The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

18 : The Key to Anchor Lake

Excerpt from chapter 2 of The Key to Anchor Lake by Mary S Nesbitt – "A Brief Introduction to the History of Anchor Lake in the 16th – 20th Centuries"

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PART TWO

The Events of the 18th Century: 1719 – 1794

In the early 1700s, the entire country was ravaged by smallpox, which swiftly became the deadliest disease of the 18th century with more than 400,000 Europeans dying each year. In London alone in 1719, there were over 3,000 recorded deaths. The following year, Foula – a remote island in the unforgiving North Sea, some 250 miles north of Anchor Lake – lost 90% of its residents.

It could, therefore, be argued that Anchor Lake fared well in comparison, losing just shy of forty percent of its population to the disease, but that hardly negates the devastation it caused. Is a tragedy less tragic because it could have been worse?

I don't think so. Anchor Lake is not a large town now; it was far small back in 1719, and to lose more than a third of its residents would have set it back decades. Many of the dead were the town's old and young; entire generations were wiped out by the disease, even more devastating when life expectancy at the time was only thirty-five. Records show that many children under the age of five and almost every single resident over the age of thirty-five lost their life, including the town's oldest resident, Alice White.

At eighty-nine years old, Alice not only far surpassed the life expectancy of the time by over fifty years, but she also outlived the current standards by over a decade: in 1999, the life expectancy in the UK was only 77.39 years. Alice had already outlived her husband and two of her children; the town's archives show that three more also succumbed to smallpox, along with their own children. Smallpox ravished Anchor Lake, and eradicated entire families.

The virus changed the world over the course of centuries, with the last known case a mere twenty years ago, when the World Health Assembly announced in 1980 that the world was free of the virus. It's therefore highly likely that this desolate Highlands town was still recovering in 1744 – the threat of smallpox was still prevalent and deaths in the area were still being recorded- when a terrible summer brought the town to its knees.

In 1744, Anchor Lake experienced the hottest, driest summer on record at the time. There was no rain recorded for over three months and paired with the unprecedented heat, and two lifelines of the town were stripped away: its crops, which shrivelled and failed, and the lake, which virtually dried up.

Trapped in an already remote valley, the residents suffered, and over 60 residents – a relatively large portion of Anchor Lake's population after smallpox – died that summer. The true number is likely to be far higher, as a bad summer would have led to a bad autumn, which would have in turn resulted in a winter of suffering.

The first half of the century was not kind to Anchor Lake, a small and seemingly unimportant town in the Scottish Highlands, but the residents persisted and limped forward another twenty-five years with a sudden decrease in smallpox deaths, despite the country being almost fifty years away from a vaccine. To those who lived here at the time, it would have been a glimmer of hope, a sign that things were changing for the better and that the future would be far brighter than the past.

In 1769, still blighted by loss but carrying on with life, the town was struck by tragedy. On the 4th of June, the world experienced a total solar eclipse at around half past eight in the morning, Universal Time – half past nine in Anchor Lake. The town was plunged into spectacular darkness during daylight hours for just over three minutes, and that was all the time it took for disaster to strike.

During approximately two hundred seconds of darkness, the captain of a small pleasure boat out on the lake became disorientated, and in an attempt to steer towards the centre of the water, he instead crashed onto the shore, where residents had gathered to view the eclipse.

Unlike today, when we have television and radio and people who tell us when to expect such events as total solar eclipses, there was no forewarning for the townspeople in 1769. It would have been a novelty for some, to see night during day, and a horror story for others, to spend three minutes wondering if the world had ended without so much as a bang.

It was another type of horror story for those on the lake's shore, including five-year-old Rebecca Smith, the youngest of five people to lose their lives that day. With modern medicine what it is these days, perhaps their lives could have been saved; we'll never know. All it took was three minutes of darkness for five residents to die.

This is the first of the Anchor Lake tragedies about which rather a lot is known, as it came some forty years after the advent of newspapers in the United Kingdom. Despite Anchor Lake's remote location and it being rather cut off from the major Scottish cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Inverness, the story of the freak coincidence – the boat being on the water; the people on the shore; the solar eclipse – made it to both of Scotland's national newspapers at the time.

Both the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury, founded in 1718 and 1720 respectively, covered the story, and thanks to copies of the latter in The British Newspaper Archive, details of the accident and the dead are still available today.

As if that weren't enough tragedy for the town, 1794 brought with it another freak accident that also made it into the Caledonian Mercury. During the morning playtime at the local school, which no longer exists – ever since the dawn of the twentieth century, Anchor Lake's students have had to face a thirty- to sixty-minute commute through the surrounded mountains to get to school – there was a dry thunderstorm.

There was no rain, no warning of the impending storm, and therefore the children were not brought inside the building from their outdoor playtime when lightning struck. The first bolt hit the school's playground. Six children were killed by the electrocution, all six years old. The few who survived suffered life-altering injuries from the power of the lightning that struck the very ground they were playing on. Children who left home that morning for a regular day at school were carried away lifeless. A year group ripped apart; families ruined.

How did those families recover? How is any parent supposed to come back from the death of their child, the senseless theft of the buoyant life of a six-year-old?

I don't know. I don't know how they did it. Maybe they didn't. It's easy to measure a tragedy by the lives lost, the sacrifices made. It is far more difficult to accurately gauge the impact of a disaster, the broken people who are never put back together in the wake of an atrocity. In a single second, in the time it took one billion volts of electricity to travel from the sky to the school, six lives were lost. Many more were irrevocably changed. 

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