of shipwrecked mariners. A report made in 1911 states that there was only one inhabitant of Staten Island who had been left alone at Port Cook, in charge of some machinery for extracting fat from seals, for six years.
Mr Mountstewart’s strongest card in this game of getting me to sea was the one about time running out. For me time running out meant an outbreak of war, for him it meant waking one morning to find the seas stripped of four-masted barques. There were still in 1938 thirteen vessels entirely propelled by sail, engaged in carrying grain from South Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. There were other cargoes for these ships; timber from Finland to East Africa, guano (a sinister kind of bird dung) fom Mauritius and the Seychelles to New Zealand, and very rarely, for the two remaining German barques, cargoes of nitrate from Tocopilla, Mejillones and other ports on the Chilean Coast to be carried round the Horn to Hamburg. But for the most part the outward voyages from Europe to South Australia round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Indian Ocean were ballast passages. Grain was the staple cargo. If that failed most of these thirteen ships would soon be rusting at forgotten anchorages.
The survival of the big sailing ships in this trade was due to several favourable circumstances. Grain was not dependent on season, neither was it perishable. In the primitive ports of the Spencer Gulf, where the grain was brought down from the back blocks in sacks, steamers found it difficult to load a cargo in an economical time. Although at some ports there were mile-long jetties, at most places the grain had to be brought alongside the ships in lightering ketches and slung into the hold with the vessel’s own gear, which might, and frequently did, take weeks. But a sailing ship run with utmost economy and a low-paid crew could still in 1938 take six weeks to load her cargo of 4,000 tons of grain, reach Falmouth or Queenstown for orders after 120 days on passage and still make a profit on a round voyage of about 30,000 miles, the outward 15,000 having been made in ballast.
Moshulu, Belfast Lough, September 1938
When I returned from my holiday, events started to happen with increasing momentum so that I began to feel like the central figure in one of those films of the twenties, in which the actors flash in and out of buildings in the twinkling of an eye. With suspicious promptness a letter arrived from Gustav Erikson in Mariehamn, in which that man of iron told me to get in touch with his London Agents, Messrs. H. Clarkson of Bishopsgate.
Captain Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn, ‘Ploddy Gustav’ as he was known more or less affectionately by the men and boys who sailed his ships, was in 1938 the owner of the largest fleet of square-rigged deep-water sailing vessels in the world. The great French sailing fleet of Dom Borde Fils of Bordeaux had melted away upon the withdrawal of government subsidies in the twenties; only two barques, Padua and Priwall, still belonged to the once great house of Laeisz of Hamburg; Erikson remained. He was not only the proprietor of twelve four- and three-masted barques, he also owned a number of wooden barquentines and schooners, the majority of which were engaged in the ‘onker’ (timber trade) in the Baltic and across the North Sea.
At the time I went to sea he was sixty-five years old. Unlike most twentieth-century shipowners he had been a sailor with wide practical experience before he had become a shipowner. At the age of nine he had shipped as a boy aboard a vessel engaged in the North Sea trade. Ten years later he had his first command in the same traffic and then, for six years, he had shipped as mate in ocean-going ships. Between 1902 and 1913, when he finally left the sea to concentrate on being an owner, he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels.
If I had imagined that Clarkson’s would be impressed when I approached them, I should have been disappointed. I was one of a number of Englishmen who applied to join the Grain Fleet every year, and Clarkson’s could not know that I was to be one of the last. From this small mahogany-bound office, saved from being prosaic by the numerous pictures of sailing ships on the walls, they looked after the destinies of practically every grain sailer in the world. Even the Germans came to Clarkson. In 1937 they fixed the high freight of 42s 6d a ton for the Kommodore Johnsen. Most cargoes were for British ports and Clarkson fixed the freights. Erikson was well served by them.
I learned some of these things from a little white-haired man, who said that to make the voyage at all I must be bound apprentice and pay a premium of fifty pounds. He made no suggestions except that I would probably be better advised not to go at all. I left Bishopsgate with a form of indenture which among other provisions stipulated that my parents were to bind me to the owner for eighteen months or a round voyage; that if I deserted the ship in any foreign port my premium would be forfeited; that if I died or became incapacitated, a pro-rata repayment of premium could be claimed; that I should receive 120 Fin-marks (10s) a month, and that I should be subject to Finnish law and custom.
This document my father reluctantly signed after hopelessly trying to discover something about Finnish law and custom. I remember that he was particularly concerned to find out whether the death penalty was still enforced and in what manner it was carried out. Even more reluctantly he paid out £50 and sent off the Indentures with two doctors’ certificates attesting that I was robust enough for the voyage, and one from a clergyman which stated that I was of good moral character. By this time I began to feel that I was destined for Roedean rather than the fo’c’sle of a barque.
During this time Mr Mountstewart had not been inactive. For him the balloon had gone up, this was what he had been waiting for. In the language of his generation it was ‘Der Tag’. With memories of long periods of inactivity in the skysail yarder, he had got into touch with an acquaintance of his, a fashionable ship’s chandler, whose interest lay principally in the fitting out of yachts in the Solent and the Hamble River. Between them they had drawn up a formidable list of books on navigation and seamanship which I would peruse under the direction of the Master. This was a heaven-sent opportunity for Mr Mountstewart’s friend, and he was not backward in loading me with his wares, which included a particularly repellent kind of sea-water soap. I staggered from his showrooms to a taxi with a great pile of logarithm tables, nautical almanacs and seaman’s manuals, all slightly shop-soiled. He had tried to persuade me that I needed a sextant but a premonitory and for once accurate voice told me that where I was going I might find difficulty in living it down.
His conscience had not allowed him to recommend his ‘yachting’ brand of oilskins and clothing, and he had sent me off to the East India Dock Road where I might obtain more suitable garments than his own, which were no doubt excellent for the purpose for which they were designed. Perhaps he knew more than I imagined about sailing ships and feared that I might return after the voyage to accuse him of selling oilskins that split.
When the manager of the store in the East India Dock Road heard who had sent me and what I was proposing to do, he decided to give me his personal attention. He was far grander and more sure of himself than the neighbourhood in which the outfitters was situated would have led me to expect. The complete outfitting of a hundred shipwrecked lascars would have been nothing to him. I was a smallish order and he proposed to deal with me accordingly. He swept me down the staircase to the basement past rails of hideous shore-going suits. ‘Now, sir,’ he said, taking a deep and well-practised breath, ‘you will be wanting pilot coat heavy trousers two suits working clothes heavy underwear heavy seaboots long oilskin coat oilskin trousers sea-boot stockings stormcap knife and spike, mattress straw.’
It was a hot September day. I put on the long thick vest and underpants; like all their counterparts in England they were supported mysteriously by a number of tapes which once tied in a knot could never be
