St. Kilda men, they are tolerable hands at it. All along the ledges of the rock are nests of different sorts of sea-gulls, and on the little islands (accessible at a low spring tide) you may find the nest of the black-backed gull, a noble fellow, as big as a goose. They lay two large eggs, strongly marked with black on a white ground: and if you take the young to rear in the garden, you must take care of their beaks as you climb down with them. One of the natives was coming down a rock with two young black-backs slung over his back, and the birds took a bit out of his leg before he could get to terra-firma.
On these islands the razor-bills, or “mers,” breed, and the quaint little puffins, who form the prettiest sight imaginable on a fine morning, as they skim the water in a long white line.
In some parts of the cliffs you may have the luck to see peregrine falcons and ravens building; or to see a fight in the air between a raven and the peregrine, in which the “leary” raven generally escapes from “the king of birds.” On every rock are cormorants or shags sunning their wings, and sometimes a flock of loons (a very large species of cormorant) will pass, or a gannet shoot down into the water like a stone from a sling.
I need not say that you require a cool head not to turn giddy when let down over a cliff, or drawn up from the bottom, with a rope round your chest, especially if about fifty feet up the wind gives you a rotary motion, so that you think you will be too giddy to see the shags’ or gulls’ eggs on their ledge, but you soon get accustomed to it in a small way; though I should be sorry to say that any one could come up to some of the feats given to the fowlers of St. Kilda, that is, letting oneself down alone by a rope over a cliff, and when you have, in the excitement of the sport, let the rope slip, springing out into the air, catching it, and climbing up. We do not do things quite as strongly as that down here. However, in a small way, there is very good sport of the kind, and with a good 100-foot rope, and two men to haul, you may get both eggs and exercise ad libitum.
For those who prefer birds easier to get at, there are plenty of plovers, godwits, dottrells, and terns, which breed in the sand of the bay, or may be shot for eating.
But, besides the birds, there are great opportunities for those who like sea-fishing, and the strain of a good big codfish on their line.
The fishing is either off the rocks with a stout sea rod, or from the fishermen’s boats, about the Longships Lighthouse.
From the rocks we catch bream, pollock-whiting, the Land’s End pollock, and various sorts of wrasse of all colours, shapes, and weights; but to get the bigger fish, such as cod, and the larger pollocks and breams, one should go out for a mile or so and fish with lines, when the sport is very good.
There are other ways of fishing as well, such as “whistling” and “deep-sea fishing.” The former is done among the stones at low water, with an inch of line and a basket, into which you whip red, soft, roundheaded fish, from eight to twelve inches long, which they call “pettifoggers;” they taste very much like enormous shrimps.
The deep-sea fishing is a very formidable undertaking indeed; for this you start about 3 or 4 p.m., and do not come back till the next morning. The boats go out to a bank of sand about twenty miles out, and there fish for great skates and congers, and sometimes for cod and ling. Forty or fifty congers are a good night’s work, and it is no joke getting a conger on your line if you have never tried it before. They catch them of a hundred weight or more, and the great delight of the natives is to get a stranger with them who thinks that he can easily haul them up. They laugh and say:
“Ye waent hale (haul) un into boât, sir; ye waent hale un long, if there be girt skeât or girt conger on t’ hook! Lev un for me to hale, sir, or you’ll lost un!”
The congers are very unpleasant when they do come up, realising the sketch of Mr. Briggs’s pike, by “standing up on their tails and barking like a dog;” at least they bite like a mad dog if the fishermen do not nearly cut their heads off before they get them in. When they bring up a very large skate they cut it loose, being afraid of lumbering up their boat, and perhaps getting a ragged tear from the skate’s tail; they are generally glad enough to get rid of a shark or a sunfish, if they take the hook, but they sometimes bring in young sharks for bait. Sometimes they get out on a blowy night by mistake, and are glad to get to Scilly for shelter. One sailor here was driven in an undecked boat a hundred miles past Scilly in an Atlantic storm, and got back safe after all!
“I somehow thought we should pull through wi’ un,” was all his remark on landing, as he fell on shore, with his face the colour of boiled pork.
In the winter time this is a fine place for wild fowl of all sorts—snipe, woodcock, teal, widgeon, &c., and last winter a great many wild geese and swans were shot on the little meres by the cliffs. It is a fine time for the Land’s Enders when they can get a few wild-fowl to eat, otherwise in the winter time they have nothing but salt fish, potatoes, and rye-bread.
They go on the principle that the land ought to support them entirely, for they eat (as they say) “most everything that comes along.”
Some of the dishes are very peculiar—some are very good. Among the most peculiar I may mention squab-pies, of alternate slices of mutton and apples, and conger-pie with Cornish cream (!) This last we have tried, and found very good when the feeling of horror has worn off.
Then there are roasted breams with chicken stuffing, stewed seagulls, puffins and razorbills boiled and roast, every possible preparation of every sort of eggs, and, lastly, roasted cormorants which they consider a delicacy. We shot a cormorant one day and brought it home, chiefly because we had had such work to get it, for in shooting our boat near a zawn or cave to pick it up, a large wave carried us far into the hole, snapping off the mast and breaking the oars against the rocks. However, we got our cormorant, and were induced to eat it, and it certainly was not so bad