The Seaborne
“a parable for our torn times”
Damian Walford-Davies
The Seaborne is about a man from our own times, John Finlay, whose London engineering business fails. In panic he runs away to Scotland and arrives on the quay at Mallaig, looking for work as a deck-hand on a deep-sea fishing boat. The next picture we have is from the perspective of a raven, soaring above a sea-coast, watching a small boat coming to land. Then we're into the viewpoint of one of the fishermen, Dermot, bringing ashore a body found at sea.
By the time we're in John's mind again, he's hallucinating. Only when the fever that followed his ordeal has left him do we accompany him through his dawning realisation that he has not, as he thought, been washed up on some Hebridean shore. His surroundings look medieval. They're clearly pre-industrial. The boats have sails, not engines. The round houses have thatched roofs, and no chimneys. There are no vapour-trails in the sky. People are amazed at the zips on his clothes. This is not a Scottish island in ordinary time.