I may have slept in the same bed as the Queen of England. Or perhaps my mother did.
You could as well, if you would like to. All you have to do is book a cruise round the islands off the West Coast of Scotland on the Hebridean Princess. Queen Elizabeth booked the whole vessel for her 80th birthday and loved her first cruise so much, she’s about to take the ship over once again on July 15.
Me personally, I’m not a cruise fan. I think of shuffleboard games, competitions to turn bedspreads into fancy dress, and people staring in silence in the lounge. When my 86-year old mother asked me to join her on one, I was surprised. She too, I had thought, despises cruising.
The Hebridean Princess is in a category of its own, luxurious and discreet, with only 49 passengers and almost as many crew to take care of us. “This is a cruise for people who don’t like cruises,” declared Michael Hepburn, captain of the Hebridean Princess, at our welcome Gala Dinner. And the Queen is not a personage easily pictured tossing quoits or strapping into fancy dress.
Converted from a car ferry, the ship travels the lochs and jagged islands of Scotland. She anchors in isolated bays with no sign of habitation other than corpulent groups of grey seals sagging like filled up water balloons on rocks millions of years old, and cormorants, heads dipped, stretching their wings out in a crucifixion to dry.
The food is four-star, remarkable not least because meals are produced by five chefs in a kitchen the size of a celebrity’s shoe closet, roughly 30 feet by 15. Each day at lunch there’s a choice of two appetizers, two entrées -- sometimes one is a bountiful cold buffet -- and two desserts, with an equal number of choices at dinner.
Only local Scottish produce is taken on board. Ferried in from the catch of island fishermen: lobsters, crab, prawns, langoustines, and scallops served with their coral-colored, ocean-tasting roe. (Americans don’t know what they’re missing of this delicate part of the scallop that’s tossed into the sea by US fishermen).
Oysters are shipped across from the island of Colonsay, along with heather-flavored honeycomb out of its moorland hives. Of the mainland fare, kippers come up from Loch Fyne, and from Inverawe hot-smoked salmon and smoked salmon the tint of a baby’s cheek. “That’s because it’s organic,” explained Chief Purser David Indge. Beef, lamb and veal are sourced between Glasgow and Edinburgh. There’s even a haggis that converts the wariest of passengers, piped in one Gala night with bagpipes and honored with a recital of Rabbie Burns’ “Address to a Haggis.”
Head chef Paul Sim is in charge of ordering all the food on board, overseeing the galley, and assisting where needed. Two chefs focus on hot dishes and soups, another on salads, appetizers and the canapés served with cocktails. In a corner not much wider than an ironing board, most of it taken up by his massive mixer, pastry chef Donald Esplan makes crèmes, possets, classic British puddings, tartes, sorbets, and hair-fine spun-sugar springs to decorate them.
On the two Gala Dinner nights, the team turns into a production line. Without the space for a large mise-en-place area each person works on each dish as it moves out.
“Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is now being served,” Indge announces, swinging his red MacInnes kilt. “Feel free to take your seats at any time.” There is a reserved stampede. So that unlike in a general restaurant where tables are booked over a space of hours, Sim must be ready to serve all the diners at once, from a gala menu of six courses totaling nine options.
Up to the Shiant Isles the days were bright as a mirror. The uninhabited islands teem with puffins, guillemots and skuas by the hundreds of thousands, all drifting, eddying, diving between sky and bottle-green sea. We were let down in rubber dinghies into glass-clear waters beaded with tiny globules of jellyfish, and bobbed into the heart of the bird colonies.
Most days we stepped into a tender to land in scenery more wild and lovely than can be imagined, heading off on easy hikes over the moors and round the lochs that stud these isles. Where the boat touched the mainland, we visited medieval castles, and Inverewe, an exuberant garden created in 1862 out of a barren promontory, by the son of the laird of Gairloch, aged 20. On Lewis we drove to Callanish Standing Stones, a Paleolithic circle nearly 5000 years old.
As the ship headed into the waters of the North Minch, clouds that had gently smoked across the blamelessly blue heavens began to boil. “The Sound of Shiant,” said walking tour leader Ted Heath, “is where the Blue Men live.” Strange, seaweed-covered, semi-human wraiths of Scottish myth, they come aboard and sit beside you singing a verse or two of Gaelic song before suddenly they stop. If you can’t carry on in the Gaelic with the same rhythm and meter, they’ll sink your boat and drown you. Rough white mustaches crisping the lips of the waves grew to a full-blown beard. “Och!” declared Heath, “the sea’s getting a wee bit lumpy.” The sky split in straight lines of color - purple above, bleached out below. The ship and its cooks began to rock and roll.
Sim is given weather warnings from the bridge. “The galley,” said Indge, “can be a dangerous part of the ship in rough seas. If need be, they can prep some meals, have them secured.” Despite the surging seas, fish-and-chips, deep fried in bubbling fat, was on the lunch menu. We’d clamored for fish-and-chips ever since docking at Stornaway on Lewis and discovering the captain had stolen away on shore to eat what he said were the best fish-and-chips in Scotland.
A sudden tilt of the boat and there was a crash from the galley, followed by a rounded cursing of the ship and the captain. “D’you suppose that’s our lobsters gone?” Mama remarked. The kitchen crew could be heard shouting with laughter. Sim, 36, has been on cruise ships for nine years now and can’t imagine working anywhere else.
The swell grew more lively. Some passengers left for their cabins. “It’s Wimbledon on television,” they explained, looking a little pale. The captain tannoyed that we might not make it out to St Kilda. “We must get there,” urged an Australian whose ancestors had come from St Kilda.
Terrible and beautiful, the archipelago was inhabited for 3500 years. The islanders lived on the gulls they caught off the cliff face. Sliding down ropes barefoot to snatch them from their nests, their big toes grew preternaturally long to give them greater purchase. Its last 36 inhabitants abandoned the settlement in 1930.
At six in the morning, Borosay and Stac Lee, the first two of the three godforsaken islands, emerged from the cloud stretched over the sea, grim cliffs swirling with birds. Beyond St Kilda, the next landfall is Nova Scotia. It was hard to imagine any generation spending a lifetime here. Harder still to leave this haunting landscape behind as the captain set course for home.
Mama is studying next year’s brochure.
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Julia Watson is the editor of local food site eatWashington.com.
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