Shipwrecks and Barra

History Scotland has another winner in the Jan/Feb edition: "Shipwrecks and Barra" by Michael Clark. It describes an 1866 report by Thomas Gray who investigated shipwrecks for the Board of Trade.

Mr. Gray was shocked at what he found on Barra. His personal reactions were recorded in a strictly confidential memo, which has lain undisturbed "at the bottom of a box of Board of Trade papers in the National Archives" until now.

I like to think my ancestors were a noble and kindly bunch, so this article makes depressing reading. According to Mr. Gray, Barra's people were extremely poor and dirty living in windowless chimneyless huts. Upon the wreck of the "Annie Jane", the farmer charged the ship's owner 365 pounds for cattle too scared to eat, 360 pounds for cows that aborted, and 420 pounds for calves lost. To quote Gray:

"It would appear that all the cattle in the Island went to see the wreck and that all these cows were in the family way and all in such a precarious state at one and the same time, that the wreck had such an effect on them as to bring on premature delivery and cause the offspring to die. This would not be believed in a novel."

Barra's landlords had been absentee since 1838, and a factor squeezed every penny it was possible to squeeze from the tenantry. Among other joyous things, it seems the landlord decided who could be an innkeeper. Comfort was not required. Clark says,

"At one wretched local inn, Gray slept on a table in a tap-room, with a brick floor that was swilled down twice a day with water, and chickens and ducks for companions.... (in another)... "The ceiling was not watertight but the bedstead was - it had a good strong wooden roof and could be moved to the dry parts of the room when it rained..."

One interesting aspect: Barra people did not eat eels, because they believed that eels spring from human hair, so eating them would be a form of cannibalism. According to Clark, this idea was commonly held in the Orkneys, as well as parts of Essex (where the tail of a horse was put under a stone in a pond to breed eels.)