Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  Off Cape Horn there are two kinds of weather, neither of them a pleasant kind. If you get the fine kind, it’s dead calm, without even enough wind to lift the wind vane. The sea lies oily and horrible, heaving in slow, solemn swells, the colour of soup. The sky closes down upon the sea all round you, the same colour as the water. The sun never shines over those seas, though sometimes there is a red flush, in the east or west to hint that somewhere, very far away, there is daylight brightening the face of things.

  If you are a ship in the Cape Horn calm you forge ahead under all sail, a quarter of a mile an hour. The swell heaves you up and drops you, in long, slow, gradual movements, in a rhythm beautiful to mark. You roll too in a sort of horrible crescendo, half a dozen rolls and a lull. You can never tell when she will begin to roll. She will begin quite suddenly for no apparent reason. She will go over and over with a rattling clatter of blocks and chains.

  It is cold, this fine variety, for little snow squalls are always blowing by, to cover the decks with soft, dry snow, and to melt upon the sails. If you go aloft you must be careful what you touch. If you touch a wire shroud or a chain sheet, the skin comes from your skin as though a hot iron had scarred it. If you but scratch your hand, in that fierce cold, the scratch will suppurate. I broke the skin of my hand once with a jagged scrap of wire in the main rigging. The scratch festered so that I could not move my hand for a week.

  We had rigged up a bogey stove … It did not burn well this stove, but we contrived to cook by it. We were only allowed coke for fuel, but we always managed to contrive to steal coal enough either from the cook or from the coal hole. It was our great delight to sit upon our chests in the dogwatch, looking at the bogey, listening to the creaking chimney, watching the smoke pouring out of the chinks. In the night watches, when the sleepers lay quiet in their bunks behind the red baize curtains, one or two of us who kept the deck would creep below to put on coal. That was the golden time, the time of the night watch, to sit there in the darkness among the sleepers hearing the coals click.

  Yet this was a false tranquility, an uneasy truce with Cape Horn, which could not last. All the while, the sailors awaited heavy weather, and when it came, it came with an absolute vengeance. The Antarctic winter exploded upon the Gilcruix, hurling all of its fury upon the ship, and the men suffered terribly. Weathering Cape Horn when you come from the Atlantic side is an art in itself. The westerly winds mean that you are essentially going to have to batter your way through against the elements. Square-rigged ships were never notable for their ability at sailing into the wind, even in their last evolutions, and the trick was to tack back and forth awaiting a favourable slant to get you round. This meant exposing yourself for days, even weeks at a time to some of the meanest weather known to man. The tall-ship record for weathering Cape Horn east to west is five days, achieved by the clipper Flying Cloud through endless hard driving and extreme good fortune. The slowest passage runs into hundreds of days. The British Isles, a contemporary of the Gilcruix, once took 84 days to weather the Horn. In heavy weather, these big iron ships lacked the buoyancy of their wooden predecessors and their decks were constantly flooded with icy water, which often came aboard with a force that swept men off their feet and even overboard. The Gilcruix lacked a central ‘Liverpool House’ a full-width raised deckhouse amidships, which some later vessels had, and this meant a sea could pour inboard forward of her poop and then sweep the length of the deck. If you weren’t smart enough to jump for the rigging, you were simply hurled pell-mell along the deck, either overboard or smashed against some unforgiving piece of deck equipment. This was precisely what happened to Eric Newby aboard the Moshulu:

  As I went another body bumped me and I received a blow in the eye from a seaboot. Then I was alone, rushing onwards and turning over and over. My head was filled with bright lights like a bypass at night and the air was full of the sounds of a large orchestra playing out of tune. In spite of this, there was time to think ‘I’m done for’. At the same time, the lines of the sea poem: ‘ten men hauling the lee fore brace … seven when she rose at last’, came back to me with peculiar aptness. But only for an instant because now I was turning full somersaults, hitting myself violently again and again, that might have been the top of the hatch. Then I was over it, full of water and very frightened, thinking ‘is this what it’s like to drown?’ No more obstructions now, but still going very fast and still underwater, perhaps no longer in the ship, washed overboard, alone in the Southern Ocean. Quite suddenly there was a parting of water, a terrific crash as my head hit something solid, and I felt myself aground.

  The Moshulu, which Newby served aboard, was a larger ship than the Gilcruix, and her deck was more enclosed, so inundations of this nature must have been common as the ship laboured among the great greybeards of Cape Horn. Up above, the wind howled a great roaring moan in the rigging, utterly baleful in the lonely sky.

  It was down here in this wasteland that Masefield first heard the haunting shanty ‘Hanging Johnny’, described by him thus:

  It has the most melancholy tune that is one of the saddest things that I have ever heard. I heard it for the first time off the Horn in a snowstorm. We were hoisting topsails after heavy weather. There was a heavy grey sea running and the decks were awash. The skies were sodden and oily, shutting in the sea about a quarter of a mile away. Some birds were flying about us screaming.

  (Chantyman)They call me Hanging Johnny.

  (Sailors) Away-i-oh.

  (Chantyman) They call me Hanging Johnny.

  (Sailors) So hang boys, hang.

  I thought at the time that it was the whole scene set to music. I cannot repeat those words without seeing the line of yellow oilskins, the wet deck, the frozen ropes and the great grey seas running up into the sky.

  Off the Horn, Masefield’s diary comes to an end, almost unquestionably because he was simply too frozen, exhausted and wretched to continue with it. We can get some idea of his sufferings from the recollections of the author Basil Lubbock who made a trip around the Horn west to east in the four-masted barque Ross-shire in 1899. He encountered a similarly epic storm to Masefield, and recalls the unimaginable scale of these great waves:

  When on top of one of these great Cape Horners, looking forward was like looking from the top of a mountain; the first smaller mountains, then hills, until what looked like a valley, seemed miles away in the distance.

  I am very certain that it was a good deal nearer two miles than one mile from crest to crest of these enormous seas and I don’t believe that any vessel under 500 tons could have lived in them for five minutes.

  The main deck is often out of sight now for some minutes, even the hatches being covered, and as the ship rolls it becomes a roaring, hissing, boiling cauldron.

  The difference for Lubbock was that his ship was running – or hove to – before this tumult. The Gilcruix was battling into this maelstrom and, in all, was 32 days extricating herself from it. This being the southern winter, her situation was made even worse when she became ensnared among icebergs, and some fairly serious damage was done following a collision with a small berg. Masefield never elaborated upon this period of hell and only commented on:

  thirty two days of such storm and cold I hope never to see again. The Horn is a hard place in the winter, seas forty feet high and two miles long, and ice everywhere. On deck, in the rigging and tumbling in the sea.

  The closest we have to a full description of the conditions from Masefield is probably his poem Dauber, the tale of a sensitive young artist who goes to sea in order to learn more about the ships he loves to paint, and finds himself utterly rejected. He finally wins acceptance from his shipmates after an epic battle with the elements off the Horn. This piece is clearly written by one intimate with this desolate stretch of ocean:

  The snow whirled all about – dense, multitudinous cold –

  Mixed with the wind’s one devilish shriek, which whiffled out men’s tears, deafened, took hold,

  Flatten
ing the flying drift against the cheek.

  The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak.

  The ship lay on her broadside; the wind’s sound

  Had devilish malice at having got her downed

  How long the gale had blown he could not tell,

  Only the world had changed, his life had died.

  A moment now was everlasting hell.

  Nature an onslaught from the weather side,

  A withering rush of death, a frost that cried,

  Shrieked till he withered at the heart; a hail

  Plastered his oilskins with icy mail.

  Evidently this kind of treatment was enough to turn the mind of even the hardiest sailors, let alone a callow youth just turned 16. There is little doubt that at times Masefield must have thought the ship would perish, and at other times he probably wished she would, particularly as some of his writings suggest that the half deck’s beloved bogey stove was washed out and unusable as they battled to turn the corner. Eventually, miraculously, the big ship won through and limped up the Pacific to Iquique. The passage had occupied some 13 weeks and without the delay off the Horn, would have been a fine one. Perhaps, had it not been for the ordeal off the Horn, Masefield would have stuck to the sea. As it stood, he was in a fragile state of mind as they approached their destination. The distant shores they had battled so hard to gain were sighted on a bright August morning, as Masefield recalled:

  The water alongside us was no longer blue, but a dark green, which was not like the seas we had sailed. As it grew lighter, the mist which had lain along the land was blown away. We saw the land we had come so far to see, the land we had struggled for, the land we had talked of. It lay in a line to leeward, a grey, irregular mass, with the sun shining over it. Over us was a sky of deep, kindly blue, patrolled with soft, white clouds, little white Pacific clouds, delicately rounded like the clouds of the trade winds.

  As they neared land, the crew made out the great snow-capped mountains, and the city of Iquique. The Chilean port was a ramshackle place, nestling in the tiny strip of land between the great Pacific and the mighty Andes. Not only is it a notoriously dangerous anchorage for ships, it’s also a very stark, lonely, harsh place. The landscape is beautiful but the town had grown up rapidly around shipping and trade and, as such, was full of all the filthy drinking dens and brothels that sailors were so fond of. In other words, it was no place for a boy in a delicate frame of mind. What happened next is not entirely clear, and Masefield never chose to talk of it at any length. All that is certain is that, after the ship was some time in Iquique discharging her cargo, Masefield was himself discharged on the grounds of being a DBS or Distressed British Sailor. He later simply stated that he had ‘had a bad time and almost died’. The reason for this is often given as ‘sunstroke’. Was this the case? It seems like a very extreme measure if it was, for as a DBS he was entitled to be transported home by mail steamer, at the expense of the White Star Line. This seems a very extravagant measure for someone suffering from sunstroke. The more likely reality was that he suffered something of a breakdown while in Iquique and the captain, being a merciful man, gave him the opportunity to leave the ship and get home in a more comfortable fashion.

  The closest hint we get to his mental state was an incidental part of a tale Masefield wrote over a decade later about a man murdered in a barroom brawl. The incident occurred after Masefield had been give a day’s leave and had headed up into the foothills of the Andes:

  High up in the hills I came to a silver mine with a little inn or wine shop at the top of it. There was a bench near the door of the tavern, so I sat down to rest; and I remember looking at the russet coloured earth from the shaft and wondering whether silver mining was hard work or not. I had had enough of hard work to last me through my time. There was a view over the sea from where I sat. I could see the anchorage and the ships and a few rocks with surf about them, and a train puffing into the depot. A barquentine was being towed out by a little dirty tug; and very far away, shining in the sun, an island rose from the sea, whitish like a swimmer’s shoulder. It was a beautiful sight that anchorage, with the ships lying there so lovely, all their troubles at an end. But I knew that aboard each ship, there were young men going to the devil and mature men wasted, and old men wrecked and I wondered at the misery and sin which went to make each ship so perfect an image of beauty.

  Hardly positive thoughts for a young man of 16, but they do perfectly illustrate his internal struggle with ships and the sea; the beauty and the loathsomeness of it all. The tale goes on to recount a rather shocking murder that had evidently just occurred inside the tavern. Not the kind of thing a brooding Masefield needed to witness at that moment. The true reasons for his sick leave will never be known, but after a short while convalescing in a Valparaiso hospital, he returned home via the Panama Isthmus and the Atlantic. It was far from a wasted trip, and many of the thrilling sights and people found their way into his later books. The fictional Santa Barbara, which makes an appearance in several of his novels, is a sort of distillation of everything he saw out in South America.

  He returned home to the utter derision of his Aunt Kate, who taunted him on his failure – a failure that certainly haunted him the rest of his life in one way or another. His sister Ethel recalled that he was in a pretty poor state on his return to Ledbury that autumn, and spent much time muttering the words to the shanty ‘Hanging Johnny’, which had struck a chord in the desolate wasteland of the Horn. In the spring, his Aunt announced that she had secured him a place on another windjammer, the big four-masted barque Bidston Hill, loading case oil in New York and bound for the East. John was dispatched to New York to serve, once again, as an apprentice. Masefield’s thoughts on this matter were very clear, as he later recalled:

  The sea seemed to have me in her grip. I was to pass a life beating other men’s ships to port. This was to be ‘life’ for me. The docks and sailor town and all the damning and the heaving.

  It was likely he reported aboard the Bidston Hill, but a few days of the usual toil was enough for him, ‘I deserted my ship in New York. I cut myself adrift from her and from my home. I was going to be a writer come what might.’

  And that was that: a couple of years of landlocked adventures in the US were followed by a working passage home as a bar steward aboard a transatlantic passenger vessel. Aside from a burst of seafaring serving on a hospital launch during World War One, Masefield was finished with the sea. Yet when he picked up his pen in earnest around 1900 at the age of 22, he returned immediately to the oceans and the ships he had so loved and loathed. To Masefield the writer, the sea was everything. His one voyage as a true sailor, and his experiences on the Conway, seeped through much of his best poetry and prose. His first published poems were overflowing with the romance and mystical beauty of the oceans and the elegant windjammers that plied them in ever diminishing numbers. And this brings us back to the start of this tale, and the young poet, so embarrassed of his lack of ‘real’ sea knowledge. True, next to Conrad, who had worked on the sea for many years and even commanded a clipper ship, he was a novice, yet his one epic voyage had taught him all he ever needed to know about the sea. He was not benumbed to its charm and horror by years of grind. He saw and fully understood with great clarity how sailors come to love and hate it in equal measure. He also understood how sometimes you need to turn your back on the sea to love it and, in many cases, to live. Many of his Conway contemporaries died tragically young. Despite this, he wasn’t above occasional regrets:

  There is solid comfort in a roaring storm ashore here, but on a calm day, when it is raining, when it is muddy underfoot, when the world is the colour of a drowned rat, one calls to mind more boisterous days, the days of effort and adventure; and wasn’t I a fool, I say, to come ashore and live a life like this. And I was surely daft, I keep saying, to think the sea as bad as I always thought it. And if I were in a ship now, I say, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m trying to do. I wouldn’t be hunched at
this desk, I say, I’d be up on a bridge – up on a bridge with a helmsman, feeling her do her fifteen knots.

  Yet, there was another factor in his young life that contributed to, and in some ways marred, his writing. Masefield’s youth was all about failure, isolation and loneliness. In many of his books there is such a longing for a happy ending that it tarnishes the story itself. Perhaps this is why his children’s fiction The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights are still cherished while works such as Sard Harker and the Bird of Dawning are largely overlooked. Both these books are packed with beautiful descriptions and narrative, but are spoilt by the perfection of the hero and the ludicrously neat conclusions. Graham Greene once wrote that Sard Harker, ‘would have been the greatest adventure story in the English language if it hadn’t got that ridiculous ending.’

  Fortunately Masefield’s life did have the happy ending he craved. He married, settled in Oxfordshire and was poet laureate for 37 years. Perhaps the greatest contributor to this good fortune was Masefield’s ability to love and appreciate the sea but accept that it was necessary for him to turn his back on it. Naturally, the best insight into this complex relationship comes from the man himself, pithily summing up his feelings after meeting up with an old shipmate from the Gilcruix, who had remained at sea and commented how ‘old’ Masefield had become by sticking to the land. Reflecting later on the conversation, he pondered that epic voyage: