Cape Horn, Madeira, the Beast and early steam...

Captain Klebingat rounds the Horn:

I will try to give you an account of Beating around the Horn bound westward. Basil Lubbock says, that the winter of 1905 was especially bad, as I was deakboy in a full rigged ship, and my first trip to sea, allow me to talk about that winter on the Horn.

The preparation made in any ship making a westward passage are worth recording. Somewheres off the River Plate as we call it we would run into the doldrumms, that is the time, all your old patched and quilted sails you had used in the trades had to come down and replaced with the best set, mostly brand new. Of course you carried at least 3 suits ot sails, and probably of lower topsails about 4 suits. That is in a well fitted out ship as the one I was in. In the trades all footropes and blocks had been overhauled, new gear was rove off. All Spare spars all ships carried some, were doubly secured with extra lashings. All hatches had an other layer of 3 by 12 planks lashed on top, to make doubly sure that no hatch could be stove in. All hatch wedges were secured by sowing them in canvass, that no sea could wash them away, and free the hatch battens. And last on either side along the maindeck, a wire manrope was stretched tight from foreward to aft.

W E Sinclair goes looking for Madeira:

We timed our watches from the chronometers of two British steamers that we boarded in Vigo Bay. The first of these was a respectable boat and therefore took but a mild interest in us. The second was a disreputable collier from Cardiff and the crew took us to their hearts and blacked us all over. The captain gave us the time and some biscuits and he sold us some lime juice and tobacco. He showed us his book in which he worked out the ship’s position day by day and pointed out a method of shortening our work. This method we soon adopted.

The first mate spent a couple of hours in the Joan’s cabin one evening giving us tips and yarns. He wondered how we ever got to Vigo and did his best to frighten us out of our wits.

‘Look here, my boys, I’m going to talk straight to you two and I shall be very blunt about it. You spoke about going to Madeira. Don’t you attempt it. It’s not like finding your way to Vigo. That was a straightforward proposition because you had only to sail east and you were bound to strike your port. But Madeira is an island and it’s generally covered with mist so that you can’t see it ten miles away. What are you going to do if you miss it? And you will miss it. Finding an island isn’t an easy job.’

Julian Blatchley makes a handbrake turn:

The last thing that went smoothly in my taking command of the Procyon was my arrival in Singapore. My plane landed fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. ‘Captain Blatchley’ said an electric sign in the hand of a dapper chap in short-sleeved shirt and knife-edge trousers in the Arrivals Hall at Changi Airport. ‘I am Lee,’ said the dapper chap. 'Agency runner. Please come with me.’

Seconds later I was in the first-row seat of the shipping agency's van, racing along the East Coast Parkway towards the ECG-trace skyline of Singapore City, Mr Lee's serious face peering back at me from the front passenger seat.

‘I was expecting the chief engineer to be on the same flight,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he arrive?’

Lee nodded. ‘He arrive, but go another car. They make a change. You not go to Cymbeline anymore. You go to Procyon.’

‘Procyon? What’s that?’

‘I not so sure. We go office. Mr Chang explain.’

Mr Chang did. They had changed my ship.

Keith Muscott discusses survival at sea:

Alain Bombard, a French biologist and physician, and Hannes Lindemann, a German doctor given to crossing oceans in canoes, shared the same ostensible objective: to increase the chances of survival of those cast away at sea. Both men were inspired by a report written by Prince Albert I of Monaco in 1888, asserting that survivors in ships’ lifeboats or on rafts could last until help arrived if they had the right attitude and equipment.

The equipment suggested by the Prince included fine mesh nets for scooping up plankton; several fishing lines of about 150 feet with wire casts, large hooks and artificial lures for big quarry like tuna; a small harpoon to spear the little fish that congregate around flotsam; a larger harpoon for bigger fish; and a number of short traces made up of feathered hooks for use on handlines. Less clear-cut was the need to suppress panic and encourage a determined and practical approach to surviving day by day; the mind must never succumb before the body.

Richard Crockatt on a terrible voyage:

In September 1740 Commodore George Anson left the Solent with six ships to sail round Cape Horn to ‘arrive on the Spanish coast of South America to annoy and distress the Spaniards...by taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying all their ships.’ They were also to take any port belonging to the Spaniards that they deemed suitable for repairing and provisioning HM ships and take the Spanish galleon making its annual voyage from Acapulco to Manila carrying treasure from the silver mines. Anson succeeded in seizing the galleon’s treasure and returning home, completing a circumnavigation and in the process securing a fortune, but at an enormous cost in men and materiel. Of his six ships only one, his own flagship the Centurion, returned; of the 1900 men who had embarked over 1400 died. It was one of the most disastrous successes in British naval history.

En route, however, the Wager, Captain Cheap, a former Indiaman acting as the fleet's storeship and modified for naval work with the addition of 28 guns, was wrecked on the ironbound coast of the Guayaneco archipelago in Patagonian Chile. The crew were ashore for five chaotic months during which many men died, a few were murdered, and the rest endured unimaginable hardship. Finally, a group of the survivors decided to sail to safety.

Max Liberson brings home the Beast:

On the 18th June 2021 I was sitting in the comfortable saloon of my ancient gaff cutter Wendy May. I looked around at the brass cooker and the oil lamps, the varnished mahogany panels and the small table at which I had read and written for months, and said a temporary goodbye to my old friend. Then I flew to Portugal.

My mission was to get a 50-foot trimaran from Portimao to Cornwall. The boat was half-designed and unfinished, with experimental electric drives powered by a new system that I didn’t understand and which was already failing. The task was to get this beast into a condition to sail safely the 900 nautical miles home, against the Portuguese trades and across the Bay of Biscay, with a crew that had never sailed together before. I had thirty days before I ran out of permitted time to be in Europe.

Gordon Davies discusses early steam:

For centuries, becalmed sailing ships were towed behind their boats, and smaller vessels were poled or rowed up difficult rivers. The introduction of steam power in the late 1600s offered the possibility of escaping from these labours. The successful use of steam was not, however, simply a matter of developing the engines; it was also necessary to find ways of using their power to propel the ship. Here, though, the steamship pioneers could draw on methods that had already been invented for moving ships without using their sails.

One such method was jet reaction. In 1661 two Englishmen, Thomas Toogood and James Hayes, suggested ‘Forceing Water by Bellowes...through the Bottome or Sides of Shipps belowe the Surface’, the bellows being worked by men. A jet boat using man-powered bellows was actually demonstrated in 1730 by John Allen, a medical doctor based in Bridgewater; it achieved walking pace. Not only was jet power simple to use, it was the only propulsion mechanism that was easy to analyse in theoretical detail, as Daniel Bernoulli, the founder of the science of hydrodynamics, established in 1753.

James Hayes on the wreck of the 'Herschel':

We had a valuable cargo of fine goods, would take more on in Lisbon, and we had such a full passenger list that my deck cabin was given up. It was taken for the Condo d’Eu, husband of the Princess Isabella of Brazil, heiress to the throne.

The passage to Lisbon was stormy, a perfect ‘dusting’ through the Bay of Biscay in southwest gales, but after getting to leeward and rounding Cape Finisterre, the wind backed to northwest and we made good sail down the coast to Lisbon. The Herschel’s rig was that of a heavily rigged brigantine, the sails greatly helped in side winds, at twelve knots heavily dragging the screw; the engine power alone made nine or ten knots in smooth water. Flue boilers, jet condenser, two large cylinders of equal size on about eighteen pounds boiler pressure explained the coal consumption of thirty-five tons daily. She loaded about 2000 tons deadweight of coal and cargo on twenty-one foot draught, her main deck about two feet above water with high bulwarks, the forecastle, bridge and poop aiding much buoyancy. Coal on the main deck, supplementing the bunkers, was a great nuisance for half the voyage, the dust always about, and this defect in passenger steamers remained long unremedied.

How Hurricane Jack got his name:

I very often hear my friend the Captain speak of Hurricane Jack in terms of admiration and devotion, which would suggest that Jack is a sort of demigod. The Captain always refers to Hurricane Jack as the most experienced seaman of modern times, as the most fearless soul that ever wore oilskins, the handsomest man in Britain, so free with his money he would fling it at the birds, so generally accomplished that it would be a treat to be left a month on a desert island alone with him.

‘Why is he called Hurricane Jack?’ I asked the Captain once.

‘What the duvvle else would you caal him?’ asked Para Handy. ‘Nobody ever caals him anything else than Hurricane Jeck.’

Mano a mano with Bill Tilman – Julia Jones explains:

Recently I came across a line in a brochure which identified Janet Vera-Sanso as ‘probably the only woman to have sailed with Bill Tilman’. It’s not enough. She ought to be described as ‘probably the only person to have told Tilman what sailing was actually about while offering him a lesson in good manners.’

and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, the inimitable drawings of Claudia Myatt, the reprehensible musings of Ray Doggett, fresh breezes, salt air, peace, violence, and the rest of life at sea….