SUPERNATURAL - The Lighthouse - page 112

8
S UPERNATURAL
An idea of the nature of how the islands were viewed by the more learned members
of the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands and islands is given by the Scottish writer,
Martin Martin. He was a native of Bealach, near Duntulm on Skye and had graduated
fromEdinburghUniversity with anMAin1681.He wrote abookentitled A Description
of the Western Islands of Scotland , 1 which was originally published in 1695. This de-
scription of the Isles in particular, despite its age, has become the main reference work
for all other topics which followed to date. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell took
a copy of the corrected second edition (1703) on their tour of the Hebrides in Autumn
1773. A good explanation of the early travellers' accounts is given in an excellent work 2
by Martin Rackwitz, who refers to all accounts by the travellers in the Highlands and
Hebrides between 1600 and 1800.
With the folklore and superstitions of the Western Isles and no trace whatsoever of
the three men being found, it was inevitable a supernatural explanation of some kind
wouldbesought.Inadditiontothiswasthenatureofthelighthouselivingquarterswhen
the Hesperus arrived with the relief - the empty rooms, the fire gone out, all the clocks
stopped,thelightitself notworking-whichprovidedaneerie aspect tothetale, asifthe
men had been there one minute and vanished into thin air the next. It was also inevitable
that parallels would be drawn with the Mary Celeste. 3 The 'uneaten meal' and the 'over-
turned chair' supposedly found at the Flannans Lighthouse, which in fact first appeared
the poem Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. are redolent of the often misreported
account of the 'uneaten breakfast' and 'still warm tea' on the table found on the Mary
Celeste when she was boarded after being found drifting 600 miles west of Portugal, It
is certainly possible that the inspiration for this part of the poem came to Gibson from
the story of the Mary Celeste. Gibson was a Georgian poet, born in Hexham, Northum-
berland in 1878, who became a good friend of Rupert Brooke. Gibson had been a social
worker in London's East End and had served on the front line in the First World War.
His poems, understandably, tended to concern themselves with poverty and the life of a
soldier at war. His poem on the Flannan Isle disaster ( see Appendix I) is written in the
macabre style which he used for some of his poetry. Although Gibson's work was pop-