This unassuming speck on the map was thrust into the spotlight this past summer when the Scottish government accused Irish trawlermen of overfishing<\/a> in its territorial waters, before announcing<\/a> that its coast guard would board any Irish fishing boat venturing into a 19-kilometer zone around the islet of Rockall. Trawlermen from the town of Killybegs, who have been casting their nets in those waters since the late 1980s, were dumbfounded.<\/p>\n \u201cThey find it incredible,\u201d says Sean O\u2019Donoghue, chief executive of the Killybegs Fishermen\u2019s Organisation. \u201cThe attitude, certainly among my members, [has been], we are not going to take this. They can come and arrest us and we\u2019ll fight this all the way.\u201d<\/p>\n Map data by OpenStreetMap via ArcGIS<\/p><\/div>\n For fishermen in Killybegs\u2014where economic activity is concentrated overwhelmingly in the harbor\u2014any exclusion from the water around Rockall could prove economically disastrous. O\u2019Donoghue estimates that up to a third of the town\u2019s herring and blue whiting catch comes from the 19-kilometer area around the outcrop. What\u2019s more, he argues, Scotland has no right to prevent Irish fishermen from plying these waters. British claim of ownership over Rockall has never been legitimate, he says. \u201cWe\u00a0\u2026\u00a0as an industry, and as an Irish government, have never recognized that.”<\/p>\n As Edinburgh and Dublin clash in distant boardrooms, Irish trawlermen continue to drop nets around Rockall, now under the watchful eye of Scottish enforcement vessels. For the moment, the outcrop\u2019s status remains uncertain. But with Brexit threatening to cut off access to these waters to European Union trawlermen, Killybegs\u2019s fishing community is set to be the first casualty in a maritime legal dispute decades in the making.<\/p>\n Rockall is at least 52 million years old, the battered remnant of an extinct volcano. As high as a four-story building and slightly wider than a city bus, the seamount only began appearing on navigational charts in 1606. Early descriptions portray a familiar, if unusual, sight for mariners crossing the Atlantic. \u201cRokel [sic<\/em>] is a solitary island\u00a0\u2026\u00a0not unlike [Sule] Stack, but higher and bigger, and white from the same cause,\u201d wrote<\/a> Captain William Coats of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1745.<\/p>\n That cause\u2014namely, the abundance of guano deposited by resting gannets and guillemots\u2014along with Rockall\u2019s almost vertical cliffs must have put off most sailors from landing, because it wasn\u2019t set foot upon until 1811 when Lieutenant Basil Hall of the HMS Endymion <\/em>led a small crew in two longboats to its summit. After having mistaken the islet for a ship under sail, an expedition was mounted as, Hall later wrote<\/a>, \u201cwe had nothing better on our hands.\u201d<\/p>\n The trip was a waking nightmare. First came the difficult landing and ascent, complicated by a high swell and Rockall\u2019s slippery cliffs: one false step, Hall wrote, \u201cmight have sent the explorer to investigate the secrets of the deep.\u201d By some miracle, the crew clambered up to the summit, only for a dense fog to descend. Frightened about losing their ship, Hall and his men hopped back onto their boats as fast as the rising swell would allow. After several hours rowing through dense mist, they made it back to the Endymion<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Royal Navy wouldn\u2019t return in force until 1955\u2014this time with a helicopter<\/a>, four marines, and a plaque declaring Rockall British territory to prevent it from being used as a base for the Soviet Union to spy on the United Kingdom\u2019s missile tests. The annexation briefly fixed the islet at the forefront of British cultural imagination. Many found the episode faintly ridiculous. Satirists Michael Flanders and Donald Swann captured the public\u2019s bemusement in a loving ditty<\/a>:<\/p>\n We sped across the planet![\"map](\"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/map-rockall-dispute-1200x669.png\")
<\/a>
\n
\nTo find this lump of granite
\nOne rather startled gannet
\nIn fact, we found Rockall.<\/p>\n