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The Last Grain Race
Eric Newby


An engaging and informative first-hand account of the last ‘grain race’ of maritime history, from respected travel writer Eric Newby.In 1939, a young Eric Newby – later renowned as a travel writer of exceptional talent – set sail aboard Moshulu, the largest sailing ship still employed in the transportation of grain from Australia to Europe. Every year from 1921 to 1939, the vessels involved in the grain trade would strive to find the shortest, fastest passage home – ‘the grain race’ – in the face of turbulent seas, atrocious weather conditions and hard graft.First published in 1956, ‘The Last Grain Race’, featuring many photographs from the author’s personal collection, celebrates both the spirit of adventure and the thrill of sailing on the high seas. Newby’s first-hand account – engaging and informative, with frequent bursts of humour and witty observations from both above and below deck – chronicles this classic sailing voyage of the Twenties and Thirties, and records the last grain race of maritime history.









THE LAST GRAIN RACE

ERIC NEWBY








William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB WilliamC‌ollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014

First published in Great Britain in 1956 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

Copyright © Eric Newby 1956

Eric Newby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by www.nathanburtondesign.com (http://www.nathanburtondesign.com)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007597833

Ebook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780007597840

Version: [2014-10-07]


A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS (#u0ed9e114-16c1-5898-8350-2075982ce92f)

All photographs in this book are drawn from a collection of several hundreds taken by the author in the course of the voyage, none of which had been previously published until the book’s first publication in 1956. The copyright is held by the author. The illustration on p.17 is reproduced by kind permission of the Editor, The Belfast News-Letter.


LLOYD’S WEEKLY SHIPPING INDEX MAY 5th, 1904 (#u0ed9e114-16c1-5898-8350-2075982ce92f)

On April 18th there was launched at Port Glasgow by Messrs William Hamilton and Co. a four-masted barque of about 3,200 tons gross, the last of two sister vessels built for Messrs G.H.J. Siemers and Co of Hamburg, for their nitrate trade: vessel has a length of 320 feet (b.p.), a beam of 47 feet and a depth of 28 feet to main deck, and is classed at Germanischer Lloyd’s under special survey. With the view of minimizing labour numerous winches are fitted on board for working of sails and the equipment also includes on 6-h-p. and one 10-h-p. petrol winch. During construction the vessel has been supervised by Mr Alexander Craig on behalf of Germanischer Lloyd’s, and by Captains Opitz and Gerdau on behalf of the owners. The barque was named Kurt (by Mrs T. W. Hamilton).

LLOYD’S LIST AND SHIPPING GAZETTE MARCH 5th, 1935 (#u0ed9e114-16c1-5898-8350-2075982ce92f)

MOSHULU (ex ‘Kurt’). – Steel four-masted barque: 5,300 tons d.w., 3,116 gross, 2,911 net. Built Port Glasgow, 1904 Sold by the Charles Nelson Company, Inc., San Francisco, to Captain Gustaf Erikson, Mariehamn. It is understood that the sale is ‘subject to survey’.














Contents

Cover (#u539d0f41-792d-55bb-9a8a-3fd50c8138c6)

Title Page (#u867324e7-65a5-5873-8755-98021d6e683c)

Copyright (#u06522c77-069b-5791-bc63-fb2fbd852dad)

A Note on the Illustrations (#u62641166-3495-54a9-89f0-0b9745bdaeef)

Extracts From Lloyd’s Index and List (#u4c47f563-33d4-53f4-a18c-6b0f3dc05ed4)

Sail Plan and Diagram of Running Rigging (#u769d4910-7b58-5b64-8eeb-14868d19d67c)

Map of Moshulu’s Course Round the World (#u5ff9b6fb-07b7-5ffa-860e-f1b708d4cecd)

Introduction to the 1981 Grafton Edition (#ue21bba15-8ee9-53ce-82a4-5825a699b5b8)

Chapter 1: Wurzel’s (#ufd1a15f9-fea5-52f5-955f-14fadaad844b)

Chapter 2: Mountstewart (#u03fc8876-f6c8-54b8-b3a3-331395d1dd57)

Chapter 3: Fitting Out (#u2d2525b2-55b4-5d5e-a3e4-78a85efedb76)

Chapter 4: Op the Rigging (#u0a86dd10-2ce6-5126-ae57-d02922c075e8)

Chapter 5: Over the Side (#u502c82bd-3a64-512e-9fff-40858dcbb1d5)

Chapter 6: Sömmarström and His Sails (#u5b00b4d7-f20c-5548-82f8-2805d4facf94)

Chapter 7: Wild Life in the Irish Sea (#ue221b7db-b2d7-55e5-b1d7-1417aca3d968)

Chapter 8: The Watch Below (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9: ‘Ängelskit’ and ‘Kabelgarn’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10: ‘Rundvask’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11: Kroner (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12: ‘England’s Hope’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13: Inaccessible Island (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14: ‘God Jul’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15: Into Battle (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16: Cape Catastrophe (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17: Port ‘Veek’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18: The Last Grain Race (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19: Storm in the Southern Ocean (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20: Cape Horn (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21: ‘Like Spreeng After Vinter’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22: North of the Line (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23: The Race Is Won (#litres_trial_promo)

The Beaufort Scale (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grain Race 1939 (#litres_trial_promo)

Moshulu – Belfast to Port Lincoln (#litres_trial_promo)

Moshulu – Port Victoria to Queenstown (#litres_trial_promo)

Later History of Moshulu (#litres_trial_promo)

Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Eric Newby (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Introduction to the 1981 Grafton Edition (#ulink_6d0d20ad-33bc-55ff-845a-47b60ef85a42)


Although I did not know it when I joined the four-masted barque Moshulu in Belfast in the autumn of 1938, this was to be her last voyage in the Australian grain trade, as it was to be for the rest of Gustav Erikson’s fleet of sailing ships, as well as for most of the German and Swedish ships which took part in the 1939 sailings from South Australia to Europe. In that year thirteen three-and four-masted barques sailed for Europe, eleven of them by way of Cape Horn, and by the autumn all of them were back in European waters; but although one or two of them continued to sail during the first year or so of the war, carrying various cargoes, and some even survived into the post-war years, the big Finnish fleet of Gustav Erikson was dispersed and the ships never came together again to form the great concourse of vessels which lay in Spencer Gulf, South Australia, in the early months of 1939.

Today there are no more steel, square-rigged sailing ships left trading on the oceans of the world. If any more are built for commercial purposes it seems certain that they will be as different from the barques that I knew as the crews which will be employed to man them will be different.

Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn in the Baltic was the last man to own a great fleet of sailing ships. He employed no P.R.O.s to improve his image. I never met any foremast hand who liked him – it would be as reasonable to expect a present-day citizen of Britain to ‘like’ the Prime Minister or an Inspector of Taxes. In our ship he was known as ‘Ploddy Gustav’, although most of us had never set eyes on him. The thing that warmed one to him was the certainty that he was completely indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not. He was only interested in his crews in so far as they were necessary to sail his ships efficiently, and for that reason he ensured that they were adequately fed by sailing-ship standards, and that the ships they manned were supplied with enough rope, canvas, paint and other necessary gear to enable them to be thoroughly seaworthy. He certainly knew about ships. Originally, as a boy of nine, he had gone to sea in a sailing vessel engaged in the North Sea timber trade. At the age of nineteen he got his first command in the North Sea, and after that spent six years in deep-water sail as a mate. From 1902 to 1913 he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels before becoming an owner. By the ’thirties the grain trade from South Australia to Europe was the last enterprise in which square-riggers could engage with any real hope of profit, and then only if the owner had an obsessional interest in reducing running costs. Erikson had to pay his crews (which had to be as small as was commensurate with safety) as little as possible. He could not afford to insure his ships, most of which he had obtained at shipbreaker’s prices; but at the same time he had to maintain them at such a standard that they were all rated 100 A1 at Lloyd’s, or an equivalent classification elsewhere. He was respected and feared as a man over whose eyes no wool could be pulled by the masters whom he employed to sail his ships, and the tremors they felt were passed on down to the newest joined apprentice. Of such stuff discipline is made. A now out-moded word, but sailing ships do not stay afloat and make fast passages at the pleasure of committees of seamen.

The work of handling the great acreages of sail was very heavy, even for men and boys with strong constitutions. Thirty-four days out from Port Victoria, two days after we had passed the Falkland Islands on the homeward run, with a crew of twenty-eight, which included officers, cook, steward, etc., we started bending a complete suit of old, patched fair-weather canvas for the tropics in order to save wear and tear on the strong stuff, sending the storm canvas down on gant-lines. Sail changing was done always when entering and leaving the Trade Winds, four times on a round voyage. While we were engaged in this work it started to blow hard from the south-east; then it went to the south, blowing force 9 and then 10 and then 11 from the south-south-west, when the mizzen lower topsail blew out. This was followed by a flat calm and torrential rain. In the middle of the night a Pampero, a wind that comes off the east coast of South America, hit the ship when it was practically in full sail. Because the Captain knew his job we only lost one sail, the fore upper topgallant.

In those twenty-four hours the port and starboard watches, eight men to a watch, took in, re-set, took and re-set again twenty-eight sails – the heaviest of which weighed 1½ tons – a total of 112 operations; bent two new sails and wore the ship to a new tack twice, an operation which required all hands, including the cook, and which took an hour each time it was done. The starboard watch were unlucky, having to spend eleven consecutive hours on deck. This was by no means uncommon. Yet strangely enough, I look back on the time I spent in Moshulu with great pleasure.




1 (#ulink_18349d1c-a0ea-5e5c-9d31-a39391c79450)

Wurzel’s (#ulink_18349d1c-a0ea-5e5c-9d31-a39391c79450)


On the day we lost the Cereal Account I finally decided to go to sea.

‘You’ve ’ad it,’ said the Porter with gloomy relish as I clocked in a little after the appointed hour at the advertising agency where I was learning the business.

I was not surprised. I was eighteen years old and had been at The Wurzel Agency for two years after leaving school on the crest of one of my parents’ more violent financial crises. They had known George Wurzel in his earlier, uncomplicated days and had placed me with him in the fond belief that the sooner I got down to learning business methods the better. By now they were beginning to feel that they might have been wrong. Wurzel’s had long held a similar opinion. Since I had ridden a bicycle into Miss Phrygian’s office they had been more than cool. Julian Pringle, the most rebellious copywriter Wurzel’s ever had, bet me that I could not ride it round the entire building without dismounting. The coast had been clear, the numerous swing doors held open, and the bicycle, which was being sketched for the front page of the Daily Mail, borrowed from the Art Department.

It was a pity that Julian did not tell me that the brake blocks were missing; perhaps he removed them. Whatever the reason, I failed to take the dangerous corner at the bottom of the main corridor and ended on Miss Phrygian’s desk. She was the Secretary to the Managing Director and carried Wurzel’s on her capable shoulders. Though it was by no means obvious at the time, she apparently never bore me any ill-feeling, and during the war Miss Phrygian’s enormous parcels of cigarettes were the only ones that consistently got through to the various P.O.W. camps I inhabited. But this kind of antic was only condoned in Layout and Ideas men of the calibre of Julian Pringle, who kept their sanity and independence by behaving atrociously whenever a Director appeared. It was nothing for a client being hurried past the Layout Department to less controversial regions to be treated to a display of paper dart flying. (Once a potential customer was hit on the nose by an ink pellet.) The Prep-School Heart still beat strongly in Layout and Ideas.

I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on.

In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me.

When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’.

‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din.

Les, the other checker, had a less rugged exterior than Stan and a passion for Italian opera on which he spent all his money. He would often appear in the morning, dark-eyed and lifeless after long hours in the Gallery at Covent Garden, drop a leaden hand on my shoulder and greet me: ‘’Lo, Noob. Jer ’ear Gilli lars ni’? … Bleedin’ marvellous.’

The Department was presided over by a gnome-like little man who knew everything there was to know about his job and had such a retentive memory that he could tell you without hesitation on which page of some old Regimental magazine a sherry advertisement had appeared. Quite naturally our behaviour often exasperated him and he would turn to Stan and me, who were locked in an orgy of ‘pummelling’, and say: ‘’Ere, for Christ sake! turn it in!’

From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat.

When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’

After what seemed an eternity in this very unhealthy place, I graduated to the Filing Department where the proofs of the advertisements were kept. Here I had Miss Reidenfelt all to myself when she visited me in search of proofs; but I was much too much in awe of her to take advantage of my hard-won advancement. I found that the white-collar boys in the outer office, where twenty telephones rang incessantly, felt just the same about Miss Reidenfelt as Les, Stan and I had in our more private labyrinth. In a more primitive society Miss Reidenfelt would have been the central figure in a fertility rite and would by now have rated a six-figure entry in the index to ‘The Golden Bough’.

Next I went to ‘Art’, of which I remember little except wearing a smock, being covered with bicycle tyre solution (which ‘Art’ used in gallons), and my surprise, when, after standing for hours being sketched for an advertisement for mass-produced clothes, I found that I had emerged on paper as a sunburned, moustached figure wearing a Brigade Tie and a bowler hat. Long afterwards I cherished the hope that this picture might lure some unwary Adjutant of the Grenadiers into our clients’ emporium, where he would certainly be provided with a very remarkable suit. Julian had had one of them by his desk for some time. He said it inspired him. The canvas used in its construction was so stiff that with a little effort it could be made to stand up alone like a suit of armour.

From Art I moved to the outer office and bought myself some white collars and a more grown-up suit. Here I was in full view of Mr McBean, the Scots Manager, who, with his bald head, horn rims and slightly indignant expression, seemed to swim in his glass-bound office like some gigantic turbot; only the absence of bubbles when he dictated to Miss Rundle showed that Mr McBean breathed the same air as the rest of us. He had a facility shared by fish and London taxis for turning very rapidly in his tracks, and sometimes, thinking myself undetected, I would find him glowering at me from his aquarium. He disapproved of frivolity and my reputation had preceded me when I joined his department.

With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation.

It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude and averted their eyes from their unfortunate fellows. I had no personal possessions to put together. My hat was in the cloakroom where it had remained for two years. I had never taken it out but sometimes I dusted it, as Mr McBean from time to time checked up on the whereabouts of the more junior and unstable members of the staff by identifying the hats in the cloakroom. This was my alibi; with my hat in its place I was permanently somewhere in the building.

This morning Mr McBean was not in his office. He was not an unkindly man and the decimation of his staff had probably upset him. I went up to Leopold, the bright and intelligent Jew who looked and sounded so much like Groucho Marx that I had once seen him signing the autograph albums of eager fans in the street. He was smoking an enormous Trichinopoly cheroot – the product of one of the smaller accounts which he helped to handle in addition to breakfast food. I asked him what went on.

‘We’ve lost Brekkabitz, dear boy.’

‘I suppose it was your fault, Leo. I must say I thought some of the stuff you put out was positively filthy.’

He removed the cheroot from his mouth and blew a great cloud of smoke in my face. I began to understand why the sales of this particular brand needed all the impetus Wurzel’s could give them. His voice came through the smoke: ‘… And when dear Wurzel went to America he got a very chilly reception. The client didn’t like our handling of the Digestive Tract. Neither did anybody else. Nobody wants to be reminded at breakfast how many feet of gut he’s got. Wurzel stuck out for the last foot.’

‘Statistics show that the average is thirty-nine feet,’ I said.

‘Boy,’ said Leopold eagerly, ‘I am glad to meet you. So you really read the series?’

‘The whole hundred-and-twenty-six of them. I had to in the Checking Department. They made me stick them in a book. They were terrible. They made my flesh creep.’

‘So you’re the only living creature who ever read them…. I disliked them so much I used to look at them with my eyes shut. At any rate, they were a flop and this is the pay-off. We’re all going, even Robbie and Johnny.’

‘What about me?’

‘Unless you received a registered letter with your oven-crisp Brekkabitz this morning you’re still here.’

I looked at Robbie and Johnny. They were calm, a little icy and slightly green about the gills, but this may have been due to the Annual Staff Party which had been held the night before. They too were preparing to leave.

‘Why Robbie and Johnny?’ I asked. ‘Why are they packing up? They handle the Bicycle Account. That’s nothing to do with Brekkabitz.’

‘My boy,’ said Leopold, biting a great soggy chunk off his cheroot, ‘when the heads finish rolling in this place it will look like a field full of swedes.’

‘What about Lettice?’

‘Joke,’ said Leopold. ‘Lettice is just a nice girl with a good heart and she types like a dream. They’ll never sack Lettice. I don’t know what she’ll do without me. It’s a pity that this should happen after such a heavenly party,’ he added.

The Annual Staff Party had been held at a rather raffish roadhouse on a by-pass. With its peeling stucco, bulbous thatched minarets and empty jars of liquid soap over the basins in the washroom, it still holds for me, in retrospect, the essential uneasy spirit of the thirties. We arrived at the road-house after a treasure hunt in motor cars to find that the whole place had been reserved for Wurzel’s. People who had driven out for dinner were being turned away.

It had not been a lively evening. Sporadic outbursts of drunkenness were extinguished early. Only Leopold had really enjoyed himself. He had appeared dressed as a waiter in a loathsome greasy suit of tails; the service was so dilatory and the food so bad that he managed to serve the Managing Director with a leg of chicken made of plaster of paris without being detected. Mr McBean had been grateful to find a large helping of smoked salmon on his plate, but this proved to be skilfully fashioned from a rubber bathmat with ‘Welcome’ in white letters on the reverse side.

When the tables were cleared the Managing Director had risen to his feet. He was shiny and palm-beach-suited. In office hours he was disagreeable; now, filled with wary bonhomie, he was unspeakable. He began his speech by referring to us as ‘Boys and Girls’, at which a premonitory and quite audible shudder ran through the assembly. He went on to regret the absence of Mr Wurzel, our Chairman, who had unexpectedly been called away. Although, he said, we had made progress in the last year, we might have to draw in our horns and retrench in the very near future.

After what seemed a lifetime, the Managing Director reached the final peroration: ‘What I always feel,’ he said, ‘is that we’re just one big happy family.’ He then sat down to a round of rather limited applause.

Now, in the grey morning, the party was over and the happy family was breaking up fast. In Layout and Ideas packing was going on with end-of-term abandon. The illusion was heightened by Julian Pringle, an enormous creature dressed in a green jacket of primitive homespun and a flaming tomato tie. He was sitting on his desk chanting ‘No more Latin, no more French’ whilst he tied up a great parcel of Left Book Club editions. This was nothing to him. Ideas men lived the uneasy life of King’s favourites, and if not discharged would very often take themselves off to another agency, sometimes with a client in tow. At nine-thirty this morning Julian had already been in touch with a well-known rival to Wurzel’s, who was glad to have him.

Before Robbie left I asked him why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now.

‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’

I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘’ad it.’ I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed… too unimportant to be sacked…. At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny.

At Hammersmith, where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own.

I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague.

The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand.

On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a café and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships.

I never went back to Wurzel’s.




2 (#ulink_5c9900e5-f6dd-558a-a3d2-d1e489689bad)

Mountstewart (#ulink_5c9900e5-f6dd-558a-a3d2-d1e489689bad)







Young Eric Newby

The sea had always attracted me. I had inherited my enthusiasm from my father, who had once tried to run away to sea and had been brought back from Millwall in a hackney cab. He had not repeated the attempt but ever since, the sound of a ship’s siren or the proximity of a great harbour would unsettle him. He was, and still is, the sort of man who would crush other people’s toes underfoot to look out of a crowded compartment as the train passed Southampton Water, simply to gain a fleeting glimpse of the liners berthed there. Seagulls wheeling over a ploughed field would bring the comment: ‘There must be dirty weather at sea to drive them so far inland.’

My interest in sailing ships was being constantly renewed by my visits to the house of a certain Mr Mountstewart whose daughter had been a great friend of mine ever since I could remember. Although Mr Mountstewart was not old-looking when I first met him at the age of six or seven, he could not have been particularly young even then. He had taken part in the Matabele War, the Jameson Raid and various other skirmishes. Buchan would have loved him. In fact, if he had known Mr Mountstewart he would probably have incorporated him in the Thirty-Nine Steps instead of Hannay, who always seemed to me to be a creature unduly favoured by fortune.

You could not imagine Mr Mountstewart needing luck or coincidence to help him, although he was by no means well off and would probably have welcomed the chance that Buchan gave his heroes to make their piles before returning to ‘The Old Country’. Later, when he lent me Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, I immediately identified him with Davies, that splendid sailor and enthusiastic patriot. It did not surprise me when I learnt that he had known Erskine Childers. To this day I am convinced that Mr Mountstewart was a member of the British Secret Service.

At some time towards the end of the eighties he had made a voyage from Calcutta to London in a clipper ship which carried skysails above the royals. His description of sitting astride the skysail yard, which was as thin as a broomstick and shook violently, filled me with apprehension. He had shipped as a passenger, lived aft and had had leisure for reading and speculation. His reminiscences were to prove highly misleading.

The study where he worked was extraordinary, and nothing like it can conceivably have existed outside the British Museum and those sections of the Royal College of Surgeons not accessible to the general public. On the wall facing the door was the longest muzzle-loading punt gun I had ever seen. Below it was a smaller model. Mr Mountstewart was a Fen man and still occasionally discharged this piece from a specially strengthened canoe. Both punt guns hung close up to the ceiling, I suspect, because they were loaded. Beneath them a shark’s head, its jaws agape, protruded from the wall. Next door was the bathroom; sometimes when I called, Mr Mountstewart would be having a bath, and the sounds coming from it made me think that it was the invisible hind parts of the shark happily threshing the water.

On the back of the door hung a spiked pickelhaube from a volunteer regiment that Mr Mountstewart had joined in some sudden emergency. On one side it was flanked by a narwhal’s tusk and on the other by the sword of a swordfish.

To the left of the door over the fireplace was an oil-painting of the skysail yarder outside Foochow. She was shown with her ports painted black and white, which according to him was supposed to discourage piracy in the China Sea. The picture was by a Chinese artist whose imagination had overburdened the vessel with canvas.

For the rest the room contained a fantastic medley; faded photographs of early submarines at Spithead and the first turbine vessel Turbina, filled with apprehensive-looking men in bowler hats roaring through a crowded anchorage; assegais and knobkerries; devil masks and kris; Martini-Henry rifles and bandoliers of soft-nosed bullets.

In a recess stood a large bookcase, the top shelf filled with bottles containing nasty things in pickle, including a foetus, of what species I never dared to ask, only hoping it wasn’t human. The second shelf contained a quantity of Nobel explosive and, within dangerous proximity, an electric exploder. The shelves below were filled with books of travel, charts, maps and text-books which instructed you how to behave in the most difficult circumstances. One of these, a work on first aid in extremis, contained the account of a North American trapper successfully amputating his leg with a bowie knife after an affray with Red Indians. It also contained instructions for setting a broken collar bone by hurling yourself backwards off a rock.

Near the window, in a polished brass shell-case of a Gatling gun, stood a sheaf of large rockets with metal sticks which served the same decorative purpose as the Pampas grass in the front window of the next house. One Fifth of November Mr Mountstewart had appeared in our garden by Hammersmith Bridge with a number of these rockets which he fired off in series in the direction of the poorer and more inflammable parts of Fulham. They had disappeared into the night with a satisfying scream, and I am quite certain did a large amount of damage. Mr Mountstewart always maintained they were life-saving rockets but it is more probable that they had been constructed for offensive purposes at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

The following year he appeared with a spherical object called a Gerb which he insisted was a firework. The bomb, for that is what it proved to be, was lowered into a thick iron mortar which was supposed to be deeply embedded in the earth. Unfortunately, this was not carried out properly, as the gardens were the common property of the flats in which we lived and it was felt that the grass would be damaged. It would have been cheaper to damage the grass. The initial explosion jerked the mouth of the mortar into an upright position, and instead of going over the river the Gerb, like its modern counterpart the V-2, shot vertically into the air with increasing velocity. At eighty feet it should have exploded, but it failed to do so and began to descend on us with a tremendous whining sound. In spite of his age, Mr Mountstewart was farthest from the Gerb when it finally exploded, breaking a number of windows.

I do not think my parents approved of Mr Mountstewart. In any event they never mentioned his name and my visits to his house became more or less clandestine. There I first read Slocum’s Sailing Alone Round the World and Shackleton’s South, with its description of the journey in a small open boat in the Antarctic winter from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and the subsequent crossing of that island on foot which resulted in the rescue of the rest of the members of the expedition.

I always felt that Mr Mountstewart resembled the Seafaring Rat in The Wind in the Willows who persuades the Water Rat to renounce everything and go to sea. By the time I had been at Wurzel’s a year his plans for me were nearly coming to fruition. Not only had he succeeded in making me think of nothing but sailing ships; he had also made me feel that discomfort and worse were preferable to my present situation. We would be discussing some proposed voyage and the victuals required and he would bring out the South American Pilot (Part 2), which was full of passages like this:

Off Cape St. John, the eastern point of Staten Island, a heavy tide rip extends for a distance of five or six miles or even more, to seaward. When the wind is strong and opposed to the tidal stream the overfalls are overwhelming and very dangerous even to a large and well found vessel. Seamen must use every precaution to avoid this dangerous area.

A horrid picture of the Fuegian scene was conjured up by the following extract under ‘Refuge Station – Lifeboat’:

A refuge station has been established by the Argentine Government in this harbour (St. John), provided with a lifeboat for the assistance of shipwrecked mariners. A report made in 1911 states that there was only one inhabitant of Staten Island who had been left alone at Port Cook, in charge of some machinery for extracting fat from seals, for six years.

Mr Mountstewart’s strongest card in this game of getting me to sea was the one about time running out. For me time running out meant an outbreak of war, for him it meant waking one morning to find the seas stripped of four-masted barques. There were still in 1938 thirteen vessels entirely propelled by sail, engaged in carrying grain from South Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. There were other cargoes for these ships; timber from Finland to East Africa, guano (a sinister kind of bird dung) fom Mauritius and the Seychelles to New Zealand, and very rarely, for the two remaining German barques, cargoes of nitrate from Tocopilla, Mejillones and other ports on the Chilean Coast to be carried round the Horn to Hamburg. But for the most part the outward voyages from Europe to South Australia round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Indian Ocean were ballast passages. Grain was the staple cargo. If that failed most of these thirteen ships would soon be rusting at forgotten anchorages.

The survival of the big sailing ships in this trade was due to several favourable circumstances. Grain was not dependent on season, neither was it perishable. In the primitive ports of the Spencer Gulf, where the grain was brought down from the back blocks in sacks, steamers found it difficult to load a cargo in an economical time. Although at some ports there were mile-long jetties, at most places the grain had to be brought alongside the ships in lightering ketches and slung into the hold with the vessel’s own gear, which might, and frequently did, take weeks. But a sailing ship run with utmost economy and a low-paid crew could still in 1938 take six weeks to load her cargo of 4,000 tons of grain, reach Falmouth or Queenstown for orders after 120 days on passage and still make a profit on a round voyage of about 30,000 miles, the outward 15,000 having been made in ballast.




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Fitting Out (#ulink_86f75f72-177c-5a23-8e1a-e025bc7a14c2)







Moshulu, Belfast Lough, September 1938

When I returned from my holiday, events started to happen with increasing momentum so that I began to feel like the central figure in one of those films of the twenties, in which the actors flash in and out of buildings in the twinkling of an eye. With suspicious promptness a letter arrived from Gustav Erikson in Mariehamn, in which that man of iron told me to get in touch with his London Agents, Messrs. H. Clarkson of Bishopsgate.

Captain Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn, ‘Ploddy Gustav’ as he was known more or less affectionately by the men and boys who sailed his ships, was in 1938 the owner of the largest fleet of square-rigged deep-water sailing vessels in the world. The great French sailing fleet of Dom Borde Fils of Bordeaux had melted away upon the withdrawal of government subsidies in the twenties; only two barques, Padua and Priwall, still belonged to the once great house of Laeisz of Hamburg; Erikson remained. He was not only the proprietor of twelve four- and three-masted barques, he also owned a number of wooden barquentines and schooners, the majority of which were engaged in the ‘onker’ (timber trade) in the Baltic and across the North Sea.

At the time I went to sea he was sixty-five years old. Unlike most twentieth-century shipowners he had been a sailor with wide practical experience before he had become a shipowner. At the age of nine he had shipped as a boy aboard a vessel engaged in the North Sea trade. Ten years later he had his first command in the same traffic and then, for six years, he had shipped as mate in ocean-going ships. Between 1902 and 1913, when he finally left the sea to concentrate on being an owner, he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels.

If I had imagined that Clarkson’s would be impressed when I approached them, I should have been disappointed. I was one of a number of Englishmen who applied to join the Grain Fleet every year, and Clarkson’s could not know that I was to be one of the last. From this small mahogany-bound office, saved from being prosaic by the numerous pictures of sailing ships on the walls, they looked after the destinies of practically every grain sailer in the world. Even the Germans came to Clarkson. In 1937 they fixed the high freight of 42s 6d a ton for the Kommodore Johnsen. Most cargoes were for British ports and Clarkson fixed the freights. Erikson was well served by them.

I learned some of these things from a little white-haired man, who said that to make the voyage at all I must be bound apprentice and pay a premium of fifty pounds. He made no suggestions except that I would probably be better advised not to go at all. I left Bishopsgate with a form of indenture which among other provisions stipulated that my parents were to bind me to the owner for eighteen months or a round voyage; that if I deserted the ship in any foreign port my premium would be forfeited; that if I died or became incapacitated, a pro-rata repayment of premium could be claimed; that I should receive 120 Fin-marks (10s) a month, and that I should be subject to Finnish law and custom.

This document my father reluctantly signed after hopelessly trying to discover something about Finnish law and custom. I remember that he was particularly concerned to find out whether the death penalty was still enforced and in what manner it was carried out. Even more reluctantly he paid out £50 and sent off the Indentures with two doctors’ certificates attesting that I was robust enough for the voyage, and one from a clergyman which stated that I was of good moral character. By this time I began to feel that I was destined for Roedean rather than the fo’c’sle of a barque.

During this time Mr Mountstewart had not been inactive. For him the balloon had gone up, this was what he had been waiting for. In the language of his generation it was ‘Der Tag’. With memories of long periods of inactivity in the skysail yarder, he had got into touch with an acquaintance of his, a fashionable ship’s chandler, whose interest lay principally in the fitting out of yachts in the Solent and the Hamble River. Between them they had drawn up a formidable list of books on navigation and seamanship which I would peruse under the direction of the Master. This was a heaven-sent opportunity for Mr Mountstewart’s friend, and he was not backward in loading me with his wares, which included a particularly repellent kind of sea-water soap. I staggered from his showrooms to a taxi with a great pile of logarithm tables, nautical almanacs and seaman’s manuals, all slightly shop-soiled. He had tried to persuade me that I needed a sextant but a premonitory and for once accurate voice told me that where I was going I might find difficulty in living it down.

His conscience had not allowed him to recommend his ‘yachting’ brand of oilskins and clothing, and he had sent me off to the East India Dock Road where I might obtain more suitable garments than his own, which were no doubt excellent for the purpose for which they were designed. Perhaps he knew more than I imagined about sailing ships and feared that I might return after the voyage to accuse him of selling oilskins that split.

When the manager of the store in the East India Dock Road heard who had sent me and what I was proposing to do, he decided to give me his personal attention. He was far grander and more sure of himself than the neighbourhood in which the outfitters was situated would have led me to expect. The complete outfitting of a hundred shipwrecked lascars would have been nothing to him. I was a smallish order and he proposed to deal with me accordingly. He swept me down the staircase to the basement past rails of hideous shore-going suits. ‘Now, sir,’ he said, taking a deep and well-practised breath, ‘you will be wanting pilot coat heavy trousers two suits working clothes heavy underwear heavy seaboots long oilskin coat oilskin trousers sea-boot stockings stormcap knife and spike, mattress straw.’

It was a hot September day. I put on the long thick vest and underpants; like all their counterparts in England they were supported mysteriously by a number of tapes which once tied in a knot could never be undone but had to be severed. Over these foundation garments I put layers of unseasonable clothing: thick navy working shirts and trousers of itchy cloth, a seaman’s jersey, stockings and seaboots. Over these went the oilskin coat and trousers, the latter insecurely supported by a single cord. On my head was the storm cap. Even this was disappointing: it was made of patent leather trimmed with imitation Astrakhan. There were flaps that let down over the ears or could be tied up on top of the hat like a deerstalker. Everything was unnecessarily ugly.

The manager was delighted at my transformation. ‘Now, sir,’ he said briskly, ‘if you would like to move about a little…’ I walked a few feet to get what he called ‘the feel’ of the things and the waterproof trousers fell down.

‘You will also require a trunk,’ said the manager. At this moment one of his assistants wheeled one in. It was the sort of trunk that stingy murderers use for the disposal of their victims; covered with bright yellow fabric and fitted with imitation brass locks, it gave off a gluey smell and was sticky to the touch.

I was sweating profusely, unhappy to be looking so ridiculous and miserable about the trunk.

‘I want a wooden sea-chest, not a trunk. That thing will fall to pieces if it gets wet.’

The manager smirked. He was accustomed to this kind of complaint. ‘The sea-chest is a thing of the past,’ he said, ‘are you expecting the fo’c’sle to be filled with water?’

‘As a matter of fact, I am.’

‘In that case,’ he replied rather stiffly, ‘you will no doubt want to take your own precautions. We will wrap these in brown paper.’

On the way back to Hammersmith, from the top of a bus I saw a magnificent trunk in the window of a shop that disposed of railway lost property. The trunk in the East India Dock Road had been an octavo trunk; this was a folio and the next day when I went to see it, I found that it even opened like a book. One side contained numbers of drawers intended for shoes and the other a big space for hanging clothes. It was blacker and grander than I had imagined. A small ticket said: ‘This trunk by Louis Vuitton for sale’, and underneath, more despairingly, ‘Must be disposed of’. I bought it for four pounds, and put my shore-going clothes and my pilot jacket, of which at the time I was inordinately proud, in the space once filled with Paquin dresses. Its small white label, Louis Vuitton. Paris. Nice. Vichy, with its false promise of more gracious living supported me through periods of homesickness and depression.

At about this time occurred the Business with the Caribou Skin Sleeping-bag. It took up a great deal of time that I could have spent more profitably in eating. One of my chief sources of information about life in sailing ships was Basil Lubbock’s Round the Horn Before the Mast. Lubbock, a tall, tough Etonian, had taken part in the gold rush to the Yukon; returning from the Gold Fields in 1899, he had shipped out of ’Frisco in an iron barque and worked his passage home before the mast. Among his possessions was a Caribou sleeping-bag for which he had given a pair of 12 lb. blankets ‘to a man who was camped alongside me at Lake Bennett, on the way into the Klondyke’. He described it as having been made in Newfoundland by the Indians from two caribou skins sewn together with the sinews of the animals. The following passage convinced me that I too must have a caribou skin sleeping-bag.

‘How delightful and cosy I felt turning into my sleeping-bag in the first watch, better far than a dozen blankets. Off the Horn the air is so moist that once one’s blankets are damp they never get dry again; besides which the iron side of the half-deck sweats awfully, and drops on to everything. But when everybody and everything else was wet off the Horn I would crawl into my bag, my underclothes wet, my socks dripping, I did not take them off as the only chance to get them dry was by the heat of my body, and in turning out again I would find my clothes dry, and my feet smoking hot, notwithstanding the wet socks.’

The demand for caribou bags had slumped since the Gold Rush of 98. I learned this after visiting the showrooms of half a dozen manufacturers of camping equipment. In most of them I was met with blank stares of incomprehension. True to type, the assistants in those of the better sort, being asked for something outside their experience, refused to admit the existence of such a bag. In the most elegant of Piccadilly outfitters I was told by a man in a tail coat who looked like an aloof penguin that he had not been made aware of the caribou, and I returned home feeling like a character in an undiscovered sequel to Alice Through the Looking-glass.

Mr Mountstewart suggested the Army and Navy Stores. I was naturally a little wary of him by this time, but he produced that most remarkable work, the Stores Catalogue, which was as thick as a telephone directory, and this, although it did not list caribou skin bags, hinted that even more extraordinary articles could be obtained to order. I therefore decided to pay a visit to Victoria Street.

The man in the department which dealt with camping equipment received my request very well. He had heard of the caribou and could see no reason why its skin should not be turned into a sleeping-bag.

‘I suppose we could get one,’ he remarked rather gloomily. ‘It’ll have to come from one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. We’ll have to barter for it but I’ll take your name and address and let you know.’

‘When will it be here?’ I asked anxiously; time was getting short.

‘It should be here in two years. They’re nasty things. The last one gave the man who slept in it anthrax.’

I thanked him and after looking up ‘Anthrax’ in an encyclopaedia in the book department, I gave up the struggle. I was content. I knew now that if I really wanted a caribou skin bag I could have one. Instead I bought from him a real camel-hair sleeping-bag of four thicknesses made by Jaeger. In 1956 the hair of the camel is as rare as the skin of the caribou and much more expensive. I used it until 1942, when an athletic Egyptian leapt into the back of the truck in which we were driving down from the Desert, and removed three large bedding rolls belonging to myself and two brother officers; mine contained, in addition to all my other possessions, the sleeping-bag.

When I returned home, I found a letter from the owner’s agents telling me to join the sailing vessel Moshulu in Belfast. She was the one ship I had never heard of, and none of the more popular works on sailing ships gave any information about her. Even Mr Mountstewart knew nothing. However, just before I left for Euston he telephoned me. ‘I understand,’ he boomed, ‘that she is extremely large.’




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Op the Rigging (#ulink_204c4ad3-3571-50da-8ef9-d810c8fd7b05)


I crossed on the night steamer from Heysham and as we came into Belfast in the cold early morning I saw for the first time the masts and spars of Moshulu. By comparison the scaffolding of the shipyards, where riveting hammers reverberated about the dark bulk of a new Union Castle liner, seemed solid and rooted in the earth. The barque was invisible, but the four enormously tall masts, fore, main and mizzen, and the less lofty jigger mast, towered into the sky above the sheds of the dockside, not white as I had imagined them, but yellow in the October sunshine.

‘Anyone’s welcome to that,’ said the smooth young steward as he plonked a pot of Oxford marmalade on my table. ‘Nasty great thing.’

I did not have the strength to argue with him. All through breakfast I had felt like someone in a condemned cell and my knees had been knocking together under the influence of a nervous impulse which I had been unable to control.

On the quay when I landed there had been some competition among the waiting taximen for my Vuitton trunk. ‘You’ll be wanting the Grand Central Hotel, most likely?’ said the shaggy owner of the most dilapidated taxi who had finally secured me as a fare. I told him I wanted to go to the Moshulu and as this did not seem to mean anything to him, I pointed to the towering masts, upon which he mumbled something about ‘that big sailer full of Chinks’ and we set off at a crazy speed, lurching into the puddles where the cobbles had subsided and slewing dangerously across the tracks of tank engines that bore down upon us at full steam. I barely noticed these things as I was in terror at the thought of climbing those masts which had a beautiful cold remoteness about them like the North Col on Everest. For the first time in my life I wished that a taxi ride would never end, but it was only three or four hundred yards to where the ship was discharging her cargo in York Dock and, too soon for me, we drew up alongside her. There was no sign of life aboard except on the well deck forward, where some stevedores were still unloading her cargo of grain.








Moshulu taken in Cork (Cobh), June 1936

I left the taximan extracting my trunk from the fore part of his vehicle where it had become jammed between the floor and the roof, and went forward to explore, waiting for a lull in the unloading operations to go up a slippery plank which led over the bulwarks and so on to the deck. When I reached it I began to feel that the taximan might be right about the ship being full of Chinese, for I found myself face to face with a rather squat, flatnosed boy of about seventeen who would have looked more at home outside a nomad tent in Central Asia. From beneath a great shock of disordered hair his eyes stared unwaveringly at me. Only the filthy dungarees in which he was dressed and the oilcan he carried proclaimed him to be a child of the West.

It was his face that finally reassured me. Surely, I thought to myself, such an ugly face has something better behind it. I held out my hand and said: ‘I am Newby, a new apprentice.’

The slant eyes looked at me suspiciously but I thought I could detect a glimmer of interest in them. He did not take my hand but a deep voice finally said, in a way that made me jump, ‘Doonkey.’ Believing this to be an epithet directed at me, I began to prepare myself for a fight. None of the books I had read said anything about a situation like this. Their heroes fought only after months of insult. Fortunately I was mistaken and he put me at ease by pointing at himself and saying: ‘Jansson, “Doonkey,” orlright,’ and at the same time grasping my hand which completely disappeared in his.

This was one of the two Donkeymen responsible for the proper functioning of the donkey engine, the diesel, brace and halliard winches and all things mechanical on board. In spite of his villainous appearance he was really the most tolerant and long-suffering of people, and we went through the entire voyage without trouble.

I indicated the trunk on the dock, and Jansson said: ‘Orlright’ again, and we went down the gangplank to the taxi. The driver was waving a piece of the roof of his vehicle which had broken off in his efforts to dislodge the trunk and was telling a little knot of stevedores everything he knew about me. As our acquaintance had been short he was drawing effortlessly on his own ample imagination. I was anxious to be rid of him and overpaid him considerably, but this encouraged him to ask for a large sum for the damage to his taxi, for which he said I was responsible. The stevedores closed in to support their countryman, but Jansson made such a threatening gesture with his tattooed forearm that they dispersed and the driver, finding himself outnumbered, gave up the struggle and drove away.

We now lifted the trunk and tried to make our way up the plank, but it was steep and my leather-soled shoes slipped backwards. ‘Orlright,’ said Jansson. He spat on his hands, slung the trunk on his back and shot up the incline like a mountain goat depositing it with a great crash on the deck. I followed him. My luggage and I were aboard.

We were now on the starboard side of the foredeck by the square opening of No 2 hatch. A travelling crane was dipping over it like a long-legged bird, pecking up great beakfuls of sacks. Underfoot was a slush of oil and grain; the oil came from a diesel winch which lay about the deck completely dismembered.

‘Kom,’ said Jansson and kicked open a door. I followed him through it and found myself in the starboard fo’c’sle. I had imagined the ship to be deserted but once I was accustomed to the half light and the thick pall of cigarette smoke that hung between the deck and the low ceiling, I was able to make out the figures of half a dozen men in overalls who were silently regarding me whilst sitting at a long table which ran the whole length of the fo’c’sle. Most of them seemed to be between seventeen and twenty years of age; all were muscular and pallid.

‘Good morning,’ I said, and their silent impassive staring went on until, like a long-awaited echo, they rumbled some kind of reply. Fortunately Jansson handed me a mug of coffee which he poured from a big white enamel jug. Someone else on the other side of the table shoved over a can of milk, a loaf of bread and a ten-pound tin of margarine. I helped myself to my second breakfast; there were some perfunctory introductions, and munching steadily, I listened to them discussing (without visible enthusiasm) my English nationality. At the same time I was able to take note of my surroundings. They were not inviting.

The fo’c’sle was about twenty feet long and thirteen feet-wide; its steel bulkheads were painted light grey; round the four sides were bunks which looked like double-banked coffins in an Italian cemetery. The lower ones mostly had home-made curtains which could be drawn when the owner was inside. Only one of the bunks was now occupied, but the curtains were half open, revealing an inert figure with its face to the wall, from which groans escaped at intervals. Down the centre of the fo’c’sle was the long narrow table, its feet screwed to the deck, the top pitted by the scrubbing and scouring of several generations of sailors. Around the edge was a raised beading, or fiddle, intended to stop the crockery sliding off in heavy weather. On either side of the table were heavy wooden benches cleated down to the deck.

Some natural illumination came from the portholes in the ship’s side, one or two of which looked out on to the well-deck; but the light was more or less obscured by a chaos of wooden sea-chests, oilskins and mysterious roped bundles which completely filled the upper bunks. Above my head was a teak skylight with a number of thick glasses set in it through which daylight seeped reluctantly. Artificial light was provided by a heavy lantern swinging perilously low above the centre of the table. Behind me was a cupboard with a shelf for crockery, and another for bread, margarine and condensed milk. Below the cupboard was a white drinking-water tank with a brass tap. The crew had just finished breakfast; on the table were the remains of this ghastly repast: some sort of thick brown stew with macaroni, now rapidly congealing, and what seemed to me, judging by the mounds of skins, an unhealthy quantity of potatoes. Standing among the ruins was an archaic gramophone with a fluted horn. This was now wound up and amidst sighs of anticipation a record was put on. There followed a preparatory churning as the needle engaged itself in the grooves and then the most appalling dissonance of sounds burst upon my ears. After I had become used to the din, I distinguished the words:

There’s a little Dutch mill on a little Dutch hill

Where the little Dutch stars shine bright.

Now a little Dutch boy and his little Dutch girl

Fell in love by the light of the moon one night …




This was Moshulu’s only record and though I may probably never hear it again, it will always remind me of Belfast and the time after Munich.

The playing of the record released any inhibitions my arrival had imposed on the company. Conversation became animated and deafening, and as the song ground itself to a standstill the boy sitting next to me, a Lithuanian whose name I later discovered was Vytautas Bagdanavicius, turned to me, flashed a brilliant smile and said happily ‘No good’ as he wound the motor and started the record again.

Jansson, wishing to show off every item of interest, pointed at the body in the bunk and winked significantly.

‘Is he sick?’ I asked.

‘Bloddy sick, drank too much Akvavit last night,’ said Jansson. To confirm this he began prodding the blankets and when this had no effect started to roll whoever it was backwards and forwards like a piece of dough on a pastry-board, roaring ‘Rise op, rise op.’ Upon this there was a violent heaving among the blankets.

‘Perkele, perkele, perkele; devils, devils, devils,’ screamed a furious voice from the bed, mounting to a crescendo like an engine on a bench being tested to destruction. Even the hardened audience jibbed at the rich descriptive obscenity which followed and begged Jansson to leave him alone. He did so, and just like an engine, the voice died away.

Somewhere on the deck, a whistle blew. One by one the occupants of the starboard fo’c’sle went out to continue their work and soon the sounds of hammering proceeded from the port side of the ship where most of them were over the side chipping rust and painting.

Because Vytautas, the Lithuanian, had been watchman all night, he did not go with them. He advised me to get into my working clothes and report my arrival to the Mate. First he helped me stow my trunk in a convenient space behind the fo’c’sle door. Gingerly I put on my navy blue dungarees which seemed stiff and unprofessional compared with the faded blue overalls worn by most of the boys.

‘Do not leave anything in the fo’c’sle,’ said Vytautas in his rather oriental sing-song. ‘These stevedores are thieves. At sea we are all right. Here … nobody is good.’

I asked him whether he had just joined the ship, but he replied that this would be his second voyage. Moshulu had been on the timber run from Finland to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa in 1937 before going to Australia for her grain cargo. I was glad; at least he was not leaving, as many of the others were. I had already begun to cling to any acquaintance as a drowning man clutches a straw.

It so happened that I met not the First Mate but the Second, as everything was in a state of flux: some members of the crew were signing off and returning to Mariehamn, others arriving to take their place. The old Captain, Boman, who had commanded her since she joined the Erikson fleet, was going home and being replaced by Captain Sjögren who was coming from the Archibald Russell.

The Second Mate was thin, watery-eyed and bad-tempered. At sea he was to prove much better than he looked to me this morning. He did not like ports and he did not like to see the ship in her present state. My arrival did not seem propitious and after dressing me down for not reporting aft directly I had come on board, he suddenly shot at me: ‘Ever been aloft before?’

‘No, sir.’

We were standing amidships by the mainmast. He pointed to the lower main shrouds which supported the mast and said simply: ‘Op you go then.’ I could scarcely believe my ears, I had imagined that I should be allowed at least a day or two to become used to the ship and the feel of things, but this was my introduction to discipline. I looked at the Mate. He had a nasty glint in his eye and I decided I was more afraid of him than of the rigging. If I was killed it would be his fault, not mine, I said to myself with little satisfaction. Nevertheless I asked him if I could change my shoes which had slippery soles.








High rigging

‘Change your shoes? Op the rigging.’ He was becoming impatient.

At this time Moshulu was the greatest sailing ship in commission, and probably the tallest. Her main mast cap was 198 feet above the keel. I started towards the main rigging on the starboard side nearest the quay but was brought back by a cry from the Mate.

‘Babord, port side. If you fall you may fall in the dock. When we’re at sea you will always use the weather rigging, that’s the side from which the wind blows. Never the lee rigging. And when I give you an order you repeat it.’

‘Op the rigging,’ I said.

The first part of the climb seemed easy enough. The lower main shrouds supporting the mast were of heavy wire made from plough steel and the first five ratlines were iron bars seized across four shrouds to make a kind of ladder which several men could climb at once. Above them the ratlines were wooden bars seized to the two centre shrouds only, the space for the feet becoming narrower as they converged at the ‘top’, eighty feet up, where it was difficult to insert a foot as large as mine in the ratlines at all. Before reaching this point, however, I came abreast of the main yard. It was of tapered steel, ninety-five and a half feet from arm to arm, two and a half feet in diameter at the centre and weighed over five tons. It was trussed to the mainmast by an iron axle and preventer chain which allowed it to be swung horizontally from side to side by means of tackle to the yardarms; an operation known as ‘bracing’.

Above me was the ‘top’, a roughly semi-circular platform with gratings in it. This was braced to the mast by steel struts called futtock shrouds. To get to the ‘top’ I had to climb outwards on the rope ratlines seized to the futtock shrouds. There was a hole in the ‘top’ which it was considered unsporting to use. I only did so once for the experience and cut my ear badly on a sharp projection which was probably put there as a deterrent. I found difficulty in reaching the top this first time and remained transfixed, my back nearly parallel with the deck below, whilst I felt for a rope ratline with one foot. I found it at last and heaved myself, nearly sick with apprehension, on to the platform, where I stood for a moment, my heart thumping. There was only a moment’s respite, in which I noticed that the mainmast and the topmast were in one piece – not doubled as in most sailing ships – before the dreadful voice of the Mate came rasping up at me:

‘Get on op.’

The next part was nearly fifty feet of rope ratlines seized to the topmast shrouds. Almost vertical, they swayed violently as I went aloft; many of them were rotten and one broke underfoot when I was at the level of the topsail yards. Again the voice from the deck:

‘If you want to live, hold on to those shrouds and leave the bloody ratlines alone.’

The lower topsail yard was slung from an iron crane but the upper topsail yard above it was attached to a track on the foreside of the topmast allowing the yard to be raided by means of a halliard more than twenty-five feet almost to the level of the crosstrees. The crosstrees formed an open frame of steel girdering about 130 feet up, at the heel of the topgallant mast. Originally the topsail had been a single sail, but to make it easier for the reduced crews to take in sail, it had been divided into two. At the moment the upper topsail yard was in its lowered position, immediately on top of the lower topsail yard. The crosstrees seemed flimsy when I reached them; two long arms extended aft from the triangle, spreading the backstays of the royal mast, the highest mast of all. I stood gingerly on this slippery construction; the soles of my shoes were like glass; all Belfast spread out below. I looked between my legs down to a deck as thin as a ruler and nearly fell from sheer funk.

‘Op to the royal yard,’ came the imperious voice, fainter now. Another forty feet or so of trembling topgallant shroud, past the lower and upper topgallant yards, the upper one, like the upper topsail yard, movable on its greased track. The ratlines were very narrow now and ceased altogether just below the level of the royal yard.

I was pretty well all in emotionally and physically but the by now expected cry of ‘Out on the yard’ helped me to heave myself on to it. In doing so I covered myself with grease from the mast track on which the royal yard moved up and down. It was fifty feet long and thinner than those below it. As on all the other yards, an iron rail ran along the top. This was the jackstay, to which the sail was bent. (In cadet training ships this rail would have had another parallel to hold on to, as, with the sail bent to the forward jackstay, there was little or no handhold. Moshulu had not been built for cadets and this refinement was lacking. With no sails bent what I had to do was easy, but I did not appreciate my good fortune at the time.) Underneath the yard was a wire rope which extended the length of it and was supported half-way between the mast and either yard-arm by vertical stirrups. This footrope was called the ‘horse’ and when I ventured out on it I found it slippery as well as slack so that both feet skidded in opposite directions, leaving me like a dancer about to do the splits, hanging on grimly to the jackstay.

‘Out. Right out to the yardarm,’ came the Mate’s voice, fainted still. I hated him at this moment. There were none of the ‘joosts’ and ‘ploddys’ of the stylised Scandinavian to make me feel superior to this grim officer. He spoke excellent English.

Somehow I reached the yardarm. I tried to rest my stomach on it, and stick my legs out behind me but I was too tall; the foot-rope came very close up to the yard at this point, where it was shackled to the brace pendant, and my knees reached to the place on the yard where the riggers had intended my stomach to be, so that I had the sensation of pitching headlong over it. Fortunately there was a lift shackled to the yardarm band, a wire tackle which supported the yard in its lowered position, and to this I clung whilst I looked about me.

What I saw was very impressive and disagreeable. By now I had forgotten what the Mate had said about falling into the dock and I was right out at the starboard yardarm, 160 feet above the sheds into which Moshulu’s 62,000 sacks of grain were being unloaded. The rooftops of these sheds were glass and I remember wondering what would happen if I fell. Would I avoid being cut to pieces by the maze of wires below, or miss them and make either a large expensive crater in the roof or a smaller one shaped like me? I also wondered what kind of technique the ambulance men employed to scoop up what was left of people who fell from such heights. I tried to dismiss these melancholy thoughts but the beetle-like figures on the dock below that were stevedores only accentuated my remoteness. The distant prospect was more supportable: a tremendous panorama beyond the city to the Antrim Hills and far up the Lough to the sea.

‘Orlright,’ called the Mate. ‘Come in to the mast.’ I did so with alacrity, but was not pleased when he told me to go to the truck on the very top of the mast. I knew that with these blasted shoes I could never climb the bare pole, so I took them off, and my socks too, and wedged them under the jackstay.

There were two or three very rotten ratlines seized across the royal backstays. The lowest broke under my weight so I used the backstays alone to climb up to the level of the royal halliard sheave to which the yard was raised when sail was set. Above this was nothing. Only six feet of bare pole to the truck. I was past caring whether I fell or not.

I embraced the royal mast and shinned up. The wind blew my hair over my nose and made me want to sneeze. I stretched out my arm and grasped the round hardwood cap 198 feet above the keel and was surprised to find it was not loose or full of chocolate creams as a prize. Now the bloody man below me was telling me to sit on it, but I ignored him. I could think of no emergency that would make it necessary. So I slid down to the royal halliard and to the yard again.

‘You can come down now,’ shouted the Mate. I did. It was worse than going up and more agonising as I was barefoot, with my shoes stuffed inside my shirt.

‘You were a fool to take your shoes off,’ said the Mate when I reached the deck. ‘Now you can learn to clean the lavatories.’

Since that day I have been aloft in high rigging many hundreds of times and in every kind of weather but I still get that cold feeling in the pit of the stomach when I think of the first morning out on the royal yard with the sheds of the York Dock below.

TECHNICAL INTERLUDE

(Surface at ‘That night I went ashorev…’)

In the afternoon I went with a number of other newly arrived crew to sign some papers at the office of the Finnish Consul. Afterwards Vytautas took me over the ship. The strength and size of her steel top hamper was matched by that of her immense steel hull – into which more than 4,800 tons of grain would be packed. Moshulu’s gross tonnage (that is to say, the entire internal volume expressed in units of 100 cubic feet to a ton) was 3,116. She drew twenty-six feet of water when loaded and measured 335 feet on the waterline.

She had a very handsome, fine bow entrance somehow disproportionate to her rather heavy overall appearance; a tiny poop only twenty feet long also contrived to spoil her looks when seen from the beam, but the general effect was undeniably impressive. Like Archibald Russell, Moshulu was fitted with bilge keels to make her more stable. Above the loadline the hull was painted black except for the upper works of the amidships, which were white. Her masts and spars were light yellow. Under the bowsprit there was no splendid figurehead like those of the Killoran and Pommern, only on the beak beneath the bowsprit a carved boss with a coat-of-arms picked out in yellow and blue, the house mark of Siemers, the Hamburg owners who had had her originally in the nitrate trade.

The masts, fore, main, mizzen and jigger, were each supported by a system of heavy fore-and-aft stays, six on the foremast, four on the main and mizzen, three on the jigger. On the foremast the forestay that supported it was a double stay set up taut with rigging screws shackled into the deck on the fo’c’sle head. The fore topmast stay, the next above the forestay, was also a double stay led through blocks on either side of the bowsprit and passed round rigging screws. The bowsprit itself was held rigid by two stays underneath it, the outer and inner bobstays, and on each side by three bowsprit guys shackled into the bows.

The three square-rigged masts were supported by shrouds of heavy wire; three pairs of lower shrouds extending from the bulwarks to the ‘top,’ round the mast and back to the bulwarks; three topmast shrouds extending from the ‘top’ to the crosstrees; and two topgallant shrouds above. From aft came great stresses and there were nine backstays on each mast to meet them. Both lower shrouds and backstays were set up to the hull plating and tautened by heavy rigging screws. All the doublings were wormed, parcelled, served and painted black; the seizings were white, one of the few concessions to the picturesque in the whole ship.

In the days when a ship’s masts and yards were wooden, the rigging was of hemp, set up with lanyards and deadeyes. In a dismasting it was sometimes possible to cut away the wreckage and allow it to go by the board; but the shrouds and backstays of Moshulu’s standing rigging were of steel wire so thick and strong that if the masts went over the side and one set of rigging screws was torn bodily out of the ship, it would be a tremendous job to cut away the slack rigging on the lee side without special equipment if the rigging screws stripped their threads.

Each square-rigged mast crossed six yards to which six sails were bent, a total of eighteen: the royal, upper and lower topgallants, upper and lower topsails and below these the big course-sails, fore, main and mizzen. There was a total of thirteen fore-and-aft sails: four head sails set on the forestays to the bowsprit – the flying jib outermost, set on the fore topgallant stay, the outer and inner jibs and the fore topmast staysail all set on their respective stays. In addition there were two staysails set on the topmast and topgallant forestays between each mast, six in all. There could have been royal staysails too, but they were never set in Moshulu while I was in her. With a small crew topgallant staysails were more than enough. Once we set a fore royal staysail beyond the flying jib, but it blew out in a squall and the experiment was not repeated. All the fore-and-aft sails had downhauls for taking them in and halliards for setting them. On the jigger mast there were three fore-and-aft sails, a triangular gaff topsail, an upper spanker between the upper gaff and the gaff boom and biggest of all, the lower spanker. The two lower sails were controlled by brails and were difficult to furl. The arrangement of three sails on the after mast was peculiar to the ex-German nitrate traders. Most barques only had two. With all these sails set, Moshulu’s sail area was in the region of 45,000 square feet.

Vytautas took me right out on the bowsprit. Into the tip of it several nails had been driven, to which some dried horny fragments adhered.

‘Shark’s fins,’ said Vytautas. ‘Good luck, not much of it left now.’ We were facing one another on the footrope. ‘Very dangerous here,’ he said happily. ‘No netting under the bowsprit. If she runs heavily she may dip and wash you off. If you are sent to furl the “Jagare”, that’s the flying jib, look out for the sheet block, it can easily knock you into the water. Remember, please,’ he added a little more wistfully, ‘if you fall from here the ship will go over you and by the time she can heave-to it will be too late to find you.’

I was suitably impressed by these observations and had reason to remember them on many occasions during the voyage.

We worked our way down the bowsprit to the white-railed fo’c’sle head deck, the raised part of the ship at the bows. To port and starboard were Moshulu’s bower anchors, of the old-fashioned kind with stocks, lashed down to the deck. Their stocks prevented them being hauled close up to the hawse pipes, and there was a small crane to lift them on board. Beneath the crane was a teak pin rail with iron pins in it to which the downhauls of the headsails were belayed. The sheets led to pin rails on either side of the fo’c’sle head just above the well deck. In addition there was a capstan with square holes in it to take the heads of the wooden capstan bars. At sea this capstan was used for hauling down the tack of the foresail when the vessel was beating into the wind, but it could also be geared to the anchor windlass beneath the fo’c’sle head. On both sides of the capstan there were massive bitts to which the tack of the foresail could be made fast.

At the break of the raised deck were the two lighthouses which protected the port and starboard navigation lights; each could be entered through a hole in the roof of the lamp rooms under the fo’c’sle head. In port, the copper domes of these lighthouses were neglected and bright green from exposure, but at sea, unless the weather was very bad, they were kept brightly burnished. Two companion ladders led to the well-deck below, and between them hung in a sort of gallows the big bronze bell with Kurt, Hamburg (the name given her by her German owners), engraved on it.

Lashed up next to the bell, with its heel on the deck, was the spare sheet-anchor. Immediately below the lighthouses on the well-deck were the pigsties, built solidly of steel but for the present untenanted.

Underneath the fo’c’sle head-deck were the lavatories, ablution rooms, blacksmith’s stores, the boatswain’s store, and the port and starboard lamp-rooms. It was a draughty, smelly part of the ship. The lavatories were very gruesome, with no locks on the doors and no flushing arrangements. I had spent a memorable half-hour on the first morning cleaning them with a long iron rod and innumerable buckets of dirty dock-water. This was the most disgusting task I have ever been called upon to perform in peace or war. In war not even the pits beside the railway tracks so thoughtfully provided by the Germans for our convenience when we were being moved westwards in chains from Czechoslovakia equalled the lavatories in Moshulu.

Between the two washrooms stood the anchor windlass with its massive cables, and the salt-water pump, a very rickety affair with a pipeline aft to the main deck.

Immediately aft of the pump was No 1 hatch, a tiny thing eight feet square, leading down into the tween deck space and also to the forepeak where the bulk of the coal for the galley was kept. Forward of the coal store were the chain lockers, two vertical shafts in which the anchor cables were faked down link by link as they came in over the windlass pawls above. In the forepeak were great coils of wire strop, mooring springs and towing hawser, and for some distance aft in the ’tween-deck the space was filled with a pell-mell of bundled sail. The ’tween-deck was really an upper hold eight feet high, extending the length and breadth of the ship as far as the after peak, or lazarette, beneath the poop. This deck was pierced through by tonnage openings of the same size as the hatches above them. At sea both the hatches above and the tonnage openings below were battened down, cutting off the upper and lower holds. There was no artificial light below and because of this there was to be a nasty accident quite soon.

Next to No 1 hatch the great trunk of the foremast rose up through the deck from its roots on the keelson of the ship. By the mast was a teak fife rail with iron belaying pins to which the headsail halliards and the sheets of four square sails above the lower topsail were belayed; the lower topsail and foresail sheets were belayed to cleats on the fore part of the mast itself. Not far distant from the fore mast were the halliard winches for raising the upper topsail yards and topgallant yards when setting sail. The royal halliards rove through blocks and were belayed to the pin rails. It took ten men to raise a royal yard. The square sail halliards were so placed that with the yards raised they became in effect additional backstays.

Abaft the foremast was the donkey boiler room with a hinged funnel on top where Jansson and his even more savage-looking superior tended their charge, which was intended to raise the anchors. On very rare occasions it provided power for sending aloft the heavier sails. Here the Donkeymen kept the tools of their trade, which included a blacksmith’s forge, spares for the winches and, an important item, a blow-lamp with which they were always brewing cocoa, happily independent of the irascible cook. On either side of the donkey house was a capstan to which the sheets of the great foresail were brought through fairleads in the bulwarks. They were also used to send sail aloft by manpower.

Between the donkey house and the raised bridge deck amidships was No 2 hatch with Jansson’s dismantled winch beside it. Here the Belfast stevedores, using shore cranes, were unloading with an almost ritualistic deliberation, like figures in a slow-motion film of a coronation ceremony. To port and starboard were the pin rails for the forebraces which controlled the final angle or trim of the foresail and upper and lower topsail yards after they had been roughly braced round with a Jarvis brace winch. Only the course and topsail yards on each mast were operated by winches. The hand braces for the topgallant and royal yards came down to the deck still farther aft on the midships section, and were belayed to the fife rail at the mainmast.

Next to the mainmast was the Jarvis brace winch for the foremast yards with which four men could brace round the course and upper and lower topsail yards according to the direction of the wind, the wire braces playing out on cone-shaped drums on one side of the winch, whilst the slack was taken up by a similar set on the other side. There were three Jarvis brace winches in Moshulu, which eased what would otherwise have been an almost impossible task in so large a vessel for a crew as small as ours. The remaining yards, the two topgallants and the royals, were braced round with long rope braces. In the same way those operated by the winch had also to be trimmed properly by hand.

The forepart of the raised bridge-deck was painted white and had brass scuttles set in it. These portholes shed some light into the port and starboard fo’c’sles and into the galley where the Cook, that most wretched of men, lived in a stifling atmosphere filled with escaping steam, looking very much like ‘the Spirit of the Industrial Revolution’ in a Nursery History of England. The bridge deck, sixty-five feet long, forty-seven feet on the beam, was connected with the fo’c’sle head and poop decks by flying bridges over the fore and main decks which enabled the Mates to move about more quickly when issuing orders. On the bridge-deck was the charthouse, a massive construction where the charts, sailing directions, log-book, barometer and navigational instruments were housed. A companion-way led below to the Officers’ quarters.

Right amidships were the two massive teak wheels connected with the steering-gear aft by well-greased wire cables running through sheaves in the deck. These cables would sometimes break when a heavy sea was running. In a big gale three men would stand on the raised platforms to assist the helmsman who checked the more violent movements of the wheel with a foot-brake set in the floor. In front of the wheel was the big brass binnacle and behind the helmsman was the ship’s bell on which he echoed the striking of the clock inside the charthouse. On a brass plaque below the bell was engraved: Wm. Hamilton, Shipbuilders, Port Glasgow.

Beneath the bridge-deck, in the forepart, were the port and starboard fo’c’sles with the galley in between them; the Petty Officers’ cabin, which housed Carpenter, Donkeymen, and the Sailmaker’s assistant, who normally worked by day; and the Sailmaker’s loft. In the after part were the six rooms of the Master’s accommodation – saloon, bathroom, cabin, etc – spare room for guests – and the Officers’ quarters, also the accommodation for the Steward and Cook. The Steward, Steward’s boy and Cook lived aft but helped to work the ship, and even went aloft when the necessity arose.

Short ladders to port and starboard led down to the 130-foot long main deck, where the ports of the Captain’s saloon amidships faced on to No 3 hatch. By the mizzen mast was another Jarvis winch for the mainbraces, the mizzen halliard winches and the main pumps. On either side of it were skids supporting the ship’s motor-boat and a gig. Farther aft, to port and starboard, were two sets of davits each supporting a lifeboat. Between them was the standard compass on a raised platform, level with the flying bridge and connected with it, a henhouse on skids above the deck, No 4 hatch, a freshwater tank, just before the break of the short poop and the jigger mast with the mizzen brace winch. On the poop was the patent sounding machine, a capstan and the spare kedge-anchor.

Beneath the poop was the entrance to the after peak where the stores were kept. It was covered with a grating, heavily padlocked. Also under the poop was a pair of auxiliary wheels which could be connected to the steering-gear if the cables parted; there was also a binnacle with a compass card that displayed the most extraordinary abberrations. The helmsman’s head projected right through the deck, but he was so walled-in by a curved steel coaming above and on either side that only a very imperfect view aloft could be had through the glass window in the front of it. There were six compartments under the poop. Two were originally intended for the apprentices, one was appropriated by the Sailmaker as a cabin in cold weather, another served the Carpenter as a workshop.

The bulwarks on the fore-well and main decks were shoulderhigh and fitted with steel doors at intervals, hinging outwards from the top. These freeing ports enabled the water to drain off when the ship took a heavy sea. They made an abominable din and ropes were often washed off belaying pins and jammed in them.

All the slack of running rigging was coiled down on these belaying pins. There were a couple of hundred pins with some 300 lines belayed to them, some miles of hemp, wire and chain. As no sails were bent aloft, they seemed mystifying and without purpose.

All this I learned from Vytautas.

‘The higher the gear, the farther aft, is the rule,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s quite easy.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You know the names of all the yards?’ asked Vytautas.

‘Yes,’ I said. I thought I did.

‘But do you know buntlines from leechlines and clewlines and the difference between a sheet and a tack? You will have to know these things, you will have to know them in Swedish, and you will have to find them at night.’

‘How?’

‘We must see Sömmarström. He’s the Sailmaker and the only one who can help you.’

*

That night I went ashore with Jansson and Vytautas Bagdanavicius to have a ‘liddle trink’. It was the farewell to the boys who were going back to Mariehamn. A steady Ulster drizzle was falling as we came on to the dockside and the cobblestones shone greasily in the glare of the arc lights.

It was a long way to the main gate. We passed a steamer moored astern of us, brilliantly lit, throbbing with the movement of hidden machinery; there was no one about her, no one on the dockside, only a mangy cat scrabbling at a rubbish pile, whilst the rain swished down into the filthy water of the dock. After what seemed an interminable walk, for my feet still ached after the business in the rigging, we arrived at the dock gates, where in addition to the watchman there were two vast Belfast policemen, hard as nails, armed with pistols and long sticks, who eyed us unlovingly. Outside the gate we were on the Donegal Quay where, what now seemed a whole life ago, I had put my trunk in a taxi. Facing us, across the quay, was a wild and woolly-looking pub with its name ‘Rotterdam Bar’ over the door in letters of blood.

Inside, most of the crew had already gathered. Many of them I had never seen. Those I had were unrecognizable in the shore-going uniform, single-breasted blue serge suits of very Teutonic cut and light-coloured caps. In their company the evening passed in a haze. I remember meeting an Englishman called Sowerby who had just completed a round voyage in Moshulu as a passenger. As the evening wore on and people became drunker and spoke more freely I got the impression that the ship had not been very happy or the Captain very popular.

I was unused to beer in large quantities and, downing pint after pint, I quite soon found myself drunk. Leaning my forehead on the brickwork in the lavatory, I remember being sick and groaning to myself: ‘Oh, God, I’m drunk, oh, Christ, I’m drunk, what am I here for?’

There was a lot of singing of a dark, Nordic kind. Then, after a long while, I heard a voice calling ‘Time’. Lights were dimmed and we reeled out into the wet unfriendly night.

Someone suggested that we should dance and we set off down a street of heart-breaking squalor in the direction of a dance hall on the first floor of a building in Corporation Street. We went up a flight of narrow stairs and paid a shilling each to a man who, in any Police Court, would have been described by the Magistrate as a ‘Corrupter of Youth’. The pleasures which we were made free of appeared innocuous enough. The room was large and to the music of a modernist radiogram two or three couples were circling rather gingerly. At intervals the music was drowned by the noise of passing tramcars which swayed past the uncurtained windows like ‘Flying Dutchmen’. The seats round the walls were filled with a lot of girls heavily powdered but well below the age of consent. Some were drinking fizzy lemonade. Most of them looked like schoolgirls who ought to have been in bed asleep by this time after finishing their homework. Soon I was prancing round the room with a big, niffy red-headed girl who was liberally covered with the wrong shade of powder. I tried to talk to her but was relieved to find that she spoke no known tongue. I was very tired.

I was almost glad when a quarrel broke out between one of our crew and one of the natives; chairs were raised and began to fly through the air, the lights went out, there was the crash of glass and a bottle landed in Corporation Street. My partner vanished to join the opposition and soon we were fighting a rear-guard action on the stairs. By the time we reached the street police whistles were trilling merrily.

The march back to the ship was like the ‘Retreat from Moscow’ painted by an elderly spinster. The injured and the incapable were being supported by their companions. Jansson, who was very far gone, was being held up by Vytautas and myself, one on either side.

‘The police will not like this,’ said Vytautas, who was almost sober. ‘I also do not like this place.’

At his suggestion we disengaged ourselves from the main body and made for a different entrance to the dock. Just then Jansson passed out completely and we dragged him forward along the street with his feet scuffling the granite cobbles.

‘We must lift him now,’ said Vytautas, as we came up to the gate. There were the inevitable two policemen, suspicious and broken-nosed. They bore down on us as we hoisted the Wretched Jansson into a vertical, more lifelike position.

‘Where are you going?’ one of them demanded accusingly.

‘Moshulu,’ said Vytautas in a disarming way.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked the other, flourishing his great bludgeon in the direction of Jansson whose head unfortunately chose this moment to fall forward with an audible click.

‘He is suffering from overwork,’ I said with drunken insolence, and hiccuped. Nothing seemed to matter any more. Fortunately the policeman failed to understand my English accent. At the same time the drizzle of rain increased to a downpour and they both retired to their hut. Otherwise we should probably have been arrested.

We proceeded on our miserable and interminable way. To reach the Moshulu we had to pass round three sides of the York Dock. On the way we tripped over a hawser in a patch of shadow and nearly dropped Jansson in the water.

At the gangplank we were met by a bedraggled watchman armed with a pick helve who scrutinised us minutely before allowing us on board. Exhausted and wet we reeled into the fo’c’sle and after removing Jansson’s boots, pushed him into his bunk and sought our own. As soon as I lay down on my straw mattress the fo’c’sle began to revolve like a gramophone record. I crawled on deck, barking my shins on all sorts of projections, and sticking my head over the rail, was fearfully sick for the second time. It had been a long, long day.




5 (#ulink_f27cac44-5708-5c0c-8cd7-ef1b090c6b4a)

Over the Side (#ulink_f27cac44-5708-5c0c-8cd7-ef1b090c6b4a)


We were awakened at 5.30 in the morning after our ‘liddle trink’ by a dreadful voice crying, ‘Resa upp, Resa upp.’ This summons with its medieval implications of Hell and Judgment, made me feel like a corpse in a Dürer engraving, and the illusion was sustained when I sat up in the coffin-like bunk and hit my head a great crack on the bedboards of the bunk above.

‘Shot op,’ came an angry voice from the occupant of the upper bunk. I lay still in the stifling blackness until the fo’c’sle door was kicked open and the night-watchman, in oilskins, appeared with a lantern, which he hooked to the ceiling, and a pot of coffee which he banged down on the table. One by one groaning figures began to roll out of their coffins and grovel for boots. From outside came the hiss of rain in the darkness of the too-early morning.

This was to be such an invariable routine, the watchman impatient and bad-tempered after a night on deck, surrounded by the terrors of Belfast that I no longer remember individual days but only that awful first morning.

With two others I was given the job of carrying coal to the galley from the small hatch near the fo’c’sle head. In the coal store by the forepeak we filled great oil-drums with coal, manhandled them in the darkness below decks to the hatch opening, hauled them on deck and carried them to the galley, slung on a capstan bar – hard work for my unpractised arms. We made ten journeys like this before the Cook was satisfied. Afterwards I again cleaned the lavatories.

At eight o’clock came breakfast, which was a mess of pungent beans and very pickled bacon. I was then told to collect a hammer, a pot of red lead and a brush and go over the side forward to chip the rust off the topsides – a job the more experienced and favoured members of the crew had been engaged in since 6 a.m. Rain was still falling steadily. There were already two or three precarious platforms over the side when I got there. They were simply planks with ropes made fast to either end and belayed on deck.






Painting the ship

I do not think it was by design that the platform I inherited was in the most difficult position right over the bows, about two feet above the water. Grimly I lowered myself twenty feet to the platform, to find that it was immediately below the lavatory which I had just cleaned. I began to wish that I had used two or three more buckets of water, and this was a good lesson to me in doing a job thoroughly. At sea one was very likely to find oneself let down by one’s own mistakes. I had not the strength to climb the rope again and shift to a more wholesome area, so I settled down to work where I was.

Set perilously above the dirty waters I first chipped and then red-leaded a large irregular piece of the ship’s side, using red lead from the pot which hung in front of me on a cord. Horizontal movement of the platform was controlled by a system of ropes. In trying to move my platform so that I could work in a fresh and more agreeable situation, and being unable to regain the deck to shift the head-ropes, I inadvertently let slip a clove-hitch which was keeping my platform about four feet to the left of its proper position. The whole construction, thus released, swooped sideways and hit the platform of the man who early that same morning had told me to ‘shot op’ when I hit my head on his bed-boards. He was an able seaman called Sedelquist, made more bad-tempered than usual by the events of the previous evening. The shock of the collision made me drop my hammer in the dock, upset the red lead on Sedelquist’s overalls, and knocked the brush out of his hand. It gave him a bad fright. I had not imagined that he could speak English, as up to now we had not spoken, but he immediately called me a ‘focking


bastard’ and disappeared on deck. Soon he returned with the same Mate who had sent me aloft the day before.

‘What d’you bloody well think you’re doing?’ he shrieked down at me.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I replied. This piece of English courtesy was wasted on the Mate. In fact it made him more angry.

‘I’m sorry you’re in this ship. Where’s your hammer?’

‘I’m afraid it’s gone,’ I replied, almost bashfully.

‘Jesus,’ said the Mate. ‘Because you’re English you think you can lose my hammers. I’ll take it off your pay.’

When, months later, I got to Australia and collected part of my pay, amongst the deductions for cigarettes and so on made by the Captain, was my little hammer.

‘You are zorry, I am zorry,’ said Sedelquist, when the Mate had gone, looking at his beautiful dungarees covered with red lead.

My morale, which had been dropping since I arrived in Belfast, fell to new depths. But I was learning. I vowed that I would never again, whilst in the ship, be sorry for anything, and apart from some lapses I managed to keep this resolve. I had been outraged by Sedelquist’s action in rushing on deck to tell the Mate what had happened. Years of school life, happily behind me, told me that by schoolboy standards, Sedelquist had ‘sneaked’. At my prep school he would have been sent to Coventry. Here I seemed to be in danger of suffering the fate which should have been his.

After some hours on the freezing platform, during which I brooded on these questions and hit viciously at the ship’s side, a whistle blew. It was the dinner hour. Sedelquist swarmed up his rope with agility. Pride prevented me from asking his help. I had never been very good at climbing at school and I had always loathed the glib, bouncy, P.T. instructor who used to disport himself on the comfortably thick ropes in the gym. This rope was different. It was two-inch manilla and very greasy. With great efforts I rose seven or eight feet and then slipped miserably down again. My second try took me higher but I could not see how I could climb out over the flared bow.

I managed to get within an inch or two of the lower rung of the rail and then I was back on my platform, almost in tears. I considered jumping in the dock and swimming or shouting to attract attention. Neither of these courses really appealed to me. Eventually I managed to traverse the side of the ship and reach the platform beyond Sedelquist’s. Here I got my foot in a hawse-pipe and reached the deck easily.

Dinner was over and the ‘Little Dutch Mill’ was being played when I arrived. I was greeted with derisive cheers. I had learned another lesson, not to be late for meals.

‘You are zorry,’ said Sedelquist, ‘and you are noh strong.’

There was no reply to this and I got on with the cold remains of the dinner which I had begged from the Cook and which seemed unaccountably good.

Although my popularity was at a low ebb, it received a tremendous fillip the next day, my third on board, a short period which already seemed to me like an eternity. The coal supplies were low and we were replenishing them from the shore. I was therefore rather dirtier than usual and was looking forward to a bath at the Salvation Army Refuge, of which I thought very highly, having had a hot one for next to nothing the night before. I was standing at the rail when I saw a very fast and luxurious sports car nose its way along the dock and come to a halt by the ship. There was a flurry of skirts as the occupant emerged, and a distant vision of legs of timeless elegance as a woman, clutching a splendidly unpractical hat, came up the gang-plank.

Naturally all work on board ceased, and the crew gave themselves up to an orgy of speculation. There was a short interval before she appeared by the mainmast, escorted by two Mates (the First having just joined); both wore social expressions and braid caps which they had put on with miraculous speed. According to Sedelquist, they kept their hats handy in the officers’ lavatory for just such an emergency. I was not used to the Second Mate in this new social role, but by now I had recognised the visitor and was not as surprised as the rest of the crew when I was called aft.

The visitor was a great friend of my parents, called Lucy, whom I had always worshipped from afar. Whenever possible I would refer to her as ‘my aunt in Ireland’, but it was only practicable to do so when she was not present and to people who did not know her. I had been debarred from any other pretence by my extreme youth. Now, here she was, dressed in black, the most elegant woman in Ireland. I must have looked pretty bad, because her first words were: ‘Och, Eric, come away home now, your mother’s crying her eyes out.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t, Lucy,’ I said, lying bravely. ‘It’s tremendous fun really, and I’m not always as dirty as this.’

‘Can he come home with me?’ she asked the Mate, who was goggling.

‘We stop work at twelve o’clock on Saturday. He must be on board by six o’clock on Monday morning.’ I really thought that he was going to choke as the words came dragging out of his boots.

‘How sweet of you,’ said Lucy, going over him with a lovely smile. ‘I’ll pick him up here. Now, can he please show me the ship?’

I didn’t think that even Lucy could pull this one off but she did, inserting a parenthetic: ‘Perhaps you could come too. I am sure Eric knows very little about it.’

Both Mates escorted her to the car when she drove away. It may have been autumn in the York Dock, but over the deck of the Moshulu hung the expensive scent of springtime.

The boys crowded round. Just like school again.

It was Sedelquist who led the interrogation.

‘Who is hee?’

‘She’s called Lucy.’

‘Hee is very good. Hee is your friend?’

‘She’s all right,’ I parried.

Sedelquist persisted: ‘Hee is your girl friend.’ I pondered this, wondering why he had not said boy friend. I thought too of my diminished status, all the mistakes I had made in three short days: If we did not sail soon I should be a laughing-stock.

Sedelquist was about to ask the same question again.

‘Hee …’

‘Well, sort of,’ I said. ‘She’s a sort of aunt.’

Whatever the Scandinavian interpretation of ‘aunt’, it satisfied everybody. I was ‘noh strong’, but Lucy was my aunt and in the dark days to come, before I became ‘you strongbody’ and could take it out of other people, it was the respect that the crew had for her that kept the mass of them on my side whatever violent battles I might have to fight individually.




6 (#ulink_b7c98f86-21ab-5999-a8f4-5c08f69b21c7)

Sömmarström and his Sails (#ulink_b7c98f86-21ab-5999-a8f4-5c08f69b21c7)


On Monday morning I was delighted to find that two more ‘foreigners’ had arrived on board and had been allotted to the starboard fo’c’sle. One of them, George White, was a tall thin young man from Massachusetts; the other was a young Dutchman called Jack Kroner who spoke fluent English. Both had signed on as apprentices, but Jack, who had been to sea before, had very sensibly evaded the premium which my father had been required to pay on my behalf, by arriving unheralded at the ship and striking a bargain on the spot.

Belfast after dark, into which we used to sally with Vytautas on modest porter-drinking expeditions, was a strange city, like a studio set for a Hitchcock thriller and equally deserted. The rain shone on the cobblestones and the wind howled down the dismal thoroughfares, rattling the glasses of the gas-lamps above our heads.

The only people we ever encountered off the main streets were numbers of apparently able-bodied men who would emerge from the shadows outside public houses and demand money. If not satisfied they would become abusive. One of the Finns who was being repatriated became so enraged by their attentions that he picked one of them up and threw him bodily into a glass shopfront. His departure was delayed for some days by this act, but he was saved from serious consequences by his ignorance of English and the ingenious plea put forward on his behalf that he had misunderstood the nature of the importunity. The four of us never had any compunction about refusing these requests for money as we had so little ourselves.

During these innocuous evenings spent in the snug of one of the less wild pubs we gradually drew up, to use the idiom of the times, a multi-lateral pact to resist those Finns and Swedes who already showed signs of becoming aggressive. Vytautas was not included in these arrangements. He had already made a round voyage in Moshulu and his position was established; besides, he had the happy temperament that did not attract trouble. Like other pacts in the world outside, to which we gave so little heed, it was to be rendered invalid by the loss of one of the contracting parties and the isolation of the remaining two, which made it impossible for one to help the other.

For the most part our thoughts were dominated by The Voyage. Sometimes, tired of the squalor in which we found ourselves, it seemed that we would never sail. It was Vytautas, by far the most resilient, who made us feel, by some reminiscence of life in the Trade Winds or in the high latitudes, that our present discomforts were bearable.

The last of the cargo was unloaded and the ship was warped down the dock to a deserted quay where we were to take on board our ballast stiffening for the voyage to Australia. There we cleared hundreds of blind baby mice from the frames in the hold; cleaned out the bilges which were filled with rotting grain and very smelly bilge-water, and set to work sweeping out the ’tween-decks. It was here that the accident occurred. The weather had been abominable and the open hatches were covered loosely with tarpaulins. In the ’tween-decks it was pitch black. We had two lanterns, and by the light of one of these George was sweeping with a will, working his way aft. Soon he was outside the circle of light thrown by his lamp; unused to the ’tween-decks, he stepped backwards over the tonnage opening below No 3 hatch and fell into the empty hold, hitting the keelson twenty feet below. When we reached him he was rigid, but still breathing. By the time we had got him out of the hold on a stretcher he was conscious and in pain. In the ambulance on the way to hospital he said. ‘I guess you’re going to have to do without me.’

One of his legs was broken and quite a lot of other things as well. He remained in hospital until December, two months after we sailed. It was a bitter disappointment for George; unlike the American of European imagination, he was not a rich young man. He had worked his passage to England and spent most of his savings to realise his ambition. I was downcast too. I had been long enough in the ship to realise that the confined space in which we lived would become very irksome once we were at sea. I was now deprived of my principal ally.

The following day Vytautas fell off the donkey house and broke an arm. Moshulu was dangerous for the unwary.

At the quay we took in our ballast, fifteen hundred tons of coarse dark sand used in the manufacture of pig-iron, huge lumps of paving-stone, granite blocks, and the best part of a small house. At the same time the stevedores added two dead dogs, but we did not discover this until we reached Australia in January, the hottest month of the year.

John Sömmarström, Sailmaker and Bosun of Moshulu, was a famous figure in the Erikson ships. If ever a man deserved the title of ‘shellback’ it was he.








John Sömmarström, Sailmaker

When I first met him he was fifty-eight years old and had been forty-three years at sea, all of them in sail, most of them in square rig. He had served in Scottish ships like Loch Vennachar in the 1900s and he had been for a time in the china-clay trade between Par in Cornwall and other West of England ports. In later years he had been Sailmaker in the barquentine Mozart which he described as ‘a cow’, the four-masted barque L’Avenir (he had served four years in L’Avenir when Erikson still had her), and a year in the Archibald Russell.

As I entered the sail loft I had an impression of a solid chunky man with spectacles set on a rather snub nose and a face covered with grey stubble. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In his mouth was a pipe that had gone out and on his head a unique hat. It was an ordinary grey felt hat, tweeked up in the middle like a scoutmaster’s, punctured with a number of holes that might have been made by bullets, intended, he said, to allow the air to circulate. I noticed that his fingers were rather stubby but that the nails were very finely formed. He had a wonderful smell about him compounded of hemp and Stockholm tar.

When he began to speak I was surprised that he spoke really fluent English, or rather Scots, with the accent of the Clyde. Perhaps he had picked it up in the Loch Vennachar. I told him what I wanted.

‘It’s a funny thing that most of the people who get killed in these ships are Englishmen,’ he granted. ‘Limeys we used to call them. There were Limeys, Squareheads, and Dagoes. You’re a Limey. You hang on tight.’

(Readers who are discouraged by technical details about sails and sailmaking should skip the rest of this chapter.)

‘If you like,’ he went on, ‘I’ll tell you something about square sails. First, they’re not square at all, they’re four-sided and square at the head but the foot’s cut on an arc, called the roach, to allow the sails to clear the fore-and-aft stays when they’re set.

‘Most people seem to think that a sail’s cut in one piece. A sail’s cut cloth by cloth. I already know how wide the sail has to be because all square sails extend to within eighteen inches of the yardarm cleats on the head, and the depth depends on the height of the mast and the distance between the yards.

‘That’s the material over there.’ He pointed his pipe at a heavy bolt of canvas. ‘Webster’s 24˝ Standard Flax Canvas from Arbroath. The finest stuff in the world and expensive.’

‘How much would it cost to make a complete new set for the ship?’

He glared at me. ‘About £2,500. But you listen to me. It doesn’t matter to you, does it, how much it costs? I’m telling you something more important.’ His pipe had gone out so I offered him some tobacco, rather diffidently, afraid that Fribourg and Treyers’s mixture would not be strong enough for him. It made him splutter a bit at first but he appeared mollified. ‘Where was I?’ he said. Fortunately this was a purely rhetorical question and did not require an answer from me.

‘I said that a sail is cut cloth by cloth and before I start the actual cutting I have to calculate the number of cloths the width requires, allowing for seams, tabling on the leeches and slack. The leeches are the perpendicular edges, and you have to allow some slack when sewing on the bolt ropes, otherwise when the bolt rope stretches in wear, the sail might split.’

‘What is tabling?’

‘Tabling is a broad hem made on the skirt of the sail by turning the edge and sewing it down. It strengthens the sail for sewing on the bolt rope. You needn’t be afraid to ask if you don’t understand. I only get wild if you ask me questions like a bloody fool reporter.’

He continued: ‘In the depth I’ve got to allow for tabling at the head and the foot. There are gores in a sail too, they’re the angles cut at the ends of the cloth to increase the width or the depth. The canvas for the gores is cut on the cross, the longest gored side of one cloth makes the shortest side of the next. After the first gore is cut the rest are cut by it.’

‘Christ,’ I muttered, overcome by the Sailmaker’s command of technical and outmoded English with which he seemed equally at home as with his native Swedish. He began to explain how he found the number of yards of canvas needed. ‘It comes in bolts twenty-four inches wide. I add the number of cloths in the head and the foot together and halve them to make them square. Then I multiply the number of squared cloths by the depth of the sail and add to that the additional canvas contained in the foot gores, and linings and the four buntline cloths. The linings are sewn to the leeches and middle to strengthen it. The buntline cloths are to stop chafing on the sail. That’s why the sails are heavy. A course, that’s the big sail on the fore, main and mizzen – weighs more than a ton, and much more when it’s wet.

‘If you’re interested,’ went on the Sailmaker, ‘I’ll tell you something about sailmaking. This is my sail-loft.’ He waved his hand to indicate the austere and cramped quarters in which he worked. ‘And these are my tools: palm and needles; a sail-hook.’ He held up a small iron hook with a cord spliced to an eye in the shank. ‘Used for holding still the work. Marline-spikes for opening rope strands when I splice. A wooden fid for the same purpose. A pinker, like a marline-spike but straight, and a heaving-mallet.’ This was a hammer with a small cylindrical head used as a lever to haul tight the cross-stitches when sewing the bolt ropes on the sail.

‘What are the bolt ropes?’ I asked, having wanted to know all this time.

‘The bolt rope is sewn to the edge of a sail to stop it splitting. It’s either wire or hemp, mostly wire now. If it’s hemp it’s sewn with three-thread twine. The rope has to be well twisted while this is being done and it has to be cross-stitched on the leeches every twelve inches on every seam and at the middle of every cloth in the foot. In the head of the sail are the cringles through which the rope-yarns are passed securing the sail to the jackstay on the yard. In the foot are the cringles to which the buntlines are fastened and by which the sail is drawn up to the yard for furling.’

‘And what’s this?’ I asked him, holding up another hammer with a grooved head. ‘Another sort of heaving-mallet?’

‘It’s a serving-mallet,’ he replied. ‘And this is the way I serve a clew – which, by the way, is the lower corner of a sail to which the sheet is fastened.’

On the leech of the sail was a cringle, a ring made by working a strand of rope round an iron thimble. This cringle he hooked on to a bulkhead, hung off a block and tackle on the bolt rope where the clew was to be and set it up taut between a vertical iron post and the bulkhead. He took a ball of spunyarn, made two or three turns round the bolt rope, confining the end under the turns; he placed the serving-mallet on the rope, passing the yarn round the rope, the head of the mallet and the handle. ‘Take hold of this,’ he ordered, handing me the ball of yarn to pass round the rope as he turned the hammer which wound the yarn tightly on to the rope.

‘This is serving,’ said the Sailmaker, after he had made a few turns to show me the idea, ‘but first you must worm the rope by winding spun yarn along the contour of it to get a level surface and after that you parcel it with tarred canvas wrapped on before you serve it.

‘Now that you know how to make a sail,’ the Sailmaker went on optimistically, ‘you must know how to sail the ship. Do you know anything at all about square rig?’

I said that I knew very little.

‘Huh,’ he sniffed contemptuously. ‘Well, you’d better bloody well wake up and learn.’

He immediately launched into a long and clear exposition of the theory of square sails and the action of the water on the ship’s rudder. How, when Moshulu’s wheel was put to starboard, the rudder would go to starboard and the vessel turn to starboard; that the greater the angle of the rudder the more the ship’s way would be impeded. It was therefore important so to balance the ship with sails that only a slight touch on the helm was necessary.

‘Now suppose,’ said the Sailmaker, ‘that Moshulu has the wind on her starboard beam, that is to say at right angles to the direction in which she is heading. Sails are set on the foremast only and the yards are braced so that the sails are full. What happens? I’ll tell you,’ he said before I could open my mouth. ‘Her bows will fall off and her stern will come into the wind. That’s because she rotates on her pivotal turning point, which is forward of the mainmast when she’s trimmed properly. With sail set on the mizzen, her head will come into the wind. With sail on the main only she will go ahead, and if the yards are braced so that the wind blows on the forepart of the square sails, she’ll go astern.’

He went on for an hour and I only understood half of what he told me. Finally he lumbered to his feet, saying: ‘I’m off to see the Consul. Leave that list of English words, I’ll write down the Swedish later.’

Now he was getting restive, rummaging in a box. ‘Aw hell, I’ve got to see the Consul.’

‘Which Consul?’ I asked, wondering why he suddenly wanted one at five o’clock on a wet October night.

‘The one under the fo’c’sle head, on the port side,’ he grunted triumphantly, for he had just found a copy of the New Statesman and Nation to serve his need, and departed on this urgent mission.








Preparing sails for the Atlantic

The next morning, in spite of consultations between the Mates and the Sailmaker the utmost confusion prevailed. For winter in the North Atlantic we needed a complete suit of thirty-one storm-sails. Some of them were in the sail-loft but the rest were in the ’tween-decks mixed up with tropical sails we would need later and old blown-out rags too rotten to mend. None of the crew seemed to know which sails were wanted or where they were to be found. The sails were three and four deep in the darkness and as heavy and intractable as lead. The Mates flashed electric torches and groped for the lower leeches of the square sails on which were stencilled the name of the sail, together with the initials of the maker. There were some very old sails amongst the newer ones. One or two, of American cotton, must have been made for her before she was laid up in Seattle after the 1927 voyage to Melbourne; others were out of a well-known ship, the StarofEngland. There was also a mainsail with reef-points in it from Herzogin Cecilie, which must have been made before 1921 when she passed to the Finns, and was probably made long before 1914, at the time when she was a training-ship and cargo-carrier for the Norddeutscher Lloyd Company.

Some sails were marked in Swedish, some in English, others in German and, as each sailmaker had his own system of marking, the Mates tied themselves in tri-lingual knots.

After about half an hour of sweating and swearing, they sent for the Sailmaker. He lumbered about in the darkness saying ‘Aw, shit,’ when he tripped over some obstacle. Occasionally he borrowed a torch to consult a grubby and almost illegible piece of paper. Very soon we were heaving the chosen sails on deck: long, sausage-shaped bundles which cut into our shoulders as we tottered along the flying bridge with them.

The first sail I helped to send aloft and bend was a main lower topsail. It was stretched out across the deck and the head earrings (the ropes with which the head of the sail was stretched out along the yard) made fast to their cringles. Then the robands, the rope yarns with which the sail was bent to the jackstay, were put through each eyelet hole in the head. Next the sail was made up with its head and foot together and a gantline was rove through a block on the mast-head. One end of it was made fast to the centre of the sail, which was then hauled aloft with the help of the donkey-engine, a refinement we were not to enjoy at sea because the donkey-engine guzzled too much coal and water. Once at sea every sail was sent aloft on a gantline by hand capstan.

At the yard, clewlines, buntlines and chain sheets were ready to be bent to the lower topsail which now swung on the gantline above the yard. The sheets for the lower topsail had been cast off the cleats on the mainmast and enough chain hauled up from below to enable them to be shackled to the clew of the sail. The clewlines were shackled on and the buntlines were passed through the wooden thimbles on the front of the sail and clinched to the cringles in the bottom of the sail by a buntline knot which would not jam. The sail was now ready to be brought to the yard. Those on deck hauled away at the buntlines and those on the yard hauled on the head of the sail, one man sitting astride each yardarm to reeve the head earring through straps on the yard and haul out the head of the sail to make it quite square. The head of the sail was then made fast to the jackstay with the robands already in the cringles.

The sail was now bent, with the clews of the lower corners of the sail drawn right up to the yardarm by the clewlines and the body or bunt of the sail hauled upward by the buntlines. Now we had to furl it, as we were making a neat harbour stow. The weather leech had to be taken in first and the heavy weight of sheet and clew earring taken as far in towards the mast as possible. Next, the body of the sail was hauled up and beaten down in a neat package on top of the yard and the rope gaskets passed round both the yard and the sail, and secured.

To set the same sail one hand would be sent aloft to cast off the gaskets and overhaul the bunt and clewlines, leaving them slack. The lee sheet would be hauled down, then the weather sheet, and, on a movable yard such as the upper topsail, the yard would be raised by the hands on deck applying themselves to the topsail halliard winch. The last job for the man aloft was to overhaul the buntlines and make up the gaskets neatly on top of the yard, seizing them to the jackstays.

All this was mystifying to me. I had read of these things and, with the aid of the Sailmaker’s list, had tried to memorise the Swedish for buntlines, clewlines and so on, but it was different up in the rigging. In the fo’c’sle I might know that the upper topsail outer buntline on the port side was ‘babords övre märs yttre bukgårding.’ In practice my mind became blank. It was difficult enough to hang on and furl sail in a flat calm in dock. I trembled to think of performing these feats in the Atlantic.




7 (#ulink_c4101095-ecc0-5487-bbe9-938d086b21ee)

Wild Life in the Irish Sea (#ulink_c4101095-ecc0-5487-bbe9-938d086b21ee)


We sailed from Belfast on Tuesday, October 18th, 1938, our destination Port Lincoln for orders. On board were a crew of twenty-eight, including the Captain, a man of huge size, who had come to us from Erikson’s four-masted barque Archibald Russell.




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