A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby. Eric Newby
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fore brace … seven when she rose at last’, came back to me with peculiar aptness. But only for an instant because now I was turning full somersaults, hitting myself violently again and again as I met something flat which might have been the coaming of No. 4 hatch, or the top of the charthouse, for all I knew. Then I was over it, full of water and very frightened, thinking ‘Is this what it’s like to drown?’ No more obstructions now but still going very fast and still under water, perhaps no longer in the ship, washed overboard, alone in the Southern Ocean. Quite suddenly there was a parting of water, a terrific crash as my head hit something solid, and I felt myself aground.
Finding myself in the lee scuppers with my head forced right through a freeing port so that the last of the great sea behind me spurted about my ears, I was in a panic that a second wave might come aboard and squeeze me through it like a sausage, to finish me off.
Staggering to my feet, my oilskins ballooning with water, too stupid from the blow on my head to be frightened, I had just enough sense to jump for the starboard lifeline when the next wave came boiling over the port quarter and obliterated everything from view.
Swinging above the deck on the lifeline with the sea sucking greedily at my seaboots, I began to realize what a fortunate escape I had had from serious injury, for the alacrity with which I had leapt for the lifeline in spite of the great weight of sea-water inside my oilskins had convinced me that I had suffered no damage except the bang on the head.
The sea had taken me and swept me from the pin rail of the mizzen rigging, where I had been working, diagonally across the deck for fifty feet past the Jarvis brace winches, on the long handles of which I could so easily have been speared, over the fife rails of the mizzen mast, right over the top of No. 3 hatch and into the scuppers by the main braces outside the Captain’s quarters.
‘Where you bin?’ demanded Tria accusingly, when I managed to join the little knot of survivors who were forcing their way waist deep across the deck, spluttering, cursing, and spitting sea-water as they came.
‘Paddling,’ I said, relieved to find that there were still six of us.
‘Orlright, don’ be all bloody day,’ he added unsympathetically.
‘Tag i gigtåget. One more now. Ooh – ah, oh, bräck dem.’
‘What happened?’ I asked Jansson.
‘That goddam Valker let her come up too mooch,’ said Jansson. ‘I bin all over the bloddy deck in that sea.’
The fore upper topsail was the most difficult. All the buntlines jammed and more than half the robands securing the topsail to the jackstay had gone. The outer buntline block had broken loose and was flailing in the air, so that when we reached the lowered yard eighty feet above the sea, we hesitated a moment before the ‘Horry ops’ of the Mates behind us drove us out on to the footropes, hesitated because the bunt of the sail was beating back over the yard. The wind was immense. It no longer blew in the accepted sense of the word at all; instead it seemed to be tearing apart the very substance of the atmosphere. Nor was the sound of it any longer definable in ordinary terms. It no longer roared, screamed, sobbed, or sang according to the various levels on which it was encountered. The power and noise of this wind was now more vast and all-comprehending, in its way as big as the sky, bigger than the sea itself, making something that the mind balked at, so that it took refuge in blankness.
It was in this negative state of mind that could accept anything without qualm, even the possibility of death, that I fell off the yard backwards. I was the last man out on the weather side and was engaged in casting loose a gasket before we started to work on the sail, when without warning it flicked up, half the foot of a topsail, 40 feet of canvas as hard as corrugated iron, and knocked me clean off the footrope.
There was no interval for reflection, no sudden upsurge of remorse for past sins, nor did my life pass in rapid review before my eyes. Instead there was a delightful jerk and I found myself entangled in the weather rigging some five feet below the yard, and as soon as I could I climbed back to the yard and carried on with my job. I felt no fear at all until much later on.
It needed three-quarters of an hour to make fast the weather side. Time and time again we nearly had the sail to the yard when the wind tore it from our fingers.
My companion aloft was Alvar.
‘What happened?’ he said when we reached the deck.
‘I fell.’
‘I din’ see,’ he said in a disappointed way. ‘I don’ believe.’
‘I’m damned if I’m going to do it again just because you didn’t see it.’
‘I don’ believe.’
‘Orlright,’ I said. ‘The next time I’ll tell you when I’m going to fall off’
‘Dot’s bettair,’ said Alvar.
At noon on Saturday, the 25th, our position was 50° 7’ S, 164° 21’ W. In the 23½ hours from noon on the 24th Moshulu had sailed 241 miles and made 228 between observed positions. Her previous day’s runs were 296 and 282, but the violence of the sea and the necessary reduction in canvas were slowing her increasingly.
The barometer fell and fell, 746, 742, 737 millimetres. The sun went down astern, shedding a pale watery yellow light on the undersides of the deep black clouds hurrying above the ship. It was extremely cold, colder than it had ever been, blowing a strong gale, force 9. Big seas were coming aboard. I felt very lonely. The ship that had seemed huge and powerful was nothing now, a speck in the Great Southern Ocean, two thousand miles eastwards of New Zealand, three thousand from the coast of South America, separated to the North from the nearest inhabited land, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, by two thousand miles of open sea; to the South there was nothing but the Antarctic ice and darkness. She was running before seas that were being generated in the greatest expanse of open ocean, of a power and size unparalleled because there was no impediment to them as they drove eastwards round the world. She was made pygmy too by the wind, the wind that was already indescribable, that Tria said had only now begun to blow.
We rounded Cape Horn on 10 April, Easter Monday, having sailed more than six thousand miles, and were fifty-five days to the Line. We were one day ahead of Parma’s record-breaking passage of eighty-three days from Port Victoria to Falmouth in 1933. That year she had been thirty days to the Horn, twenty-five to the Line, but in 31°N 47°W our luck deserted us and we failed to pick up the strong westerlies we needed to beat her.
On 9 June at 8 p.m., ninety days out from Port Victoria, we raised the Fastnet Rock, fifteen miles to the north-east. We had smelt the land for days. The following morning and until evening we were becalmed near the Rock. Five men rowed out to us from Crookhaven, near Mizen Head, nine miles. The Captain made them drunk on rum and we left them drifting into the sunset in the direction of the New World. (More than twenty-five years later I got drunk in Crookhaven with the survivors of this long row.) Then a breeze came up and took us ghosting along the coast of Southern Ireland, past Cape Clear. Nothing could have been more beautiful to us than this country at this moment.
The following day at 5 a.m., the wind shifted from NW through W to WS W, the best sort of wind and we squared away for Queenstown. At about eleven o’clock we took a pilot from a black and white cutter, heaving-to for him to come across to us in a rowing-boat. Then both watches went to the fore braces, boarded the fore tack and began to clew up the remaining course sails, before racing aloft to see which watch could be the first to furl the Main and Mizzen. We won, in the port watch.
We came to anchorage off the narrow entrance to Queenstown under a couple of topsails and staysails. It was twelve o’clock ship’s time on Saturday, 10 June 1939, and we were ninety-one days out from Port Victoria, having sailed a round voyage of more than thirty thousand miles.
The Pilot told us that we were first home, and although we did not know it at the time, we had won the Last Grain Race.
On the 19th June Moshulu was ordered to Glasgow and a tug was sent to tow us. It seemed an ignoble end to such