In northern waters

Grey seas, icebergs, wrecks and whales. 

A voyage to the St Lawrence, 50 years ago

One of the odder things about aging is that one may enter a room, forget why, and suddenly recall what one was doing 50 years ago to the day instead. It happened to me this morning. I noticed that it was August 21 and a series of images came unbidden into my head; then I started playing one of those mental newsreels of a past time that are always incomplete. It flickered into life with the image of a train. I was in the dining car with my parents and sister. A flat stretch of late-summer countryside was flashing by, black-and-white cows in a field; a white-jacketed waiter emerged through a swing door with oval windows, a large silver tray at shoulder-height. I wondered why we had been in the dining-car; my parents were the sort who found sandwiches quite adequate. But perhaps it was all part of our ticket, for this was a boat train.

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The Empress of Canada in her original livery (Canadian Pacific postcard)

The boat train was once a quite usual feature of international travel, speeding you from Euston or Waterloo and taking you, not to the main station for the port, but straight into the docks, where one climbed down and entered the terminal building or shed to surrender your baggage. This would be labelled as needed, to be taken to your cabin or stickered “Not Wanted on Voyage” and swung into the hold in nets that hung from cranes or derricks. In this shed, too, one would undergo passport formalities before striding up the gangway and into the doors let into the side of the vessel. On one’s return to Britain one went through the same process in reverse, assuming one got through customs in time.

On one occasion some years earlier, my mother had missed the boat train. Disembarking from the Holland America Line’s much-loved Nieuw Amsterdam at Southampton with a two-year-old (me) and my seven-year-old sister, she made the mistake of giving me an orange as we waited in the queue, enraging a customs officer who lectured her about the phytosanitary dangers of American oranges and proceeded to examine our luggage in minute detail. The boat train left without us.

“He was very small. A pipsqueak,” she remembered years later, thought for a moment and added, outraged: “He was Welsh”, as if this somehow explained the man’s behaviour. I remember someone – I believe it was John Treasure Jones, the last captain of the mighty Queen Mary (and himself Welsh) – telling a magazine interviewer how to avoid trouble at customs. Look for a chap with a loosely-knotted tie, he said; a tight, small knot indicates a small, tight mind. It is advice I have carried through life ever since.

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But back to the late summer of 1968.

The train rolled into the docks at Liverpool and came to rest outside a cavernous shed. We entered it, and through the open doors at the other side I saw a huge wall of white steel, punctuated by row upon row of portholes. It seemed a leviathan.

The Queen Elizabeth at New York (date and photographer unknown)

In fact, at about 27,000 GRT, the Empress of Canada was dwarfed by the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which at over 81,000 GRT were for a long time the largest man-made moving objects on earth. I had sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, too. In what I believe to be my earliest memory, I am in the children’s playroom on board, pushing a toy car along the art-deco ventilation grilles at the edge of the room and annoying a little girl trying to play with one of the doll’s houses set against them. Then I look up to see my mother standing above me in a Dior-like New Look skirt. If I am correct, it was August 1958, and I was just 15 months old, so it does not seem possible – surely it must have been another ship, probably the Nieuw Amsterdam – but old black-and-white pictures of the Cunarder’s playroom seem to match my memory.

If the Empress of Canada could not compare to the Queens, it was still very large, and was one of the most modern liners on the North Atlantic run, launched on the Tyne in 1960. Designed for the Liverpool to Montreal route, she could carry about a thousand passengers. In the 1960s there was still demand for cabins. Atlantic flights had been offered since the 1940s, and were having an impact on shipping. Jets had offered a transatlantic service since October 1958, a British-built airliner beating the Americans by a matter of days. But jet travel was still for the very well-heeled; older planes often had to refuel at Gander, and the journey to New York could take 12 or 14 hours. And all air travel was still very expensive. All this would change with the arrival of wide-bodied jets in 1970. But for now, ships remained the best choice for many, for Australia as well as North America (many of the British emigrants who went to Australia as part of the assisted passage scheme in the 1960s made the six-week voyage by sea).

We walked up the gangway and into the entrance in the ship’s side. The first thing one noticed was the flooring; often in this ship, it was a light blue rubberised surface with raised buttons, from which water would drain, and on which one would not slip in rough seas. The first place one called was one’s cabin, where hopefully one’s luggage would arrive too. The cabins were small but not cramped and had their own bathrooms and toilets. I took the upper bunk above my sister. I was sleeping right by a porthole and could sit up in bed and look out at the sea.

I was 11, and old enough to wander around the ship alone; in fact I had just been given my first watch especially for the voyage, so that I would know when to turn up for meals. On this first day I went on deck and looked over the side at the docks. I was in a crush of other passengers, many waving goodbye to friends and relatives on the docks far below; some held coloured paper streamers that ran over the side, with the other end held by those below. As the ship pulled away the streamers would break or fall. In those days many passengers on a ship to Canada would have been emigrants, and I suppose the streamer represented the ties that were being broken in a rather poignant way. In fact I remember that everyone was in quite a cheerful mood, despite the greyness of the English summer sky. One passenger may not have been so happy – the owner of a large steamer trunk (yes, we had them) that was bobbing up and down between the ship and the water. A pair of stevedores tried half-heartedly to retrieve it with grappling hooks. “I say, I hear the poor chap’s PhD thesis is inside,” said someone. There was general chortling. And then the hawsers were unwound and we began, ever so slowly, to inch away from England.

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At Greenock (date and photographer unknown)

In the morning all had changed. The ship had steamed up the Irish Sea in the night and had entered the Clyde estuary, and was standing off Greenock, waiting for the tender that would bring the last mail and passengers for Canada. We went on deck. It was a quite brilliant, still summer’s morning, the mountains to the north standing out green against the wonderful cloudless sky; the water was flat calm and the ship lay on a mirror in a room of deep blue. I have travelled widely in the half-century since, but I do not think I have seen many scenes to rival that strange and beautiful morning.

We did not stay long. In due course the tender nosed out to meet us, a small motorboat with a dozen or so passengers and some mailsacks. I suppose the sheer white walls of the ship must have reared hundreds of feet above them. They came up a ladder and the tender went about its business; we pulled away. I wonder what became of passengers who had booked their passage from Greenock to find that the weather had been too bad for them to transfer to the ship in this way – as must surely sometimes have happened.

As we left the Clyde behind, the weather dulled. The coast of Ulster was a low grey-green smudge in the distance. We settled into the ship that would be our home for the next week.

Shipboard life acquires a rhythm. Dinner was taken in a large airy dining-room below, at a shared table, served by a waiter in evening clothes, a very small red-headed man from the Shetland Islands; he was quiet but friendly and every night he handed us a new elaborate menu, great white creations of heavy card, with embossed letters and each night a different picture of a sailing ship’s stern on the front. The menus delighted me and the Shetland waiter, noticing that I liked them, kindly brought me a large white envelope marked “A Souvenir of a White Empress”, with a sample of each menu used on the voyage. I had it for many years and believe it may still be among my papers somewhere.

A 1950 poster by Roger Couillard

Between meals there was not that much to do. One could shop at the duty-free. One could play deck games, weather permitting. One could visit the cinema (we did, once; the film was the latest hit, The Cincinatti Kid. It bored us and we walked out). There were lounges and, of course, bars. My parents made little use of these and did not mingle much with the other passengers; my father, though not unfriendly, was not a clubbable man and was rather self-contained. In those days English people were more reserved than they are now and were cautious with strangers until they could place them, or identify a common relative or acquaintance. I made one friend on board, but apart from that I can remember few friendships being forged. We did meet a young woman who was travelling with two unfeasibly slender borzoi dogs. I had a plastic box-brownie camera (I have it still) and she posed for a picture with the dogs, which sat on a bench beside her; her legs were crossed and her skirt quite short and her leather raincoat unbuttoned, and in the picture there is an elegant expanse of thigh.

And of course one looked at the sea.

If one stood at the stern one could see the wake of the ship, a huge white maelstrom, fading at its edges to green and then grey. Seabirds wheeled and screamed above it. The volume of water displaced must have been enormous as the 27,000-ton ship ploughed through the water at 23 knots. One wonders what the wake of the Queen Elizabeth was like; three times the size, and rather faster – she made well over 30 knots, about 33 MPH.

When one tired of looking at the wake, there was the vast seascape around us. As anyone who lives by the sea can tell you, it has many moods. There was none of the glassy tranquility that we had seen at Greenock. Further out the fresh wind whipped up whitecaps. As it was summer, we followed the Great Circle route some way to the north; it grew cold, and the sky was a dirty light grey and the sea gunmetal with crests of white. One day an announcement on the PA told us that we were near what was thought to be the last position of the Titanic (it had yet to be found). Late that afternoon we saw icebergs in the distance.

At that time, no British person could cross that stretch of ocean without remembering that it was also a graveyard. The U-boat battles of the second war had reached their climax in 1943, just 25 years earlier; plenty of people on board would have remembered them, and perhaps some of the crew had sailed through them – in fact I am sure they had, for the ship was crewed in Liverpool. My father was quiet and mildly irritable throughout the voyage and I know he disliked the sea. I did not understand why, but now I realize that he must have spent weeks on a troopship to what was then the Gold Coast in 1941, a tense voyage; the vessel would have swung much of the way out towards Brazil to avoid U-boats. Many were sunk off West Africa, including a previous Empress of Canada; she was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, but by a twist of fate the ship was carrying Italian prisoners, nearly 200 of whom died.

A few years ago I wrote about crossing the Atlantic, then and now – a piece I later included in my 2014 book The Nine Horizons. It included this passage:

A convoy in 1942 (US Navy picture)

Some journeys on this ocean always have ended badly. You are in your cabin; it was a five-day voyage before, but now it's three weeks as you limp along at the pace of the slowest ship, and you zigzag and dogleg, and destroyers and corvettes fuss around like smoky sheepdogs. It's early morning and you're still in your bunk when there is a soft thud and a jolt and the ship falters and seems to have come to a stop. There is an odd silence. The lights flicker but stay on. You can hear the footsteps of a steward clanging on the steel floor of the passage outside so you open the door. No, probably nothing to worry about, but perhaps you wouldn't mind going topside, sir, do you have warm clothing? – good, sir, if you can get it on quickly. On deck everything's quite calm, but the other ships have moved on ahead, leaving a black smoke stain on the horizon; and you're alone in the early morning between a still, solid grey sea and a gunmetal sky, and there's a cool breeze. It's very calm and it must be only your imagination that the ship is settling slowly to starboard. In fact everything is so calm that you cannot envisage the jagged hole below and the cold water streaming in across the hot boilers and the lascars and stokers screaming in agony from the superheated steam.

When I was young, many older people hated the sea.

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On the fifth day it was still dull and cold. In the early afternoon I was standing on the deck when someone pointed in the distance. A school of whales was passing us a mile or so away, their bodies breaking the water, huge, but very small in the distance. I went up again at dusk, which came late (we were a long way north, and it was still summer). On the far horizon in front of the ship was a long, low shadow, and it was not a cloud. I wonder if it looked the same to Leif Ericson a thousand years ago, or to the first of the Breton and Iberian cod-fishermen not long afterwards. Or maybe to St Brendan, 500 years earlier. Many believe he made it. Should we be so sure he didn’t? The American explorer Robert Marx once claimed to have found amphorae from a Roman shipwreck in Guanabara Bay, off Rio de Janeiro. Who knows who first saw that shore from the sea?

That night, there wasn’t much to see. But the next morning we had passed Belle Isle and into the mouth of the St Lawrence.

The sheer size of this river is hard to comprehend. It drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic and, if one counts the estuary, is not much less than 2,000 miles long. To make landfall at Belle Isle and then spend two days steaming to one’s destination is to comprehend its size and that of Canada itself. Of course, there was now other shipping. Before long that morning a bulk carrier of Manchester Lines slipped past on its way to the ocean, and as the ship ploughed on towards Quebec, the traffic became more frequent. We were some way out in mid-stream; as the day wore on, however, we started to see small white houses nestled in the wooded shoreline. Bit by bit we sailed back into the human world.

The Empress of Ireland (Bibliothèque et Archives Canada)

The St Lawrence had its own harsh history for Canadian Pacific. On the night of May 29 1914, near Rimouski in Quebec, just inside the river proper, the Norwegian collier Storstad hit the Empress of Ireland in fog. The Storstad remained afloat, despite a damaged bow. The 14,000 GRT Empress of Ireland did not, sinking in just 14 minutes with the loss of just over a thousand lives – a disaster quite comparable to that of the Titanic, yet hardly known; perhaps the outbreak of the Great War two months later overlaid it in memory. The rapid sinking was attributed to the use of longtitudinal watertight compartments, which allowed one side of the ship to fill very quickly with water while the other did not, causing it to capsize rapidly. Many of those who did escape the ship died in the water, which at that time of year was still very cold. The exact circumstances of the collision were disputed at the enquiry, and remain so now. (The Storstad was repaired and returned to service, but seized by Canadian Pacific after a civil suit. She was torpedoed southwest of Fastnet Rock three years later.) I did not know it then, but we must have passed the wreck site in the St Lawrence during the sixth day.

In the evening we tied up at Quebec City. It was not yet time to leave the ship, but we went ashore to stretch our legs, striding along the dock below the towering mass of the Château Frontenac, built by Canadian Pacific themselves in 1893. It was there that Churchill had met Mackenzie King and Roosevelt in 1943 to discuss strategy. On this evening in late August 25 years later, there was little activity on the dock – it seemed empty – and even the other passengers seemed to have stayed aboard. At length we returned to the ship. But we had stood on North American soil. Well, concrete.

The next morning I pulled back the curtains above my bunk and saw an odd view. We had come to a halt at Montreal and were tied up near Man and His World – what had been Expo 67, the very successful World’s Fair the previous year. It was over but one could still visit the site, now called Man and His World. I was looking at Habitat 67, the strange cuboid flat complex that had been part of the exhibition and was still lived in, and is to this day.

We were chivvied off the ship by our parents and a Montreal metro train with big rubber wheels took us to an American-style train that took us to Ottawa. We rode upstairs in the observation car. The train rattled slowly along, seemingly right through people’s backyards. We left the Empress of Canada and its great white walls behind us at Montreal. I never saw her again.

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From the 1930s

A year later, my father’s work in Canada was done. This time he flew. The rest of us returned the way we had come, in almost the same week. But this time we sailed on a sister ship of about the same size – the Empress of England, also built on the Tyne. The weather was markedly worse and the ship, although only slightly older, was less modern in design. It pitched and rolled. I had been ill before we went aboard and for the first and, so far, last time in my life, I was seasick. After two days for which I had vomited uncontrollably, my mother summoned a nurse from the dispensary in the bowels of the ship. The nurse unsheathed a very large needle that looked as if it was used to tranquilize horses. “Turn over,” she barked, and thrust it into my rump; I could not see but I think she was holding it aloft with both hands, as if sacrificing a goat. It did make me better, but not well enough to go to dinner. Instead, while my mother and sister went to eat, a friendly Belfast steward brought me some rather nice sandwiches and stayed with me until they returned, telling me all about the Mini-Coopers that he rallied in the winter season. It was a cheerful act of kindness that I still remember after nearly half a century. I recall little else about that voyage, except that we tied up at Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock on a cold and drizzly afternoon, I think the first day of September. I looked over the rail at the rows of cars parked on bombsites near the dock, their windows streaked with rain, and felt a strange sense of being grounded, of being dragged home to England against my will. I would feel it later, as an adult, many times.

The Empress of England would not make people vomit for much longer. In two years she was off the route; in five she was scrapped. But the Empress of Canada would work on. Her own life as a transatlantic liner was nearly over; 18 months later the first of the wide-bodied jets entered service. A very few vessels staggered on for two or three years, but soon the QE2 was the only liner left on the route. The others found new lives as cruise liners. For the Canada, this was nothing new; although her sister-ships stayed on the Atlantic route the year round, she herself had always spent the winters cruising.

Twenty years later, as a volunteer in Sudan, I met a man who had been one of the crew in the ship’s heyday, and had been aboard when we made that crossing. He had fond memories of the cruise season. Every woman loves a sailor, he said, and recalled a Hollywood star who had liked to go ashore with them and have sex with them, one by one, against a palm tree. “Funny, she was always sort of unfriendly once you’d done her,” he mused, nursing a glass of the local firewater. He then identified her as someone who was, in the 1960s, a household name. She has long passed away, but I shall take that name to the grave.

The ship was sold in the early 1970s, becoming the first of the Carnival line’s cruise ships. As the years went by, the North Atlantic survivors were replaced by purpose-built cruise ships, vast, slow, soulless floating malls that meander slowly through the water, pausing now and then to unleash thousands of holidaymakers on some defenceless Caribbean island; were our Hollywood star still living, she would find it hard to find a palm tree to herself. But the Empress of Canada somehow survived into the new century, latterly on gambling cruises in the Gulf of Mexico.

Final fate: The Empress of Canada broken at Along, 2003

In 2003 she was finally sold for scrap and was run ashore at the great shipbreakers at Alang Beach, Gujurat – one of those places where men swarm across a huge ship in their hundreds and break it with axes and saws and the sweat of their brows. In a few months, there was nothing left of a great ship that had been home to thousands for days or even weeks at a time, on which some men and women would serve for years.

But that is the fate of the things we use, isn’t it? The year I sailed on the Empress of Canada, British Rail finally abandoned steam, and thousands of engines were left in long lines at a huge yard in Barry, South Glamorgan. One moment they were living, breathing monuments to human ingenuity. The next they were rotting hulks in the drizzle. And the same happened to typewriters, to record players, to valve wirelesses, to cathode-tube TVs and to the car that once picked you up from school; and one day it will happen to your phone and to your tablet and your microwave and the laptop on which I am typing this. Later, someone will look at one in a book or online or in a museum and wonder, yes, but what did it do? And few will know what it was to forge through a vast grey sea, peopled by ghosts of Vikings, Breton fishermen, men o’war and submarines, to see icebergs pass astern or whales in the distance, or see a low grey line on the horizon at dusk and wonder if it was a low cloud, or the New World.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing,  The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.

Around the Horn before the mast

Just as steam took over the world’s seaways, a last flowering of sail gave us some of the most beautiful vessels ever built. They did not last for long. But they left their mark on literature

On March 17 1894, Scientific American had its usual varied diet for the curious and intelligent. There was a report on a cablecar service over the Tennessee River in Knoxville.  Figurines in Oriental dress had been unearthed in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. The number of immigrants landing in New York had been down in 1893 (the largest group was Italian, at nearly 70,000). 

The Beatrice (Allan C. Green/State Library of Victoria)

Tucked away in an inside page, however, was maybe the biggest story. The Arthur Sewell & Co. yard at Bath, Maine, had launched the Dirigo - the first steel sailing ship to be built in the USA. The article reported that she was 330ft overall, of 45ft beam, and was to carry 4,500 dwt in cargo. “The vessel is rigged as a four-masted ship ... and will spread about 13, 000 yards of canvas," the Scientific American reported. "In the early spring she will be fitted for sea and will load at pier 19, East River, New York, for San Francisco, Cal.”

Westward round the Horn, then, against the prevailing wind; a baptism of fire.  But this was an important ship. Eugene Chamberlain, the USA’s Commissioner of Navigation, clearly thought so. Patricia M. Higgins, in her Hidden History of Midcoast Maine, quotes him as saying that the Dirigo’s construction represented “the beginning of a new industry in this country. The ship of the future is to be of steel, and the introduction of that material is necessary to the maintenance of, for foreign trade, a fleet of large sailing vessels.” But neither the Scientific American nor, probably, Chamberlain fully grasped that the iron or steel-hulled sailing ship, or windjammer, was not a new era for sail. It was its brilliant apotheosis.

The windjammer era was brief. Today we celebrate them as “tall ships”, and those still at sea are usually training vessels. In their heyday, they were hard ships on which to sail. Usually four-masted barques with steel hulls, their era started sometime in the late 19th century. They are not to be confused with the clippers, which were smaller but carried far bigger crews, enabling them to be driven hard in poor weather, and were therefore much faster; their time was already really over when the Dirigo was launched.  The windjammer’s purpose was not to fly to Tilbury with the first of the year’s tea. It was to carry non-perishable bulk cargo such as coal, grain and nitrates at lower cost than the new steamships, by using the prevailing winds, and taking as long as they needed on the journey. When the windjammer era began, steamers still needed frequent stops for water and bunkering, and were often quite slow.

By the 1920s, much had changed – and in time the motorship appeared, cleaner, more economical and easier to run. The windjammers fought harder and harder to compete; costs were slashed, crews were small – sometimes almost too small to work the vessel – and the conditions on board were basic. Yet they represented the last flowering of a technology that had evolved from the time humans had gone to sea. They were also romantic; and they have left their mark on literature as no containership will ever do.

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The Dirigo played its part in this. In March 1911 Jack London and his second wife, Charmian Kitteredge London, boarded her in Baltimore, bound westward round the Horn to Seattle. The voyage would provide the backdrop for for one of London’s last novels. Published in 1914, only two years before his death, The Mutiny of the Elsinore isn’t his most famous book and it’s not seen as his best. It is still memorable.

The book’s plot (without spoilers) is as follows: It is March 1913 and a successful but world-weary young playwright, John Pathurst, seeks refreshment and inspiration by going round the Horn as a passenger on a windjammer from Baltimore to Seattle. He knows the Elsinore may take months over the voyage, but that’s fine. He has paid highly for his passage, and is accompanied by his manservant; he intends to be comfortable. But the rounding of the Horn is drawn-out and dangerous, and the ship is nearly lost. Moreover the regime aboard the Elsinore is harsh, and the crew are a bunch of no-good lowlifes who will eventually mutiny against it. Pathurst’s luxury passage will turn into a nightmare. The long voyage south-east towards West Africa and then south-west to the Horn is used to build up character and tension, so that by the time the Elsinore gets stuck in westerlies off the Horn, you know there’s a disaster waiting to happen.

It helps that London does a fair job of evoking what life in a windjammer must have been like. He can do this because this book was drawn, at least in part, from life.  London and Kitteredge boarded in Baltimore very much as Pathurst does in the book, and Kitteredge later described the voyage in a memoir of London that she published a few years after his death. The Elsinore is clearly the Dirigo and the novel includes a number of incidents that that are in Kitteredge’s account. Most are trivial (London/Pathurst’s fox terrier, Possum; an attack of hives; the chickens in the hut amidships). One or two are major. For example, in the novel, the captain dies on passage off the Horn. On the Londons’ real voyage he did fall sick there, and died shortly after the ship reached Seattle.The captain and mate in the book also seem to match those of the Dirigo. The captain, according to Kitteredge, was: “The fast disappearing type of lean New England aristocrat, who always presented himself on deck immaculately attired... The calm kingliness of his character was in cool contrast to that of the Mate, Fred Mortimer, hot-hearted, determined ... driver of a crew that was composed ...of landlubbers and weaklings.”

Aboard the C.B. Pedersen (State Library of Victoria)

London takes these two officers and exaggerates their characteristics, and those of the crew too. As the latter board in Baltimore: “ ...I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone into the forecastle. These were the worse for liquor, and a more wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.”  And later: “I ...wondered where such a mass of human wreckage could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without exception they were under-sized.”

Long before the mutiny of the title, life on the Elsinore becomes a struggle of two worlds – the gracious, comfortable world of the officers and crew in the poop, dining pleasantly every night, the Mate, Pike (as he is called in the novel), playing classical gramophone records with enthusiasm; and the forecastle, full of degenerate wretches that Pike controls with an iron fist and great savagery. Bit by bit the Elsinore seems to appear a microcosm of a divided, unfair society. Is this what Jack London was trying to say in this book?

Or is there something more sinister being said? Pathurst is the narrator, and his sense of superiority expresses itself in a belief that the Captain and the Mate are superior beings, and the crew scum. His class is thus destined to dominate. Moreover a number of the crew meet with nasty ends even before the mutiny. During it, two die quite horribly, torn apart by giant albatrosses: “A great screeching and squawking arose from the winged things of prey as they strove for the living meat. And yet, somehow, I was not very profoundly shocked. These were the men whom I had seen eviscerate [a] shark and toss it overboard, and shout with joy as they watched it devoured alive by its brethren. They had played a violent, cruel game with the things of life, and the things of life now played upon them the same violent, cruel game.”

Oh dear. Men born to rule over their inferiors, and nature red in tooth and claw. It’s the narrator’s voice, but London seems to use it with great enthusiasm (with references to the captain as a Samurai warrior, and occasional references to Nietzche). It’s just a little too genuine, and Pathurst’s views are not discredited by the way the book ends. Jack London was a socialist all his life, but was there also a whiff of fascism about him?

George Orwell thought so. Writing in 1940 about an earlier London book, The Iron Heel, he commented that London was “temperamentally ...very different from the majority of Marxists. With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in ‘natural aristocracy’, his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain." In The Mutiny of the Elsinore, we see this; it’s also evident in his earlier and greater book, The Sea Wolf. However, Orwell didn’t say London was a fascist. Rather, he thought these traits made London better able to understand the nature of the ruling class, and that far from espousing fascism, he understood its dangers before it existed (The Iron Heel, published in 1908, describes a fascistic dystopia). It is more likely that London is using Pathurst to warn how the ruling class really think. Still, the earliest Nazis appealed to a certain type on the left as well as the right. Reading The Mutiny of the Elsinore, you do wonder whether, had London lived into the Fascist era, he might have been swept up in it all.

That apart, The Mutiny of the Elsinore is quite a read. The description of the ship as it fights to round the Horn is also excellent, bringing forth a picture of a great steel ship, its sides streaked with rust, burdened by a cargo of thousands of tons of coal, wallowing in the huge seas as the sun comes and goes behind fast-moving, hostile clouds. The crew are also well-drawn. Now and then they do get close to caricature, but most work well. In particular, there is a frail man with a twisted spine who radiates malevolence; he is also very well-read, and it is easy to see where his hatred comes from as he compares Pathurst’s luck with his own. Several of the crew are clearly “bad lots” and there is a reign of terror in the forecastle, from which the officers mostly dissociate themselves. By the time the ship reaches the Le Maire (or Lemaire) Strait at the southern extremity of Argentina, several of the crew have gone mad, or killed themselves or someone else.

Perhaps London exaggerates somewhat (he’s writing a novel, after all). But life on a windjammer was indeed hard. To compete with steam, they sailed on small margins; the crew were paid little, the food was bad and the ships were sometimes worked with too few men. London does not exaggerate the difficulty of rounding the Horn from the Atlantic side, either. Now and then a skipper just gave up, turned round and sailed east around the world instead.  The Mutiny of the Elsinore is a striking account of how it must have been. Maybe it says how London saw his fellow-man. Maybe it doesn’t. In any case, London is not the only person whose attitudes now look suspect because of events they pre-dated, and would not have condoned.  The Mutiny of the Elsinore might not be the greatest book that London wrote, but it is enthralling nonetheless. It is also a vibrant picture of a world that has passed.

*

That world would endure a little longer. On January 19 1928, 17 years after London’s voyage, two four-masted barques loaded with grain left Port Lincoln in South Australia, bound for Falmouth. One was the Beatrice, an elderly 2,000-ton iron ship built on the Clyde in 1881, and now owned in Sweden. The other was the steel barque Herzogin [Duchess] Cecilie, built in Germany in 1902, and now Finnish-owned – by the world’s largest remaining sailship operator, Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn in the Åland Islands. The two skippers knew each other, and both intended to reach Falmouth first. There they would await orders as to where they would discharge their cargos.

Herzogin Cecilie (Allan C. Green/State Library of Victoria)

On board the Finnish ship was the Australian writer and seaman, Alan Villiers. At the time he was only 24 (though he had already written two books). He had shipped on the Herzogin Cecilie as an able seaman, but it was understood that he would write of the voyage.  Falmouth for Orders, his account of the voyage, was the result. It is an odd book, part travelogue, partly an account of the then state of sail.

The post-war slump of 1921 had caused freight rates to collapse. By 1927, according to Villiers, there were about 30 such ships remaining, of which perhaps 15 were actively trading. Those that were, were mostly either German vessels carrying nitrates around the Horn from Chile to Germany; or they were Erikson’s, working the grain trade. They would sail, usually in ballast, from Europe around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, load in South Australia and return either the same way or eastward round the Horn. The skipper might not decide which way round to go until he was at sea.

Villiers describes the trade, and the fates of individual ships, in great detail. It is all a bit geeky, and the book would have been the better with less of it. When he writes of the voyage itself, he is more interesting. There’s a charming glimpse of life in Port Lincoln, where both ships host parties for the locals on board:  “The [Herzogin Cecilie’s] own orchestra, in the shape of four of her boys supplied the music, and ...a real Scandinavian supper was provided. ...The presence of two uninvited guests, in the shape of two rats who made their presence known in the middle of a waltz, added considerably both to the noise and the excitement.”  No-one seems to take much notice of a young woman who visits the ships in port, and keeps stating her determination to sail in a ship like this. On the second day out she appears on deck, dressed as a boy, having got a fisherman to bring her to the ship by pretending to be a seaman who’s been on a bender. She hides in the hold and emerges only when she thinks the ship will no longer want to put about. “It was Petrén who saw her first,” writes Villiers. “He got such a shock that he nearly fell out of the jigger rigging.” The woman was not welcome on board, but became so as the voyage progressed, making herself useful and minding her behaviour. Villiers does not give her name, at least in this book, but it seems to have been Jeanne Day or Jennie Day (another source says Jean Jeinnie). She was 23 and from Adelaide, where she had apparently been a teacher in the Methodist Ladies’ College. She stays with the ship to England, where she is said to have died only a few years ago.

The captain, reconciled to his stowaway, decides on an eastward passage; he will go round the Horn. The Beatrice  fades from sight (in fact, she has gone via the Cape). The Cecilie’s progress is slow at first; some on board blame this on the presence of a woman on board. But eventually they pass south of New Zealand, and the pace picks up.  The same is true of the story, but only up to a point. Villiers diverts too often into discussions of the dying industry, and there are long lists of ships and their voyages. His description of the passage across the Southern Ocean, one of the most challenging places on earth, is not really resonant, although the ship has gone a very long way south and there is a smell of ice in the air. Rounding the Horn seems easy enough, though it can never really have been (it is true that westbound ships had it much worse).

The later chapters are better. The ship is caught in the Doldrums and does not move for days. Villiers and others take the opportunity to circle the ship in a launch, and he is struck by its beauty; he takes a photograph, which shows the Herzogin Cecilie perfectly reflected in the flat calm. Later, a mystery ship is spotted that could be the Beatrice; overhauled, the turns out to be the Swedish-owned C.B. Pedersen, built in Italy in 1891. They exchange visits, complete with bands and feasting, and a good time is had by all. The meeting is a major event for the crew of both ships, for it is not unusual for a windjammer to sail from South Australia to Falmouth or Queenstown without seeing another ship, or land; on this voyage the Cecilie had sighted land just once, a brief glimpse of Staten Island off the southernmost tip of Argentina.

Then on towards England, and the Cecilie runs into a bad North Atlantic storm:

At a little after 4 o’clock in the morning ...we had the most vivid thunderstorm ...With appalling suddenness the sky seemed to burst into a sheet of flame that lit up the whole ocean and instantly dispelled what there has been of fog; there was a roar as if all the stars ..had been throwing gelignite at each other ... The thunder boomed and crashed and roared, until we feared that ...there wouldn’t be any sky left; the lightning flashed and crackled and burst, lighting up the blackness of the sea and the gleaming wet of the driving ship’s decks with strange effect. ...Queer blue lights danced about the steel rigging and on all the steel yardarms. ...And we had to lay aloft and set the royals fast in the midst of those blue lights.

But the Herzogin Cecilie makes Falmouth in 96 days – a fast voyage even for her. She has beaten the Beatrice, which has had a dreadful voyage, by many days.

Although parts of this book read well, others don’t. The lists of long-dead ships and voyages were more important at the time, but even then they must have dragged for some readers. Also, there is a slight Boy’s Own air to some of the writing; splendid tanned seamen, adventure, beautiful ships. It is all just a little too jolly given that conditions on these ships were hard, and could also be very dangerous. Villiers was well aware of the danger; at one point he lists some of the accidents and deaths that have occurred off the Horn. Yet somehow the book’s tone does not convey the hazards and hardship the way it might have done. Villiers was to become a distinguished figure, and would go on writing about the sea for another half-century. I remember being enthralled, as a young boy, by his account of the Battle of Trafalgar. He also wrote more about the last days of sail, and took wonderful photographs of this voyage and others (many now held by the National Maritime Museum, which has exhibited them). Falmouth for Orders is probably not his best book. But for those who love ships and the sea, there is much to enjoy.

*

The Herzogin Cecilie continued to trade. In April 1936, after an even faster passage, she again arrived off Falmouth, and was ordered to Ipswich. On her way she ran aground off South Devon; despite attempts to salvage her, she eventually sank off the mouth of the Kingsbridge Estuary. She lay in shallow water and one could (and still can) swim over and view the wreck. Two years later the 18-year-old Eric Newby did just that.

Herzogin Cecilie aground off Devon, April 1936 (State Library of Queensland)

In 1938 he was a bored 18-year-old working in a London advertising agency. When it lost an account, many of his colleagues were sacked. To his disgust, he wasn’t. Apparently he was not important enough to sack. After the holiday on which he swam over the Cecilie, he left anyway and signed on as an apprentice on the windjammer Moshulu for a round-the-world voyage. The Last Grain Race is the story of that voyage. Published nearly 20 years later, it was the first book from one of the best-loved of British travel writers.

In 1934, two years before the Herzogin Cecilie ran aground, her owner, Gustaf Erikson, had bought the 30-year-old Moshulu, one of the largest and best windjammers left afloat. He paid just $12,000. It was not much. But freight rates were still collapsing, especially in the grain trade, for there was a slump in wheat prices in the 1930s. Erikson must have thought hard about this, even at the price. But he was not the sort of man who leaves a record of his thoughts.  In any case, Newby joined her at Belfast in September 1938. As usual, she would sail in ballast via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean to South Australia, where she would load several thousand tons of grain; then she would return via the Southern Ocean and around the Horn. The journey would take from September until the following summer. Moreover Newby was indentured; his father had paid £50, no small sum in 1938, and would forfeit it if Newby failed to discharge the terms of his apprenticeship. If he was killed, his father would of course get it back. This would look likely on several occasions.

Boarding at Belfast (with a Louis Vuitton trunk), Newby is sent straight up the rigging, in unsuitable shoes. It is a good move because he does not seem to have felt such terror again. He will have more trouble in the forecastle, where he is the only Englishman in a bunch of a very hardboiled Scandinavians. He is not popular. Eventually he finds a turd in his cigarette-tin. He takes on the perpetrator in a fist-fight; it is a close contest but Newby prevails, hurting his opponent badly, only to be told later that the turd has actually been left by someone else. But that isn’t the point.

Life in the forecastle would be rough anyway. In bad weather the water sloshes around inside and nothing is ever dry. Work is hard, a constant battle against changing winds, decaying ropes and rust. In the high (e.g. low) latitudes of the Southern Ocean, bound for the Horn, they are thrust into a force 10 gale that lasts for days. On one occasion Newby is thrown from the rigging and is lucky to be caught in a cradle of ropes some five feet down. Yet throughout this he never loses his sense of adventure, or his eye for the beauty. You do need patience with this book now and then. It’s full of Swedish and Finnish jargon. There is also a great mass of top-gallants, buntlines, clewlines, crojacks and more. But it is worth it. The Last Grain Race is an achievement, and is a reminder that the greatest travel books transport us across more than one dimension. To read this book is to be dumped right in the middle of a world that is gone forever.

It would vanish sooner than Newby imagined. Soon after the Moshulu returned to Belfast, the war broke out and the windjammer grain trade – the last in which they were profitable – came to an end. It never really re-started after the war, and Erikson himself died in 1947. The ships too have gone. The Herzogin Cecilie’s fate we know. Dirigo is not far from her; she was stopped by a German submarine in 1917 while on passage from New York to Le Havre, and sunk with explosives six miles south-west of the Eddystone Rock lighthouse (the position of the wreck is known). The Beatrice was broken up in Stavanger in 1932, not long after her hard-lost race with the Cecilie.

The C.B. Pedersen (State Library of Victoria)

The C.B. Pedersen, the ship Villiers encountered in mid-Atlantic, survived until April 1937. In that month, about 600 miles southwest of the Azores, she collided with a Scottish steamer, the Chagres.  Everyone aboard the C.B. Pedersen was saved, though the skipper of the Chagres died of a heart attack. The Sydney Morning Herald  for April 27 reported her loss and recalled that on her last voyage to Australia, she had been unable to find a cargo; she had loaded passengers instead and made for Europe via the Torres Strait, a difficult passage for a windjammer. The voyage, says the Herald, had been “enlivened by several exciting incidents. Three days after the vessel put to sea a girl stowaway was found on board, and later, one of the apprentices in the crew deserted by fitting an outrigger to the captain's wooden bath, and sailing it to an island – a voyage which occupied six days.” Further details are lacking.

Newby’s ship, however, has survived. The Moshulu was dismasted during the war and spent most of the next 30 years as a floating grain store. Yet for her, at least, it was not the end. Fitted with dummy masts and rigging, she was brought to Philadelphia, where today she is a floating restaurant. The owners clearly respect the ship’s history, which is recounted in some detail on the restaurant’s website.

The food seems to have improved. That served in the forecastle, according to Newby, was terrible. Early in the voyage they are served something very pungent that Newby thinks is fried herring. “Ees not fish,” says Newby’s enemy, Sedelquist. “Ees bacon, smelly like English girl.” It is, says Newby, “ghastly and apparently putrefying”. He throws it overboard. Later he learns never to waste even the worst food and to eat what he can get. Were he to visit the Moshulu today, he would be offered “Herb-rubbed Italian-style pork sandwich, Ciabatta Roll, Provolone, Pickled Eggplant & Hot Pepper Relish; House Cut Fries”. One wonders what Newby (or Sedelquist) would have thought of that.

But if dining on the Moshulu is a little different now, the books, at least, give a flavour of the past.  The Elsinore (or Dirigo) fighting for her life off the Horn. Sunsets of bright yellow as the light slants under dark grey clouds across a rough sea; great albatrosses swooping around the ship; the warmth as she turns north after rounding the Horn. Seas of blue, green and white washing across the deck of a rolling ship, smashing men sideways and into the scuppers or, if they are unlucky, over the side. A thunderstorm, with electric light flashing across the yards. Or a flat calm, the ship rolling a little on an oily swell, its silhouette perfectly mirrored in the surface of the sea.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.