.”’

      This was clearly a threat to the crew but luckily, before disaster could strike, the Blue Man they had captured ‘broke his ropes and over he went.’

      Is there anything more serious one can say about this? TC Lethbridge, sailor, archaeologist, savant, Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge for much of the twentieth century, who believed that Druidism and Brahmanism were the same, had an intriguing theory about the Blue Men. In The Power of the Pendulum, his final, eccentric and free-spirited book, published in 1976, he touched briefly on the survival of beliefs such as these. Making connections which more strait-laced archaeologists are wary of, he identified the Blue Men with Manannan, the Celtic sea-god remembered in the place-name of Clackmannan, meaning ‘Manannan’s stone’, and Manannan with Poseidon. The seaways around the shores of Europe bring stories, and ways of looking at the world, as well as goods. He plunged on into dangerous territory. A ditty had been recorded in the early twentieth century that was still being said or muttered among the fishermen of Mallaig:

Ickle Ockle, Blue Bockle		Little youthful Blue God
Fishes in the Sea.	or	Of the fishes of the sea
If you’re looking for a lover		If you’re looking for devotion
Please choose me.		Please choose me.

      It is a charm-cum-game-cum-riddle for Poseidon, of whom the Blue Men in the Minch were the last, rubbed-down remnants. ‘How would you describe a god of this kind?’ Lethbridge asked. ‘As a cloud of past memories, to some extent animated by the minds of those who retained it.’

      John MacAulay as a fifteen-year-old boy forty-five years ago, spending a season ‘at the fishing’ on the Monachs, to the west of Uist, heard stories from fishermen who had been out in the Sound of Shiant. On a wild day, they had hauled something or other very strange from the sea. They had no idea what it was. Other creatures of the same sort seemed to be visible in the surf around them and they didn’t like it. Nothing is easier than being spooked at sea in a small boat, and the Sound of Shiant seemed to be turning into that horrible continuity of white and broken water. All sense of one’s own fragility; the thumping of the hull against each new wave, the distance from shore, one’s own pitiable progress to windward, the sheer size of the cold, hateful sea, the knowledge of all the others that have been drowned here before you: your throat constricts, you feel it in your chest and the stories start to turn real.

      The fishermen, rather than carry their mysterious catch back home in triumph or as a curiosity, threw it back into the thrashing water among its companions, and it was lost to sight. Surely not a Blue-Green Man? John MacAulay guesses that it might have been a walrus, of which one or two occasionally wander south from their Arctic breeding grounds, appearing here as enormous mustachioed aliens to Hebridean eyes. Donald MacSween is scepticism itself: ‘How have you got on with your investigations into the mermaids?’ he asks from time to time.

      I wasn’t interested now. I was straining for the sight either of a Galta, a blessed gable-end, or of Damhag in front of me. Some of the swells were just breaking under their own weight. Behind me, the little grinning teeth of the breaking seas were scattered across the whole visible width of the Minch. Downwind I couldn’t see them. If I looked ahead of me, it was like a crowd from behind, a sea of wind-coiffed heads. The slick black-grey backs of the waves moved on in front of me. Scarcely any whiteness was apparent. It was like two different seas.

      The wind was coming and going around me. I called the Coastguard on the VHF, Channel 16. ‘Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard, this is Freyja, Freyja, Freyja.’ My eyes were on the sea ahead for the white on Damhag, the appearance of a Galta, the radio in its waterproof case in one hand, the tiller in the other communicating the quiver of the sea to my hand. Out of the radio a voice:

      ‘Freyja, Freyja, Freyja, this is Stornoway Coastguard, Stornoway Coastguard.’ A young woman in a calm, warm office twenty miles away, grey carpet on the floor, magnetic charts of the Sea Area Hebrides covering half of one wall, men and women in their blue uniforms at the desks, coffee there on plastic coasters, a normal call on a normal day.

      She gave me the forecast but we exchanged no names. She was the Coastguard, I was Freyja. She was providing a service. I was on my own. The weather would stay as steady as it was for the next twenty-four hours, south, southwesterly, four to five, with the wind dropping away after that. There would be something like calm for a day or two.

      I was cold. I reached down into the bag at my feet for my own coffee in the thermos. My hands fumbled with it. Sandwiches in the plastic bag. I checked my position on the GPS again. It all feels a little absurd, to think that I might ever reach the condition in which it would be natural to call those rocks ‘The Gables’. I am in my own world of bags from the Stornoway Co-op, the VHF in its ‘Aquapac’, the GPS locating me through the American military satellites orbiting above. They tell me that I have passed Damhag and the Galtas. It is time to turn east.

      It’s a relief. I must be nearly there. Simply taking the stern of the boat through the wind and gybing, moving the sail over to the other side, it feels better. That is a sign of arrival, or at least of near-arrival. I have got that amount of sea under my belt. All that strange width of sea has now, oddly, changed in my mind. Uncrossed, it felt terrifying. Having crossed it, I feel as if I could cross it any number of times. I sense John MacAulay at my shoulder. Is this all right John? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you’re not doing too badly.’

      Now, though, I was moving into the shadow of the known, the sea around the Shiants. Because the Shiants are themselves such a disturbance to the flow of the tide, for others this would seem like the most hazardous and hostile