‘From Bermuda’s reefs; from edges
Of sunken ledges,
In some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama and the dashing,
Silver flashing
Surges of San Salvador.’
In August of our first summer afloat, we went for a month’s cruise on
the Essex coast. We had various mishaps of the kind which arrive out
of the blue and remind the yachtsman that, however long his
experience, he is still a learner.
One day, beating down the Colne in a fresh wind and a buffeting short
sea, I made an error of judgment by sailing between two anchored
barges where there was not enough room to handle the _Ark Royal_.
Finding myself in difficulties, I let go the anchor, but we dragged on
to one of the barges and bumped against her as gently as our best
fendoffs would let us. Our anchor had fouled the other barge’s cable,
and it took some time to clear it, even with the help of the friendly
skipper of the barge we had bumped.
[Illustration: THE RIVER ORWELL]
‘Aren’t that the little ould _Will Arding_, sir?’ he said, when we
were ready to drop astern and let go.
‘Yes.’
‘I reckoned that was she as soon as I seed ’er, and ain’t she smart
with her enamel and all? But I’d a knaowed she anywhere. Scores and
scores o’ times she’s laid alongside o’ we, that she hev!’
No damage was done except to my feelings. But the barge skipper had
the delicacy to say that the _Ark Royal_ had meant to rub noses with
an old friend, and had dragged alongside on purpose.
At Pin Mill Louisa had the panic of her life. We were all on shore
except Louisa, and a shift of wind blew the stern of the anchored _Ark
Royal_ on to the mud. As the tide fell the barge’s bows sank lower and
lower until, to Louisa’s horror, water began to rise over the kitchen
floor. Seeing the water rise continually, she naturally thought the
vessel had sprung a leak and was going to sink. Her first idea was to
lift the plug to let the water out--a thing she had seen me do when
the ship was high and dry. But luckily she could not get at it. With
some presence of mind she then went on deck and hailed a neighbouring
barge, whose skipper and mate came off and helped her to bail out her
kitchen, and explained to her that as a barge is flat-bottomed the
pumps can never empty her completely, and a very thin layer of water
spread over such a large surface will seem considerable when it runs
to one end.
Life moves slowly in Pin Mill. If going by steamer to Ipswich or
Harwich one is expected to be seated in the ferry-boat, which goes out
to meet the steamer, at least ten minutes before she starts. When we
went to Ipswich one day the ferry-man, having stowed us and the other
passengers in the boat, left us and returned fifty yards up the hard
to resume varnishing a boat. When we did start it was certainly five
minutes earlier than necessary, and we had not got more than half-way
out when I saw a look of annoyance come into the ferry-man’s face.
‘There yaou are,’ he said angrily, jerking his hand towards some
figures on the shore; ‘them people tould me they wanted to go to
Ipswich, and they came daown half an hour agoo, and they ’adn’t got
nawthen to do, only wait, and they goo off for a walk or suthen!’
Another day the children’s gramophone nearly caused a fire on board to
be more serious than it need have been, for it prevented us from
hearing the cries for help which Louisa uttered while she struggled
with an outbreak in the forecastle. We had bought a new cooking-stove
with a patent automatic oil feed. We ought to have understood when
buying it that it would be unsuitable because it had to be kept
upright. The first time it was used while we were under way was one
day in Harwich Harbour. We had been running, and had just hauled our
wind to stand up the Orwell. Luncheon was almost ready. The _Ark
Royal_ was heeling a little to a fine topsail breeze, and was spanking
along to a selection from the ‘Mikado,’ when suddenly I saw some smoke
issuing from the forehatch. I sent one of the boys forward to see what
was happening, and he bellowed back that the forecastle was on fire.
The Mate took the wheel, and I rushed forward in time to see Louisa,
like a pantomime demon, pop up through the forehatch in a cloud of
smoke. We attacked the fire from aft, and a few buckets of water and
some damp sacking put it out.
In September we returned to Newcliff, went into our old berth in the
creek, and once more spent Christmas on board.
Soon afterwards the Mate was taken mysteriously ill. The doctor asked
for another opinion, and a specialist came from London. But for the
fact of our isolation on board ship the diagnosis would instantly have
been typhoid. But the next two days, we were told, would settle the
question.
It was typhoid.
The ship now became a hospital, with a special bed sent down from
London and two nurses. The saloon was emptied of everything save what
the nurses wanted, and the long struggle began.
It was like all other serious illnesses in any other home--the
children sent away, the pitiful lies that affection devises, the
assumed bravery, the broken nights, the anxious talks with the nurses
or doctor, and (the background of it all) the fever chart. I wonder
whether any skipper of a ship ever watched his positions on a chart
with such feelings as I had then.
The crisis came and passed, but ‘When will she be out of danger?’ was
asked secretly for many days before a confident answer came. How far
these good nurses perjured themselves I do not know. Often they made
me go to London, but the journey home was torture. Once, returning in
the dark, I saw from the train that there was no light in the saloon.
The Mate, as it turned out, was only sleeping. But afterwards a light
was always placed on deck to show me that all was well.
At last the children were allowed to come and look fearfully through
the windows, and later to speak a few words through them. And then
step by step the Mate grew stronger until at last she walked on deck,
and we dressed the ship in her honour, and she went away on a long
convalescence.
When she came back well and strong I had a surprise for her. She had
always been rather afraid of the great fifty-foot sprit which used to
sway in a heavy threatening way over our heads when the barge rolled
in a cross sea. I had therefore sold the mainsail, sprit, topsail, and
mizzen, bought a large yacht’s mainsail second-hand, and had it made
into a new mainsail and topsail. I had also bought an eight tonner’s
mainsail, which I rigged as a larger mizzen. The whole transaction
from first to last cost about eight pounds.
What we really needed most was a motor-launch to give the barge
steerage way in calms, to help her up creeks, or for going on shore.
With a slow large craft it generally happens that one has to anchor a
long way off the landing-place, because the smaller craft are always
near the hard; and in bad weather this means heavy work. We bought a
book on internal combustion engines, but it did not prevent us from
buying an engine that did not generally achieve internal combustion.
When the next August holidays came we were delayed in starting for our
usual cruise because the motor-boat had not been delivered. We stood
over her till she was ready, and then went for a trial trip, during
which she emitted the most distressing noises we had ever heard.
However, we could wait no longer, and took her in tow behind the _Ark
Royal_.
The first night of the cruise we lay off Southend. The weather, which
had been bad, became worse; the wind backed with vicious determination
at low water; and by ten o’clock it was blowing a gale. Southend is an
exposed anchorage, and we foresaw that we should have some anxious
hours as the tide rose. We were close to the pier, where there were
five other barges, whose anchors lay round about us sticking up out
of the hard sand, and promising us destruction if we should sit on one
of them.
We laid out another anchor, forcing it well into the sand, and by
eleven o’clock the _Ark Royal_ was afloat. It was a wild night indeed;
the barge wallowed, and the motor-boat jerked about on the rollers,
snatched and snubbed at her painter, while the spray was cut off from
the tops of the waves as though by a knife and flung into her.
I was on deck all night. The gale was blowing its worst about two
o’clock in the morning at high water. I could have sworn that the
other barges had driven nearer to the _Ark Royal_, so close did their
flickering lights seem to us, till I checked our position by the marks
I had taken and by the anchor buoys of the barges, and made sure that
none of us was dragging. On board each of the barges I could discern a
dim watching figure. What an incredible waste of riven water as I
looked over the plunging bows of the _Ark Royal_! The sea was like a
snow-drift, and across this bleak waste the wind roared unresisted and
tossed the spray even on to the deck of the _Ark Royal_. I was much
occupied with the thought of a humiliating wreck on a lee shore, as I
had little hope of being able to claw off the land if we did begin to
drive. And yet I do not think there was a moment when I would have
admitted that I had chosen a wrong way of living to be here with my
family instead of in a house on the land. Every moment was enriched
by an exhilaration that conquered other feelings, a kind of zest in
defiance.
The wind is a grand enemy. He gives you his warnings fairly, and those
who are not careless have generally time to cut and run if they are
only coasting. In this storm, for instance, no one could have mistaken
the signs. The glass had fallen rapidly, and a ‘mizzle’ of rain had
been followed by a downpour; and all the time the wind had been flying
round against the sun. The glass fell still more during the first four
hours of the gale, then it suddenly leaped upwards, and the wind
moderated or ‘sobbed,’ as the fishermen say, only to be followed by a
harder blow than ever--a blow in which the squalls moved at over sixty
miles an hour and followed one another in rapid succession, showing
that the gale was still young.
There is nothing that relates the dweller at home so intimately to the
business of the wider waters as to lie at the mouth of a great
estuary. Here were steamers from the ends of the world slogging across
the snowdrift, their masthead lights moving steadily like major
planets across the sky. Some, perhaps, had passed through the very
region in which this storm had been born. No yachtsman who studies the
weather can think of a gale as an accident of the British Isles; he
sees in imagination a tiny cyclone created as a whirlwind somewhere,
it may be, in six to eight degrees north latitude. In the desert of
the Atlantic, in calm and heat, with the sun nearly overhead, a tiny
column of air ascends and cooler air rushes in to replace it. The
cyclone is born. Perhaps it is not a hundred yards across, but as it
goes revolving on its journey of thousands of miles it draws in the
air all round it as a snowball gathers snow. Westward and
north-westward it travels to the West Indies, turning on its axis
against the hands of a watch, unlike the cyclone born south of the
equator, which revolves the other way. The wind does not blow
accurately around the centre, but curves inwards spirally, so that in
the northern hemisphere, when you stand face to wind, the centre of
the storm is always from eight to twelve points to the right.
When once you understand this rotatory and spiral movement of the wind
you cannot listen to the roar of a gale without thinking of
ocean-going sailing ships fleeing from the deadly centre. You think of
the cyclone touching the West Indies: one rim on the islands, the
palm-trees staggering at the assault; the other rim on the open ocean,
a ship laid over by the blast, the crew, clinging to the yards,
fighting to get the maddened canvas under control before it is too
late. The master of that ship had had the warning of the swell which
is the gentle forerunner of the storm, but perhaps he carried on too
long. Now, under heavily reefed canvas, or perhaps under bare poles,
he races from the deadly centre of the storm.
From the West Indies the storm curves to the northward and
north-eastward, still growing in size, till it may have a diameter of
even a thousand miles. Along the Gulf Stream it comes, conveying
within its frame that mysterious core which no one in a sailing ship
ever wishes to see--a central patch, it is said, of unnatural calm
surrounded by squalls from every point of the compass, a patch where
the sea is piled up into a pyramid, untrue, treacherous, and
overwhelming. The cyclone bursts later into that tract of dripping fog
where the Gulf Stream meets her frigid sister from the north; and when
it reaches us in England it is sometimes huge and harmless, but
sometimes it has stored its strength and blares across a comparatively
narrow belt with the power of a hurricane. And it comes in various
guises, in pale bright skies, or wreathed in films of scud, or in
rolling hard-edged clouds of inky darkness, or behind a tormented veil
of rain.
About three o’clock in the morning I went below to drink some tea and
to smoke. When I returned the motor-boat was gone. The frayed painter,
hanging from the stern of the _Ark Royal_, told me what had happened.
Our brand-new uninsured motor-boat, which we never ought to have
bought! I knew that if she had reached the stone-faced seawall or one
of the breakwaters there was little hope for her.
As the tide fell I went off in the dinghy in search of her.
Fortunately, I found her in the hands of two men from the gasworks,
who had seen her coming ashore and had waded out to meet her. They had
pushed her clear of a breakwater, and were standing in the rollers
holding her head to sea at the foot of the sea-wall.
As the tide fell farther we walked her out gradually to the _Ark
Royal_, and I settled the question of salvage by paying a couple of
pounds. Even Cockney Smith could not have accused the gas-workers of a
‘salvage job’ in the circumstances, though no doubt he would have
pointed out that they were gas-workers and not sailormen.
Our cruise of that summer was ordered by the necessity of sailing
continually from one port where there was a motor engineer to another
port where there was another engineer. The children used to take the
metal seals off the petrol cans and hang them on the engine as medals,
in numbers according to the merit of its performance. If the engine
began to knock, for instance, a medal would be forfeited--to be
restored if the knocking stopped. They enjoyed the vagaries of the
engine; and loved it in secret even when it stopped work altogether
and had lost all its decorations. They christened the motor-boat
_Perhaps_.