Racundra's First Cruise

by Arthur Ransome

  So I wandered on into the forest and came to a house with a little pigsty beside it with a glass window, the only pigsty with a glass window that I can remember to have seen. And beyond that, sure enough, was a house, a log cabin, with a tiny barn, and the barn was whitewashed. And here I spoke to the woman of that house in Russian; but she did not understand me, and called to her husband, who came from the potato-bed, wearing his shirt outside his trousers in the Russian fashion.

  With him, of course, I had a good talk and great difficulty in coming to business. He told me he had come here as a soldier in the Russian service thirty years ago, and had married a wife and lived here ever since. “Yet, if I were to ask some of them from our village, by Poltava, to help me till this ground, they would laugh at me, for they would say there was nothing to be got out of it, and indeed in Poltava is the black earth and here is nothing but stone; but now I am fifty years old and a little more, and I am not too well, and I do not suppose I shall see Russia again.” Then he told me he had sold all his milk for the Endla; but I let that pass, and he told me of how he had been a policeman in Hapsal – “a summer policeman,” he explained, for in winter, it seems, there are no visitors, and policemen are not necessary – and how a man wearing a Cossack bourka, or long cloak, and talking very good Russian had told him that he had played cards with the Emperor. “It was clear enough that he was a great man.” Then I put in another word about the milk, and he said something to his wife about milk for the Endla, and she laughed, and I guessed that the people of the Endla were going to get less perfect milk than they had hoped, for she took my milk-can and went off, while he told me there had been great rains, so that the water stood between the potato rows and the potatoes had rotted, and went on to ask if all was well with England. Then he noticed the eggs that I had bought at the inn. “Those are very little eggs,” said he, and asked me what I had had to pay for them. I asked him if he had any, as we needed more for our ship, and he sent a little girl who brought ten beauties, twice the size of those already in my basket. Then the woman came back with my milk-can full of new milk warm from the cow, and he asked how he should know my little ship, so that his wife could bring me more milk in the morning, if we had not sailed. Then, when I paid for the eggs and the milk, he asked me if there was nothing else I wanted that he could give me, and I could think of nothing; but he gave me the best of his turnips and a lot of fresh beans, and with that he walked with me to an opening in the trees, whence we could see the harbour and Racundra’s two masts. “If those masts are there in the morning,” said he, “my wife shall bring you some more milk.”

  And so we parted, thanking each other, like old friends, and I hurried back by a quick way he showed me across country and came to the ship, and found that those hungry ones had finished supper and that my supper was cold, but I ate it with great pleasure, full of the warmth of this abundance of human intercourse.

  “TOLEDO” OF LEITH

  THE last time I was at Heltermaa was a year before we sailed in there in Racundra, when I came there on foot, after walking from the other side of the island, where I had landed from a small timber-carrying schooner in which I had sailed from the mainland. I came to Heltermaa by the road from Kerdla, and was hurrying back to rejoin the Kittiwake at Baltic Port. It so happened that I came there on a day when there were no means of getting across the Sound to Hapsal, and I was disconsolately trying to arrange with the innkeeper to let me sleep the night on a bench, when two sailors came in buying provisions. I tried them in my own language. One of them knew a few words, and told me that the captain of his ship spoke English, and that I had better come with them. I asked him where his ship was, and he pointed far out to sea, where, sure enough, a large steamship was lying.

  I helped the men to carry a sack of potatoes, a tin of kerosene, milk, butter, bread and a lively little pig down to the tiny harbour. They had a small open boat, with a jib and spritsail, tied under the quay. We stowed everything into it, the pig squealing all the time with the regularity of a mechanical siren. We could not talk, but divided the labour in silent agreement. One man took the tiller, the other dealt with the sails, and I nursed the little pig. Within half an hour of my trudging into Heltermaa I was at sea, slipping rapidly over the four or five miles that separate Heltermaa from the Erik Stone.

  As we came nearer, I was surprised at the way the ship was lying, broadside on to the wind and perfectly steady, across breaking waves. She was aground. Then, as we came nearer yet, I saw that her shrouds were dangling round the masts and that she had been stripped bare. She was not, as I had supposed, a passing ship sending ashore for provisions. She was a wreck. I asked how long she had been there. “Two years or more. We are waiting for high water,” said the man.

  “TOLEDO” OF LEITH.

  INHABITANTS OF MOON.

  There was a rising wind, and we approached the wreck at great speed, shot round under her stern, luffed, lowered the sails and caught hold of a rope-ladder. As we came round under her stern I looked up for the name and read, “TOLEDO: LEITH”. Here in this most unexpected of places was a British ship. I ran up the ladder and climbed over the bulwarks and down on the rusty shell of what once upon a time had steamed in all the pride of new paint and shining brasswork out of the Firth of Forth.

  A small boy was hanging some fishing-nets to dry. He pointed aft when I asked for the captain, and, bending to avoid the nets and fishing-lines that were hanging under the upper deck, I groped my way towards the stern. Captain Konga, well over six feet high, came out of a sort of hutch he had rigged up between the decks. He greeted me in English, invited me into his cabin, told me I must stay the night with him, and promised to put me over to the mainland in the morning.

  I have seen many cabins, but none quite like that hutch in which the captain of the Toledo had his comfortable being. It was built of baulks of wood set up on end between the iron decks. It was six feet six inches high, long and broad. That size, Captain Konga explained, he had found by experiment to be the most convenient. Sitting on his bunk, he could put wood on the stove in the corner, light his reading-lamp, take a book from the opposite shelf, eggs or bacon from his store-cupboard, reach down his saucepan or frying-pan from the hooks on the wall, or get the boatswain’s whistle, with piercing blasts of which he summoned the members of his crew. From any place in it he could reach every other place, and that, he said, was the most labour saving kind of house.

  He told me the story of the ship. She had been captured by the Germans in the summer of 1918. She had been aground on the shallows close by Heltermaa, but one wild night, while the Germans had all been drinking ashore, a strong westerly wind had so raised the waters in the Gulf that the Toledo floated off, and when the Germans came to look for her in the morning, she had floated far out to sea, and by miraculous chance had settled herself on this small shoal by the Erik Stone. The water had fallen again, and the Germans had lost the war and left these parts before it had ever again risen high enough to let them get her off. Then the Salvage Company had taken her over and Captain Konga had come to live on board. Once only in the previous winter, she had floated for a few minutes, but the ice round her was so thick that with the instruments at his command he could not shift her, and the sinking water had left her again in her place. Today the water was rising again. “Another four inches and we shall have her moving,” said Captain Konga, and showed me the cables he had laid out astern, the little boiler and donkey-engine he had brought from Reval, and his other arrangements for pulling her into deep water the moment she should float. Actually, as we stood there, we could feel that she was on the point of floating. He had a marked pole over the side, and from time to time looked at it, to see if the water was still rising.

  “Yet she isn’t worth much, nowadays,” he said. “The Germans stripped her of some things, and when they went the local pirates did the rest. They took everything, even pulling the engines to pieces to get the nuts. Nuts make good sinkers for fishing-nets. The portholes have all
gone. All the new schooners built on Worms have fine brass portholes made in Edinburgh.”

  And here for two years Captain Konga had been living and enjoying himself most mightily. He shot seals which came and played by the rock. He painted the rock red. He shot duck. He fished. All passing boats took supplies of fresh fish from the Toledo. He made his own nets, and for his own amusement he kept his log, accurately as if at sea, but each day in a different language – Esthonian, German, Swedish, English, Russian – ringing the changes on these five. He was delighted to talk English, and told me he had a friend in England, a very pretty young woman, living near Hull. He had taught her Russian and she had taught him English. “A very pretty young woman,” said he. I asked him when he had last seen her, and he told me, twenty-five years ago. I hardly liked to suggest that the young woman might now be older, for he seemed so certain that for her at least time had stood still. “And so merry,” he added, “and so active. Runs like a hare and dances ... you should see her dance!”

  Time, for Captain Konga, did not exist, except that he never had quite enough of it for all he wished to do. When I offered to send him newspapers, thinking foolishly that he might enjoy them, living alone out there on the wreck with Heltermaa as his metropolis, and that only approachable in fine weather in his little boat, he thanked me, but said he would never have time to read them, his life was so busy, what with birds, seals, fish, and the making of cartridges and nets and fishing-lines, drying, salting and skinning. He was enjoying himself enormously, and, as we talked, I perceived that he always had enjoyed himself enormously, looking neither before nor after, but whole-heartedly engaged in whatsoever he was doing. And he had done strange things, hunting bears in the Arctic, hunted himself by the women of the Samoyeds maddened by the drinks of civilization. He had his whole life at his fingers’ ends. It was all contemporaneous for him, and talking of this or that, as he taught me how to make a net, he would refer to events of thirty years ago as if they had happened that same afternoon.

  Next day it blew so hard that it was almost impossible to stand on deck, except in the shelter of the bulwarks, so I spent another night with Captain Konga, netting, and hearing tales of the Esthonian coast, of Ungern Sternberg and his wreckers, of the people of the Tutters islands, who will not let the Salvage Company approach a wreck before the men of Tutters have finished with it. “The sea was black with their little boats, and as I came near with a tug, they shouted at me to keep off, and waved every man a gun to show that they were aimed.” “But that was a long time ago,” said I. “It was last year, or the year before. These people do not change so fast. I’ve had to show that we have guns to keep them off the Toledo. The Dagö folk are quiet enough, but the men of Worms ... and the men of Worms are sucking babes beside the pirates of Tutters.”

  On the second morning the sea was going down and the wind was less, and the captain and one of his men lowered away the little skiff that he had for fishing. There was just room for the three of us in her. We sailed due E. to the island of Worms, thinking that I should there catch the postman’s cutter for Hapsal. We came upon patches of rocks, awash and out of the water. Then the man lowered the sprit, reducing the sail by one-half as we threaded our way among them. Now and again we were skimming over less than a foot of water. Once we stepped out and carried the boat over a shallower place. Then out in deep water again, and the little boat, which was Captain Konga’s special pride, fairly slipped across the waves. We landed on the eastern corner of Worms by Sviby, but the post cutter had gone, and the captain looked at his watch. It was just possible that we might catch the train at Hapsal. We were off again, but as Hapsal came in sight saw the train steaming in the station. It is nearly two miles from the pier to the station. The thing could not be done. “How many minutes have we?” asked the captain. I told him. He said nothing, but turned aside from the fairway leading to the pier and steered straight across the rocky shoals at the station. We touched once, again, and sat every moment expecting to ground for good. But luck was with us, as it must always be with such as Captain Konga, and with two minutes to spare he ran the boat ashore and I jumped for the train.

  That autumn the water gave him his chance and he took it, pulled the Toledo off, and with the help of a tug from Reval took her to Helsingfors. I felt sorry for him when I heard it. As a salved ship, in these days, I do not suppose the Toledo was worth much, nor would his share of that be large. But as a fishing and shooting box, for a man like him, who knew how to use every moment of his time in such pursuits, she was without a better in the world.

  FROM THE ISLAND OF DAGÖ TO THE

  ISLAND OF MOON

  AT Heltermaa we were to stay for longer than we wished. We lay there from the 12th to the 17th of September, watching the barometer and the sky and getting sharp pains in the backs of our necks from looking up the mast at the wimpel, which for all that time showed us a wind in our teeth, while, as we could see from the bowing spar-buoys outside, there was a current to match it. To beat S. against wind and stream was hopeless. So we lay there and talked of how when our own wind came we would fly southward through the Moon Sound and then run from end to end of the Riga Gulf in a single twenty-four hours. When our wind came we actually did that run in many hours less, and most of it under almost bare poles, but our wind was a long time in coming. Meanwhile there was plenty of wind of the wrong sort, which blew our flag to pieces and unravelled it until there was hardly any of it left. The Ancient made a new long wimpel from a strip of red bunting, and when I joked with him for hoisting a Bolshevik flag, replied: “It’ll give the wind a fright and make it blow the other way.” But the wind seemed rather to relish it, and blew on day after day.

  The second day after our arrival there was half a gale from the S.E., and a heavy swell came through the wooden piles of the pier. The schooner from Worms had warped into the quay to load apples and we had shifted to make room, and then tied up to the schooner, hoping for better protection. But that night, at two o’clock in the morning, a loud crack brought me on deck, barefoot and in pyjamas, to meet the Ancient, who had tumbled up out of the forehatch at the same moment, and the two of us, just in time, hanging on a rope with all the strength we had, held Racundra, while we fixed a new warp to replace the stout one that had parted. It had chafed through in spite of heavy parcelling, and thereafter we not only served and parcelled it where it crossed the schooner’s railing, but spliced it as if it were a broken limb, binding chips of firewood round it, so that it lay snug in a wooden shell. Even that had worn thin before we left, but the rope was kept in perfect condition, and the dodge is one to recommend to any other little cruisers in such circumstances.

  A HOUSE ON MOON.

  A HOUSE ON MOON TODAY.

  Not all the inhabitants of Dagö were as friendly to us as those with whom I had talked on that first evening. Some are stern patriots, and show their feelings by refusing to talk the languages which, until in 1919 they became independent, had been imposed on them by force. All three of us knew a few words of Esthonian and made what play we could with them, but when it came to serious business had to use Russian, German or Swedish. Now, there was one stout old man in top-boots who used to come down on the quay and seemed to have authority among the others. He had said “Good-day” to us in Esthonian once, and we had replied in Esthonian, for politeness’ sake, and perhaps from pride in this small scrap of our uncertain vocabulary. But next day, when he came again, the Ancient, talking Russian, tried to learn from him where he could buy meat, and the Esthonian flushed red and angry, and asked him what he was talking Russian for, when he had shown the day before that he could talk Esthonian as well as himself. The poor Ancient tried to make him believe that he knew how to say “Good-morning”, but did not know how to say anything else, but the Esthonian would not be appeased, turned his back on him and took up a fine Napoleon attitude on the pierhead, “as if,” said the Ancient, “he would like to be the stone figure of a patriot.” Unfortunately, however, he was not content
with being a stone figure, but tried to persuade others of his fellow-countrymen to have no dealings with us except in Esthonian. After that there were two factions among the people who came down to the quay – the patriots who would have nothing to do with us and the cosmopolitans who sold us what they had and made us presents of ripe apples and worms for our fishing, and, when in the middle of the night the little steamer came from Reval, woke us up with shouts from the quay, lest we should miss our share of the general happy excitement. The two factions came often to hot words, and among the younger members to blows; and we, who had hoped in Racundra to escape politics of any kind, found it a little tedious to be bones of contention. We felt, in our little ship in that foreign harbour, what a small nation must feel while its fate is being discussed by greater Powers.

  During the days when we were not fishing, and, since the wind from the south was blowing the bait in the fishes’ mouth, catching plenty of good fish suppers, we walked on the island. We found a great number of fossils on the beach – stone sponges and petrified shells of different shapes. We also found lucky stones, with natural holes in them, like (but how different from!) the lucky stone on Racundra’s cabin wall, that came from Coniston and the friendliest house in England. It was warm in the sunshine, and I saw a green woodpecker, but he is with us all the year, and from other signs it was only too clear that winter was falling swiftly upon us. The starlings were in great flocks. The leaves on the trees were turning and the nights were growing long. The very apples that were being brought down to the quay in little springless carts and carefully packed away in the hold of the schooner beside us were a warning that the days were coming when, in these waters at any rate, little ships cannot keep the sea. The Ancient began talking with persistent gloom about “the Equinotion time”, when the Gulf of Riga would be at its very worst. The autumn equinox of September 23rd was indeed close at hand; and we were held here as if by some malice of its own to wait for its notorious inhospitality.