Island of Wings (31 page)

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a fictionalised portrait of the historic lives of the Rev. Neil MacKenzie and his wife. It builds largely on documentary sources – including notes by Neil MacKenzie, George Clayton Atkinson, Lachlan MacLean and George Sands – and published research, perhaps most importantly the work of Dr Mary Harman and Professor Andrew Fleming. Students of these texts will realise that I have taken a number of liberties regarding the individual characters and their personalities, but the account is accurate in most historical details.

The lines in italics on page 87 are taken from George Atkinson's ‘Notice of St Kilda', published in 1832 in
Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumberland
2, pp. 215–25.

The lyrics on pages 81 and 159–60 are versions of traditional songs. Calum Ferguson offers a good selection of St Kildan songs (some of which were originally noted down by MacKenzie) in
St Kildan Heritage,
published by Acair in Stornoway in 2006.

After leaving St Kilda, Neil and Elizabeth MacKenzie had another two daughters: Helen, who died in her first year, and Eleanora Alexandra, who lived for almost a hundred years. The family eventually settled in Kilchrenan on the banks of Loch Awe in Argyll. Lizzie died at the age of sixty-one and was buried in the churchyard at Kilchrenan in 1864. Neil lived on for another fifteen years. He died while staying with his youngest daughter in Glasgow. The funeral cortège, with full Victorian splendour, journeyed by road and water for over ninety miles in order to reach the grave at Kilchrenan in December 1879.

Betty Scott drowned in 1863 when the 30-foot
Dargavel
– carrying a group of starving St Kildans who had set out to seek aid from the mainland – sank with all hands.

The St Kildans joined the Free Church, and the kirk and manse at St Kilda stood empty and locked for many years. Eventually a new minister from the established Church, the Rev. John MacKay, arrived on the island in 1865. By then the social and demographic culture on St Kilda was much altered, a third of the population having left the island in 1853 in order to seek a better life in Australia.

The neonatal death rate on St Kilda in the 1830s was about sixty per cent. The cause of death – which the St Kildans called the ‘eight-day sickness', as the affected infants tended to die within a couple of weeks of birth – was neonatal tetanus. The origin of tetanus was not known until 1884. Scientists have found high levels of the tetanus toxin in the St Kildan soil, possibly due to the fact that bird carcasses were ploughed into the fields as manure. A suggestion has been made that contaminated fulmar oil was used on the umbilical cord when a child was born, but there is no clear evidence of this practice and it is more likely that the infants were infected by the knife used to cut the cord in a generally very unhygienic environment.

Hirta was finally evacuated in 1930 after life on the island had become unsustainable. As they left their native island for the last time it is said that the remaining thirty-six St Kildans lit fires in their hearths and left their bibles on the tables, each one opened at the first page of Exodus.

*

I am grateful to the Thora Olsson Cultural Fund, which funded part of the preparation for this book, including a trip to St Kilda and the Outer Hebrides in the summer of 2007.

I am also indebted to several people who offered their kind assistance during the research, particularly the staff at the National Archives of Scotland and The British Library, and Alma Topen, Duty Archivist at Glasgow University.

Thank you, also, to Tim Pickering, skipper of
58 Degrees North
, to Amanda Clarke who first told me about the excavations on St Kilda, and to Therese Lloyd, Michael Holroyd and Ingemar Fasth who walked with me on the ice.

My particular thanks are due to my agent Gill Coleridge and to my editor Jon Riley for their enthusiasm, good faith and great encouragement. I owe much to the two of them – as well as to Cara Jones at RCW and to Georgina Difford and Charlotte Clerk at Quercus – for piloting my book through the skerries towards publication.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and brought up in southern Sweden, KARIN ALTENBERG moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of Reading. Her thesis was published in 2001 and won the Nordenstedska Foundation Award. She is currently senior advisor to the Swedish National Heritage Board and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Island of Wings
is her first novel and she is currently working on her second.