A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (5 page)

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 (10
s
) 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.

Then, towards the end of September, I received a letter from the owner’s agents telling me to join the four-masted barque
Moshulu
which was discharging its cargo of grain in Belfast.

S/V
Moshulu
, East Side,
York Dock,
Belfast

26 September 1938

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

… I was up on deck on the steamer from Heysham about 6.30 just in time to see the terrifically high masts of the
Moshulu
rising high above the dock sheds and looking very cold and remote in the early morning. After breakfast in the steamer I took a very ancient taxi that was practically falling to pieces to the ship and when it arrived alongside it was so big that I felt like a midget. It is more than three thousand tons and is the biggest sailing ship in commission in the world.

I went up a gang plank and spoke to a very tough-looking boy with slant eyes like a Mongolian who was oiling a donkey engine, and asked him if he would help me with my enormous trunk. He picked it up, having made threatening gestures at the taxi man who was trying to overcharge me, and carried it up the plank on his back all by himself!

Meanwhile, sacks of grain were being hoisted out of the hold and weighed before being taken ashore and into the sheds – altogether the ship brought back more than sixty-two thousand sacks from South Australia on this last voyage and was a hundred and twenty days at sea, which is rather slow. A hundred days from Australia to Britain is good, anything under a hundred, very good.

Then my new friend, Jansson, who comes from the Åland Islands, took me into the starboard fo’c’sle where I am to live until the watches are appointed, which will be on the day we go to sea. It is about thirty feet long and about thirteen feet wide, with wooden bunks from floor to ceiling, one above the other, like coffins with open sides. I am not sure how many but will tell you later. The boys seem pleasant enough, but not exactly gushing. About three-quarters of them speak only about a dozen words of English and some of those are swear words, which is twelve words more than I speak of Swedish which is the language in which all orders are given, rather than Finnish, which would be too difficult for non-Finns, I suppose. Swedish/Finns from the Åland Islands and Finns make up the majority of the crew.

They gave me some coffee and then I was told the second mate wanted to see me on the bridge deck, which is amidships above the fo’c’sles, where the ship is steered from, not from the poop. He was a pale, thin fellow and after asking me my name suddenly said, ‘Op the rigging!’

I simply couldn’t believe this. I thought they would give one a bit of time to get used to being in a ship. I was wearing my Harris tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and those leather shoes with slippery soles which I took the nails out of because I thought they might damage the decks! He wouldn’t allow me to change, not even my shoes, just take off my jacket and shirt. I was in a sort of daze. I swung out over the ship’s side and started to climb the ratlines, wooden rungs lashed to the shrouds which hold the mast up, quite wide at the bottom but only a few inches wide when you get under what is known as the ‘top’, where it was difficult to get feet as large as mine on to them. The top is a platform and to get on to it I had to climb outwards on rope ratlines, like a fly on a ceiling, and when I got on to it, looking down I almost fainted.

I thought this was enough, but ‘Go on op,’ he shouted, and so I went on ‘op’ by rope ratlines, some of them very rotten after the long voyage – you have to hold on to the shrouds, not the ratlines, in case they break. These ratlines ended at the cross trees, which are made of steel and form a sort of open platform, like glass with my slippery shoes on, a hundred and thirty feet up with Belfast spread out below.

‘Op to the Royal Yard,’ was the next command. This was forty feet or so of nearly vertical and very trembly ratlines to just below the Royal Yard, the topmost one, on which the Royal Sail is bent at sea. Here, there were no more ratlines, and I had to haul myself up on to it, all covered with grease from something like a vertical railway line [a mast track on which the yard is raised and lowered by a halliard] on the face of the mast.

This yard was about fifty feet long, and made of steel, like all the other yards and masts. It had an iron rail along the top [a jackstay] to which the sail is bent and underneath it is a steel footrope [the ‘horse’] on which my shoes skidded in opposite directions, so that I looked like a ballet dancer doing the splits. At the yardarm I was – I learned the heights when I got down – about a hundred and sixty feet over the dock sheds, which had glass roofs – what a crash, I thought, if I fell off! It was better looking further afield. There were marvellous views of the Antrim Hills and down Belfast Lough towards the Irish Sea.

Back at the mast, thinking thank goodness that’s over, I heard the mate’s voice telling me to climb to the very top of the main mast [the main truck]; but I couldn’t do this with such slippery shoes on, as there were only two or three very rotten-looking ratlines on the stays [seized across the royal backstays], and then nothing but about six feet of absolutely bare pole to the cap. So I took off my shoes and socks, which were even more slippery than the shoes, left them on the yard and then shinned up, past caring what happened, more frightened of the mate than anything else, until I could touch the cap which was like a round, wooden bun. This cap I have discovered is nearly two hundred feet above the keel, much higher than Nelson’s column [which is only a hundred and forty-five feet high].

Now he was shouting to me to sit on the top; but I would have rather died than do that and so I pretended not to hear him. When I got down he was angry because he said it was unseamanlike to take off my shoes and socks, and also that the shoes might have fallen and injured somebody. I think the part about sitting on the cap must have been a joke, because he never mentioned it and none of the others have done it. Then he sent me to clean the lavatories; but I was allowed to change first. My trousers got awfully dirty with Belfast soot up in the rigging and will have to be cleaned.

I am not writing this to worry you but only because I feel that I will be alright in the rigging from now on. It was probably a good idea to get it over. Anyway, it is much better than cleaning the lavatories.

Please do not send anything but letters and money as I have no room for anything in my bunk except myself.

This evening we are going ashore for what the boys call a ‘liddle trink’ at a pub called the Rotterdam Bar, a farewell party for the boys who are leaving the ship and going home. I never imagined that one day I would go to a pub called the Rotterdam Bar and be a sailor.

All my love,
Eric

S/V
Moshulu
,
Belfast

II
October 1938

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

We are now loading ballast, mostly rock and sand used in blast foundries, and paving stones and the best part of an old house. Altogether about fifteen hundred tons. There is bad news about George White, the nice American boy. He fell into the hold through the tonnage opening in the between-decks below Number Three Hatch when there was no ballast in it and broke one of his legs and various other things, so he won’t be able to sail with us. I’ve just spent a wonderful time with Ivy [a friend of my parents] and her husband at their house. The butler, called Taggart, brought me an enormous breakfast in bed and all my clothes were laundered for me, goodness knows how in the time.

My other friends are Jansson, the boy who put my trunk on board, a Dutch boy, called Kroner, and a Lithuanian named Vytautas Bagdanavicius, who sailed on the previous voyage. We go to gruesome pubs and drink porter, a weak version of Guinness and we eat fish and chips and go to the Salvation Army Hostel for wonderful hot baths. Don’t worry about mean night adventures in the streets. They are much too wet, and we haven’t got any money. The only one who tried a Matros, an AB [able-bodied seaman] got a nasty disease which he is treating himself, with a syringe. I wish he was elsewhere …

All my love,

Eric

This letter is from my father and is dated 16 October 1938. It was sent to Belfast but, having arrived too late, was forwarded to Australia.

My dear Eric,

I feel that you are on the eve of your departure for the open sea, and so I take leave to bid you a fond farewell. You have chosen a difficult job and are beginning life again on the bottom rung.

I enclose a German Text Book for Travellers which may help you with some words you have forgotten. I could not get one in Swedish or Finnish and I did not think Norwegian would be much good.

That fellow with the venereal disease sounds a rotten blighter. I should complain to the captain about him …

Good luck to you, my dear boy, and a safe journey.

Your loving father.

PS. Your mother is writing separately.

We sailed for Australia on 18 October 1938 with a crew of twenty-eight.

At two in the morning on 11 December, fifty-four days out from Belfast when we were in Latitude 39° South, Longitude 9° East in the South Atlantic, our watch was called on deck to square up the yards and sheet home the fore-and-aft sail on the port side. There was a new movement in the ship now: she was rocking slightly from stem to stern.

‘Kom the Väst Vind,’ said Tria as we ground away at the Jarvis brace winches. By noon that day the westerlies were blowing strongly, lumping the rollers up behind. This was a memorable day because we ran 293 miles, and Alvar dropped our dinner on the way from the galley.

On the 13th we crossed the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Southern Indian Ocean in 40° 33’ South Latitude. Whilst running eastward we edged south to 42° and finally to 43° 47’. Sometimes the West Wind blew strongly, sometimes we were nearly becalmed. Always the drift was carrying us eastwards, thirty to forty miles a day. In the course of this outward voyage we only made one landfall, Inaccessible Island, one of the Tristran da Cunha group.

By five o’clock that evening
Moshulu
was sailing fifteen knots. The wind was on the quarter and there was a big sea running. When Sedelquist and I took over there were already two men at the wheel. (Sedelquist was helmsman and I was help wheel.)

‘Going to be deefecult,’ he said in an unusual access of friendliness, as we stumbled out on deck, immense in our thick pilot coats, ‘going to be von bastard.’

We took over from Hilbert and Hörglund, a wild-looking but capable team. Although it was quite cold with occasional squalls of hail, I noticed that their faces were glistening with perspiration in the light of the binnacle.

‘Törn om,’ said Sedelquist, as he stepped up beside Hilbert on the weather side.

‘Törn om,’ I echoed as I mounted the platform to leeward.

‘Ostsydost,’ said Hilbert and then more quietly as the Captain was close by, ‘proper strongbody for vind, Kapten.’

The ship was a strongbody too, she was a fury, and as soon as we took over we both knew that it was going to be a fight to hold her.

Sedelquist was a first-class helmsman – very cool and calm and sure of himself. I too was on my mettle to give him all the help I could, not for reasons of prestige but because a mistake on a night like this might finish us all.

Being at the wheel was a remarkable sensation. It was as if the ship had wings. The seas were big, but they never caught up with her to drag at her and slow her down. Instead they bore her up and flung her forward.

Steering was very hard work; heaving on the spokes, at Sedelquist’s direction, I was soon sweating. There was no time to speak, nor was it permitted. Only when I made 7 bells at half-past seven did Sedelquist shout out of the corner of his mouth:

‘Oh you noh, Kryss Royal going in a meenit.’

The Captain, the First Mate, and Tria were all on deck, the Captain constantly gazing aloft at the upper sails. At a quarter to eight with our trick nearly over, when I was congratulating myself that we had come through, we suddenly lost control of her and she began to run up into the wind.

‘Kom on, kom on,’ Sedelquist roared, but it was too late. Our combined strength was not enough to move the wheel.