ZULU VOYAGE
Esther Swift has been inspired to compose 2025’s ENF Big Project – ZULU VOYAGE – by the East Neuk’s fishing communities, their history and one very special type of fishing boat – the Zulu. She has created it with around 70 musicians including St Andrews Music Project (StAMP), Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra (FYJO) and North-East Fife Community Ensemble and artist, Esme McIntyre.
“In making Zulu Voyage I discovered an incredibly rich period in our history. The fife fishing communities gave rise to the sharing and migration of culture along the coasts of Scotland and beyond, in music, stories, crafts and trade. In this piece I try to harness that spirit, by passing ideas around the different ensembles, giving them space to make the tunes their own and let old tunes continue to live and breathe in our time, not get stuck in the past. During this time of turbulence in our world, music feels like a rare moment of shared ritual and connection, allowing us to breathe together in harmonious resonance. For me the sea is the ultimate inspiration for that resonance: among her melodic storms, flat calms, murky depths and turquoise shallows lie a multitude of sounds: stories waiting to be written. If we listen, we can hear how her harmonies will help us sail through the waters of the next phase of our history.”
SOME FAST FACTS ABOUT ZULU SHIPS
The name Zulu arose from Scottish sympathy for the Zulus of Southern Africa during the Zulu wars. The first was built around the time of those wars in 1879: it was a cross between the scaffie and the fifie. The Zulu took the fifie’s upright stem and the heavily raking sternpost of the scaffie. They were built to a maximum of 80ft – the size of vessel you can see in the Scottish Fisheries Museum.
BUILDING THE BOAT
THE TOOLS
A clinker-built fishing vessel on the scale of the Zulu is an intricate construction: the tools required can be endless but some of the most important are:
The Adze: as ancient as it is vital to boat building. The earliest examples discovered by archaeologists date back 70,000 years to the stone age. It carves, smooth, fell trees – even hoe the earth.
Mallets are used to hit other pieces of wood but leave no marks – or to drive chisels for fine shaping and smoothing.
The iron square helps ensure right angles are true or squaring-off plank edges or making sure molds are perpendicular to the centre line.
Planes: there are so many kinds of plane: Low-angle block plane, Jack plane Fore plane, jointer plane, spokeshave, rabbet plane…. and in addition to the kind of plane you might find in any workshop, boat builders require specialised tools for use on concave and convex curves.
ZULU VOYAGES
Zulus would be crewed by 7 or 8 men, and it was extremely fast. With a mast that was as long as the keel, its sails were massive. One story tells of a Zulu travelling non-stop from Lowestoft to Stornaway in Orkney in 48 hours. Navigating by the stars at night, fishermen travelled far into the Atlantic and North Sea, confident of a swift return to port with the catch fresh.
