A Traveller's Life (10 page)

The second morning I and three others carried coal from what is known as the ‘between-deck', an underdeck above the hold, to the cook's galley. The between-deck is rather dangerous because it is very dark and has openings in it below the hatches, leading down into the hold, and it is easy to fall down them. I haven't, as you can see from this letter. We got very dirty shovelling and carrying coal.

After that, each day, I was put over the side on a platform to do
knacka rost
, which is chipping rust from the ship's side with a hammer. It is a rotten job when it is raining and on the first day I dropped the hammer in the dock, which comes off my ten shillings a month wages.

Today I did all the washing up for three fo'c'sles, about twenty-eight men. It was a pretty revolting job as there were lots of uneaten sausages, uneaten because they weren't much good, all stuck in solidified grease, and the tables were all covered with jam and cigarette ends. What washing-up water you can get comes from the
kock
, the cook, who is pretty bad-tempered. They give you sand for scouring. I'm going to buy some Vim as everything has to be spotless after washing up and the boys create hell if it isn't. I wonder how my hero, T. E. Lawrence, would have got on here. He made an awful fuss about being an aircraftsman.

All my love,                                

Eric                                           

Thompson's Café,
Belfast

30 September 1938

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

… Last night I was night watchman. All the rest of the crew went ashore, some of them to a dance hall in Corporation Street where I went on the first night and danced until someone started a fight and the police came. I was given a pick helve as a weapon, and lantern, and told to patrol the deck and not let anyone on board, except the crew. Night watchman is a good job as the steward leaves you out lots of bread and margarine and Dutch cheese, the round red sort that tastes a bit like soap, and mustard pickle, and you can make as much tea as you like in the galley. Of course, with my being night watchman, a lunatic, in which Belfast abounds, at least in the docks, had to try to get on board and convert me to some weird religion. By the time I had got rid of him the crew were coming back and I had to carry out another of my duties, which is to see that anyone who wants to be sick is sick over the side, anywhere rather than on the captain's sacred bridge-deck or outside his quarters where, unfortunately, the gangway to the dockside is rigged. Nevertheless, in spite of my efforts, one Finn managed to wrench open the skylight of the midship's fo'c'sle and be ill through it over the occupants, all of them senior members of the crew, what are called ‘daymen' because they don't normally stand watches at sea, such as the assistant sailmakers, the carpenter, blacksmith and so on, who were seated below. For this I was blamed, which seemed unjust, but this is not a just life.

The rest of the night was very long, until I woke the crew with lots of ‘
resa upps
' and coffee at 5.30. On deck I listened to the wind
droning in the rigging and wondered what it will be like at sea. How big the ship is. The lower yards on which the biggest square sails will be bent are ninety-five feet long and weigh each more than five tons. The sails for them, there are three altogether, each weighs two and a half tons, much more when they're wet. Altogether there are eighteen square sails and seventeen fore-and-aft sails, about forty-five thousand square feet in all and there are about three hundred ropes – braces, halliards, buntlines, clew lines, downhauls and so on – to control them; and I have to learn the names of each one of them in Swedish and where to find each one in the dark.

I was told all this by the sailmaker, who is also the bosun. He has been at sea for forty-three years, all of them in sail, and was so long in Scottish ships that he speaks English with a Clydeside accent.

Because I was night watchman I have the day off and am now eating an enormous high tea in this café while the rest of the crew are over the side, chipping. Soon we shall have to clean the bilges. Then we are going to a wharf where we shall take on board the ballast for the voyage out. ‘Bloddy job' everyone says this is.

Yesterday, when I was very dirty, Ivy Anderson arrived in an open SS100, looking wonderful, all dressed in black and in a huge hat not really suitable for fast motoring. Everyone thought she was my girl-friend, another one besides the one I cut out of
Esquire
. I said she was an aunt but no one believed this, so I just let them think what they want to. The second mate fell for her to such an extent that he's allowing me to go and stay the night at her place up the Lough. She said she's asking Mummy to come over and see the ship off. I don't think this is a good idea. Do you? Too weepy. It looks as if there's not going to be a war.

All my love and thanks very much for the money. I'm going to buy lots of jam.

Eric                                          

The next letter is from my father and is dated 6 October 1938. By this time the threat of war had receded. Czechoslovakia had been sold up the river, while four days later Germany occupied the Sudetenland in accordance with the Munich agreement.

My dear Eric,

… We are constantly thinking of you and wondering what new experiences you are having. You ought to have a bottle or two of lime juice as a preventative against scurvy. Slit trenches have been dug everywhere even, I regret to say, in the Royal Parks and in the St Paul's School playing-fields. They are proving extremely dangerous and a number of persons have already injured themselves by falling into them. We can only hope that they continue to serve no useful purpose. Duff Cooper has resigned from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. He is a man of honour and was right to do so. Your mother who, as you know, writes constantly to you, sends all her love. She is being very brave about your becoming a sailor. I am glad you have been joined by a nice American fellow. I was afraid you might be the only real English speaker on board.

Steer clear of mean night adventures in the streets and God bless you.

S/V
Moshulu
,
Belfast

11 October 1938

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

We are now loading ballast, mostly rock and sand used in blast foundries, and paving stones and the best part of an old house.
Altogether about fifteen hundred tons. There is bad news about George White, the nice American boy. He fell into the hold through the tonnage opening in the between-decks below Number Three Hatch when there was no ballast in it and broke one of his legs and various other things, so he won't be able to sail with us. I've just spent a wonderful time with Ivy and her husband at their house. The butler, called Taggart, brought me an enormous breakfast in bed and all my clothes were laundered for me, goodness knows how in the time.

My other friends are Jansson, the boy who put my trunk on board, a Dutch boy, called Kroner, and a Lithuanian named Vytautas Bagdanavicius, who sailed on the previous voyage. We go to gruesome pubs and drink porter, a weak version of Guinness and we eat fish and chips and go to the Salvation Army Hostel for wonderful hot baths. Don't worry about mean night adventures in the streets. They are much too wet, and we haven't got any money. The only one who tried a Matros, an AB [able-bodied seaman] got a nasty disease which he is treating himself, with a syringe. I wish he was elsewhere …

All my love,                                          

Eric                                                     

This letter is from my father and is dated 16 October 1938. It was sent to Belfast but, having arrived too late, was forwarded to Australia.

My dear Eric,

I feel that you are on the eve of your departure for the open sea, and so I take leave to bid you a fond farewell. You have chosen a difficult job and are beginning life again on the bottom rung.

I enclose a German Text Book for Travellers which may help
you with some words you have forgotten. I could not get one in Swedish or Finnish and I did not think Norwegian would be much good.

That fellow with the venereal disease sounds a rotten blighter. I should complain to the captain about him …

Good luck to you, my dear boy, and a safe journey.

Your loving father.                                  

PS. Your mother is writing separately.

We sailed for Australia on 10 October 1938 with a crew of twenty-eight.

4 January 1939
     38°33'S 132°21'E (78 days out)

Great Australian Bight. Made 198 miles.

Someone put a lump of shit in my bunk. Thought it was Hermansonn who has been an absolute bastard for a long time. So when dinner came I picked up a bowl of custard and threw it in his face. Then we went on deck and fought. It took some time but I won. The captain stopped the fight. It turned out that it was Holmberg who did it and I wanted to fight him too but I was dissuaded. Anyway, it didn't matter, the important thing was to wallop someone. The next time I'd do it the first day on board.

7
January
     35°09'S 135°31'E (81 days out).

Raised Cape Catastrophe in the morning, on the west side of Spencer Gulf [named by the explorer Flinders in memory of a boat crew, lost there in 1802]. From it scrub-covered cliffs ran away north-westwards with rollers steaming in at the foot of them – a bloody spot. All day with the temperature up in the hundreds we beat about south of the entrance of the Gulf trying to weather the Cape, tacking ship, slithering on the decks which we have linseed oiled, like a lot of frying flying-fish, listening to the second
mate's wireless as it literally poured out news, the first we have had for eighty-one days, from Adelaide, like a fruit machine with something wrong with it pouring out money – awful news of bush fires, frontier incidents in Poland, but at least of a world apparently not at war.

8 January
     (82 days out).

A fair wind takes us in past the South Neptune Islands. Anchor off Boston Island 2.30 p.m., eight miles off Port Lincoln, having sailed about fifteen thousand sea miles. Already at anchorage four other Erikson barques,
Pommern, Passat, Viking
and
Pamir. Lawhill
arrived the following day. Only
Pommern
, a bald-headed barque (without royals) but one of the finest, strongest vessels in the fleet, has done better than
Moshulu
, seventy-eight days from Belfast.

We were three months in Australia. At first sweltering at anchorage waiting for a freight to be fixed, so that we could load a cargo of grain somewhere in Spencer Gulf, which runs up into the heart of the wheat belt, then, when hope had almost been given up of fixing a freight for any of the ships, and we had visions of sailing home in ballast or being sold with the ships like a lot of slaves, all the ships got freights and
Moshulu
was ordered to load a cargo at Port Victoria on the other side of the gulf at £1.37½ ($6.34) a ton – in 1938 she had loaded nearly five thousand tons at £2.06 ($10.30) a ton. The Spencer Gulf was a hell of a place, wherever you were in it in summer, plagued by flies and an appalling wind as hot as a blast furnace which poured down through it from the deserts of the interior, causing
Moshulu
and other ships to drag their anchors. To go ashore, we rowed and sailed eight miles to Port Lincoln and eight miles back. I found a lot of letters waiting for me and I sent my parents a telegram which read ‘Muscular, happy, penniless' and got some money by return.

We sailed from Port Victoria at 6.30 a.m. on 11 March 1939, our destination Queenstown in southern Ireland (now Cobh), for orders, by way of Cape Horn. We were, in fact, taking part in the 1939 sailings of what was known as the Grain Race. This year turned out to be the Last Grain Race, and I wrote about it in a book of the same name.

We rounded Cape Horn on 10 April, Easter Monday, having sailed more than six thousand miles, and were fifty-five days to the Line. We were one day ahead of
Parma's
record-breaking passage of eighty-three days from Port Victoria to Falmouth in 1933. That year she had been thirty days to the Horn, twenty-five to the Line, but in 31°N 47°W our luck deserted us and we failed to pick up the strong westerlies we needed to beat her.

On 9 June at 8 p.m., ninety days out from Port Victoria, we raised the Fastnet Rock, fifteen miles to the north-east. We had smelt the land for days. The following morning and until evening we were becalmed near the Rock. Five men rowed out to us from Crookhaven, near Mizen Head, nine miles. The captain made them drunk on rum and we left them drifting into the sunset in the direction of the New World. (More than twenty-five years later I got drunk in Crookhaven with the survivors of this long row.) Then a breeze came up and took us ghosting along the coast of Southern Ireland, past Cape Clear. Nothing could have been more beautiful to us than this country at this moment.

The following day at 5 a.m., the wind shifted from NW through W to WSW, the best sort of wind and we squared away for Queenstown. At about eleven o'clock we took a pilot from a black and white cutter, heaving-to for him to come across to us in a rowing-boat. Then both watches went to the fore braces, boarded the fore tack and began to clew up the remaining course sails, before racing aloft to see which watch could be the first to furl the Main and Mizzen. We won, in the port watch.