When Scottish fiddlers ruled the waves - Susan Morrison

Throughout the seafaring world the men of Shetland were famous for their skill with the fiddl

Throughout the seafaring world the men of Shetland were famous for their skill with the fiddle. PA image

From the 1700s, the ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company set sail from London around the end of May each year. They sailed up the East Coast of Scotland, heading for Stromness. They were looking for sailors and trappers from Orkney. They also wanted fiddlers, and for that, they needed Shetlanders.

Orcadians were highly valued by the Company. They had a magnificent reputation as sailors. They were also considered better suited for the tough life of hunting and trapping in Canada.

And throughout the seafaring world the men of Shetland were famous for their skill with the fiddle.

Hanseatic traders based around Germany or the Netherlands introduced the fiddle to Shetland in the early 18th century. Prior to this the islanders had played a two stringed instrument known as a ‘gue’. Shetlanders took to four strings like teens to electric guitars. It seemed that every man could play. Arthur Edmonstone, a visitor to Shetland, commented in 1809 that ‘among the peasantry almost one in ten can play the violin’.

Light, portable and easily maintained, the fiddle was a great instrument to take to the cold, dark North.. In the days before everyone had an entertainment centre in their pockets, a fiddler was just the thing you needed for a cheery tune after a hard shift on deck, or get a reel going at a dance, and if you wanted a good fiddler, you went to Shetland.

In Canada, many of these men from Orkney and Shetland worked at Moose Fort, later known as Moose Factory. It was in James Bay, a traditional summer meeting ground for the Cree nation. It made sense to build a trading post there.

The Hudson’s Bay company had a typically colonial attitude to the James Bay Cree and their Scottish employees, particularly if marriage was involved. Head Office in London really didn’t like it, but the early Scottish fur trappers on the ground quickly realised that a local-born wife was a handy thing to have. It formed a bond with the very people who knew where to trap the all-important beaver, or the quickest routes to safety when the mountains started freezing up.

The James Bay Cree worked alongside the Scots to unload the ships that arrived each year. Naturally, the Scots did this in some style. In the early 20th century, revered Cree musician Noah Cheechoo told his son that before the ships supplies and trading goods were unloaded, the Scots disembarked in the ‘form of a pipe band’, paraded up and down the quay for a while and then returned to get the cargo off the ships with the help of the local Cree. It took around 14 days and nights of backbreaking work, and you can imagine that music helped the shifts go faster.

The James Bay Cree saw Shetland fiddlers in action at weddings and celebrations and they liked what they heard.

The Cree had no experience of bowed stringed instruments until the fiddles arrived, but they had a strong tradition of song, such as lullabies, prayers and hunting songs, known as niitooh-nikamon. It was considered just as vital for a hunter to know these sacred songs than it was to knot a snare or track caribou.

It's likely that James Bay Cree took up the fiddle for similar reasons as the Scottish sailors and trappers. It was easily transported, and if in a strong case, robust. Yes, it was an expensive item but they were easy to get at the company stores.

The James Bay Cree began to play the fiddles emulating the songs and dances they learned from the Shetlanders, and they added to it another instrument, the “taawahekan’, a drum sometimes fashioned from Caribou skin, based on the drums they had seen the Scots use to accompany bagpipes.

Fiddle tunes became a language between the Cree Nation around James Bay and the Shetlanders who landed to trade.

Reels learned from Shetland fiddlers were embraced and infused with James Bay Cree culture. They quite literally fiddled with it, with spectacular success.

Musicologist Lynn Whidden has described this mixing of Scottish and Cree fiddling as a “language of exchange” and she goes on to say that "The Cree introduced so much innovation to fiddling and fiddling tunes that one could say they created a new genre of music”.

They’re fiddling still in James Bay, and until the 1980s the Cree played in the New Year with a fiddler playing ‘The White Cockade.’

Not all the music men headed North. By 1900 brutal overfishing by the arctic whaling fleets forced the ships South. By mid-century a lad with a fiddle could sign up in Leith with Christian Salvenson to join either the Southern Garden or Southern Venturer. These two huge ships carried around 600 men on six week voyages.

They played tunes from the Greenland whaling days, ‘Merry Boys of Greenland', ‘Willafjord’ and ‘Oliver Jack’.

Concerts were held on the ships as they sailed South. The music was changing again, with guitars and accordions introduced, and once more, fiddlers learned new music and new styles.

Some crew overwintered in South Georgia, repairing and cleaning. There were radios, but mostly they had to depend on themselves for entertainment. Dr Frances Wilkins, Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen, who has done so much to uncover these stories of music at sea, spoke to Mitchel Arthur, an old whaling hand, who told her “Everybody picked up their accordions and fiddles and whatever, and Jimmy Shand would get a good hammering.”

Somehow, I think Mr Shand would have been chuffed to bits to know his music was being played at the ends of the earth, and who knows, perhaps some of those tunes contained James Bay Cree melodies.