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The Cutting Down of Cutty Sark , as published by Poetry Scotland, is a 3,040 line poem based on the fifth chapter of 'The Log of the Cutty Sark' by Basil Lubbock. Together with its extensive marginalia it forms part of a long sequence of creative work titled Boxing the Compass which began with and includes Nort Atlantik Drift

To ‘box the compass’ is to recite from memory the thirty-two points of the compass twice over: first clockwise, then backwards, from North to North, and back again. I heard this chant from my uncle Alan, a merchant seaman, when I was a child. Then it seemed to me a master mariner’s mantra, or more poetically, some kind of enchantment that might lead the lost sailor to safety.

This sequence began in 1987 with a single poem – ‘The Boat Builder’s Nephew’, dedicated to that sailor uncle of mine. I was living then in Virkie, on the southern tip of the Shetland mainland, where four years later the wreck of the oil tanker Braer would bring a brief and sullied infamy to shore. Our house had unobstructed views to the southern horizon, where Fair Isle materialised and dematerialised according to visibility. Watching the ocean-bound traffic sparked a memory of my childhood - in particular, of visits to my maternal grandfather’s house in Gonfirth, where I was intrigued by the world of the sailor. Two objects in that house focused my fascination – an outsize Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World and a model of a sailing ship in a bottle. ‘The Boat Builder’s Nephew’ attempted to capture that childhood wonder.

Later that year, the ‘nautical muse’ visited again, with the poem that appears here as ‘Disabled Seaman’. These remained, connected only by theme, as a kind of alpha and omega to the sialing life until 1994, when the remainder of the poems in the ‘Nort Atlantik Drift’ sequence came to me, all of a rush.  I was on my way to the Portsoy Small Boats Festival, where I was to read poetry as part of an ‘after-regatta’ event. Driving north over the Devil^’s Elbow into Deeside, and over again into Strathdon, en route from Perth to the Moray coast, I began to think of this audience emerging from their oilskins, and how I should approach them. I remembered the Virkie poems and began to recall images and stories from my boyhood, connected with the sea, and with sailing, and when I reached Portsoy I scribbled some these down over the finest plate of halibut I had eaten since that childhood. In time this turned into the sequence of short poems entitled Nort Atlantik Drift, referring to the part of the Gulf Stream that splits from the main current into the seas around Britain.

I settled on 27 poems as the right number for the sequence, as it echoed the lunar/tidal cycle. And I slowly went about the process of devising a method of ‘split-form/dual-language’ presentation that would allow the local voice and the material to be understood by readers not familiar with the islands.

For two years I worked sporadically on this, till I believed that it was done with, even though deep down I felt that something was missing. Then it struck me what was absent – it was ‘sail’! All the boats in my sequence were motor-powered, although the tradition of sea-faring was still referred to locally as ‘sailing’.

So I went to my bookshelves and took down an old blue book that had belonged to my paternal grandfather: a nautical work, The Log of the Cutty Sark, published in Glasgow in 1922, and written by one Basil Lubbock. I had in my mind the sound of a sail as the wind suddenly fills it, and thought that this book might fill that sound out and inspire one last short poem to complete the sequence. The book fell open at a well-thumbed page.

What I found there was an epic tale of Imperial misadventure. 

And so the second part of my ‘journey’ began – a journey among books in libraries, forcing me to question the nature of the sea-faring tradition I had long felt a certain pride in. Retelling the true story of the Cutty Sark’s voyage demanded that I discover more about the ship and its masters; the trade routes it sailed; and the Great British Imperial adventure that had provided those local seamen like my uncle (and many others in my family) with work.

So the work progressed, gradually drawing me back to ‘home port’. The material I gathered did not show my forebears or their cohorts in a very charming light. The history of the British Empire and the Scottish part in it was not all about building roads and hospitals. Often those forebears were whip-crackers, or Imperial overlords.

In the spring of 2002, I finally reached a conclusion – or so I thought. But a further year went by, before the last  fragment of information appeared. When it did, it came, appropriately enough, from a very personal source.

I was home visiting my father when he said suddenly: ‘Boy, I’ll gie de dy pedigree.’ It was no ancient illuminated manuscript he fetched, but a ream of computer paper a distant relative had sent to him, full of information on the many branches of our family. There on the very first page, my intuitions were confirmed by the phrase appended to the birth and death details of a not-so-distant relative: ‘sailed on an illegal slave-ship working out of Liverpool’.