Personal Beginnings - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 2

blowing, and our boatman in North Uist was wisely prudent. Pabbay, situated in the Sound
of Harris, is completely exposed to the Atlantic. Our boatman had decided to stay at home.
As we watched our daily food supply dwindle with the wind and rain doing its best to flat-
ten our tent, we amused ourselves with my ragged volume of Robbie Burns and imagined
where in an ideal world we would like to be the following summer. It was difficult to dry
off and we rarely ventured outside, but we did have a short moment of excitement. Andrew
headed out one morning with spade and toilet paper. A little later, he exploded into the tent,
shouting “Quick - get the nets.” A brightly coloured bunting had fluttered around him just
as he settled into his moment in the lazy beds. Soon, the bunting was in our mist nets and
identified as a yellow-breasted bunting a long way from home.
When the seascape reached new heights of foam-streaked anger, shouts came from the
beach - and there was the boatman at last. Our accommodation in the boat - a lifeboat re-
cycled from an old freighter - was beneath the roofed-over forward deck. All we could see
wasourman,silhouetted starkly infrontofalternating skyandwalls offrothywater,racing
horizontally eastward. I had often been in small boats around Scottish seabird colonies and
in seas that seemed to me to be pretty rough. Any sense of adventure was always deflated
by a glance at the helmsman, nonchalantly steering with elbows on the tiller or foot on the
wheel. This is how it had been on our way out. Now the boatman gripped the tiller with
both hands, with his gaze riveted on whatever was happening to the west. I still remember
the aroma and taste of the fresh bread he kindly brought for us and that we munched as we
wedged our feet against the little hull. I am not a great sailor, but my stomach never had a
fleeting thought of giving up that bread. It was on the foam-flecked journey on the Sound
of Harris that next year's destination was decided. It would be the Svalbard archipelago.
I never really expected to see Svalbard, but Andrew had the energy of A. A. Milne's
Tigger, and before long, he had persuaded Chalmers Clapperton, a geologist faculty mem-
ber at Aberdeen University, to organise a small expedition. Andrew then departed for
graduate work at the University of Manitoba and Norman became the president of the stu-
dent union at Aberdeen University. Two years later, however, Sandy Anderson and Bill