Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  Before you head out into the billows guided by this selection of nautical masters, I must stress one thing. This book is not intended to be any kind of earnest critique of the literary works of any of the authors. It is not a scholarly work, it is a celebration and appreciation of the sea by a fellow sailor. In the case of each author I wanted to convey their own special skill in evoking its moods and vagaries. I realised early on in the execution of the book that often the best way to do this was to put it across in their own words. Paraphrasing was pointless. Thus, there is a fair amount of direct quotes and I make no apology for that. I only hope that, through reading this book, you will be inspired to discover – or rediscover – some of these magical tales, and understand them all the better for knowing what the author went through in order to write them so well. Whether you are a sailor, armchair adventurer or a born and bred landlubber, I assure you that the rewards will be great.

  Erskine Childers

  Hidden depths

  The day of 26 July, 1914 dawned fair and breezy off the coast of Howth; racing clouds, sudden bright sunshine, and the Dublin Hills glowing emerald green in the distance. Looking out to sea across the laughing, wind-whipped waters the Asgard, an elegant ketch, completed the scene. She was jogging along the coast under easy sail and the casual observer would have simply eyed the pretty yacht with envy, for this was a fine day for a cruise. Yet the trained eye of a sailor would have seen that something was amiss; the yacht was not making the most of the conditions; she was badly out of trim and pitching sluggishly into the seas. A close observer would also have noted the dark mood of her four crew. A tense silence had settled over them and each took their turn to scour the coastline with a furrowed brow. There was obviously serious intent behind this cruise. A cursory inspection of her cabin would have revealed all, for down below the little yacht’s beautiful interior was in a terrible state; packing cases and straw were crammed everywhere, tearing into upholstery and gouging at the previously spotless woodwork. Here and there some of the contents peeked out from the packing cases. The dull metal of rifle muzzles betrayed the Asgard’s sinister freight. The truth was that her load line was almost submerged on account of her lethal cargo. Packed in her cabins, crammed into every locker, lazarette and hatch were hundreds of rifles destined to end up in the hands of young lads from the newly formed Irish Volunteers – forerunners of the Irish Republican Army. This voyage was not for pleasure, it had real purpose, and a highly illegal one at that.

  On deck, the crew was not only tense, they were out of sorts; exhausted by a storm-tossed crossing of the Irish Sea, which had presaged interminable hours of waiting for the appointed time to deliver their deadly load. The strain of the long voyage had been almost intolerable to all; none more so than on the captain, Erskine Childers, the man responsible for this cruise into dangerous waters. Yet he remained upright and resolute as he squinted towards the breakwaters of Howth, awaiting a signal from an accomplice ashore. His wife, Molly, paced the deck in a bright red dress, the sign that they were ready. The Asgard was a deep yacht and had a very short tidal window during which she could enter and leave the port. Yet without an answering signal from shore, she could be sailing straight into the jaws of a trap. Minutes ticked agonisingly by. Still nothing. What awaited them inside that inviting little harbour? Friend or foe?

  Noon came, and the tension was unbearable. Erskine turned to his loyal wife, now at the helm. ‘I am going in’, he said with quiet decision. Molly nodded in silent assent and rattled the helm down. All aboard wondered what lay in wait for them within the seemingly welcoming arms of that snug port. The yacht ghosted silently into the apparently abandoned harbour, rounded up into the breeze and furled her white wings. Childers and his wife timed the manoeuvre perfectly so that as the way fell off the big yacht and she drifted to a standstill, she was just nosing alongside the quay. Despite the extremely tense circumstances, they did it with an easy skill that only a true sailor could fully appreciate. At once, the quayside exploded into welcoming bedlam; ropes were grabbed and men swarmed aboard ‘the white yacht, the harbinger of Liberty’, as one observer later described her. Within minutes, the vessel was stripped of her murderous cargo. In total 900 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition were taken ashore and slung over the shoulders of a hundred and more hearty lads all prepared to use them in anger in the name of freedom. Not a moment too soon either, for a crackle of signalling rockets was heard overhead. Word was out. The Royal Navy was already racing towards the port. Their patrol vessel, HMS Porpoise, was not far off. In an instant, the Asgard was once more free of the dock; the chuckle of water under her forefoot as she gathered way matched by the emotions of her elated crew on deck.

  The whole improbable adventure sounds like a work of high fiction from some second-rate fantasist. Yet it is all true, and only one of the many dramas that encapsulated the quixotic life of Erskine Childers: the novelist who only wrote one novel; the quintessential patriotic Englishman who supplied arms to the Irish rebels, and, ultimately, the fanatical supporter of an Irish republic who was executed by Irish republicans.

  Yet for all the complexities and contradictions within Childers’ character, one thing that was unquestionable and uncomplicated was his love of the sea and exploring its undulations in a yacht. There is a reason that Childers’ only novel, The Riddle of the Sands, is so frequently quoted by yachtsmen as their favourite book. It is because it was written by a man who truly understood and loved his subject. Every line of this short and gripping tale of amateur espionage afloat rings true to anyone who has ever felt the demented urge to set an alarm for 5am on a chill morning in order to catch the tide and sally forth down channel to pit their wits against the vagaries of wind and wave. Every ounce of his enthusiasm and love for small-boat sailing (and in particular navigating) is poured into his one masterpiece. This is the main reason it has endured.

  For the uninitiated, The Riddle of the Sands relates the adventures of two Englishmen and their exploits in the Baltic and North Sea aboard a 30ft yacht, Dulcibella. Her quiet, introverted skipper, Davies, invites his erudite companion Carruthers, a bored civil servant, to go duck hunting with him. Carruthers agrees to make the trip to Flensburg despite grave misgivings about going sailing on a small yacht in October. These fears are initially well founded when he discovers that the yacht is ‘a scrubby little 30 footer’ and he is assigned a berth that persistently drips water on his head from a leak in the deck. Nevertheless, the simple charm of life aboard and the beauty of their surroundings gradually seduces Carruthers, and before long he rather reluctantly finds himself enjoying the trip. It is at this point that he is drawn into a web of espionage and intrigue. It transpires that Davies had previously fallen victim to the mysterious Herr Dollmann, a fellow yachtsman who used his own vessel, the Medusa, to lure Davies into a trap as he navigated the storm-tossed waters of the Frisian Islands on his way to the Baltic. Davies was lucky to escape with his life and, returning from the Baltic to these islands, he and Carruthers set about unearthing the ‘riddle of the sands’. In the process, their amateur investigations unearth German plans to use the shallow inlets of the Frisian Islands as a springboard to invade Britain.

  The book was an instant hit, and has never been out of print. Given that it was published in 1903, some 11 years before the Great War, it was extremely prescient and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, went so far as to state that the publication of the book proved instrumental in the construction of naval defence facilities at Invergordon, Rosyth and Scapa Flow. Yet for all the book’s far sightedness and even though it was among the front-runners of a new genre of espionage, neither of these factors make it the much-loved book it remains today. To understand what makes it so popular, you have to go back to the sailing and to understand that you have to look at Childers himself. Although the plot of the book is fiction laced with fact, the voyage of the Dulcibella, and the portrayal of most of the characters, is very real, and drawn from Childers’ own
adventures in those chilly waters.

  Robert Erskine Childers was born in Mayfair, London, in 1870. He was from privileged stock. His uncle was for some time Chancellor of the Exchequer and his father was a highly respected academic. Despite early years of comfort and happiness, the family cocoon was shattered forever when his father contracted tuberculosis. He died at the age of 38 after only a few months battling the illness. To make matters worse, his wife Anna had kept his illness a secret and, rather than break the family up by sending her husband to a sanatorium, she had nursed him in private. When his death became known, it was Anna who found herself carted off to the sanatorium by outraged members of the family who feared she would contaminate others with the disease, and she spent seven agonising years in isolation before she died. She paid the ultimate price for her devotion to her husband and so did her children; Henry, Robert (who was always referred to by his middle name, Erskine), Constance, Sybil and Dulcibella. Although Erskine wrote to his mother he never saw her again, and, effectively orphaned, the children lived with their aunt Agnes in their mother’s ancestral home of Glendalough in Wicklow, Ireland. From hereon, things became more settled for Erskine and his siblings, and they grew up enjoying the serenity and rugged, verdant beauty of this wild part of the world.

  Family tragedy had shaped Erskine into a quiet, reflective character. His early life followed a path familiar to many young men from privileged backgrounds in this era: prep school, a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge and paid employment as a clerk at the House of Commons. During this period there did not seem to be anything particularly unusual about Erskine. He was noted at Cambridge for being quiet and withdrawn and continued in that vein at the House. Although he was a thorough and effective worker, this was all anybody could say about him. As a colleague observed some time later: ‘He seemed a particularly quiet, almost retiring colleague who did the work allotted to him. These efficiently and without fuss, but for the rest made no great mark, and in his leisure movement, had a habit of extracting himself from all extraneous interests.’ Childers himself clearly felt his employment could be rather humdrum, and in The Riddle of the Sands he refers to the work of a junior civil servant somewhat dismissively:

  The plain truth was that my work was neither interesting nor important, and consisted chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying that Mr So-and-So was away and would be back about 1st October, in being absent for lunch from twelve till two, and in my spare moments making précis of – let us say – the less confidential consular reports.

  Yet, behind the tedium of work and the bland exterior, something new was beginning to emerge. Childers was leading a double life and the half of it that was spent away from his desk was every bit as action-packed, esoteric and adventurous as his office career was prosaic. Childers had taken up sailing and he took to the sport with an intensity that bordered on a fanaticism that appeared entirely out of character. It was only in later years that this intensity would fully emerge with tragic consequences.

  His first dabbling with the sport was undertaken with his brother Henry, who was to be a companion on many of his later trips. In 1893 the pair opted to buy a yacht and explore the west coast of Scotland. This was towards the end of Childers’ Cambridge days, and was to prove important grounding (pardon the pun) for later adventures. In recalling the moment of purchase years later, Childers reminisced:

  Our starting point was this: that we must cruise at once, visit distant places, not merely sail in one prescribed area as a matter of daily sport. It was a sound aspiration, for the essence of the cruising spirit is travel; and it is far better to familiarise the mind at once with the idea of detachment from the land than to rely too heavily on the same nightly refuge. So there followed logically the need for as stout and seaworthy a yacht as a slender purse permitted.

  This vessel was Shulah, a 33ft yacht that the brothers purchased in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, and determined to sail across to Scotland. In their choice, they betrayed the naiveté of novices: she was an out-and-out racing vessel; heavily canvassed, narrow and deep. A modern-day comparison would be a newcomer to cycling buying a racing bike to traverse rough mountain tracks. In this error, the pair could easily plead ignorance.

  Yachting had long been a commonplace pastime but by and large it was racing that was popular, and giant racing vessels such as Britannia and Shamrock, with huge sail areas and equally huge crews, ruled the day. Yacht cruising was very much in its infancy and for most, the concept of heading out sailing in a small yacht for pleasure was a completely alien concept. True, there were a few pioneers indulging in this esoteric pursuit, but they were few and far between. Cruising yachts as a class didn’t really exist when Henry and Erskine were casting around for a suitable boat and it is understandable that they settled on Shulah, even though they were clearly terrified of her huge mainsail. They were soon also to discover how restrictive her extremely deep draft was. Given that the two brothers acknowledged that they were pretty green when it came to sailing, and perhaps in deference to Shulah’s mainsail, the pair were prepared to hire a hand to show them the ropes. This step afforded mixed results, as Erskine later related rather sardonically.

  Determined to become thoroughly grounded in the technique of yachting, we had to procure a yacht hand. One meant two, for the magnitude of our main boom and swift intuition from our speech that we were inveterate landsmen evoked from our first choice an immediate demand for a mate. The whole atmosphere of the enterprise was serious. We were barely under way and threading the crowd of yachts which lay in Kingstown harbour when we were warned to don oilskins, as there would be ‘sea outside’. Clambering back to the deck clad in vivid orange, we winced at the feeling that we, like our main boom, were the objects of amused criticism. For there was no sea outside, at any rate for some miles; only a fresh offshore wind crisping the smooth waters of Dublin Bay and driving the city murk towards the cliffs of Howth. But the weather signs were held to be adverse: we found they always were – trouble might begin at any moment. So we maintained our strange armour, though it hampered our movements grievously, and by its repulsive texture and odour hastened the inevitable approach of physical distress.

  One can readily picture the friction between the working class crew and their privileged and somewhat clueless employers. Given the circumstances it is therefore perhaps understandable that it was not long before the two parties were split asunder. This happened shortly after the paid hands had managed to run the Shulah firmly aground in Belfast Lough. Erskine and Henry observed with great interest the efforts of their crew to build a makeshift scaffold out of spars to prop the vessel up in order to prevent her getting swamped by the incoming tide. The helpful hands resigned shortly afterwards.

  Despite a newfound feeling of confidence in and understanding of the dark art of sailing, neither brother quite felt up to taking command of the vessel and instead hired a skipper. This man was evidently an alcoholic and, following another serious grounding, tried to blackmail the Childers by insinuating that they had deliberately wrecked the boat in order to claim insurance. The tipsy skipper was unceremonially discharged and a new man was hired, who thankfully seemed happy to let the brothers get on with sailing and merely kept an eye on them in the meantime.

  Despite these travails, Erskine was enjoying the cruise, ‘Seeing with enchanted eyes the purple hills and wine dark seas of Scotland.’ They had made a start and, by the time the vessel was laid up for the winter, had a strong grasp of most of the fundamentals of navigating and boat handling. This was fortunate because when they returned to Shulah the following season, their latest ‘skipper’ lasted only a few days and from thereon the two brothers determined to make their own way. This step led to some interesting incidents, for there is little question that Shulah was a formidable craft for two to handle, and her huge mainsail seems to have been a permanent liability, as witnessed in this recollection by Erskine of their arrival in the anchorage of Gourock:

  We came storming with m
agnificent nonchalance into an anchorage thickly dotted with anchor lights swaying above hulls invisible in the darkness and balefully warning us off from every discernible resting place. ‘Two’s enough to manage her’ had been one of our smug commonplaces latterly; but six seemed scarcely enough now, with the tiller, the anchor, the lead, the sheets, the halyards, and the arrangement for a lookout all crying for attention from two harassed mariners inaudible to one another in the whistle of wind and rattle of canvas. We blundered miserably about, missing stays, gybing cataclysmically, shaving a bowsprit here and a jigger there, until more by accident than design brought up in an apparently free space, sullenly deaf to the cries of a dim figure in pyjamas on board a neighbouring craft. We turned in with a presentiment of evil, to find in the morning that we had tangled with some moorings, whose owner swept up and gave us his views on our seamanship.

  Most sailors will recall fondly some similar snarl-up to this at some point in their careers, and it is worth remembering that the Shulah and her contemporaries did not possess a motor of any kind, so any close-quarters handling had to be done under sail. This is an infinitely more ticklish business than the handling of most boats today, whose owners are generally inclined to rely on their engines in close quarters. While this still doesn’t seem to prevent comical accidents of the type described, it really should do.