A sailor is born, not made. And by "sailor" is meant, not the average
efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the forecastle of
deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric compounded of wood
and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to obey his will on the
surface of the sea. Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-
boat sailor is the real sailor. He knows--he must know--how to make the
wind carry his craft from one given point to another given point. He
must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and
day and night signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be
sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which
differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built and rigged. He
must know how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to
fill her on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to
fall off too far.
The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things. And he
doesn't. He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks, washes paint,
and chips iron-rust. He knows nothing, and cares less. Put him in a
small boat and he is helpless. He will cut an even better figure on the
hurricane deck of a horse.
I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first encountered one
of these strange beings. He was a runaway English sailor. I was a lad
of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot, centre-board skiff which I
had taught myself to sail. I sat at his feet as at the feet of a god,
while he discoursed of strange lands and peoples, deeds of violence, and
hair-raising gales at sea. Then, one day, I took him for a sail. With
all the trepidation of the veriest little amateur, I hoisted sail and got
under way. Here was a man, looking on critically, I was sure, who knew
more in one second about boats and the water than I could ever know.
After an interval, in which I exceeded myself, he took the tiller and the
sheet. I sat on the little thwart amidships, open-mouthed, prepared to
learn what real sailing was. My mouth remained open, for I learned what
a real sailor was in a small boat. He couldn't trim the sheet to save
himself, he nearly capsized several times in squalls, and, once again, by
blunderingly jibing over; he didn't know what a centre-board was for, nor
did he know that in running a boat before the wind one must sit in the
middle instead of on the side; and finally, when we came back to the
wharf, he ran the skiff in full tilt, shattering her nose and carrying
away the mast-step. And yet he was a really truly sailor fresh from the
vasty deep.
Which points my moral. A man can sail in the forecastles of big ships
all his life and never know what real sailing is. From the time I was
twelve, I listened to the lure of the sea. When I was fifteen I was
captain and owner of an oyster-pirate sloop. By the time I was sixteen I
was sailing in scow-schooners, fishing salmon with the Greeks up the
Sacramento River, and serving as sailor on the Fish Patrol. And I was a
good sailor, too, though all my cruising had been on San Francisco Bay
and the rivers tributary to it. I had never been on the ocean in my
life.
Then, the month I was seventeen, I signed before the mast as an able
seaman on a three-top-mast schooner bound on a seven-months' cruise
across the Pacific and back again. As my shipmates promptly informed me,
I had had my nerve with me to sign on as able seaman. Yet behold, I
_was_ an able seaman. I had graduated from the right school. It took no
more than minutes to learn the names and uses of the few new ropes. It
was simple. I did not do things blindly. As a small-boat sailor I had
learned to reason out and know the _why_ of everything. It is true, I
had to learn how to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but
when it came to steering "full-and-by" and "close-and-by," I could beat
the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had always
sailed. Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass around and back
again. And there was little else to learn during that seven-months'
cruise, except fancy rope-sailorising, such as the more complicated
lanyard knots and the making of various kinds of sennit and rope-mats.
The point of all of which is that it is by means of small-boat sailing
that the real sailor is best schooled.
And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the sea,
never in all his life can he get away from the sea again. The salt of it
is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the sea will call to him
until he dies. Of late years, I have found easier ways of earning a
living. I have quit the forecastle for keeps, but always I come back to
the sea. In my case it is usually San Francisco Bay, than which no
lustier, tougher, sheet of water can be found for small-boat sailing.
It really blows on San Francisco Bay. During the winter, which is the
best cruising season, we have southeasters, southwesters, and occasional
howling northers. Throughout the summer we have what we call the "sea-
breeze," an unfailing wind off the Pacific that on most afternoons in the
week blows what the Atlantic Coast yachtsmen would name a gale. They are
always surprised by the small spread of canvas our yachts carry. Some of
them, with schooners they have sailed around the Horn, have looked
proudly at their own lofty sticks and huge spreads, then patronisingly
and even pityingly at ours. Then, perchance, they have joined in a club
cruise from San Francisco to Mare Island. They found the morning run up
the Bay delightful. In the afternoon, when the brave west wind ramped
across San Pablo Bay and they faced it on the long beat home, things were
somewhat different. One by one, like a flight of swallows, our more
meagrely sparred and canvassed yachts went by, leaving them wallowing and
dead and shortening down in what they called a gale but which we called a
dandy sailing breeze. The next time they came out, we would notice their
sticks cut down, their booms shortened, and their after-leeches nearer
the luffs by whole cloths.
As for excitement, there is all the difference in the world between a
ship in trouble at sea, and a small boat in trouble on land-locked water.
Yet for genuine excitement and thrill, give me the small boat. Things
happen so quickly, and there are always so few to do the work--and hard
work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows. I have toiled all night, both
watches on deck, in a typhoon off the coast of Japan, and been less
exhausted than by two hours' work at reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and
heaving up two anchors on a lee shore in a screaming southeaster.
Hard work and excitement? Let the wind baffle and drop in a heavy tide-
way just as you are sailing your little sloop through a narrow
draw-bridge. Behold your sails, upon which you are depending, flap with
sudden emptiness, and then see the impish wind, with a haul of eight
points, fill your jib aback with a gusty puff. Around she goes, and
sweeps, not through the open draw, but broadside on against the solid
piles. Hear the roar of the tide, sucking through the trestle. And hear
and see your pretty, fresh-painted boat crash against the piles. Feel
her stout little hull give to the impact. See the rail actually pinch
in. Hear your canvas tearing, and see the black, square-ended timbers
thrusting holes through it. Smash! There goes your topmast stay, and
the topmast reels over drunkenly above you. There is a ripping and
crunching. If it continues, your starboard shrouds will be torn out.
Grab a rope--any rope--and take a turn around a pile. But the free end
of the rope is too short. You can't make it fast, and you hold on and
wildly yell for your one companion to get a turn with another and longer
rope. Hold on! You hold on till you are purple in the face, till it
seems your arms are dragging out of their sockets, till the blood bursts
from the ends of your fingers. But you hold, and your partner gets the
longer rope and makes it fast. You straighten up and look at your hands.
They are ruined. You can scarcely relax the crooks of the fingers. The
pain is sickening. But there is no time. The skiff, which is always
perverse, is pounding against the barnacles on the piles which threaten
to scrape its gunwale off. It's drop the peak! Down jib! Then you run
lines, and pull and haul and heave, and exchange unpleasant remarks with
the bridge-tender who is always willing to meet you more than half way in
such repartee. And finally, at the end of an hour, with aching back,
sweat-soaked shirt, and slaughtered hands, you are through and swinging
along on the placid, beneficent tide between narrow banks where the
cattle stand knee-deep and gaze wonderingly at you. Excitement! Work!
Can you beat it in a calm day on the deep sea?
I've tried it both ways. I remember labouring in a fourteen days' gale
off the coast of New Zealand. We were a tramp collier, rusty and
battered, with six thousand tons of coal in our hold. Life lines were
stretched fore and aft; and on our weather side, attached to smokestack
guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung there for the purpose of
breaking the force of the seas and so saving our mess-room doors. But
the doors were smashed and the mess-rooms washed out just the same. And
yet, out of it all, arose but the one feeling, namely, of monotony.
In contrast with the foregoing, about the liveliest eight days of my life
were spent in a small boat on the west coast of Korea. Never mind why I
was thus voyaging up the Yellow Sea during the month of February in below-
zero weather. The point is that I was in an open boat, a _sampan_, on a
rocky coast where there were no light-houses and where the tides ran from
thirty to sixty feet. My crew were Japanese fishermen. We did not speak
each other's language. Yet there was nothing monotonous about that trip.
Never shall I forget one particular cold bitter dawn, when, in the thick
of driving snow, we took in sail and dropped our small anchor. The wind
was howling out of the northwest, and we were on a lee shore. Ahead and
astern, all escape was cut off by rocky headlands, against whose bases
burst the unbroken seas. To windward a short distance, seen only between
the snow-squalls, was a low rocky reef. It was this that inadequately
protected us from the whole Yellow Sea that thundered in upon us.
The Japanese crawled under a communal rice mat and went to sleep. I
joined them, and for several hours we dozed fitfully. Then a sea deluged
us out with icy water, and we found several inches of snow on top the
mat. The reef to windward was disappearing under the rising tide, and
moment by moment the seas broke more strongly over the rocks. The
fishermen studied the shore anxiously. So did I, and with a sailor's
eye, though I could see little chance for a swimmer to gain that surf-
hammered line of rocks. I made signs toward the headlands on either
flank. The Japanese shook their heads. I indicated that dreadful lee
shore. Still they shook their heads and did nothing. My conclusion was
that they were paralysed by the hopelessness of the situation. Yet our
extremity increased with every minute, for the rising tide was robbing us
of the reef that served as buffer. It soon became a case of swamping at
our anchor. Seas were splashing on board in growing volume, and we baled
constantly. And still my fishermen crew eyed the surf-battered shore and
did nothing.
At last, after many narrow escapes from complete swamping, the fishermen
got into action. All hands tailed on to the anchor and hove it up.
For'ard, as the boat's head paid off, we set a patch of sail about the
size of a flour-sack. And we headed straight for shore. I unlaced my
shoes, unbottoned my great-coat and coat, and was ready to make a quick
partial strip a minute or so before we struck. But we didn't strike,
and, as we rushed in, I saw the beauty of the situation. Before us
opened a narrow channel, frilled at its mouth with breaking seas. Yet,
long before, when I had scanned the shore closely, there had been no such
channel. _I had forgotten the thirty-foot tide_. And it was for this
tide that the Japanese had so precariously waited. We ran the frill of
breakers, curved into a tiny sheltered bay where the water was scarcely
flawed by the gale, and landed on a beach where the salt sea of the last
tide lay frozen in long curving lines. And this was one gale of three in
the course of those eight days in the _sampan_. Would it have been
beaten on a ship? I fear me the ship would have gone aground on the
outlying reef and that its people would have been incontinently and
monotonously drowned.
There are enough surprises and mishaps in a three-days' cruise in a small
boat to supply a great ship on the ocean for a full year. I remember,
once, taking out on her trial trip a little thirty-footer I had just
bought. In six days we had two stiff blows, and, in addition, one proper
southwester and one rip-snorting southeaster. The slight intervals
between these blows were dead calms. Also, in the six days, we were
aground three times. Then, too, we tied up to the bank in the Sacramento
River, and, grounding by an accident on the steep slope on a falling
tide, nearly turned a side somersault down the bank. In a stark calm and
heavy tide in the Carquinez Straits, where anchors skate on the channel-
scoured bottom, we were sucked against a big dock and smashed and bumped
down a quarter of a mile of its length before we could get clear. Two
hours afterward, on San Pablo Bay, the wind was piping up and we were
reefing down. It is no fun to pick up a skiff adrift in a heavy sea and
gale. That was our next task, for our skiff, swamping, parted both
towing painters we had bent on. Before we recovered it we had nearly
killed ourselves with exhaustion, and we certainly had strained the sloop
in every part from keelson to truck. And to cap it all, coming into our
home port, beating up the narrowest part of the San Antonio Estuary, we
had a shave of inches from collision with a big ship in tow of a tug. I
have sailed the ocean in far larger craft a year at a time, in which
period occurred no such chapter of moving incident.
After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing.
Looking back, they prove to be punctuations of joy. At the time they try
your mettle and your vocabulary, and may make you so pessimistic as to
believe that God has a grudge against you--but afterward, ah, afterward,
with what pleasure you remember them and with what gusto do you relate
them to your brother skippers in the fellowhood of small-boat sailing!
A narrow, winding slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced with
gangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the waste
from the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on either side
mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid; a crazy, ramshackled,
ancient wharf; and at the end of the wharf a small, white-painted sloop.
Nothing romantic about it. No hint of adventure. A splendid pictorial
argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that
is what Cloudesley and I thought, that sombre, leaden morning as we
turned out to cook breakfast and wash decks. The latter was my stunt,
but one look at the dirty water overside and another at my fresh-painted
deck, deterred me. After breakfast, we started a game of chess. The
tide continued to fall, and we felt the sloop begin to list. We played
on until the chess men began to fall over. The list increased, and we
went on deck. Bow-line and stern-line were drawn taut. As we looked the
boat listed still farther with an abrupt jerk. The lines were now very
taut.
"As soon as her belly touches the bottom she will stop," I said.
Cloudesley sounded with a boat-hook along the outside.
"Seven feet of water," he announced. "The bank is almost up and down.
The first thing that touches will be her mast when she turns bottom up."
An ominous, minute snapping noise came from the stern-line. Even as we
looked, we saw a strand fray and part. Then we jumped. Scarcely had we
bent another line between the stern and the wharf, when the original line
parted. As we bent another line for'ard, the original one there crackled
and parted. After that, it was an inferno of work and excitement.
We ran more and more lines, and more and more lines continued to part,
and more and more the pretty boat went over on her side. We bent all our
spare lines; we unrove sheets and halyards; we used our two-inch hawser;
we fastened lines part way up the mast, half way up, and everywhere else.
We toiled and sweated and enounced our mutual and sincere conviction that
God's grudge still held against us. Country yokels came down on the
wharf and sniggered at us. When Cloudesley let a coil of rope slip down
the inclined deck into the vile slime and fished it out with seasick
countenance, the yokels sniggered louder and it was all I could do to
prevent him from climbing up on the wharf and committing murder.
By the time the sloop's deck was perpendicular, we had unbent the boom-
lift from below, made it fast to the wharf, and, with the other end fast
nearly to the mast-head, heaved it taut with block and tackle. The lift
was of steel wire. We were confident that it could stand the strain, but
we doubted the holding-power of the stays that held the mast.
The tide had two more hours to ebb (and it was the big run-out), which
meant that five hours must elapse ere the returning tide would give us a
chance to learn whether or not the sloop would rise to it and right
herself.
The bank was almost up and down, and at the bottom, directly beneath us,
the fast-ebbing tide left a pit of the vilest, illest-smelling, illest-
appearing muck to be seen in many a day's ride. Said Cloudesley to me
gazing down into it:
"I love you as a brother. I'd fight for you. I'd face roaring lions,
and sudden death by field and flood. But just the same, don't you fall
into that." He shuddered nauseously. "For if you do, I haven't the grit
to pull you out. I simply couldn't. You'd be awful. The best I could
do would be to take a boat-hook and shove you down out of sight."
We sat on the upper side-wall of the cabin, dangled our legs down the top
of the cabin, leaned our backs against the deck, and played chess until
the rising tide and the block and tackle on the boom-lift enabled us to
get her on a respectable keel again. Years afterward, down in the South
Seas, on the island of Ysabel, I was caught in a similar predicament. In
order to clean her copper, I had careened the _Snark_ broadside on to the
beach and outward. When the tide rose, she refused to rise. The water
crept in through the scuppers, mounted over the rail, and the level of
the ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck. We battened down the
engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed
perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight. We were all
sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled
madly for several hours. We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our
mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything
crackled including ourselves. We would spell off and lie down like dead
men, then get up and heave and crackle again. And in the end, our lower
rail five feet under water and the wavelets lapping the companion-way
combing, the sturdy little craft shivered and shook herself and pointed
her masts once more to the zenith.
There is never lack of exercise in small-boat sailing, and the hard work
is not only part of the fun of it, but it beats the doctors. San
Francisco Bay is no mill pond. It is a large and draughty and variegated
piece of water. I remember, one winter evening, trying to enter the
mouth of the Sacramento. There was a freshet on the river, the flood
tide from the bay had been beaten back into a strong ebb, and the lusty
west wind died down with the sun. It was just sunset, and with a fair to
middling breeze, dead aft, we stood still in the rapid current. We were
squarely in the mouth of the river; but there was no anchorage and we
drifted backward, faster and faster, and dropped anchor outside as the
last breath of wind left us. The night came on, beautiful and warm and
starry. My one companion cooked supper, while on deck I put everything
in shape Bristol fashion. When we turned in at nine o'clock the weather-
promise was excellent. (If I had carried a barometer I'd have known
better.) By two in the morning our shrouds were thrumming in a piping
breeze, and I got up and gave her more scope on her hawser. Inside
another hour there was no doubt that we were in for a southeaster.
It is not nice to leave a warm bed and get out of a bad anchorage in a
black blowy night, but we arose to the occasion, put in two reefs, and
started to heave up. The winch was old, and the strain of the jumping
head sea was too much for it. With the winch out of commission, it was
impossible to heave up by hand. We knew, because we tried it and
slaughtered our hands. Now a sailor hates to lose an anchor. It is a
matter of pride. Of course, we could have buoyed ours and slipped it.
Instead, however, I gave her still more hawser, veered her, and dropped
the second anchor.
There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the other of us
would be rolled out of our bunks. The increasing size of the seas told
us we were dragging, and when we struck the scoured channel we could tell
by the feel of it that our two anchors were fairly skating across. It
was a deep channel, the farther edge of it rising steeply like the wall
of a canyon, and when our anchors started up that wall they hit in and
held.
Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the seas
breaking on the solid shore astern, and so near was it that we shortened
the skiff's painter.
Daylight showed us that between the stern of the skiff and destruction
was no more than a score of feet. And how it did blow! There were
times, in the gusts, when the wind must have approached a velocity of
seventy or eighty miles an hour. But the anchors held, and so nobly that
our final anxiety was that the for'ard bitts would be jerked clean out of
the boat. All day the sloop alternately ducked her nose under and sat
down on her stern; and it was not till late afternoon that the storm
broke in one last and worst mad gust. For a full five minutes an
absolute dead calm prevailed, and then, with the suddenness of a
thunderclap, the wind snorted out of the southwest--a shift of eight
points and a boisterous gale. Another night of it was too much for us,
and we hove up by hand in a cross head-sea. It was not stiff work. It
was heart-breaking. And I know we were both near to crying from the hurt
and the exhaustion. And when we did get the first anchor up-and-down we
couldn't break it out. Between seas we snubbed her nose down to it, took
plenty of turns, and stood clear as she jumped. Almost everything
smashed and parted except the anchor-hold. The chocks were jerked out,
the rail torn off, and the very covering-board splintered, and still the
anchor held. At last, hoisting the reefed mainsail and slacking off a
few of the hard-won feet of the chain, we sailed the anchor out. It was
nip and tuck, though, and there were times when the boat was knocked down
flat. We repeated the manoeuvre with the remaining anchor, and in the
gathering darkness fled into the shelter of the river's mouth.
I was born so long ago that I grew up before the era of gasolene. As a
result, I am old-fashioned. I prefer a sail-boat to a motor-boat, and it
is my belief that boat-sailing is a finer, more difficult, and sturdier
art than running a motor. Gasolene engines are becoming fool-proof, and
while it is unfair to say that any fool can run an engine, it is fair to
say that almost any one can. Not so, when it comes to sailing a boat.
More skill, more intelligence, and a vast deal more training are
necessary. It is the finest training in the world for boy and youth and
man. If the boy is very small, equip him with a small, comfortable
skiff. He will do the rest. He won't need to be taught. Shortly he
will be setting a tiny leg-of-mutton and steering with an oar. Then he
will begin to talk keels and centreboards and want to take his blankets
out and stop aboard all night.
But don't be afraid for him. He is bound to run risks and encounter
accidents. Remember, there are accidents in the nursery as well as out
on the water. More boys have died from hot-house culture than have died
on boats large and small; and more boys have been made into strong and
reliant men by boat-sailing than by lawn-croquet and dancing-school.
And once a sailor, always a sailor. The savour of the salt never stales.
The sailor never grows so old that he does not care to go back for one
more wrestling bout with wind and wave. I know it of myself. I have
turned rancher, and live beyond sight of the sea. Yet I can stay away
from it only so long. After several months have passed, I begin to grow
restless. I find myself day-dreaming over incidents of the last cruise,
or wondering if the striped bass are running on Wingo Slough, or eagerly
reading the newspapers for reports of the first northern flights of
ducks. And then, suddenly, there is a hurried pack of suit-cases and
overhauling of gear, and we are off for Vallejo where the little _Roamer_
lies, waiting, always waiting, for the skiff to come alongside, for the
lighting of the fire in the galley-stove, for the pulling off of gaskets,
the swinging up of the mainsail, and the rat-tat-tat of the reef-points,
for the heaving short and the breaking out, and for the twirling of the
wheel as she fills away and heads up Bay or down.
JACK LONDON
On Board _Roamer_,
Sonoma Creek,
April 15, 1911