On Admiralty Chart 2471, published under the authority of the Hydrographic Office in London, there is a cluster of black crosses marked *St. Jude’s Reef — Break at Low Water*.
For eighty years, merchant steamers running coal between Cardiff and the Baltic gave that quadrant of the Minch a wide berth of twelve nautical miles. No captain wished to test his hull on jagged Lewisian gneiss in a westerly gale.
Yet when acoustic depth sounders were first dragged through those waters in the summer of 1938, the bottom showed eighty fathoms of pristine sand. There was no reef. There had never been a reef.
There had only been Robert MacIntyre, a brass ruling pen, and an unbreakable vow made to the seals of the Monach Isles.