Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  At 13.35 I take the local noon shot and work out our position. 31°30' north, 37°31' west. I plot this on the chart and measure the distance from yesterday’s fix. In the lightest of winds, we’ve sailed 88 miles since yesterday at local noon, which is better than I’d have imagined. About 1,900 miles to the USA.

  July 14

  Twelve days from Horta.

  At noon today, looking down at my chart – a view from outer space if the paper were the ocean it represents – we appear to be about halfway across. Not necessarily in time or distance sailed, but visually: we appear to be halfway between North Africa and, say, the Carolinas.

  More water may be leaking in. I spend nearer to three minutes pumping every few hours. However, I seem to be avoiding any effort to gauge the rate. I haven’t noted in the log the frequency of my pumping, which I imagine a really tough, hardcore single-hander with the courage to face anything the ocean might throw at him would do. At night, particularly, I manage to put it out of my mind by pumping desultorily when I come up half asleep for a lookout. I don’t really want to know about the whole thing.

  But I’m convinced now that Toad remains structurally sound, that the problem is Henry’s goddamn Cascover sheathing, even if, in my brief snorkel overboard, I didn’t see it delaminating anywhere. I think the water’s seeping under it, somehow, and coming in through planking seams and joints wherever the old caulking has dried out and shrunk. And there’s nothing I can do about it. A hole in the bow I might be able to patch, but a thin leaking scrim spread over the entire hull can only be repaired by hauling out and ripping the sheathing all off and caulking the seams anew. All I can do is to keep on pumping and get there.

  Shortly before midnight, roused by my bleating alarm clock, I stick my head up into the cockpit to look around and see a ship’s lights.

  23.40: Tried calling a ship passing a few miles N. No answer. I’m watching it for a minute or so to make sure we pass in the night with good clearance. We’re becalmed, sails slatting, though zephyrs are NE’ly, which would be nice a little stronger.

  Project Arabia is the ship – they just called back – and had a nice chat with the Kraut O.O.W. (Officer on Watch). Container ship. They’re headed for Baltimore, then back to the Med. Nice to talk with someone. He says I make a pretty poor radar picture. I’ll probably hoist a plastic bag full of aluminium foil up the mast when I get to foggy Maine.

  First ship I’ve seen for a while. First time I’ve spoken with anyone since leaving the Azores. I don’t expect them down here, far south of the high-powered shipping lanes, and most ships are high-powered now. But it’s a comfort. There are others abroad in the world.

  In the dark I can’t see Project Arabia’s shape, only its lights, port red and white bow and stern, the lights of any ship at night. In the dark I can imagine that it looks the way I want it to look: a much older vessel, a tramp steamer, with plumb bow, raking masts and funnel; a ship Conrad’s Marlow would have seen going down the sea reach of the Thames estuary in the long English twilight while he sat Buddha-like against the mizzen mast of the tide-rode yawl Nellie telling his friends about the horror-turned Kurtz.

  It would also be one of Mr East’s ships.

  I came by a love of ships and much of the romance I feel for the sea not by being dandled on the knee of a hoary sea-captain great-grandfather stinking of rum and linseed oil, or by having a keen boating dad, for none of these was available. I was taught about ships at school, by Mr East.

  In the fifties, when we still lived in Connecticut, my mother’s father and mother made a number of trips to Europe. For several of these they embarked by ship, and we – spruced up, slicked down – went into New York to see them off. This was all I knew of New York in those early days: a ride through the skyscraper canyons to the Cunard Line pier on the west side. There I got a glimpse of travel at its grandest before such a world disappeared: men in cashmere coats, women in furs, everyone well hatted; stevedores moving great mounds of matching bespoke luggage; uniformed Cunard officers welcoming passengers aboard as if they were royalty. We traipsed through the Queen Mary’s first-class dining halls, lounges, staterooms, all of it huge, sumptuous, grand, densely upholstered, set off by gilt and hardwood, inlaid veneers, extravagant murals. You can only see it now in books (although the Queen Mary is rotting at her tourist berth in Long Beach, California; but I don’t think I could go aboard).

  This, apparently, was travel.

  Pretty soon we were pulled off, down the gangplank, and the ship – an impossibly big art deco building, looking immense even alongside Manhattan – moved away from the dock with such solid deliberation that it felt as if the dock were moving backward instead. Out into the Hudson River, pulled by tiny tugs, the ship turned for one lovely profile view, when the whole of it could be grasped, and then slid from sight.

  But I don’t think I got any romance of the sea from that. I didn’t see the sea, just a scrap of the Hudson, and New Jersey on the other side. They were going across the ocean to Europe. So what? I wanted to go home and play with my Fanner Fifty and watch Gunsmoke.

  Then, in 1959, my parents decided that we were going to start a new life and move to England where my father would ‘sell space’ – it was many years before I understood this meant selling space in magazine pages to advertisers, and I had a rather billowy, amorphous impression of how my father made his living. And more years, until after the failure of Viva III and my parents’ divorce, until I saw this move in a less whimsical context. But at the time, when I was nine years old, it seemed like a neat idea. Something along the lines of what my grandparents did, only for longer. Again we drove to the Cunard Line pier, this time boarding the Cunarder Caronia. Five days at sea, of which I remember little except closing my brother’s head in the elevator doors – by accident, I swore to my mother – and seeing Some Like It Hot four times in one day in the ship’s free theatre. No romance of the sea. Movies, yes.

  My parents had told my brother, sister and me that in England they spoke English, as we did. But as the Caronia drew alongside the dock in Southampton, up over the rail came a whiff of the separation I would come to know in the years ahead, brought about by the sharing of that common tongue:

  ‘Come on ’en! Bungit over ’eeah! ’Ang abaht! Mind yer noggin, mate! Blimey! ’Eeah, wos yor gime? Gettat bleedin’ fingmebob aht the way! ’Ass it! Bob’s yer uncle!’

  A tiny car was waiting for us dockside. My parents strapped trunks to its roof, drew a circle on a map around London, and we drove off into the English countryside to look for a new home.

  This was England fourteen years after the end of World War II, and it looked to me then as strange and foreign as it would look to a nine-year-old English boy today. I remember seeing at close range through the car window, as we lumbered along a narrow lane in the Kentish Weald, my father getting used to the car’s gears, an overtaking motorcycle-and-sidecar. Never seen one of those before. The man at the handlebars wore goggles, tweed cap, mackintosh, well-shined shoes. In the sidecar sat his wife, in scarf, goggles and mackintosh, and strapped onto the sidecar behind her was a dead, unplucked chicken. Few English children today have seen unwrapped meat on the carcass of its original owner impaled for view in the window of the High Street butcher’s shop. Today’s England with its generic supermarkets is much more like the United States, and I would have recognized it instantly in 1959.

  We landed, eventually, in Sevenoaks, in Kent, about 25 miles south of London. We children were dropped immediately into local schools. I went to Bayham Road Primary School, for boys, a small pebble-and-brick Victorian house with some later unattractive prefab structures, partly painted a hopeful Scandinavian orange, pressed up against it. Mr Hill was the headmaster, and he was fond of giving the boys encouraging ‘talks’ in the gym on Monday mornings. One of these I remember, I believe verbatim, from that distant time:

  ‘Look down. Go on. What do you see down there on the floor? Feet. Among the many, two of them are yours. I shouldn�
�t imagine you chaps think of your feet very often, do you? Why bother? There they are, down there, getting on with their job, and up top you’re getting on with yours. Just feet, eh? But you know, it’s the old feet that get you where you’re going, day after day, year after year. And uncomplainingly for the most part.’

  Everywhere in the gym, we boys began to look at our feet, at our neighbour’s feet. Now that you looked at them, they did seem to be a rum extremity. No four alike. Up at the front of the gym, on both sides of Mr Hill, teachers – ‘masters’ they were called – were trying desperately not to look at their own feet.

  ‘But ignore them too long and your feet’ll let you know all about it! Athlete’s foot! Verrucas! Bunions! Ingrowing toenails! Suddenly you’re hobbled, can’t go anywhere! The old feet have gone on strike! And then see where you are. Stuck, a prisoner, sitting on your backside, probably developing a good case of piles. So spare a thought for the old feet. Give them a jolly good scrubbing when you take your bath. Dry them carefully, especially between the toes. And trim the nails – but not too short!’

  Such was my earliest instruction at school in England. Well beyond the scope of anything I had been learning back in the States.

  I was in Mr East’s class – or form, as it was called. I have to presume we had lessons in English, maths, history, and so on, but I remember nothing of that. I remember only studying ships to the exacting requirements of Mr East. We looked at books of ships. He drew ships and their complete deck plans on the blackboard. He took us on outings up to London, to Tilbury and West India Docks and the Isle of Dogs, where we gazed at the creamy-hulled P&O liners and the lavender-hulled Union Castle liners, while Mr East pointed out the decks and the arrangement of the super-structure, just as we had learned at school from his diagrams. He took us aboard these ships and explained the workings of the lifeboat falls, the windlasses, and we ran our little hands over the giant links of anchor chain.

  ‘Cor! Crikey! Crumbs!’ we all said.

  He took us to the merchant docks where cargo ships were unloading rum, sugar and tropical hardwoods that prickled the insides of our noses. He pointed out the derricks and explained the meaning of the truncated sections of superstructure, so different from the long, uninterrupted promenade decks on the liners. On the bus returning to Sevenoaks we drank Tizer, and ate gobstoppers and sherbet lollies.

  Back in school Mr East read us the poetry of John Masefield. He made us memorize the third verse of Cargoes, and we sat in class chanting it like a mantra:

  Dirty British Coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

  Butting through the Channel in the mad March Days,

  With a cargo of Tyne Coal,

  Road-rails, pig-lead,

  Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

  We shouted it!

  He told us how the Orient Line’s Orion, built for the Australian run, was launched by wireless when His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester pressed a button in Brisbane, Australia, and the ship rolled down the ways at Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire.

  ‘Cor!’ we breathed, amazed at the power of science.

  What I remember most of Mr East’s class is making models of ships. We made them out of balsa wood: thick pieces for the hulls, thin sections, painstaking layer upon layer, for the superstructures. We made liners and cargo ships, but I think it was the cargo ships, Masefield’s rust-and salt-streaked British coaster, and the once ubiquitous, now entirely vanished tramp steamers that were closest to Mr East’s heart. He explained them to us meticulously, their workings, the colours of their shipping lines that we painted on our model funnels, where they went (invariably to some outpost of the British Empire coloured Empire pink in our inky atlases), and what they carried in their holds.

  He was rigorous in his standards for our model-making. Our little hulls had plenty of curve and sheer to them, achieved not by hacking at them with our model knives, but by the steady, tiresome application of sandpaper of increasingly fine grits. Then, once the shape of a hull was approved – brought up for Mr East’s inspection at the front of the room – we sanded it fair and smooth. This fairing of the compound curves of the hull was, as it is in real-life wooden boat-building, a difficult task, particularly with the fibrous and hairy balsa wood. Mr East instructed us to gauge the smoothness of our hulls by rubbing them across the skin between our noses and our upper lips. This was the most sensitive area of skin on our bodies, he told the class of nine-year-old boys, and the skin above our lips was sure to pick up the imperfections in our ships’ hulls. We sat there rubbing our model ship hulls across our faces.

  What class was this? Because this wasn’t a one-time thing. This was what I did at Bayham Road School. Any other area of the curriculum I have forgotten. I recall a vague snapshot from a geography book: a photograph of a ship loading cargo in some East African port. I’m sure if any of Mr East’s pupils had gone on to join the merchant navy, they would have immediately shot to the top of the class.

  Did we have fun doing this? Surely we enjoyed the outings to see ships, but the model-making probably took on some of the drudgery of any school endeavour: this was day-in, day-out stuff. I stopped building ships the moment I left Bayham Road. It never turned into a hobby at home. Where are those models now? I took them home, but I must have thrown them out to make room for comic books, bowie knives and Beatles albums. They were, after all, only junk from school.

  I wish I’d kept just one.

  And who was Mr East? Did he ache to be on a rusty British tramp heading up the great, grey, green, greasy Limpopo River with a cargo of firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays. Or was he simply an enthusiast, like a train-spotter, or a birdwatcher, or a philatelist? He was tall and thin, beaky-nosed, wore glasses, and dressed well in that negligent British way, with rather good brown shoes – or this is what I think I remember. I can see him in P&O officer whites on the bridge of a good ship, but not in overalls shovelling coal on his way up through the ranks. I imagine he was bookish, well-read-up on far-flung places, probably rather pained about Britain’s shrivelling position in the world; a keen rambler, who possibly also had an appreciation for fine locomotives. But I don’t know. Was there a Mrs East? Again, I don’t know, but I think not. He seems, in my memory, to be the exemplary bachelor, a man living a life taken up with his own interests.

  So at the age of nine, without wanting it or thinking about it, I absorbed from the passion of Mr East, and through the pre-pubescent skin above my upper lip, a sense of the beauty of ships.

  I only spent three months, the autumn term of 1959, at Bayham Road. My parents had discovered it wasn’t a very good school. Some of the boys – like my friend Dave Gilbertson, who wore a grimy double-breasted grey flannel suit from the Co-op that I coveted – were working-class yobbos. I would realize this later on. My sister and I were already taking riding lessons on Sundays dressed in jodhpur boots and Harris tweed hacking jackets. We had to go to the right schools. That’s part of what being in England was all about.

  Mr East seemed genuinely sorry when he learned I was leaving. Perhaps he liked my ships. Perhaps, though I wouldn’t remember, I showed a promising skill at shipbuilding. But one day when Dave Gilbertson and I had done some naughty anarchic thing and were scarpering off to the bog, and I was shouting, in the low accent I adopted at school, ‘Look out, Dave, the bloody prefects are coming!’ we ran into Mr East around a corner and he literally collared us. He looked at us with disgust. And to me he said: ‘I’m glad you’re leaving.’ And I was cut to the quick.

  But I think he would be pleased to know that one of his boys didn’t become an insurance sales rep or a grocer or fruiterer, but went off to sea in his own little boat when he grew up, and was for ever mad about ships, and when their lights passed him in the night, he thought of Mr East.

  July 15

  01.45: Becalmed.

  09.00: Still becalmed.

  10.00: Saw a bottle and thought I could see a note in it. Much excitement. Drifted over to it,
but it was empty. Thought of the bottles J. used to put messages in and throw overboard. Would like to find one of those now.

  11.30: Have found US Mutual news on short-wave. Temperature in the 80s and thunderstorms in New England today. Zephyrs from SW out here.

  13.50: Noon pos: 31°15' N, 41°29' W. 35 miles noon to noon. Depressing.

  Today the leak is clearly worse, and I’ve done the manly thing and got some education. I pumped fifty strokes per minute, five full minutes, two and a half hours after the last pump-out. That’s easily about double what it was a week ago. The pump is a Whale Gusher, model number 15. I presume this means it pumps out fifteen gallons per minute. Seventy-five gallons I pumped out.

  Is that a lot? I don’t know what to compare it to. It’s not too frightening as long as I can pump it out. It’s a little less than Toad’s total freshwater capacity of around ninety gallons, held in two trapezoidal-sectioned, six-foot-long tanks beneath the saloon bunks. That’s a lot of water.

  But not enough to sink the boat – yet. Not enough even to come above the floorboards – I usually start pumping when I feel I may soon see salt water washing over the floorboards because I know I would find this a disturbing sight.

  It doesn’t even take up a lot of time. What’s five minutes every few hours?

  But if it’s double what it was a week ago, there is a time factor here. I can pump it out of sight and mind now, but it’s getting worse, faster. The leak and I are in a race to dry land.

  We’ve been sailing over a millpond. What is going to happen, I wonder, when the wind picks up, as I’ve been wishing it would, and as it certainly will do eventually?

  20.00: Great salad for dinner, but, alas, the end of my fruit & veg – though I have some onions, potatoes, and a bit of rubbery cabbage.

  22.00: Becalmed.

  23.00: A breeze coming across the glassy sea. I feel it on my skin, then it rustles the sails, fills them into pale parabolic kites, and we begin to move. The water gurgles astern in a new wake.