What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby
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my exposed film to enter a lake and swim across it. As a result, when the film was developed, the negatives looked as if they had been processed in some sort of thin soup.
This is the problem with photography. It is inimical to travellers and to travel. It takes ages to do it properly. You can wait days, months, even years for a crescent moon to appear over the Taj Mahal, and then the camera goes wrong. If a modern one, the nearest place it can be repaired is Hokkaido, Japan. Even there they probably won’t repair it. They will simply ‘replace the unit’, and to do so will take at least six months, for a large part of which it will be stuck in customs. If the camera doesn’t go wrong of its own accord, you yourself will inevitably drop it. Now that the exposure meter forms an integral part of the camera (only the most sophisticated photographers have separate meters any more), you score double by breaking both. Having done this, the only thing to do is to drop the remains in a deep river and tell the insurance company that someone stole it, otherwise your claim will never be settled. If any of these things happen to you, and you are relying on your camera to take photographs suitable for publication, it can seriously endanger your peace of mind. You therefore need several cameras, just like the professionals. Amateurs almost always have only the one.
After this photographic débâcle in the Hindu Kush, nothing happened photographically until 1962 when Wanda and I descended the Ganges in various sorts of boats. On this journey we both took pictures for the book I was going to write, if we survived, sharing (what folly!) a single Pentax between us, a Weston exposure meter, and using what was then a new colour transparency film called Kodachrome X. Kodak were so pleased with the results – surprised would be more accurate – that they put on an exhibition of our photographs in Kingsway.
One of the further troubles with having a camera is the lengths to which you must go to avoid pictures entirely devoid of human beings. You always have to run on ahead. In the Hindu Kush, it was in order to photograph the caravan approaching, at around 16,000 feet, that I was left at such a height, feeling utterly lifeless. On the Ganges, for the simple purpose of photographing the boat, Wanda and the boatman, I disembarked, only to find I was in danger of being left alone in the middle of Hindu India as the boat sped away down some rapid. But if you don’t run on ahead or go ashore on such journeys, you will end up with pictures of endless mountain ranges and endless reaches of water, and never a person in sight.
Much more important to me than cameras, either on the Hindu Kush or on the Ganges, were my journals; because all that I have ever really needed to record what I needed to record has been a notebook, and one of those Staedtler pencils with a long lead and a sharpener at one end which I always have to be careful not to lose. A pencil is better than a pen because when the paper gets wet the ink runs and the writing becomes illegible. On the Ganges, which was pretty wet, I used as a log book a Gujarati account book with a red linen cover and yellow paper bought in Chandi Chowk, Old Delhi. This I filled with such monumental observations as ‘9.50 a.m. Left Bank. Saw a tree’, and some miles further on, ‘10.45 a.m. Right Bank. Saw a cow’. From such modest beginnings it soon became a tome stuffed with information, some of it curious, a lot of it useless, but something without which I knew that I would never be able to write whichever book I was planning to write. Just as I had kept a log book in the sailing ship without which I could not have written The Last Grain Race sixteen years later.
Even the thought of losing the Gujarati account book filled me with apprehension, and then, one day, I did lose it. Waking up in what had been a church hall in Bihar in the middle of the night, plagued by rats, I realized that I had left it on the platform at a railway junction, miles away. Arriving there by cycle rickshaw in what was by then the early hours of the next morning, I found that there had been no cause for alarm. ‘Sir,’ said the ticket clerk, when he handed it over to me, ‘it is only a book of writing, of no value to anyone at all.’
The following year, in 1963, I went to work for the Observer as Travel Editor, and a large number of the pictures in this book were taken during that period, one of the happiest periods of my life, which lasted ten years. As a result, What the Traveller Saw essentially commemorates the past, and, in many cases, a world that has changed beyond all recognition.
Round the Horn Before the Mast 1938/39
THESE PHOTOGRAPHS form part of a large collection taken while I was serving in the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu of Mariehamn in 1938/9, when she was engaged in the Australian grain trade.
As an apprentice in Moshulu I was bound by the Conditions for the Acceptance of Apprentices in Finnish Sailing Vessels. You had to be not less than sixteen years old and of strong constitution. Two doctors’ certificates were required, and one from a clergyman testifying that the applicant was of good moral character. My father had to pay the owner of the ship, Gustav Erikson, a premium of £50 for a year or a round voyage, whichever was the shorter. If I died, he was told, he would get a pro-rata repayment. The apprentice had to supply his own gear and was paid 150 Finmarks a month (about 10s. or 50p), but only at the end of the voyage, and less any deductions (I dropped a hammer overboard in Belfast before we sailed, and the cost was deducted from my pay). An able-bodied seaman got about 650 Finmarks, the sailmaker (because he was exceptionally experienced) about 1400 Finmarks, the steward about 2000, the mates from 1200 to 3000, and the captain about 4000 Finmarks (£20) a month. Not much for such a lonely position of responsibility. He was in his thirties. The oldest member of the crew was the sailmaker, who was nearly sixty.
Being an apprentice, I took nearly all the photographs during my free watch; many of them when I was done-in after long hours on deck, at the wheel, or up in the rigging. If I wanted to record the other watch working in rough weather, it required an effort of will not to fall asleep as soon as I went below, but to turn out again with my camera. Similarly uninviting was the prospect of keeping my daily log of the voyage up to date, which I did for some eight months, without missing a day.
What induced budding sailors to sail in Erikson ships in the 1930s, apart from a few inquisitive English speakers such as myself? The Finns were obliged to because they had to spend three years in square sail before going to navigation school in order to sit for a second mate’s ticket in their merchant marine. Numbers of Germans had to do the same in order to get in the time required by their government, until Hitler came to power when they had to serve their time in German ships. A great blow to the Germans was the loss of the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Admiral Karpfanger, a four-masted barque sold to them by Erikson, which went missing in the Southern Ocean on her way to the Horn from South Australia with the loss of all 68 hands, including 40 cadets, in 1938 – the same year I joined the Moshulu. Norway, Sweden and Denmark had similar arrangements for their sailors, some of whom sailed in Finnish ships.
By the 1930s the grain trade from South Australia to Europe was the last enterprise in which the remaining square-riggers (by 1938 there was still only one ship equipped with an auxiliary engine) could engage with any real hope of profit, and then only if the owner exercised the strictest economy and at the same time maintained the utmost efficiency.
The only contender for such a role by the time I joined his fleet was Gustav Erikson from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands in the Baltic, off the coast of Sweden, the owner of ten ocean-going square-rigged sailing ships. He employed no PROs to improve his image. One of the things that warmed me to him was that he was completely indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not. It would have been as reasonable to expect anyone to ‘like’ the Prime Minister or the Inspector of Taxes as to like ‘Ploddy Gustav’, as he was known. He was only interested in his crews in so far as they were necessary to sail his ships efficiently (the majority who sailed in them had to whether they wanted to or not), and for that reason he ensured that crews were adequately and decently fed by sailing-ship standards (which meant that we were permanently ravenous and dreamt of nothing but food), and that the ships, which were rated 100 A1 at Lloyd’s but not insured (only the cargoes were insured), were supplied with enough rope, canvas, paint and other necessary materials to enable them to be thoroughly seaworthy.
He certainly knew about sailing ships. At the age of nine he was shipped aboard a vessel engaged