The Pirate Queen (15 page)

Stromness, the Orkney Islands

T
HE OFFICE
of the Orkney Fudge factory in Stromness reminded me of one of the offices my father used to share with accountant friends in the 1950s and early '60s. Like those rooms, these offices had linoleum floors and plain metal or wood desks, straight-backed chairs, venetian blinds—everything solid, nothing flimsy, all of it looking vaguely army surplus, in drab brown, beige, and green. Not a computer or fax in sight, only an elderly adding machine and a few typewriters. Vanilla was in the air, and chocolate, and cigarettes, and the mustiness of old paper and leather.

At the largest desk sat a dapper gentleman in his late seventies with some fat ledger books bound in crumbling leather in front of him. He wore a tweed suit with a sweater vest. His eyes were very blue against ruddy skin. The ledgers didn't belong to the Orkney Fudge factory, but had come from his great-great-grandmother, Christian Robertson, a well-known merchant and whaling agent in Stromness in the early 1800s.

I'd seen cellophane-wrapped bars and gift boxes of Robertson's Orkney Fudge for sale in shops since arriving in these islands, but it never occurred to me to put the name together with the woman whose story I was seeking. Christian Robertson was another of those tantalizing names that had floated across the pages of a guidebook. “The Doubles is a large
pair of houses built as a home by Mrs Christian Robertson with the proceeds of her shipping agency, which sent as many as eight hundred men on whaling expeditions in one year,” said
The Rough Guide to Scotland.
I'd wanted to come to Stromness, of course—a history-rich seaport as well as the departure point for the ferry to the Shetland Islands—but the story of Christian Robertson was what drew me, that and the prospect of lively stories of maritime women. After my melancholy stay in Whitehall, ghosted by herring lassies, I was especially glad to find myself again in the bustle of a thriving town.

A chance encounter in Kirkwall had put me on to a relative of Christian, and it was Anne Robertson, a dark-haired, forceful-looking solicitor with an office on the main street of Stromness, who told me to call her uncle. “Uncle Jimmy is the family historian. He has her papers and everything in his office.”

The papers were the ledger books detailing provisions ordered and paid for, and wages held and paid to seamen. There was also a letter book containing copies of the correspondence that went on between Christian and whaling ship owners in the northern English port of Hull. The bulky books were piled in a large trunk that had also belonged to her, rescued by her family from a moldering barn.

Jim Robertson had an engaging smile under a well-clipped white mustache, and a swing to his step. His girl, he said, making me a cup of tea, was at the dentist. Jim's responses to my questions about Christian were mixed in with stories of his own past. He had been a singer, had even been invited to audition for the newly formed Scottish National Opera. He had been a saxophonist with a swing band, and had played all over the islands. Once or twice a man in coveralls and a puffy blue paper cap poked his head in the door of the office, but at four or four-thirty
the faint noise from the factory stopped. The sun had come out and filtered through the venetian blinds and the smoke of Jim Robertson's cigarette.

“So, you're asking about Christian, are you? She's someone we're very proud of. She made this family. Johnston was her maiden name. She was born around 1780 on a large farm near Birsay on Mainland. She was sent to a ladies' academy down south, that is, on the Scottish mainland. She was well educated for a woman of her time. Her brother had the family farm; he went bankrupt and she got nothing. She married into the Robertson family, who were merchants in Stromness. Her husband died young, in 1808, after a long illness. She was left with five children and a great many debts.” One of the earliest letters the family has of Christian's mentions these debts. She writes to her cousins William and Nicolas Leith:

That I am much pinched owing to a deal of bad debt that is owing my late husband and whatever claim is against the family every person is calling on me, and I am paying every person off as quick as in my power to save the property as I hope in God I shall do it.

Within eighteen years, not only were the debts cleared but Christian had built up business to such an extent that she was able to leave a significant amount of property in her will. The business that she took over and expanded was varied, but it was built on provisioning the vessels that made a last stop in Stromness before heading off across the Atlantic, either to Canada or Greenland. Orkney at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a far different place from the Norse-Scottish backwater of earlier times. Wars with France had
rendered the English Channel frequently unsafe for shipping through much of the eighteenth century, and the blockades, privateers, and trade embargoes of Napoleonic times had made even the ferocious Pentland Firth an attractive option. As ships made their way north around Scotland, the protected harbor of Stromness, with its alehouses and inns, its fresh water, produce, and meat, was discovered by traders.

Increasingly, too, Stromness had become a place to recruit men for work in Canada with the Hudson's Bay Company. The company first engaged Orcadians in 1702, thirty-two years after it was incorporated in London for the purpose of seeking a passage to the Pacific and engaging in whatever sort of profitable trade it could, which turned out to be trapping beaver and other fur-bearing animals. The profits from the fur trade sustained the company for over two centuries and gave it an economic monopoly and a quasi-political jurisdiction over a territory called Rupert's Land or the Nor' Wast, which began as the area around Hudson's Bay and came to encompass most of Canada. Orcadians were much in demand in the Nor' Wast for their “patience and perseverance, quiet disposition and industrious habits and power of endurance.” By 1799 the men from Orkney made up four out of five workers on the company's payroll.

Robertson's had had its own pier out into the harbor, and its offices above the shop gave a good view of the activity on the wharves and main street below. The ledger I'd opened showed page after page, in the neatly flowing script of the time, now sepia with age, of orders for tea, ale, chicken, whiskey, blacking, timber. Robertson's made up provisions for ships heading out to sea, as well as for requests brought back from Orcadians in Canada on five- and ten-year contracts at the trading posts and
settlements. Robertson's handled orders for clothing, books, musical instruments, biscuits, sweets, and spirits. Hudson's Bay ships brought the requests in the autumn; Robertson's compiled the orders over the winter, packed them in watertight wooden boxes and sent them out in early summer. Christian Robertson was also a temporary recruiting agent for Hudson's Bay when they were between company managers in Stromness, and more importantly as the years passed, for the whaling trade based in Hull. Owners of the whaling ships wrote to her asking for men to make up the crew; her letter book holds copies of correspondence with ship owners Gardiner and Joseph Egginton, twin brothers and Hull's biggest whale-ship owners, and with John Voase, the owner of the
Truelove,
which made over seventy trips to the Arctic. Christian hired local men, arranged for cash advances, and made financial arrangements for relatives at home. At one time there were eleven hundred men on her books.

The boom years of the Hull whaling trade were 1813 to 1820, when ships returned with casks of chopped-up blubber to be boiled down for oil, and whalebone or baleen for corsets and umbrellas. The ship owners prospered and with them Stromness. For after the hunting grounds around Spitsbergen to the north of Norway were depleted, the whaling ships headed for Greenland and the Davis Strait, destinations that made Orkney a more obvious port.

The 1820s were good years, too, and hundreds of Orcadians were taken on by the Hull whaling ships. Adept rowers, and accustomed to wet and cold, they were perfect for Arctic conditions and much in demand on whalers. But in 1830 expeditions began to encounter harsher weather than they'd ever known. Late that summer the ice advanced with terrifying rapidity in Melville Bay and floes were driven against the land ice, crushing
the ships between them and grinding their hulls until they split apart. One observer wrote:

At one fell swoop the
Baffin
was cut asunder; in the same dreadful spot the beautiful
Ville de Dieppe
and
Achilles
of Dundee were pressed to the water's edge; the
Ratler,
an old sloop of war, that, by her firmness and wedge-like form, had rode triumphant over the floes in 1821, was now projected from the surface and shivered in her fall.

Nineteen British ships and one French vessel were crushed that season; many more were barely able to drag themselves back across the Atlantic. Worse years were to come in terms of falling catches and more ship breakups; in 1835 many ships were trapped in the ice for most of the winter, leaving crews with dwindling provisions and almost no water. A relief expedition, finally sent in January 1836 by the British Admiralty to find eleven missing ships, was unable to cross the Atlantic and was driven back to Stromness. It was fortunate that the relief ship, the
Cove,
with its bedding, medication, and food, was in harbor, for soon two whaling ships staggered into port, carrying frostbitten, starving, scurvy-plagued survivors. The town became a hospital, and then a morgue. Many seamen never came back at all. It was almost as bad the next winter, in 1836.

Through it all, Christian Robertson kept Robertson's warehouses and agent services going. She drummed up business by writing ship owners:

That you may have some idea of the rate of wages here last fishing season I shall hereto subjoin a note of the wages of
the ship
Alexander
of Aberdeen and
Cumbrian
of Hull from which you will perceive that the wages are (I presume) much lower than they are in your quarter.

She was clearly in charge. All letters came addressed to “Mrs. Christian Robertson, Stromness.”

I paged through the ledgers and letter books, a bit overwhelmed by the steady brown script, and was distracted by other stories Mr. Robertson wanted to tell me. Stories about the sinking of the German fleet at the end of World War I, and much more about his own life. He had gotten into confectionery by chance. He'd been working in a café and playing sax at night here in Stromness, when he and a friend decided to start a bakery. This was right after the war, when rationing was still in effect. Jim Robertson's friend could decorate a cake like an artist paints a painting; they had a dozen ideas for fillings for buns and tarts, but there was an apparent bakery mafia in Stromness. The mafia had sewn supplies up tight, and there were no flour, no eggs, no butter to be found. All the two friends could get was sugar and chocolate, so they decided to try candy making instead. They made something that in Orkney was called “tablet,” a rather granular, hard bar of flavored sugar, without a hint of cream or butter. Visitors called it “Orkney fudge,” and the name stuck. “I expanded, had a factory in Edinburgh. Now it's small again, winding down. It's hard to get good help,” Mr. Robertson said. “Engineers, I mean. People who can fix the machines. They can make more money abroad, or at the oil terminal on Flotta. Business used to be much stronger, in the eighties. I had lots of important visitors then.”

I noticed he had a photograph of himself and a kilted Prince Charles on the wall, and next to it, one of himself and Margaret
Thatcher. “Margaret and I got on very well,” he said. I asked if I could take his photograph, and he turned, posing so I could get his profile. A lifelong bachelor, he still played the sax.

Before I left, Mr. Robertson gave me a tour. The factory was deserted, and its machines strange and wonderful. They were heavy and foreign-looking; some had been built in Poland and France, others looked as if they'd been constructed in Hollywood in the 1950s for films about interstellar or underwater travel. The milk condenser was a giant ball of shiny steel, pale enamel green with complicated levers and gauges and bolted portholes that appeared to have been designed according to instructions by Jules Verne. Others were painted, cast-iron machines, decorated with buttons and knobs of unknown use, now pushed to the side of the cavernous warehouse. “We did fancier chocolates, once, truffles and so on. But no one knows how to run some of the machines now. We used to have fifty people here. The old ones retired, the engineers went to work for the oil companies, the young ones leave Orkney. The techniques are lost.”

Over everything hung the scent of chocolate, vanilla, and sugar with a flicker of rum, a rumble of whiskey. One of the specialty fudges was called “Stag's Breath.” Mr. Robertson loaded me with boxes of fudge and I walked out of the factory to find welcome sunshine. Even the weather seemed more cheerful here than in Whitehall. I left the fudge at the Ferry Inn, where I was staying, and began to stroll along the narrow main street, so unified between the gray flagstone pavement below and the gray sandstone houses on either side. What might Stromness have looked like in the late 1700s or early 1800s?

I imagined the salt-crusted timbers of the wharves stacked with water butts and rum casks, hogsheads of wine, barrels of
salt pork and ship's biscuits, with coils of rope and folded sailcloth, and waterproof boxes. Two three-masted ships are anchored out in the harbor; in deeper water, barks and cutters are tight alongside the wharves, with seamen heaving boxes on and off the vessels, to rattling oaths and songs. The main street is lined with the workshops of carpenters, sail makers, rope makers, with ship chandlers, tailors, barbers, and drapers, with inns and alehouses. Here, where the post office now stands, are the premises of Robertson's, shelves stocked with goods, ledgers neatly acknowledging orders requested and filled. The sharp smells of salt fish, tobacco, coffee, and pickles permeate the walls, spill out into the street, mingle with the sour-sweet reek of peat fires and damp, dung-infested narrow alleys and closes. Pigs and cows are being driven over these gray flagstones, and chickens in coops squawk down on the wharves. Horses pull carts of hay and fodder for the animals being taken aboard. And the squealing and lowing, the clucking and the calling out, “Cockles, fresh cockles,” and “Look sharp, mate!” are the background to singing on the wharves: