With a Zulu to White Heifer: Schooner Days MCLXVIII (1168)

by C. H. J. Snider

Irish Interlude—5

Inishbofin, 1954

A CONVERTED Zulu took me to the Isle of the White Heifer.

This Island breasts the Atlantic and the setting sun off the ragged west coast of Ireland.

Previous to casting away assegais and black-or-white bull's hide shields this Zulu had had two great cutch-and-tallow-tanned lugsails, spread by yards crossing her masts. The mainsail was the biggest, and farthest forward. Its fore-tack hooked into the stemhead. Yard and sail had to be shifted to the lee side of the mast every tack. Hard work.

Conversion left the Zulu a low fore-and-aft mainsail on a Kong gaff, no boom, and a fore staysail hanked to the forestay and stem head. The convert was painted black, with a rim of blue above, and a boottop of red below.

The real transformation had been effected by cutting a piece out of her deadwood and installing a propeller and a petrol engine. This turned her from a widewinged fisherman to a discreet mailboat, plying between the ancient port of Cleggan and the still more ancient islands of the Western ocean.

Cleggan once had a fishing fleet of 25, "Zulus" and "Hookers" and "Nobby Boats" and "Pookhawns," and shipped fish, bacon hogs and island produce to England. Now it has empty quays and drydock, and no sea traffic except the black-and-blue mailboat and the trickle between the post office and the surviving "Pier Hotel."

FREE STATE MAILS

Three men comprised the Zulus crew. One of them embarked the whole Connemara mail-sack with one hand. After some tinkering with the engine, and pumping the Zulu "till she sucked," we pushed out from the little dead grey stone harbor for the Island of the White Heifer. Eight miles out, or maybe nine, or, perhaps as this was in Ireland, ten. The Zulu was flush decked, with a low rail, no cabin, though a "cuddy" forward under a little hatch, and another hatch aft giving access to the hidden engine room. Nowhere to sit, unless you were a sailor, in which case you can, as you know, sit on your thumb.

Halfway across the intervening sound the engine relapsed into silence. "Ignition" was the diagnosis, with possible complications of malnutrition. At any rate a rusty iron drum was drained to replenish the tank, but the engine was not impressed. So we pumped her dry again; that is, as dry as a leaky length of hard-used inner tube permitted. Still the engine preserved an offended silence.

The next stop after the White Heifers is Newfoundland.

CANVAS TO THE RESCUE

English being in short supply the engine was invoked in Irish, which is a good language for saints, but apparently wasted on the devil. The three Sr. Brendans of 1954 were not flustered. They never raised their voices above the deep vibrant murmurs of their mother tongue. One simply went forward and began loosening the long gasket which furled the mainsail to the gaff. Another rove a stout two-part mainsheet through the cringle of the clew of the sail.

Without a word the third man and I took the throat and peak halliards and mastheaded the long gaff and the short sail. It had two reefbands, but very little hoist, not more than it would have normally if it were already double reefed. It was really a good storm sail, and new and it had cost £20 to make. When we belayed the main halliards we set the low foresail, and there We were, snug for anything.

The oldest man took the long tiller and shaped a course without concern. The tiller was 10 feet long, coming in from a sharply raked sternpost. The Zulu was sharp-sterned with a deep outboard rudder. She steered handsomely under sail. She must have been a stepper before she was converted.

Up hove an island ahead, like a rising cloud, for we had a good breeze and the sails pulled grandly. We went booming through fleets of herring gulls and neat, black, white-vested guillemots, and sea ducks, cormorants and black heads. They whistled and cried to us welcomes in Irish. The engine turned over in its sleep and began to purr like a well-fed cat.

The White Heifer hove her flanks up out of the sea ahead. She was not white but gray. Perhaps because she is so very old. St. Colman was one of her visitors and that was fifteen hundred years ago or more. And the Atlantians, or whoever it was that built the enormous Irish headland fortresses, had been there before him. Perhaps before the flood. Who can say?

We went roaring on past grey rocks where the breakers snarled, into the sudden quiet of a smooth harbor. It seemed dominated to stillness by the gabled ruins of a large castle, but that castle had known little of peace. Bosco the Spaniard, freebooter by sea to the cost of all commerce, generous and scrupulously just to the islanders who sheltered him, lorded it over the western waves from this hold.

For weeks from this castle he fought twenty-two English ships of the line before Cromwell knocked him out.

WICKED TIMES,

CALLA LILIES

Then was the island given up to crueller plunder and persecution than pirate ever wreaked, for the Commonwealth spared none in its religious war and harried and hanged priests and their flocks, and robbed the islanders of all their stock, all their boats, and carried them off "to hell or Connaught."

We picked up moorings in a well-sheltered harbor, where lay a few live Zulus and nobby-boats (all converts) and the bones of several extinct ones.

A corragh, canvas covered and tarred watertight, was on our moorings. The four of us got into it, shipped the square-loomed, narrow-bladed oars, with wooden chocks holding them in the tholepins, and rowed to the steep shingly beach. Above were green fields, and a long rambling inn, with a thousand calla lilies, thick crowded and in full bloom, along the front of it.

The landlady ("hostess" to you and me) was island-born and bred, and that means genial hospitality, warm as the island air that grows calla lilies and palmetto in the open and makes the eyes sparkle welcome.

Mrs. Margaret Day is the lady's name, and she has a dear friend in St. Catharines, Ont., at 22 Queen st., whom she hopes will see this. Mrs. Day lives in Day's Hotel, Inish Bofin, County Galway, Ireland. Inish Bofin means Isle of the White Heifer.