Islands, pearling, privateers…

Nicholas Tracy goes sailing:

Waves from eighteen to twenty-five feet and wind speeds from thirty-four to forty knots were very difficult conditions for a 22-foot yacht. If the wind had increased above that there would have been great danger from breaking waves. We drove before the wind, easterly along the line of Cornish cliffs, about six miles off. Without a detailed chart east of Newquay we were unable to identify our location exactly, but I knew enough about the coast to believe there was no safe harbour. The description of the coast in the Admiralty Pilot was no help. It was then that I discovered that Philip had left the radio direction finder turned on at Ballyhack. The new battery I had put in Ireland was now flat, so there was no chance of getting a fix by taking a bearing on St. Mawgan air beacon.

'Then was there tumult,' wrote the Anglo-Saxon author of the Andrias. 'The sea was stirred. The horn-fish played, gliding through the deep, and above circled the grey sea-mew, greedy of prey. The sun grew dark and the winds arose.

The Tucker family visits some unfrequented islands:

It was a spectacular landfall. We had chosen to make some westing north of the rhumb in an effort to avoid the widest zone of doldrums. The island rises almost sheer from the equatorial Pacific. Waterfalls cascaded down the rock faces, surrounded by the kind of green lushness we had not seen since leaving Panama a week earlier. The opening sequences of Jurassic Park give a helicopter-eye view of this spectacular jungle-clad island. Our own arrival was rather more sedate – a tentative call on Channel 16 for permission to briefly anchor to repair a masthead light.

We were later to realise that none of the year’s cohort of Pacific skippers had any idea of the existence or location of this former pirate island, which we had randomly decided to visit en route to French Polynesia.

Billy 'Scratch' Hitchen goes fishing:

The wind had increased a bit from the west throughout the day. This made an awkward sea with the westgoing tide, but it did improve when the tide turned east. St Peter Port had given out gale warnings for most of the day, but this was not unusual, and a gale-force wind was no reason to stop fishing. We had ten days to get a trip in, and we certainly did not want to lose a day.

Julian Blatchley rides a tankerload of gasoline through a war zone:

From the sailor's perspective the tanker war had two sides. The first was the export of oil from Iran's Persian Gulf coast. This trade sailed close to the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and was prey to the Iraqi air force, which possessed anti-ship missiles. To protect newer ships, opportunistic shipowners, a great many of them Greek, retained or bought tankers ready for the scrapheap, manned them with piratical crews and kept them in the war zone, where their condition and often dubious documentation were unlikely to attract much official scrutiny. They shuttled oil between the Iranian ports and the anchorage at Fujairah, where their cargoes were transhipped into more regulated tonnage for export. It attracted sailors who wanted money, promotion, or who were clinging to the old, unregulated days of shipping.

Sixteen British seamen go a-privateering:

Previous to the arrival of Lord Cochrane’s fleet on the coast of Chili, privateering was nearly at its height in the South American seas, and it is to that period, viz. in 1818, that the following isolated passage of history belongs.

Soon after Valparaiso had fallen into the hands of the revolutionary forces, a few British seamen resolved to set up as privateers on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts. With this in view, having in the first instance, procured the governor’s licence, they purchased an old West Indian drugger boat, as sorry looking a craft as ever ventured a league to sea, but the small stock of dollars which they had succeeded in scraping together did not enable them to purchase one better fitted for their purpose.

Gordon Davies explores the history of the diving bell:

Throughout history, people have sought their fortunes on the seas, perhaps trading peacefully, perhaps exploiting the lands of other people, or perhaps by the hard graft of fishing. For those with the courage to go under the seas, wealth might be far closer, perhaps only ten metres away, but there was a formidable barrier to reaching it. As the Ballad of Gresham College put it in 1663:

‘...gentlemen, 'tis no small matter / To make a man breath under water.’

Jon Idriess joins the Broome pearl divers:

It was a beautiful day in August 1916. The sea was lazily rolling in light waves suggestive of dreamy coolness. The Sulituan, under jib and mainsail, drifting along with tide, seemed the only thing upon the ocean. One of Gregory's fleet, she was as pretty a picture as a pearler could wish to see.

But Jitaro Naka the diver was not thinking about prettiness; his mind was upon the bottom of the sea and the shell he hoped to find there. For the bigger the take of shell the bigger is the diver's cheque when the lay-up season comes. And the Tables of Chance love the diver with money.

Ian Dear on the Invergordon Mutiny:

Invergordon did not come out of the blue. In 1919 a dispute arose when inflation hit the pittance the lower deck was paid. It was eventually settled, but the Navy’s system for expressing grievances was ineffectual, and a lingering resentment and distrust remained. At the same time some ships refused to fight revolutionary Russian forces in the Baltic after the government reneged on its promise to use only volunteers.

By 1925 inflation had turned to deflation, and the government’s decision to reduce naval pay by 25% for both officers and men meant the lowest paid suffered the most. A crisis was only averted by a compromise: seamen already serving would retain their daily rate, but those joining after October 1925 would be paid 25% less – three shillings per day instead of four. This compromise had consequences. In April 1931, when the international financial crisis was at its deepest, an Economy Committee under Sir George May began reviewing all government spending. May’s report was later condemned by the economist John Maynard Keynes as being ‘the most foolish document it has ever been my misfortune to read’.

Ian Nicolson on fire at sea:

Wherever she sailed in the Mediterranean the ketch Greek Goddess was admired. She was nearly a hundred feet overall, her hull was low and slinky, and her slim wooden masts reached to the clouds. It must, however, be admitted that the beauty of this yacht did not stand up to a close inspection. She had been built of wood – not very long ago, but even so her topsides seams all showed. The varnishwork was yellowing and peeling, some of the stanchions were bent, and their bases were green with mould. You did not need to be a surveyor to see she needed more loving care than she was getting.

The owner, Mahmoud, combined an expensive lifestyle with a chronic shortage of money....

Richard Beioley reviews the story of a true pioneer:

The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters by William Willis is the account or the author's 6700-mile expedition across the Pacific by raft in 1954. Self-built from seven huge balsa logs lashed together with inch-and- a-quarter manila rope, she measured thirty-three feet by twenty, and carried a square sail on a bipod foremast and a small mizzen aft. On this ungainly craft the 61-year-old Willis planned to sail from Callao on the coast or Peru northwest to the Galapagos, then westward via the Marquesas to Samoa.

… and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with the MQ’s favourite oligarch in which he proposes the privatisation of the oceans, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….