On an Irish Island (19 page)

Dún Chaoin and the nearby mainland towns—
Ventry,
Ballyferriter, and the western peninsula’s market center, Dingle, population about eighteen hundred—were tied to the island by bonds of
marriage, kinship—and misunderstanding. Mainlanders sometimes saw the islanders as wild tricksters; islanders were apt to see the mainlanders as money-grubbing. Dún Chaoin, directly facing the island, was less a village than a collection of houses spread across the sloping highlands that stood back from the sea; it was more rural, really, than the island itself, whose compact village asserted an almost urban density. Years later, a filmmaker contemplating a documentary about western Ireland came away discouraged that
“hardly any of the villages had a close clustering of houses that could
look
like a village” on film. Local jurisdictions were many and overlapping.
Corca Dhuibhne was the broad ancestral region, the western part of County
Kerry. Then there were parishes, and named towns, and the little townlands that made them up, which rarely appeared on any map. The puffs of white that were
sheep ranging over the
West Kerry hills were more numerous by far than people.

A big moment in the year came in November, with the
Dingle Fair. Island sheep were fattened; the villagers rounded them up, brought them down to the slip, loaded them into
naomhóg
s, and rowed them across to Dún Chaoin. There, they’d tie them up two-by-two, walk them up the path to the top of the cliff, and then the dozen miles to Dingle, where they’d often spend the night. “
You’d have a drink,” Seán Ó Criomhthain remembered, “and when that went down you felt as happy as if you never had a poor relative.”

Near the center of Blasket village stood the island
school. It was one of the larger buildings, about twenty-five feet long, set, like most of them, so
its long axis followed the slope down the hill; its short northeastern wall was common to the house next door, belonging to one of the Kearneys. Beginning in the fall of 1927, Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, straight from teacher-training in Limerick, became head teacher: “
I was young and light-hearted,” she remembered. About a quarter of the island’s population—forty-two by her memory—were students there.
Attendance was no problem, “because there was nothing to keep them at home,” and because no one had to come very far. “
Even if a gale of wind was blowing they’d still have to come to
school.” In fact, her own attendance proved more the problem. Friday afternoons, she’d be rowed back across the sound, intending to return to the island on Sunday, but sometimes a storm marooned her on the mainland; the authorities in Dublin were not sympathetic. In time, she took to staying on the island.

In the decades before this picture was taken in about
1930
, as many as fifty students attended the island school; by
1941
, when it was closed down, there were just three.
(
Illustration Credit ill.15
)

At school, there was no place to hang coats, and the children would sometimes run in drenched. “
They’d shake it off like ducks,” said Ní Shéaghdha, “because they were accustomed to having the salt water blowing into their faces every day of the week and every day of the year.” She and the assistant teacher seated them at long benches, in two groups,
the younger children toward the fire, the older ones toward the door. Her pupils, she remembered, were all “
very keen on
English. Who could blame them? [Even] if they only went down to
Dingle they’d need it, and at that time there was nothing in their heads but America.” That and
poetry. “They were extremely interested in English poetry just as they were in Irish poetry. They had poetry in their blood, I suppose, and they found it easy to learn.” Seán Ó Criomhthain recalled from an earlier period that he and his classmates had studied
Macbeth,
and loved it, and were always more interested in learning English than Irish. “
We were thinking of another country and of life beyond the Island. It was then the intention and plan of everyone on the Blaskets to go to America.”

During the summer, the men would fish five or six days a week for lobster; during the winter, for
mackerel. After a night’s
fishing, the crew would row over to
Dún Chaoin, stow their
boats, and carry hundred-pound sacks of fish up the cliff path from the slip; what they got for their trouble was at the whim of the market. The early years of the century, when Synge and Marstrander visited, were good ones. But now, big French trawlers, which could fish farther out to sea, were competing more successfully with the little island
naomhóg
s. And in 1927, the United States imposed a tariff on salted mackerel. The market softened. The hard lives of the island fishermen grew harder. “
It was our business to be out in the night, and the misery of that sort of fishing is beyond telling,” wrote
Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who up to about 1926 was still sending his perfectly penned epistles to
Brian Kelly. “I count it the worst of all trades.”

The
naomhóg
s, bow and stern lifting high above the water, were instantly recognizable. On land, perched upside down on wooden posts flanking the path up to the village, black-bottomed, thick with repeated tarrings, they looked like works of nature—truly like the giant beetles visitors reliably said they resembled. Yet turn them over and slip them into the sea, and the human artifacts they were became apparent. Four bench seats were spaced along their twenty-six-foot length. The tight wooden latticework visible from inside looked like nothing so regular and measured as an engineer’s graph paper.

They were in many ways better than the big seine-boats they’d replaced in the 1880s, which had been seized for failure to pay rent and, Seán Ó Criomhthain would report, allowed to rot away on a quay in Dingle; the little
naomhóg
s, on the other hand, weren’t worth a rent collector’s trouble. They could be fitted with a single sail, but were more often rowed by three
or four men using peculiar small-bladed oars. A Norwegian fisherman “
would laugh at this little toy,” noted
Carl Marstrander. But the life of the island depended on them;
a census counted four hundred of them west of Dingle in 1921, the island itself good for several dozen.

It took a lot to sink them—heavy seas, gross overloading. They were remarkably maneuverable, easy to slip into the gap between the sea-splashed rocks, tucked away at the base of the cliff, that passed for a harbor. The men would bring the boat to an almost braked sudden stop as they approached shore, manage a graceful little 180-degree twirl, step lithely out, pass up the oars, turn the boat upside down in a single swift, graceful movement, their heads disappearing in the beetle’s carapace, and march it up the hill in stately procession. Stored bottom-up, the b
oats obligingly presented cuts or other damage for repair.

Of course, the seeming vulnerability of the little craft was not all illusion. The crew might carry a wooden bowl to bail water, a sock to plug a leak. Visitors found passage into the island memorable, thrilling—or downright terrifying. Robin Flower’s son Patrick remembered how as a boy, probably in the late 1920s, he was literally tossed from shore to a big islander in the boat, his mother “
huddled in a lump in the well of the boat,” the two of them ill the whole way across. “All I could hear was the roar of the wind and [the crew leader’s] called instructions as we breasted each wave.” It was daytime, Patrick knew, but it felt like darkest night.

A striated checkerboard of arable field above the White Strand, about sixty acres of the island’s eleven hundred, constituted the island’s farm. Oats and
rye, along with
potatoes—planted in ridges, each furrow dug, each sod turned, by hand—were the chief
crops; in 1925, a hundred pounds of potatoes might be worth six shillings, but the islanders normally consumed all they harvested.
Cabbage,
turnips, and carrots were also grown. The
sheep that grazed the green island slopes supplied
wool for
clothing,
mutton for
food, and a little ready cash when taken to market; in winter, island
women cleaned, carded, dyed, and spun the wool that they later made into jerseys and shawls. Another source of
income was
rabbit
pelts, which islanders sometimes mailed off to
Cork or
Dublin, maybe three dozen at a time, fetching perhaps three shillings.

Another “crop” was the
peat (the first stage in the transformation of vegetation to coal) used to heat every house on the island. Some years later,
Mary Kearney’s younger brother, Seán, would
demonstrate for the cameras just how you harvested it. Wearing boots, pants with turned-up
cuffs, a thick open-necked sweater, and wielding a long-handled bladed implement, Seán cut straight down into the turf. Each piece was about a foot square. Cutting out the top layer, vegetation still attached, he turned it over with the same tool and tossed it aside. At the next layer down, he did much the same, the clumps of peat liberated this time resembling squares of dark, moist cake. These would be collected and left in small stone enclosures on the far side of the island to dry. In winter, when storms made fishing impossible, the islanders would recover them and bring them down to their houses.

Accounts of objects and materials of value washing up on the
Gravel Strand, to the north of the village, or on the White Strand, or elsewhere around the island, occur often enough in local lore to suggest a surprisingly reliable source of village livelihood.
Driftwood shaped by island carpenters became part of many a window frame or
naomhóg.
Shipwrecks, too, contributed to the wealth of the island, enough to galvanize the whole village when they were reported.
U-boat sinkings during the Great War were, during the 1920s, objects of recent memory. “Thanks to the submarine campaign,” an islander told one visitor, “the Great War was a prosperous era.” Crates of oranges. Canadian potatoes. Onions from Spain. Barrels of wine. Linens and porcelains: “You see these cups that are so pretty? They came to us like that from the sea.” Perhaps the biggest haul came with the running aground of the
Quebra
in 1916, which left long stretches of shoreline crowded with “
wreckage and wood and chests and barrels and cotton,” recalled
Méiní Dunlevy, with “flour and meat and fat stranded on the beach for us.” The islanders gathered up all they could. “It wasn’t the Island of Hunger in those years, but the Island of Plenty.”

The island endured. Its people endured.
“The world is said to change every twenty years,” Seán Ó Criomhthain said when he was in his sixties. But all through the late 1920s, the island stayed much as it had long been. The hill rising above the village remained, and the ever-shifting play of light, and the grand views, and the growing green. Year by year, the tide streamed through the narrow rock-encumbered channel that was
Blasket Sound. The waves ran up on the beach, wore away at the ancient cliffs. Trees, as always, were nowhere—hard to accept for those from milder and more familiar climes, but true: no trees. No river, either, and no lake. There were no hares, no stoats, no weasels, no frogs, no foxes, no badgers, no hedgehogs, no newts. Plentiful were sea
birds; an 1880s naturalist counted 174 species on the Blaskets, including puffins, razorbills, guillemots, storm
petrels, and gulls. From the heights of the village—or most anywhere on the island, really—they were forever swooping above or beneath you.

Constant, too, in their inconstancy were irresolute skies that changed with astonishing frequency, the west wind blowing in something new every time you looked up. It rarely snowed on the island, and the cold never grew bitter, thanks to the Gulf Stream. It didn’t even
rain that much, not if you were totting up annual inches of precipitation. But it rained
often.
And when not raining it was misty, foggy, or gray, the sun at best irregular. In December, high up north as the island was, at the latitude of Labrador, islanders got an average of less than
one and a half hours of sun out of the twenty-four.

Still, the familiar comforts of nature offered balm. “You’d go back the hill, yourself and another lad or two, looking at
sheep,”
Seán Ó Guithín, who was seventeen in 1928, would remember. “
A rabbit might jump out and the dog would chase him and if there was anything troubling your mind, that would help you to forget it.”

Did the islanders live in
poverty? Was this the precise and responsible word to describe their condition? Asked many years later, Nóra Ní Shéaghdha couldn’t quite settle on how to answer the question. Well, yes, she concluded at last, some “
were certainly poor and could have done with more if they had it.” After all, the harsh life of the island was one reason they left.
Emigration sapped the island community, yet enriched it, too; many families lived better thanks to money from America. In the end,
marriage itself became problematic, for there was almost no one left to marry. Tomás’s son left.
Mary Kearney’s older sister left in 1925.
Mícheál O’Guiheen emigrated in 1928, though he returned the following year, close-mouthed about his bad time in America. “
My two eyes were red from crying,” he wrote later about leaving the island. “Son of my heart,” said his mother, “it is a poor place where you wouldn’t be better off than here. Don’t you see that everyone is running away from it if he can?”