Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  This practice of getting one’s way with local girls, made virtuous by the preaching of the missionaries, was common at the time. In The Beach of Falesa, the aforementioned Mr Wiltshire falls in love with his fraudulent bride and then reflects that, ‘… she was no even mate for a poor trader like myself.’ The clear inference of a native girl being viewed as the superior to the white trader was repugnant to the Victorians, many of whom still believed that whites were inherently superior to people of any other colour. Stevenson was accused from some quarters of doting on the natives and presenting a rather skewed vision of evil, avaricious whites and virtuous, put-upon natives. This is also unfair, for his portrayal of the South Sea Islanders was balanced. He later summed up Samoans in simple but effective terms: ‘Like other folk; false enough, lazy enough, not heroes, not saints, ordinary people damnably misused.’

  As Stevenson wrote, the rest of the party awaited the return of the Casco, to all intents and purposes marooned in this beautiful spot. After a month, their supplies were out and, given that most of their money was aboard the schooner, they were in something of a fix. It was at this point that Ori stepped in, as Margaret related:

  After much talk, Ori made a solemn oration to Louis, which was translated to him by the chief, and was to this effect: You are my brother, and all that I have is yours. I know that your food is done, but I can give you fish and fei as much as you like. This place suits you, and it makes us happy to have you, – stay here till the Casco comes, be happy, et ne pleurez plus!

  Such an offer could not be declined, and the Stevensons remained until the Casco finally returned on December 22. In fact, they did not manage to fully make their departure until Christmas Day, for their farewell was a long, protracted affair with much feasting. Stevenson regained the deck of the Casco in fine fettle; he had even taken to sea bathing towards the end of the stay in Tautira and was well prepared for the next stage of the trip, which would take them to Honolulu, Hawaii. The Stevensons had now been five months cruising the islands and, at least according to Captain Otis, were ready to return to civilisation, as he recalled:

  It took all of five weeks before I was able to return to Tautira and pick up Stevenson; but when I got there at last, I found him in fine health, and as brown as a berry, yet I am certain he had grown tired of Tahiti, and certainly he hailed the Casco like a welcome friend.

  On Christmas Day, the Casco’s anchor clanked aboard and, the vessel once more headed out to sea. A 13-gun salute resounded from the captain’s Winchester rifle, and from shore, the crack of a distant gun echoed in friendly reply. Once more the voyagers were on their way on what was to prove the final lap of their voyage aboard the Casco. As it happened, it was also to be the most trying leg of them all; for the 3,760km (2,336 mile) trip to Hawaii was dogged from the very start by ill fortune. As Louis noted in a letter to a friend back home while on passage:

  At last our contemptible ship was ready; to sea we went, bound for Honolulu and the letter-bag, on Christmas Day; and from then to now have experienced every sort of minor misfortune, squalls, calms, contrary winds and seas, pertinacious rains, declining stores, till we came almost to regard ourselves as in the case of Vanderdecken.

  In all, there were 17 days of calm before the trade winds were finally picked up, 17 days of glassy water and heat that seared the deck until the pitch bubbled in the seams. Up above, the lifeless sails flogged and clashed against the mast in a most infuriating manner until most of the party was exasperated. Captain Otis later recalled that many of the crew were ‘down in the dumps’ the only exception being Stevenson, whose persistent good humour only seemed to irritate the rest of the party all the more. In their defence, the end of the cruise was in sight, for the intention was to make Honolulu a long, possibly indefinite, stop. With the coming of the end a trip, one’s patience is often tried.

  On 20 January, the trades were picked up and the gallant Casco once more kicked up her heels and flew, skimming across the waters, trembling under the strain of her canvas like a thing alive. Once more there was purpose and hope after those listless weeks of calm. The relief of all was palpable, but it was also short lived. It was around this time the cook discovered that the vessel was dangerously low on supplies. Captain Otis grumpily blamed the extravagant Christmas and New Year feasts the guests had enjoyed, combined with the unforeseen delay of the calms. Whatever the reason, all sail was piled on in order to make Honolulu in record time. All the while, the wind freshened, and sail was shortened. Soon the Casco was running before a gale of wind, which showed every sign of worsening.

  Captain Otis found himself in a quandary: he desperately needed to make land as soon as possible, but as conditions grew ever more severe, a decision needed to be made. There was a real risk that one of the heavy seas that chased the Casco would overwhelm her, washing away her helmsman and flooding the cockpit. With the helmsman gone, the vessel would ‘broach’, slewing beam on to the seas and most likely be overwhelmed and rolled over by the next heavy sea. In such circumstances, the prudent sailor would opt to heave to, shorten down to one tiny sail and lay beam on to the sea, riding out the storm. All, however, were impatient to get on, and the shortage of supplies was now so dire that Otis, after careful consultation with Stevenson, opted to run on before the storm come what may. From this point, there would be no turning back, for once the storm worsened, heaving to would be impossible. Stevenson later recreated this moment in The Wrecker:

  ‘Captain,’ I returned, with my heart in my mouth, ‘risk is better than certain failure.’

  ‘Life is all risk, Mr. Dodd,’ he remarked. ‘But there’s one thing: it’s now or never; in half an hour, Archdeacon Gabriel couldn’t lay her to, if he came down stairs on purpose.’

  ‘All right,’ said I. ‘Let’s run.’

  ‘Run goes,’ said he; and with that he fell to breakfast, and passed half an hour in stowing away pie and devoutly wishing himself back in San Francisco.

  Thus the Casco roared on before the mountainous seas, and some idea of the dizzying ride can be gathered from this brief account by Stevenson himself:

  One stirring day was that in which we sighted Hawaii. It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, foresail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her lee rail under water and flew. The swell, the heaviest I have ever been out in – I tried in vain to estimate the height, AT LEAST fifteen feet – came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind. We had the best hand – old Louis – at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, and had noble luck, for it never caught us once. At times it seemed we must have it; Louis would look over his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the cockpit coamings. I never remember anything more delightful and exciting. Pretty soon after we were lying absolutely becalmed under the lee of Hawaii, of which we had been warned; and the captain never confessed he had done it on purpose, but when accused, he smiled. Really, I suppose he did quite right, for we stood committed to a dangerous race, and to bring her to the wind would have been rather a heart-sickening manoeuvre.

  An indication of how bad things were during this part of the passage can be witnessed by the fact that Captain Otis later stated that these were, ‘the worst seas I had ever seen’. God knows what the rest of the Stevenson party made of it, but doubtless they did not share their leader’s exhilaration. Certainly Fanny was ill for the entirety of the storm and must have longed to once more step foot on dry land. Indeed, after the trip, she declared that she would, ‘never go to sea again’ which was a brave statement for someone who was stranded in Hawaii.

  Once in the lee of Hawaii, they were essentially home and dry, although there were several hours spent infuriatingly becalmed before they finally dropped the hook off Oahu. The trip was over, for Stevenson took the decision to pay off the Casco and shortly after, she made her way back to San
Francisco, and the awaiting Dr Merritt. Stevenson, writing to his cousin Bob, noted that: ‘My extremely foolhardy venture is practically over. How foolhardy it was I don’t think I realised.’

  He continued by stating that the Casco was over-rigged and unsuitable for the trip. In this, he could not have been more wrong. The vessel had looked after the Stevensons better than they could have ever hoped and, as Otis late recalled, ‘It was her extreme handiness that got us out of many a tight corner.’ As for the friendship with Captain Otis, this had been severely strained by the tough trip up to Hawaii, but Stevenson later wrote that, ‘I really liked the man’. They never met again. In essence, the yarn is over. We leave the Casco sailing the darkening seas on her way back to San Francisco, and bid adieu to the famous author in good health and, ‘oppressed by civilisation’ as he put it, in Honolulu.

  Yet this is a tale where both author and yacht deserve a postscript, and we will begin with the Casco, for her adventures had only just begun. She returned to San Francisco, but all was not well with her owner, Dr Merritt, who died shortly after her return. Her days as a yacht with snowy white decks and plush interior were over, for in 1892 a syndicate purchased her for use in seal-hunting and trans-Pacific trading to the Far East. Her decks would have been stained with the grease of blubber and her opulent accommodation must have been at least partly ripped out to increase the size of her hold. Yet her reputation as a flyer remained and there is a claim that she made the crossing from Yokohama, Japan, to the US in 20 days, one of the fastest trans-Pacific runs on record for a sailing yacht of this era.

  Her great speed was to get her into trouble, though, for in 1898 she was purchased by new owners and operated as an opium smuggler, running the drug in to Canada and the US from China. According to later accounts by some of her crewmembers, in this same year she was involved in an extremely grisly incident off the Canadian coast. At the time she was nearing the completion of one of her smuggling voyages and was loaded with opium and around 30 illegal immigrants. As she made her way along the coast, a revenue cutter was perceived making its way under power and gaining on the schooner in the fickle breeze. Panic ensued, and the decision was taken to jettison the cargo in order to escape the inevitable severe punishment for drug and people trafficking. In the case of the opium, this was a simple case of throwing the cargo overboard, but, shockingly, the decision was taken to bring the hapless immigrants up on deck, one by one, kill them and dump them into the sea weighed down with sacks of coal. As the revenue cutter slowly gained, this grisly massacre went on, hidden from the view of the authorities in the lee of the Casco’s sails. By the time the cutter ranged alongside, the Casco was free from incriminating evidence and the authorities had little choice but to let the deeply suspicious vessel go.

  The whole shocking occurrence is more gruesome than anything the depraved pirates of Treasure Island managed, although it does chime somewhat with a conundrum faced by Robert Herrick, anti-hero of Stevenson’s South Sea story The Ebb Tide, who is faced with a similar dilemma of facing the long arm of the law or butchering his host.

  After this unpleasant incident, the doomed vessel continued her wandering, changing ownership on many occasions and working in the West Coast trade and later in the fur trade. Several owners threatened to convert her back to a yacht, but none ever got round to it. In 1919, she was chartered by a desperate bunch of adventurers seeking gold far up the coast of Alaska. It was on this voyage that her luck ran out, for she ran aground off Anchorage and was later declared a total loss. Thus passed the beautiful Casco.

  As for Stevenson, his adventures were far from over either and, after a sojourn in Hawaii, he decided that he was ready to slum it a bit after the luxury of the Casco and shipped aboard the trading schooner Equator, bound for the Gilbert Islands under the command of Captain Dennis Reid, a Scots-Irishman with whom the writer got on famously. He was quite a contrast to the rather dry, flinty Otis and the passage to the Gilberts passed pleasantly. Sadly, its details belong to another chapter altogether.

  Stevenson was never much of a sailor in terms of handling ropes and giving out orders, but he was a true voyager and a man who saw the infinite freedom and beauty of the ocean. He also saw it as his ultimate resting place, and this is perhaps why he faced its perils with the sang froid that Captain Otis had so greatly admired. Certainly he had lived with death on his shoulder for so long that it held no fear for him. He wrote of his relationship with the sea in these terms, ‘I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling, yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling.’

  So he pressed on once more, out onto its rolling hills and foaming billows, deeper into the unknown. He never left the Pacific again and only briefly left the South Seas for a trip to Sydney. He settled with his wife and ever-intrepid mother in Apia, Samoa, where he built a magnificent house and saw out the rest of his days, known to the locals as Tusitala, or the teller of tales.

  He died in 1892 at the age of 42. Ultimately it was not his lungs that gave out, for he appears to have suffered a brain haemorrhage. It is perhaps fitting that the final book published before his death was The Ebb Tide, a nasty little tale of greed, drunkenness, murder and repentance. What made this story such an appropriate epitaph to the great author was how unlike much of his earlier work it was, how innovative in dialogue he had become. In addition to this his portrayal of one of the book’s central characters, Attwater, is a masterstroke. This smooth, Cambridge-educated religious lunatic, replete with black cat on his shoulder and Winchester rifle at his hip, is both utterly repellent and fascinating, anticipating later maniacs such as Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, while also opening the door to an exploration of the twisted cruelty often at the heart of imperialism. The South Sea adventures provided Stevenson with a new chapter and a forum within which he could innovate and develop as a writer, and it is a shame that his untimely death deprived us of further stories from this obscure corner of the globe.

  There is no doubt, at his death, the words he wrote back in the Marquesas when the Casco’s anchor first kissed the sand of Aneho, Nuku Hiva still rang true: ‘I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles’. For Stevenson, the South Seas put paid to his own famous quote: ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’. There is no doubt that the South Seas were the first true home he had ever known. His epitaph, placed on his headstone where he lies to this day, high on a hilltop above his home in Apia, could not ring more true. Taken from his poem, Requiem, it reads as follows:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will

  This be the verse you ’grave for me;

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter, home from the hill.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Cruising Association for their kind co-operation in allowing me to browse through and quote extensively from their archive of Erskine Childers’ logbooks. Their straightforward approach to granting me permission was a breath of fresh air. You can find out more about their work by going to: www.cruising.org.uk. Beyond that, I am indebted to my girlfriend, Ivory, and also my mother, for their help both with listening back to drafted chapters and ruthlessly hunting out grammatical errors. James Cox also deserves mention for his help with sourcing images and thank you to both Liz and Clara at Bloomsbury for invaluable work in putting the book together with great efficiency.

  Ultimately, however, the biggest acknowledgement has to go to the authors who, in addition to providing me with much of my favourite literature, seem to have gone out of their way and often put themselves through extreme discomfort to provide me with billions of amusing and hair-raising incidents and anecdotes to narrate. I never realised that writ
ers were quite so willing to suffer for their art until I started researching this book.

  I would like to thank the following for allowing me to reproduce text from authors whose works are still in copyright. I am therefore indebted to: Penguin Random House for the use of quotes from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (see here and here) and The Green Hills of Africa (see here). The Society of Authors, who administer the John Masefield estate and granted permission to quote from Sea Fever (see here), New Chum (see here, here and here), Autobiography (see from here to here and here), On Growing Old (see from here to here and here), Cape Horn Calm (see from here to here), Dauber (see here) and Big Jim (see here). Picador for allowing me to use quotes from Eric Newby’s The last Grain Race (see here and here). The Arthur Ransome Trust for granting permission for me to use quotes from Racundra’s First Cruise (see here, from here to here, from here to here and here) and Autobiography (see from here to here).

  List of Plates

  1. Erskine Childers’ wife Molly (left) and co-conspirator Mary Spring Rice (right) aboard the Childers’ beautiful Colin Archer-designed yacht Asgard during her daring gun-running trip into Howth. The guns are German Mauser rifles and the aim was to provide armed support for the Irish rebels. (Photo © The Board of Trinity College, Dublin)

  2. Erskine and Molly Childers aboard their yacht Asgard. Erskine was one of the true pioneers of yacht cruising and his trail-blazing voyage through the North Sea to the Baltic in 1897 was an integral part of the plot of The Riddle of the Sands. (Photo © The Board of Trinity College, Dublin)