Steamers, invasions, suppressing the slave trade…

Simon Britten goes sailing with the Professor:

As the skipper talked, I noticed that the shadows of the sails were rotating slowly on the deck. A glance at our wake made it clear that we had been travelling in a large circle for at least five minutes. ‘Overheated autopilot transistor,' said the skipper. 'I know which one it is.’ He disappeared below, to reappear with a screwdriver, a strip of blotting paper and the gin bottle. ‘You have small hands. I’ll take the wheel. Unscrew George’s lid and look for two identical components on top of the edge of the circuit board facing you. If you look closely you will see that the one on the port side is peeling away from the board. Slide a folded layer of blotting paper under it. Leave half an inch sticking out. Pour a thimbleful of gin on to the blotting paper, wait thirty seconds, and when I say “195” switch on.'

I wedged and poured and waited. The order came. I flipped the switch, the servos whirred and the skipper cheered. It worked every time.

John Caldwell finds out about waterspouts:

The morning of July 8 I came on deck as usual, threw my eyes into the rigging to check on things, then gazed around the horizon at the sea. There was a fresh wind up. Off to starboard was something that made me look again. It was a dense curtain of cloudlike air, arm-shaped and bent, reaching from the sea into the clouds, and marching over the water. It was a tropic waterspout.

How many waterspouts I had seen in the Merchant Marine! How many times had I leaned on the rail peering wistfully into their mystery and wishing I was captain! And now I was captain: and I did what I always said I would do, if I saw a waterspout from my own boat. I loosed the lashings from the tiller and set Pagan on a track that put her straight for the centre of the waterspout.

Midshipman James Stoddart chases a slaver:

When we left England, we were supplied with a heavy lumbering launch, and as the boat interfered very much with the sailing of the brig, she was left behind at Ascension. Our cutter had been sent away three days before to watch a river much frequented by slavers, so we had no boats on board but a four-oared gig and jollyboat. By two o’clock with a light air aloft we had neared the chase considerably; but it again fell dead calm. We then tried sweeps, but owing to the swell made little or nothing of them. I was on the foreyard with the captain. The sky was beginning to thicken again, and if the fog came down she would be sure to escape. He shut his glass and said: ‘Go and take her.’

Gordon Davies explores the early development of the submarine:

Submarine development began, slowly, in the seventeenth century. The builders only had natural materials to work with: hulls were predominantly wooden, and the only flexible watertight material was leather. At the beginning of the century there was also very little knowledge of conditions underwater. Robert Boyle, one the leading natural philosophers of his day, was only convinced in about 1660 that pressure increased with depth. That result, essential for the design of a submarine, contradicted the age-old doctrine of the ‘non-gravitation of water in its proper place’, ie that the pressure stayed constant with depth – obviously so, since otherwise fish would be crushed. As late as 1673 the doctrine was being justified by Sir Matthew Hale, a highly influential lawyer, who blithely ignored a paper published two years earlier by the Royal Society (of which he was a Fellow) that specifically reported the increase in pressure with depth. (Hale also believed in witches.)

Julian Blatchley on living with steam:

When I took up my new position as the manager of Steam Yacht Gondola, I like to think I approached the job with respect. This was a passenger vessel, after all, and one designed over a century and a half ago. True, it was only twenty-five metres long, and sailed on a lake rather than the open sea; but I grew up on these lakes. I know their whimsical weather, and their cold, deep water. And Gondola had a steam engine. Still, I had over forty years of marine experience under my belt. Subconsciously I must have expected an easy transition. I can only hope that I managed to conceal the numerous surprises I received.

My first priority seemed to be learning to handle the boat. For fifteen years I made a living mooring supertankers to oil platforms, using just a propeller and a rudder. I am adept at threading ships through the Singapore and Malacca straits. I have sailed through perambulating sandbars into the Hooghly River and passed the tortuous Rada Ingles in the Magellan Strait. How hard could an eighty-four-foot boat be?

Pretty darned hard, as it transpired.

The Editor explains how to invade Dundee:

The Mew Stone is far astern, and the ship is heading east, towards the distant Dover Strait. The bridge still has the operating-theatre seriousness, but there is sea room, and no tortuous channel to worry the mind. The true peace of God, said Joseph Conrad, is found a thousand miles from the nearest land. Albion is only ten miles from land, but you can already feel a hint of that peace; or anyway as much of it as you can sensibly expect on a ship whose business is war.

A WWII Admiral advises a young officer on his first command:

The assumption of your first command is the greatest step that you will ever take. It carries with it not only the responsibility of a King’s ship, but the power to mould or mar the characters of a body of men. It carries with it an historic tradition of dignity and privilege, and in return makes demands on your skill and endurance, which have never before been asked, and which brook no failure.

Max Liberson in trouble again:

It was in the Navy pub that Tattooed Vic first approached me. I had gone to sea with him when I was just starting, and he had taught me a lot in a short, and not always enjoyable time. He was handy with his fists, and his whole body, including the most delicate part, was tattooed. He was chatting up Sue, the voluptuous barmaid, who was topping his pint up for free while the landlord was in the other bar. He saw me and said, ‘Maxer, just the boy I need to see,’ in a voice made gravelly by whisky. He told me that he was taking over as skipper of the fifty-foot Fruit and Nut, a stern dragger trawler, and that he needed a skipper of his current boat, the Boy Toby. I got the job....

Peter Cardy spends twenty-four hours watching comings and goings in Portsmouth Harbour:

Portsmouth Harbour never sleeps. There is constant activity throughout 24 hours, seven days a week, though most of it is unseen and unheard to the passing observer.

It is widely believed that the King’s Harbour Master at Portsmouth, and the Admiralty and civilian pilots, are here to keep sailors safe. Their vhf transmissions, with the careful exchange of information about course, speed, intentions, passengers embarked, dangerous goods and pilotage exemption certificates, all tend to reinforce this idea. In fact, however, their main purpose is – and has been for three hundred years – to protect hm ships and the Naval Base. khm’s pilotage, the information exchanges, reports and enforcement measures are all intended for their protection. The safety of civilian users and people around the harbour is a fortunate side-benefit.

Andy Thomson leaks a press release from the year 2030:

There has been a significant reduction in conventional leisure yachting over the last few years, accompanied by a rapid growth in the new and largely unregulated virtual boating sector. The LYA has taken over the significantly diminished roles of the Royal Yachting Association and British Marine, both of which have outlived their relevance and usefulness. Preserving societal norms and interpersonal appropriateness for all stakeholders and practitioners is a key lya policy. Parts of society continue to express concern over terminology used afloat. ‘First Mate’, for example, is a positional descriptor that can also be seen as having hierarchical implications ('first') and societal implications ('mate'). Until societal consensus has been reached with regard to issues such as this the LYA will use, but minimise, traditional terminology.....

Julia Jones explains her decensoring of a book by a hero:

My first encounter with Lieutenant Commander Robert Hichens DSO*, DSC**, (also mentioned three times in dispatches and recommended for a VC) was observing the effects of a cocktail he had popularised. It was called the Mark viii, and was originally poured out at ‘gin time’ at HMS Beehive, a WWII Coastal Forces base in Felixstowe, Suffolk.

Hichens, a Cornish solicitor who had become the first rnvr officer to command a motor gunboat and was then the Senior Officer of his flotilla, had initiated these lunchtime sessions as a way of bringing his fellow officers together and helping them relax sufficiently after a night patrol to be able to get some afternoon sleep before going out again when darkness fell. In his book We Fought Them in Gunboats Hichens describes the creation of the first Mark viii. They were all dead tired, too tired for choices.

‘“What will you have, sir?”

‘“Oh, anything and everything, Kelly.”

‘Kelly took me at my word. He picked up a gin bottle in one hand and a rum bottle in the other and poured in a liberal dose simultaneously. Then he picked up lemon squash and orange squash and applied them also together, finishing off with water. Thus was born the flotilla’s famous Mark viii.’

A Mark viii was also a 21ft torpedo.

My father used to serve this to our Essex neighbours on his birthday. As a young teenager it was a never-failing source of wonder just how badly the local businessmen and doctors could behave after a few tumblers of this innocent seeming drink. Later, when I read the book which Hichens had written in his last six months of life, the Mark viii made perfect sense.

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the musings of the tugmaster, tobacco smuggler and book reviewer Ray Doggett