SEA FEVER “I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over”.
Robert Bickerstaff taught me this sea shanty by John Masefield. In this verse he is honouring those footloose ancient mariners for whom life must often have seemed like a card trick.
71 THE AGE OF DISCOVERIES
Christopher Columbus’ tiny ships, heaving and blustering past the huge muddy estuaries of Guyana where I grew up, left behind Spanish names like El Dorado, Trinidad, and Port of Spain where our own little ship first broke down in 1944. Two years after Columbus, to resolve rivalry between Spain and Portugal, the Pope divided the world into East and West. He decreed that all lands discovered west of meridian 38W should belong to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. Any lands already belonging to a Christian Prince could remain under that prince. Portugal, already with interests in Brazil, objected and the line was shifted to 46W. But when the Pope wasn’t looking, Portugal grabbed a large hunk from Spain and called it Brazil. Enormous wealth started to flow back to Europe; the Portuguese king then became the richest in Europe by applying a 20% tax, the “royal fifth”, on all profits. The British, French and Dutch, not beholden to the Pope, went everywhere, to the three Guianas and to Barbados where I went to school.
In 1997 when Madeleine and Chris joined us in Portugal, a visit to the library of the Palace of Mafra helped unravel this curious Brazil connection. We followed this paper trail from Alcobaca Monastery, to Batalha Abbey, to the Algarve, to Henry the Navigator, to Magellan and Vasco da Gama, right across to the Far East. Some mariners were lucky, getting as far as the Philippines. Some turned South and hit Australia. I have a booklet Maritime Explorers of the West and several Western Australia Museum pamphlets that track the storms that led to all those European shipwrecks around our coasts.
Storms at sea. It is astonishing how those tiny little boats, top-heavy and vulnerable, battled through storms, hurricanes and typhoons to reach the far corners of the world. Columbus’s Santa Maria weighed 223 tons, the Nina 75 and the Pinta 60.My only experience of a storm at sea was in the Arabian Prince, 1900 tons but rolling at 35 degrees between those grey-black hills of water north of Ireland in February 1944. Recently I have read two of the most powerful pieces of storm writing, one fiction and one fact
Typhoon. Here, in Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon Captain McWhirr of the Nan-Shan has reached the eye of the storm. “He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleams of distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into the distant core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a cloud of steam – and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for a renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jukes’ head a few stars shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.”
And now, through the eye and out into the storm again “Captain McWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his beloved ship, Captain McWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: ‘I wouldn’t like to lose her’”
The last Grain Race. McWhirr was a captain in love with his ship. And now here is a mad 17-year old English boy in love with adventure and his camera. In 1939 Eric Newby kept a diary of the last grain race, the name of his book, from Australia in an old square-rigged sailing ship carrying 59,000sacks of grain to Europe. And here is the ship approaching Cape Horn.
“Moshulu continued to carry her sail and the storm entered its last and most impressive phase. We were cold and wet and yet too excited to sleep. Some stood on the fo’c’sle head but only for a short time as the force of the wind made it difficult to remain on two feet. Others stood beneath it and gazed out along the ship, watching the seas rear up astern as high as a three-storeyed house. It was not only their height that was impressive but their length. Between the greatest of them there was a distance that could only be estimated in relation to the ship, as much as four times her entire length, or nearly a quarter of a mile. The seas approached very deliberately, black and shiny as jet, with smoking white crests gleaming in the sunshine, hissing as they came, hurling a fine spume into the air as high as the main yard.”
And now Eric is with his camera, “130 feet up, in a wind blowing 70 miles an hour, the noise was an unearthly scream. Above me was the naked topgallant yard and above that again the royal to which I presently climbed…Far below, the ship was an impressive sight. For a time the whole of the afterdeck would disappear, hatches, winches, everything, as the solid water hit it, and then, like an animal pulled down by hounds, she would rise and shake them from her, would come lifting out of the sea with her freeing ports spouting.”
The book, Dewey number 910.45NEW, contains 32 amazing photos, a plan of Moshulu’s maximum of 31 sails, and details of the 13 ships competing in the last race before the modernity of world war two sealed them into antiquity. Incidentally, the Moshulu at 7,000 tons, was nearly 100 times bigger than La Nina.
The world’s oceans cover 70% of the globe’s surface and, since life is smeared very thinly on land and very deeply at sea, the oceans actually contain 99% of the planet’s living space. Yet we know far more of life on the surface than of life in the deep. Only in 1977 were chemosynthetic animals found at 8,000 feet in the Galapagos Rift and, in 2010, hundreds of new species were found at 16,000 feet. For our Europe-centric histories, the age of discovery started with Columbus. But, long before Columbus, Chinese fleets had sailed as far as the Persian Gulf, and these ships were 6 to 10 times as large as those of Columbus. I have already written about growing up in South America and of our epic voyage across the North Atlantic, but allow me a few memories before moving on to those oceans that surround Australia.
Guyana. The old jetty smells of salt fish and tarry nets. To the east of us are the mud flats that we call a beach. To the west is the river that brings the mud to make the beach. It is a mile wide, but there is one further west ten miles wide and one to the east fifty miles wide, all disgorging mud. To me and Tim, playing in this mud, the only sea we know is brown, right to the horizon. Behind us the land is flat for a hundred miles. Guyana was first colonised by the Dutch, and they knew how to keep the sea out. We had never seen a real hill or a blue sea, until we went to Tobago.
Tobago. Our bungalow sits on a rock above the waves, frolicking green to the reef, white-flecked royal blue beyond. Behind us a tropical riot erupts into a rugged line of hills. We are away in paradise for two whole months, a paradise marked on the map as Speyside Bay, Tobago. Below the back door there are some logs washed up in a little cove and long tough creepers are hanging down from the edge of the bush, and pretty soon we are launching our own raft, and pretty soon the knots come apart. So we go swimming, in clear green water and, after lunch, we climb the steep green slopes, right up to heaven.
JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL
In the following chapters I have tried to describe the magic of my oceanic journeys but, in the end, rely on Shakespeare. Here is Polonius urging Laertes on his own journey because “The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail:” And Titania reminiscing of another departure: “Then did the sails conceive and grow full-bellied with the wanton wind”.
Perhaps island magic comes best from “The Tempest”. Here is Gonzales lamenting as the ship sinks beneath him “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.” But then Ariel welcomes the survivors to his desert island “Come unto these yellow sands”, and tells Fernando of those who didn’t survive:
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange”
Meanwhile, Caliban appears to have been heavily dumped in the surf: “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears”
While Prospero is away with the fairies
“These our actors were all spirits….are melted into air….We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded in a sleep”
And Miranda, his daughter, is discovering men other than her father for the first time:
“How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world that has such people in’t”
Schooners. Earlier I wrote about my trip to the chemist on a sugar schooner in Barbados. Derek Walcott was a West Indian poet who wrote The Schooner Flight. Here is an extract. One day I will try out my West Indian lilt and read it to you..
You ever look up from some lonely beach
And see a far Schooner? Well, when I write
This poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
As ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
My common language go be the wind,
My pages the sails of the schooner Flight