The Last Grain Race. Eric Newby
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the less wild pubs we gradually drew up, to use the idiom of the times, a multi-lateral pact to resist those Finns and Swedes who already showed signs of becoming aggressive. Vytautas was not included in these arrangements. He had already made a round voyage in Moshulu and his position was established; besides, he had the happy temperament that did not attract trouble. Like other pacts in the world outside, to which we gave so little heed, it was to be rendered invalid by the loss of one of the contracting parties and the isolation of the remaining two, which made it impossible for one to help the other.
For the most part our thoughts were dominated by The Voyage. Sometimes, tired of the squalor in which we found ourselves, it seemed that we would never sail. It was Vytautas, by far the most resilient, who made us feel, by some reminiscence of life in the Trade Winds or in the high latitudes, that our present discomforts were bearable.
The last of the cargo was unloaded and the ship was warped down the dock to a deserted quay where we were to take on board our ballast stiffening for the voyage to Australia. There we cleared hundreds of blind baby mice from the frames in the hold; cleaned out the bilges which were filled with rotting grain and very smelly bilge-water, and set to work sweeping out the ’tween-decks. It was here that the accident occurred. The weather had been abominable and the open hatches were covered loosely with tarpaulins. In the ’tween-decks it was pitch black. We had two lanterns, and by the light of one of these George was sweeping with a will, working his way aft. Soon he was outside the circle of light thrown by his lamp; unused to the ’tween-decks, he stepped backwards over the tonnage opening below No 3 hatch and fell into the empty hold, hitting the keelson twenty feet below. When we reached him he was rigid, but still breathing. By the time we had got him out of the hold on a stretcher he was conscious and in pain. In the ambulance on the way to hospital he said. ‘I guess you’re going to have to do without me.’
One of his legs was broken and quite a lot of other things as well. He remained in hospital until December, two months after we sailed. It was a bitter disappointment for George; unlike the American of European imagination, he was not a rich young man. He had worked his passage to England and spent most of his savings to realise his ambition. I was downcast too. I had been long enough in the ship to realise that the confined space in which we lived would become very irksome once we were at sea. I was now deprived of my principal ally.
The following day Vytautas fell off the donkey house and broke an arm. Moshulu was dangerous for the unwary.
At the quay we took in our ballast, fifteen hundred tons of coarse dark sand used in the manufacture of pig-iron, huge lumps of paving-stone, granite blocks, and the best part of a small house. At the same time the stevedores added two dead dogs, but we did not discover this until we reached Australia in January, the hottest month of the year.
John Sömmarström, Sailmaker and Bosun of Moshulu, was a famous figure in the Erikson ships. If ever a man deserved the title of ‘shellback’ it was he.
John Sömmarström, Sailmaker
When I first met him he was fifty-eight years old and had been forty-three years at sea, all of them in sail, most of them in square rig. He had served in Scottish ships like Loch Vennachar in the 1900s and he had been for a time in the china-clay trade between Par in Cornwall and other West of England ports. In later years he had been Sailmaker in the barquentine Mozart which he described as ‘a cow’, the four-masted barque L’Avenir (he had served four years in L’Avenir when Erikson still had her), and a year in the Archibald Russell.
As I entered the sail loft I had an impression of a solid chunky man with spectacles set on a rather snub nose and a face covered with grey stubble. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In his mouth was a pipe that had gone out and on his head a unique hat. It was an ordinary grey felt hat, tweeked up in the middle like a scoutmaster’s, punctured with a number of holes that might have been made by bullets, intended, he said, to allow the air to circulate. I noticed that his fingers were rather stubby but that the nails were very finely formed. He had a wonderful smell about him compounded of hemp and Stockholm tar.
When he began to speak I was surprised that he spoke really fluent English, or rather Scots, with the accent of the Clyde. Perhaps he had picked it up in the Loch Vennachar. I told him what I wanted.
‘It’s a funny thing that most of the people who get killed in these ships are Englishmen,’ he granted. ‘Limeys we used to call them. There were Limeys, Squareheads, and Dagoes. You’re a Limey. You hang on tight.’
(Readers who are discouraged by technical details about sails and sailmaking should skip the rest of this chapter.)
‘If you like,’ he went on, ‘I’ll tell you something about square sails. First, they’re not square at all, they’re four-sided and square at the head but the foot’s cut on an arc, called the roach, to allow the sails to clear the fore-and-aft stays when they’re set.
‘Most people seem to think that a sail’s cut in one piece. A sail’s cut cloth by cloth. I already know how wide the sail has to be because all square sails extend to within eighteen inches of the yardarm cleats on the head, and the depth depends on the height of the mast and the distance between the yards.
‘That’s the material over there.’ He pointed his pipe at a heavy bolt of canvas. ‘Webster’s 24˝ Standard Flax Canvas from Arbroath. The finest stuff in the world and expensive.’
‘How much would it cost to make a complete new set for the ship?’
He glared at me. ‘About £2,500. But you listen to me. It doesn’t matter to you, does it, how much it costs? I’m telling you something more important.’ His pipe had gone out so I offered him some tobacco, rather diffidently, afraid that Fribourg and Treyers’s mixture would not be strong enough for him. It made him splutter a bit at first but he appeared mollified. ‘Where was I?’ he said. Fortunately this was a purely rhetorical question and did not require an answer from me.
‘I said that a sail is cut cloth by cloth and before I start the actual cutting I have to calculate the number of cloths the width requires, allowing for seams, tabling on the leeches and slack. The leeches are the perpendicular edges, and you have to allow some slack when sewing on the bolt ropes, otherwise when the bolt rope stretches in wear, the sail might split.’
‘What is tabling?’
‘Tabling is a broad hem made on the skirt of the sail by turning the edge and sewing it down. It strengthens the sail for sewing on the bolt rope. You needn’t be afraid to ask if you don’t understand. I only get wild if you ask me questions like a bloody fool reporter.’
He continued: ‘In the depth I’ve got to allow for tabling at the head and the foot. There are gores in a sail too, they’re the angles cut at the ends of the cloth to increase the width or the depth. The canvas for the gores is cut on the cross, the longest gored side of one cloth makes the shortest side of the next. After the first gore is cut the rest are cut by it.’
‘Christ,’ I muttered, overcome by the Sailmaker’s command of technical and outmoded English with which he seemed equally at home as with his native Swedish. He began to explain how he found the number of yards of canvas needed. ‘It comes in bolts twenty-four inches wide. I add the number of cloths in the head and the foot together and halve them to make them square. Then I multiply the number of squared cloths by the depth of the sail and add to that the additional canvas contained in the foot gores, and linings and the four buntline cloths. The linings are sewn to the leeches and middle to strengthen it. The buntline cloths are to stop chafing on the sail. That’s why the sails are heavy. A course, that’s the big sail on the fore, main and mizzen – weighs more than a ton, and much more when it’s wet.
‘If you’re interested,’ went on the Sailmaker, ‘I’ll tell you something about sailmaking. This is my sail-loft.’ He waved his hand to indicate the austere and cramped quarters in which he worked. ‘And these are my tools: palm and needles; a sail-hook.’ He held up a small iron hook