There’s evidence that 5000 years ago, someone set sail from Orkney to Shetland, North Sea, off the Northern Coast of Scotland.
Before the Roman Empire cast a shadow on bustling sea travel, prehistoric archaeologists who gained insight in the 20th Century beyond Rome’s landscape mastery, say that one person saw a flock of birds headed north and followed them to a new land.
Others say the person saw jetsam and the debris of their being, which might have brought him to this edge of the land, floated back until the person reached Shetland.
Lulled into a one-man fleet by the hypnotic back-and-forth of waves to walk the disappearing narrow path between his death and his curiosity.
Even centuries later, when the Roman empire was expanding, they didn’t trust the sea to embroider their glory in her swells.
‘The sea divides and the land unites,’ ran the Roman truism.
This focus on malleable landscape helped create the irreversible impression of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the sea is not so, easily or otherwise, impressed, covering up any mark and trace within minutes.
To the Romans, this was a barrier to the march of their ideas, goods, and troops. It might have been an insult to their conquest.
In his book "On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project," Scottish poet and academic, Kenneth White talked about the recovery of ‘lost wavelengths’ and ‘Atlantic sensations’, the suggestion that there are ways of feeling and thinking that are inspired and conditioned by the fact of long-term living on an ocean edge, says Robert Macfarlane.
There are, according to White, ‘events of the mind’ that could have occurred only on these Atlantic coasts, where ‘strange winds of the spirit blow.’'
But maybe it wasn’t so much the pull of the ebbing sea and tantric waves, or even the birds flying home, that quickened that person to travel on uncharted sea.
Perhaps it was the pouring out of the spirit from the inland, the way all producers and farmers move to a port. His droplet-expedition a premonition of the mighty sea trade to come.
When the inland is full of activity, traversed and marked and overflowing with road and footsteps, it pours through the streets until it reaches the coast to breathe. Here, it slides up against natural explorers and the restless and the lost, to go "out there" and find new unmarked land or old worlds to echo the lost.
Or maybe, when our inner world is too crowded, with migrant ideas and tourist conditions and forgotten natives, in our current stop in life, unable to return to quieter expanses, it pours out of us in ideas, impulse, and restlessness.
At a given moment, with the help of unseen culmination (luck), inner preparation, or sheer external force, you set sail, and maybe you find Shetland.