In the 17th and 18th centuries, when Britain was usually at war with France and the English Channel was a gauntlet, shipping bound for the Atlantic took the long way around the top of Scotland. That brought a remarkable parade of vessels into Stromness for water and stores. Hudson's Bay Company ships stopped here on their way to and from the Canadian fur country - so reliably that the company recruited Orcadian boys directly from the harbour, and for over a century a substantial fraction of Hudson's Bay men were Stromness lads. Captain Cook's Resolution and Discovery filled their casks at Login's Well, still preserved behind a glass door on the main street, on their return from the Pacific in 1780, just months after Cook's death in Hawaii. Sir John Franklin's expedition watered here too, in 1845, bound for the Northwest Passage. None of them came back.

A statue at the ferry terminal commemorates John Rae, born at Orphir on Orkney in 1813. Rae became a surgeon, joined the Hudson's Bay Company, and learned what almost no Victorian explorer would condescend to learn: how to live off the Arctic land the way the Inuit lived off it. Travelling light and fast, on snowshoes and with sled dogs, he mapped enormous stretches of the Canadian Arctic coast. In 1854, asked to help find the lost Franklin expedition, he met Inuit hunters who knew exactly what had happened. They had seen the bodies. The desperate sailors, starving in the ice, had resorted to cannibalism. Rae brought the news back to London. Victorian society, led by Charles Dickens, refused to accept that British officers could do such a thing, savaged Rae's character, and froze him out. He never received the knighthood his work earned. He is buried at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall; later forensic evidence proved him right.

Khyber Pass and Puffer's Close are two of the narrow alleys that slip off Victoria Street and either tumble down to the water or climb up the hill behind town. A hundred yards south of the museum sits a cannon captured from an American privateer in 1813. Its career after capture was less glorious than its career before: the Stromness folk used it ceremonially to greet incoming Hudson's Bay ships, firing salutes into the harbour. It never once managed to hit a vessel it was aimed at. In the newer plot of Warbeth Cemetery, west of town along the coast path, a plain sandstone headstone marks the grave of George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian poet who lived most of his life in Stromness and wrote it into Scottish literature. His epitaph reads: *Carve the runes, then be content with silence.*

Behind the town rises Brinkies Brae, ninety-four metres of grass and outcrop with a view that takes in Hoy across Hoy Sound - the great cliffs of the Old Man and the dark hills of Ward Hill standing against the western sky. The coast path runs south from the Point of Ness past the golf course and the gaunt concrete observation post of Ness Battery, built to guard Scapa Flow during both world wars. Continue past Warbeth and the path eventually swings back to town along a quiet road. NorthLink ferries sail twice or three times daily to Scrabster on the Scottish mainland, ninety minutes across the strait the Vikings respected enough to give the town its name.