Though three men dwell on Flannan Isle
To keep the lamp alight,
As we steered under the lee, we caught
No glimmer through the night!
Remember it? For many of us it was one of the few poems on the school syllabus which did not have hearts breaking with an inexplicable and silly joy, or tell of soppy emotions recollected in alleged tranquillity; instead it was the chilling story of three keepers who disappeared without a trace, leaving Flannan Isle lighthouse as eerily empty as the Marie Celeste some 30 years before.
The Flannan Isles are a remote cluster of rocks some 60 miles west of the Butt of Lewis on the Outer Hebrides. Construction of a lighthouse on the largest of these began in 1896, and it was manned and lit early in 1899.
But on the day after Christmas Day that year, the Northern Lights supply ship Hesperus arrived nearby. The siren was sounded, and then a rocket fired, and the ship waited for an answering signal, but there was none; then some of the crew clambered on to the rock, and Ay, though we hunted high and low,
And hunted everywhere,
Of the three men's fate we found no trace
Of any kind in any place,
But a door ajar, and an untouched meal,
And an overtoppled chair.
The captain of the Hesperus reported to his authorities: "The three keepers, Ducat, Marshall and the Occasional, have disappeared from the island.
"The clocks were stopped, and other signs indicated that the accident must have happened about a week ago. The light itself was in perfect working order, the fuel supply full, and the lamp freshly cleaned. The log books had been maintained until a week previously, noting several days of unexceptionable weather."
The most plausible and officially accepted explanation is that a freak wave caught the keepers unawares as they walked together near the base of the rock.
Other less savoury rumours at the time suggested that one of the three had pushed the other two over the cliff, and threw himself in afterwards.
More recently, it has been cited as a possible example of abduction by extra-terrestrials, and Gibson hints at something even more fantastic - an ancient curse on the island that transformed the keepers:
We saw three queer, black, ugly birds
Too big, by far, in my belief,
For guillemot or shag,
Like seamen sitting bolt-upright
Upon a half-tide reef;
But, as we neared, they plunged from sight,
Without a sound, or spurt of white.
But the real fate of the Flannan Isle keepers remains to this day an unsolved mystery.