Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  It was Molly who made the breakthrough. Peering desperately through the mists, she made out the vague form of the tug, with a yacht moored alongside it, the Kelpie, which – as luck would have it – was now fully loaded and just about to cast off. Soon it was Asgard’s turn to load, and the fog – previously their enemy – was now a firm friend, providing a perfect cover for their illicit activities. The calm that had dogged their passage was also a huge boon as it made loading a simple operation. At this point Childers was horrified to discover that the Kelpie had loaded a mere 600 rifles (as opposed to her expected 750) and much less ammunition than hoped. This meant the Asgard was going to have to take 900 rifles, a very heavy load, yet he spared nothing to cram as much of this cargo as possible aboard his beloved yacht. Mary Spring Rice was one of the co-conspirators in this operation and recounted the dramatic events later:

  Darkness, lamps, strange faces, the swell of the sea making the boat lurch, guns, straw, everywhere, unpacking on deck and being handed down and stowed in an endless stream – the Vaseline of the guns smeared over everything; the bunks and floors of the whole yacht aft from the fo’c’sle filled about 2’6” high with guns from side to side, men sweating and panting under the weight of ammunition boxes – a German face peering down the hatch saying, ‘they will explode if you drop them’. A huge ship’s oil riding light falling down through the hatch and, first onto my shoulder and then upside down into a heap of straw – a flare up, a cry, a quick snatch of rescue, the lamp goes out thank god, work again, someone drops two guns through, they fall on someone, no room to stand save on guns, guns everywhere. On and on and on.

  By 2.30am the Asgard was completely full and two cases of ammunition were reluctantly dumped over the side as there simply wasn’t an inch more room. Stage one of the mission was complete. The Asgard headed for Ireland, her crew sleeping on a bed of rifles and bullets as they made their way with painful slowness up the coast, heavily laden and beating into an unexpected headwind. There were several alarming near misses along the way; firstly with the Royal Navy who were on manoeuvres off both Folkestone and Plymouth, and who succeeded in terrifying the crew of the Asgard during both encounters. In the first instance they fired blanks at the yacht, in the second, a destroyer came speeding directly at them and threatened to ram them. The next major scare came as Asgard anchored in Holyhead. Erskine needed some decent sleep and was just settling in for a snooze when a coastguard boat pulled alongside and asked to speak to the skipper. He was duly woken and coolly answered their questions regarding the last port of the yacht, tonnage, destination and such like. To the immense relief of everyone, the authorities were satisfied with Childers’ half-truths and rowed away without boarding. The drama was not over yet, however, for the crossing of the Irish Sea was a brutal, tumultuous one and Erskine was not able to leave the deck for many hours as his heavily-laden vessel laboured through the storm-lashed seas. Despite this final test by the elements, Asgard was off Howth by 25 July and had a day to wait before her appointment. Unknown to the smugglers, there had been drama ashore, for there had been a tip-off that guns were going to be run into Howth and HMS Porpoise had been dispatched to patrol the area. This crisis was averted when a counter rumour was circulated that the guns were going to be run into Wicklow, and HMS Porpoise dutifully hurried off to hunt down the artfully placed red herring. The coast was clear and the Asgard’s triumphant arrival is recorded at the start of this chapter.

  Fittingly, if rather tragically, this daredevil piece of seamanship was to be Childers’ last ever yachting cruise. He was 44, and should have had many more years of pottering about in yachts ahead of him, but two things got in his way. First came the war with Germany, which he had presaged with such unerring foresight in The Riddle. Childers promptly turned British patriot again and, despite his age, served with distinction in the Royal Navy, the very force he and his friends had so dextrously dodged that fateful summer’s day off Howth. Childers distinguished himself in the Cuxhaven Raid – the first time seaplanes were used to carry out an attack – and his intimate knowledge of the Frisian coastline was to prove pivotal to its success. It was one of those strange moments that followed Childers throughout his later life, where fiction and fact seemed to melt into one. Just as he had always wished for the Riddle of the Sands to appear to the reader as fact, now the facts of his life seemed to become more fantastical than the fiction.

  Further service in the Dardanelles, and later an office job with the Admiralty, saw Childers emerge from the war relatively unscathed and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC). Yet he did not return to peace, but to his favourite subject: home rule for Ireland. He launched himself into this cause with the feverish tenacity with which he had once sought out adventure in the less fraught forum of small sailing boats. From now on, Childers was adrift on a much deeper and more dangerous ocean, and the waters were alive with sharks.

  This book is primarily about seafaring literature and is therefore a far from suitable vehicle for exploring the Irish Question. Suffice to say that Childers’ dogged approach saw him become one of the leading lights in the push for Home Rule. Yet he was always the outsider, the ‘last Englishman’, and it was a combination of this, his single-minded stubbornness and his ‘reckless courage’ that were to prove his undoing. Once Ireland had gained some autonomy, it promptly plunged into civil war, and by 1922 Childers was very much on the back foot. His closest ally (Michael Collins) had been shot and Childers was increasingly being portrayed as the destructive force behind the war. His conspicuous Englishness made him a convenient scapegoat and he was portrayed in the press as the evil mastermind behind the conflict in Ireland. On 10 November 1922, officers of the newly established ‘free state’ arrested him at his old ancestral home of Glendalough. He greeted the officers with a gun, but one of his maids intervened, throwing herself between Childers and the men. He was tried on 17 November 1922 by a court he refused to recognise and was sentenced to be executed on the rather feeble charge of possessing an automatic weapon without authority. He was executed seven days later. His final words as the firing squad lined up were: ‘Take a step or two forward lads, it will be easier that way.’ So Childers’ life ended and with it his ‘chance of being useful’.

  It was a tragic, and ultimately stupid, death. Distrusted in Ireland and reviled as a traitor in England, Childers had left himself utterly isolated. At the time of his execution Winston Churchill described him as, ‘That mischief making murderous renegade.’ He was nothing of the sort. He was just a man earnestly trying to do his best for his mother’s country. Thankfully, the passage of time has been kinder to Childers than many were in 1922 and his reputation has been restored. It is fitting that he is remembered foremost as a novelist and sailor. It is this first love of his that has endured and his ability to convey the sheer joy of ‘pottering around on small boats’ that has ensured his legacy is more than that of a rather quirky footnote in the history of Ireland’s struggle for freedom. With that in mind, it is probably best to leave the last word to Childers himself. In an article he published in The Times he mused upon the madness of, ‘embarking on voyages in small, half decked sailing craft, where they are drenched by day and racked by night.’ Yet his conclusion sums up beautifully the very essence of why yachtsmen go to such extraordinary lengths of suffering in the name of pleasure, and provides the man himself with a fitting epitaph:

  When the Sturm and Drang are past, and out of the shock of the seas they glide before the weakening evening breeze into some quiet haven or cove, to drop anchor close to trees which never looked so green or cottages which never looked so snug and homely, their spirit rebounds with a leap; painful memories become sanctified, ennobled, glorious, the mystery of pain has been solved, the riddle of happiness guessed. Something has been conquered not only by power but by love; the world has grown to double its own dimensions and is seen for the first time in harmony. New values have established themselves upon the wreckage of old standards of utility and
gratification.

  Joseph Conrad

  Clipper ship captain turned literary titan

  Of all the sailors turned writers, few enjoyed such an intimate relationship with the sea as Joseph Conrad. For him, sailing was more than just a distraction, it provided both his sole income during 20 years of wandering the globe and the framework around which his itinerant life hung. Between Conrad embarking on a career as a sailor in 1874 and when he finally turned his back on the ocean in 1893, he sailed immense distances, rounded the dreaded Cape Horn twice, meandered along thousands of miles of coast spanning the China Seas to the Mediterranean, and had worked his way up the ladder from apprentice to captain. Even this he did with a flourish, for his first command was a beautiful clipper ship, a craft that was the most perfect evolution of commercial sail. Having set the bar high as a sailor, he then proceeded to master the art of writing novels with even greater élan, producing a number of seminal works in addition to many beautifully crafted short stories. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon: these are books that have long outlived their writer and endure in the memory.

  Yet all of this achievement came from a most unpromising start, and things never looked darker than on a February evening in 1878 when the young sailor retired to his hotel room, a grubby little hovel in the back streets of Marseille, pressed a gun to his chest and tried to end his life. He had just lost a fortune at the card table and his life simply didn’t seem worth living. He was utterly alone, a stranger in a strange land and at this dark moment the role of perpetual outsider didn’t seem one worth playing any more. He fired a bullet deep into his breast. How different the literary world would be if he had succeeded in this rather clumsy attempt at suicide. He would also have deprived himself of some of the most remarkable adventures that were later recorded, embroidered and interwoven into some of the most compelling seafaring literature ever written.

  Yet, in old sailors’ parlance, we are guilty of clapping on our topsails before our anchor is out of the ground, and the tale is in danger of running away with itself. This unpromising youth was 17 years old when he attempted suicide, and the act was the culmination of a tumult of catastrophes that had propelled him across Europe and landed him penniless and desperate on the streets of Marseille. Joseph Conrad was born in Poland in 1857, the only son of Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski. Back then he was known as Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski and was relatively wealthy, for both of his parents were from the landed gentry. Although the Korzeniowskis would certainly have classed themselves as Polish, they were technically Russian, as Poland had been plundered and divided between the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians. Despite this, Poland had managed to maintain a strong national identity and during the nineteenth century the cry for freedom from imperialist rule rang strong and true through the region. Apollo Korzeniowski was a dreamer, a romantic and a man blessed with almost no business acumen. He managed to fritter away most of his own money and also his wife’s substantial dowry on a number of ill thought-out projects. At this point he turned himself solely to the cause célèbre of patriotic Polish men at the time; freedom for Poland. This led to some serious errors of judgement, which resulted in the family being arrested and exiled to northern Russia in 1861. It took two years in these unforgiving climates to kill off Evelina and six years later, when Joseph was 11, Apollo followed suit. These few bald sentences encompass a world of suffering that Joseph had to endure as a child, and which perhaps explain his brooding nature in later years. He was fortunate in one respect, however; his uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski, was a firm friend of Apollo and took it upon himself to care for his nephew. Thaddeus had none of Apollo’s rashness and wilfulness and was a pragmatic and eminently sensible man. His affection for his wayward brother-in-law endured and was transferred to Joseph and at the same time he tried to instil some of his own values into his nephew. He was the perfect foil for Joseph, who was already displaying a tendency toward the kind of unthinking romanticism that had landed Apollo in such straits. In later years, Conrad would always speak of his uncle and guardian with the greatest affection and respect.

  It must have come as something of a blow to Thaddeus when his young charge began to insist that he must go to sea. Given that he had never even seen the sea, and that a mariner’s life was almost universally acknowledged at the time to be a dangerous and poorly paid one, this must have been viewed with some concern by Thaddeus. He saw all of Apollo’s foolhardy wilfulness in the demand. Yet there seemed no stemming the youngster’s desire to escape his landlocked existence, and in 1874 Thaddeus granted Joseph his wish. Using some contacts he had in Marseille Thaddeus secured him a berth as passenger aboard the Mont Blanc, an elderly wooden sailing vessel built in 1853. She was embarking on a round voyage to the West Indies and back and it is likely that Thaddeus hoped that the monotony and hardship of a long voyage would cure his charge of any sea fever and make him eager to return to more gainful employment.

  In this assumption he was wrong, for the charm of deep-sea sailing took hold of Joseph despite the old boat taking quite a beating, as he recalled many years later:

  The very first Christmas night I ever spent away from land was employed in running before a Gulf of Lyons gale, which made the old ship groan in every timber as she skipped before it over the short seas until we brought her to, battered and out of breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the smooth water was torn by fierce cat’s-paws under a very stormy sky. We – or, rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt water in my life till then – kept her standing off and on all that day, while I listened for the first time with the curiosity of my tender years to the song of the wind in a ship’s rigging. The monotonous and vibrating note was destined to grow into the intimacy of the heart, pass into blood and bone, accompany the thoughts and acts of two full decades, remain to haunt like a reproach the peace of the quiet fireside, and enter into the very texture of respectable dreams dreamed safely under a roof of rafters and tiles. The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more. The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same half-hour) leaked. She leaked fully, generously, overflowingly, all over – like a basket.

  I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement caused by that last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the why or the wherefore. The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam. But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and least of all what I was doing in that galère. I remember that, exactly as in the comedy of Molière, my uncle asked the precise question in the very words – not of my confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey to him my (utterly unfounded) impression that the West Indies awaited my coming. I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic conviction – something in the nature of a call. But it was difficult to state intelligibly the grounds of this belief to that man of rigorous logic, if of infinite charity.

  Clearly Uncle Thaddeus’ plan had come royally unstuck. The sea gave the youngster a real outlet for his thirst for adventure and youthful romanticism. In sending Joseph to the Caribbean, Thaddeus had certainly helped. This was a flying-fish passage as the old salts would say, all deep blue glittering water, great playful swells with feathery billowing whitecaps and steady trade winds that caressed the cheek with warmth and thrummed in the rigging. After two months of this monotonous beauty, Joseph enjoyed the thrill of raising the tropical island of Martinique, with its chattering birds, azure waters and unseen, untold adventure. Joseph was theoretically a passenger on this first trip, but would doubtless have helped with the work of the ship. Life aboard a commercial sailing ship was not an easy one. Much of the work Conrad would have been set would have been dreadfully boring, a daily drudge of cleaning and scrubbing interspersed with moments of real danger when hands were ordered up the masts to furl or set sails.
It was usually the novices who were sent high into the upper yards, and death from falling was a constant threat. Yet Conrad evidently took to the work like a duck to water and the comfortable, warm-weather passage would certainly have helped ease him in to a life afloat. The only hardship would have come on the return passage, when the Mont Blanc would have taken a more northerly course and had to contend with slightly chillier conditions. Despite this, Conrad did not hesitate to sign on for a second trip, which again took in Martinique and also Haiti, concluding with an icy cold race up the North Atlantic to Le Havre, ending on a raw December day. It is perhaps telling that on this occasion, Joseph left the ship in Le Havre with unseemly haste, caught a train to Marseille and did not ship again for six full months. Whether he fell in love with the sea is highly debatable, but it did help satisfy Conrad’s wanderlust, and he later summed up the relationship as; ‘The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.’

  Still, two lengthy voyages had at least helped to sate some of this restlessness, and he allowed himself the luxury of a six-month break. This may seem pretty decadent, but the fact was that Conrad simply didn’t need to work. He received a yearly allowance from his uncle of 2,000 Francs and this was enough to afford him a life of relative comfort and idleness for extended periods ashore. His uncle may have been pressuring him to progress, but that worthy gentleman was many miles away in Poland and this gave Joseph plenty of freedom to get into scrapes. Idle evenings ashore in Marseille were whiled away in cafes and bars, enjoying the company of intellectuals and revolutionaries in this lively city. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that this young rebel without a cause fell under the thrall of a group of Carlist agitators, sympathisers with Carlos II of Spain, who believed that he had been deprived of his throne. This had led to a number of wars, the second of which had concluded in 1876. Yet the seed of rebellion still burned within Spain and it was the following year that Joseph and his new found comrades became involved in an operation to run guns into Catalonia for the rebels.