In Highland Harbours With Para Handy - SS Vital Spark

In Highland Harbours with Para Handy: S.S. Vital Spark by Hugh Foulis is a glorious little voyage around the west coast of Scotland aboard a vessel which, by any sensible maritime standard, should probably spend rather less time carrying cargo and rather more time explaining itself to the authorities.

Published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1911, this is one of the classic Para Handy collections, written by Neil Munro under his pen-name Hugh Foulis. At its centre is the Vital Spark, a Clyde puffer commanded by the magnificently resourceful Para Handy: skipper, philosopher, opportunist and a man apparently capable of turning the routine transport of coal, timber or miscellaneous goods into a situation requiring diplomacy, improvisation and several contradictory versions of what actually happened.

The Vital Spark belongs to that wonderfully particular world of the Clyde puffers: small working steam vessels which carried cargo into the remote harbours and islands of Scotland’s western seaboard. They were practical boats performing useful work, although Para Handy and his crew demonstrate repeatedly that practicality need not exclude confusion, rivalry, drinking, storytelling, wounded pride and the occasional ambitious attempt to make reality fit whatever explanation seems most convenient at the time.

Alongside Para Handy are the familiar inhabitants of this floating institution: the solemn engineer Macphail, who possesses education and therefore the dangerous belief that things ought to make sense; Dougie, the gloomy ship’s mate whose contribution to morale is generally to predict disaster; and Sunny Jim, whose nickname should not necessarily be accepted as an independent assessment of temperament.

Together they form a crew capable of transforming the ordinary business of coastal shipping into something approaching comic mythology.

Munro’s great trick is that very little needs actually to happen before everything happens. A cargo, a harbour call, a misunderstanding, an argument about machinery or an encounter with some unfortunate person ashore is quite sufficient. From these modest beginnings come elaborate disputes, magnificent excuses and conversations in which everyone understands considerably more — or considerably less — than they are prepared to admit.

Much of the pleasure lies in the dialogue and character. Para Handy does not merely tell stories; he constructs them with the careful attention of a naval architect, adding another plank whenever the existing structure appears in danger of collapse. Whether the resulting vessel will actually float is beside the point.

There is also something wonderfully evocative about the world behind the comedy. These stories preserve the life of the Scottish west coast at the beginning of the twentieth century: little harbours, steamships, island communities, coastal trade and the constant movement of goods and gossip between places which were far more dependent upon the sea than they are today.

The Vital Spark chugs through all of it, apparently held together by steam, ingenuity and a general reluctance among the crew to admit that anything has gone wrong.

For modern readers there is an additional pleasure in encountering humour that is more than a century old and discovering that human beings have not improved nearly as much as we like to imagine. Men still exaggerate. Employees still blame equipment. Experts still dislike being contradicted. People still create complicated explanations for extremely simple mistakes. The principal technological difference is that Para Handy had no social media on which to publish his version first.

This 1911 William Blackwood and Sons edition has the further charm of being contemporary with the world it depicts. This is not a modern nostalgia edition looking back through a century of romantic fog: it was published when steam puffers were still ordinary working vessels and the Highland harbours of the title were very much part of an active coastal economy.

The copy is in Good condition, especially respectable for a book which has now spent well over a century negotiating the considerably more dangerous waters of bookshelves, house moves, attics and previous ownership.

There is a mild split to the inner front endpaper at the hinge. It is not causing any significant structural damage and should be a straightforward repair if desired. In other words, the book has developed a small maintenance issue after more than 110 years, which puts it comfortably ahead of most actual steamships.

Indeed, it seems rather appropriate that a book about the Vital Spark should possess a minor defect which looks alarming enough to interest the engineer but is not actually preventing the thing from continuing perfectly well.

There is no ISBN, because this appeared in 1911, when books were identified using the surprisingly successful system of reading the title on the front.

A lovely old edition for collectors of Scottish literature, maritime writing, Clyde puffers, Highland history, humorous fiction or anyone who considers a small steam coaster crewed by argumentative Scotsmen a perfectly reasonable basis for enduring literature.

In Highland Harbours with Para Handy is warm, funny, beautifully observed and steeped in the vanished working world of Scotland’s western coast. More than a century later, the Vital Spark is still puffing along — slightly battered, occasionally questionable, but quite incapable of admitting that there was ever anything wrong with her in the first place.

Hugh Foulis (Neil Munro) — In Highland Harbours with Para Handy: S.S. Vital Spark. William Blackwood and Sons, 1911. No ISBN. Condition: Good.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where minor hinge trouble is dealt with rather more straightforwardly than it would have been aboard the Vital Spark.

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