When Malcolm Macdonald was born in 1908 on the island of Hirta, his home was a triangular roofed house with square windows that faced the prevailing winds. Built in 1860, it was already a huge departure from traditional ways. Little could he know that by the time we arrived, less than a century later, it would be a museum, housing a handful of artifacts.
We were escorted to his birthplace this morning by the descendents of fulmars that were once the life-blood of the Macdonald family. Before mainland monarchy, aristocracy, priests, teachers and tourists found Hirta in the mid eighteenth century, Malcolm's ancestors roamed this wild island barefoot, slept in stone huts warmed by farm animals, and survived almost solely on sea birds.
When World War One broke out on unknown shores, Malcolm was accompanying his father to the cliffs and learning how to catch birds by long poles and nooses. In summer they dined on puffins, in winter they relied on the salted flesh of fulmars. Every August the fulmar culling took place, with up to 5,000 birds taken annually. Malcolm's childhood medicines were concocted from precious oils extracted through their beaks, while his father told bedtime stories by lamp-light also fueled from this resource. Perhaps some of Malcolm's most vivid memories were of those days, when his parents' clothes were soaked in oil and the skies were filled with feathers.
Later, when English lords staked their ownership of the island, the feathers were paid as rent and sold to stuff soldiers' pillows, while the oil lit up London streets and lubricated steam trains. But by the time Malcolm turned 21, his parents were posing for tourist photos for coins, the prevailing winds were freezing them in their triangular roofed house, and the school master was teaching them of foreign lands where oil and feathers were no longer of value.
Today I wandered through Malcolm's village and up to the graveyard circled in stone. Ironically fulmars now nest on the top of cleits that were once filled with their ancestors' corpses, and the houses are carpeted by Soay sheep bones. For in 1930 the island was evacuated, deemed unlivable, the locals having lost their way. Malcolm went to the mainland with the last 36 inhabitants, most of whom died from disease soon after they arrived. In the Second World War Malcolm was probably fighting for England, his head laid upon one of those fulmar-feathered pillows, perhaps dreaming of egg covered cliffs or watching the shadows of wings fluttering in the oily lamp-light.
I found Malcolm's grave with the date of his death. It was 1979, when he at last returned to his birthplace. As we made our own evacuation, fog roamed thickly through the hills, and for a moment concealed the Endeavour.
Time passes quickly on Hirta, and erases all.
