Flannan Isles: the log entries everyone quotes were written in 1929

On 26 December 1900 the relief vessel Hesperus reached Eilean Mòr in the Flannan Isles, twenty miles into the Atlantic west of Lewis. No flag was flying. No provision boxes were waiting on the landing. Nobody answered.

The three keepers — James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur — were gone, and have never been accounted for.

The version of this story that circulates is a good deal more dramatic than the record, and the difference between the two can be dated exactly.

What is documented

The light had been established a year earlier, in December 1899. Ducat was the principal keeper. Marshall was the second assistant. McArthur was an occasional keeper, standing in for a man on sick leave — a detail that matters later.

A passing steamer, the Archtor, noted on 15 December that the light was not burning. The report did not reach the Northern Lighthouse Board promptly, and weather delayed the relief for eleven days.

When Joseph Moore went up to the station he found the entrance gate and the doors closed, the beds unmade, the kitchen clock stopped and the ashes in the grate long cold. Two of the three sets of oilskins were missing. McArthur's were still hanging on their peg.

At the west landing there was damage on a scale that is difficult to picture. Iron railings were bent. A block of stone estimated at a ton had been shifted. A wooden box fixed in a crevice one hundred and ten feet above the sea had been torn out and its ropes and life-buoy strewn about. Turf was stripped from the cliff top at around two hundred feet.

What was added later, and by whom

The entries that appear in nearly every popular account describe a storm of unprecedented severity, Ducat becoming quiet and irritable, Marshall reduced to tears, and a final line reading that God is over all.

They are not in Muirhead's report. They are not in the Northern Lighthouse Board's records. They are not in any contemporary newspaper. There is no surviving document in which they appear before 1929.

In that year a story built around them was published in the American magazine True Strange Stories under the name Ernest Fallon — a pseudonym of the journalist John L. Spivak. The entries were written for the piece. They then detached themselves from it and were repeated as fact for the next century.

A second layer came earlier and more honestly. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson published a poem called "Flannan Isle" in 1912, which is openly a poem and does not pretend otherwise. It supplied the image of an untouched meal and an overturned chair. Those, too, are now quoted as though they were in the report.

The explanation the investigator reached

Muirhead concluded that the men had gone down to the west landing to secure gear against heavy weather, and that an exceptional sea had taken them.

The physical damage supports it directly. Water reaching a hundred and ten feet does not require anything unusual to have been present; it requires an unusually large wave, and that coast produces them. Storm systems in that week are on record.

The Draupner wave measurement in 1995 confirmed that individual waves far larger than the surrounding sea state occur in nature, which retrospectively made Muirhead's reading less remarkable than it once sounded.

The one thing that is genuinely odd

Standing orders required a keeper to remain at the station. McArthur left without his oilskins.

This is the detail that keeps the case alive, and it is also the detail with the most human explanation. A man who looks out and sees his two colleagues about to be caught by a sea does not stop to put on a coat.