Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  It was probably incidents such as this that persuaded the brothers to sell the Shulah and cast around for a more suitable craft. The vessel was therefore sailed across to Ireland in order to be sold. It was on this trip that the Childers enjoyed their first solo night passage, and Erskine captures the magic of it most evocatively:

  Who can describe the emotions of that first night, with the rapture of freedom in adventure, and the strangely paradoxical sense of added loneliness and at the same time of wider companionship? It is true that the low hiss of the foam under the lee bow takes a mysterious, almost sinister note, unlike the vivacious melody which it plays in the sparkling sunlight, and the vessel, with her slender upper rigging fretting against the stars, seems very small and isolated.

  By 1895, Childers was fully established in his job as clerk in the House of Commons and the humdrum life of London hemmed him in. The great consolation, however, was that the Commons went into recess for weeks on end during the summer. Far longer, if you can imagine it, than they do today. This afforded plenty of time for serious yacht cruising if anyone so desired. Most didn’t and preferred to melt away to the various hunting, shooting and fishing activities that filled the long gaps between running the country. Those who did venture onto the water generally trod the snowy white decks of some elegant yacht anchored off the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes, all gleaming brass and shining varnish. Very little active sailing would have been done and most would have simply observed the numerous paid hands undertaking the actual sailing of the yacht.

  In his activities, Childers was probably unique within the House of Commons. In the spring of 1895 he had purchased an 18ft yacht, open apart from a small deck at the bow, which he kept at Greenhithe on the Thames. ‘She is not beautiful, but very workmanlike and I am quite satisfied with her.’ Childers reflected. The vessel was named Marguerite, but was always rather affectionately referred to as Mad Agnes in reference to his aunt. This little yacht was to mould Childers into the daring and adventurous sailor he portrayed in his later novel. One of her key features was her centreboard, or lifting keel. If the boat ran aground the keel could simply be raised, enabling the boat to float off. Mad Agnes was also sufficiently flat-bottomed that if she got stuck between tides, she could happily dry out on the sand without tipping over at an alarming angle. This was a direct contrast to the very deep, narrow Shulah and it allowed Childers to explore the tortuous shallows and tidal estuaries of the east coast of England.

  Childers appears to have been almost completely immune to hardship and I can do no better than quote his own description of the yacht and her accommodation arrangements:

  As for sleeping accommodation, I have a specially designed bell tent of oiled canvas, laced, (when in use) round the coaming, and bent to a halyard or runner by an eyebolt at the apex and hauled taut. The bedroom under apex is four feet six inches high. Our couches consist of two reindeer hair mattresses, which make most efficient life preserving gear.

  It is not clear whether by ‘life preserving’ he means they floated or provided sufficient comfort to ensure the crew retained the will to live. He continues:

  Comfort was not naturally, at the highest pitch; its chief foe was bad weather, for rain complicated everything. However, management and practice did much. The tent was waterproof, and my kit could be kept perfectly dry. I spread waterproof sheets on the floor after a wet day, and I may say I never slept better on a big yacht, or even on shore. For cooking I used two simple spirit stoves. I must admit that lack of space and the absence of a permanent roof tended to make one content with great simplicity.

  Despite this patent lack of comfort, Childers had no difficulty in persuading his chums to go sailing with him. His long-suffering brother, Henry, was a faithful crewmate as always, while Cambridge pals such as Ivor Lloyd Jones and William Le Fanu seem to have filled in the gaps. Childers’ logbook is full of high jinks and near scrapes: substituting their broken tiller for a mop, grappling for a match to illuminate their riding light as a steamer bore down on them on a dark night off Dover, or even tumbling into Folkestone at 4am in order to attend a fancy dress ball. The latter adventure followed a swift jaunt across the channel to Boulogne. This is no mean undertaking in an 18ft boat, particularly as this was mid-April. From hereon, Childers can be seen as one of the true pioneers of small-boat sailing and his adventures are often beyond anything that a normal, some might argue prudent, sailor would attempt. Grounding his yacht and having to kedge her off became a commonplace occurrence, while many of his trips could only have been accomplished by either a huge slice of luck, or very fine seamanship laced with plenty of daring.

  Perhaps a note on the art of kedging off is necessary here. Kedging off is a procedure for dragging a grounded yacht off into deep water. It involves loading your anchor into a dinghy and rowing out while paying out the anchor chain. Once in sufficient depth, you drop the anchor and row back to your yacht. After scrambling back aboard, you then haul on the anchor chain and pray you can pull the boat back off into the deep water where your anchor is. This short description can only hint at the misery the manoeuvre often involves: the anchor is a heavy, unwieldy implement and as you row your dinghy away from the yacht, your anchor chain constantly tries to drag you back. Invariably you are soaked, and often covered with mud. In other words, it is a task to be avoided if at all possible. Yet for Childers, kedging off seemed an everyday activity; something to be relished and sought out as he explored tortuous backwaters and shoals.

  An example of a typical adventure is Childers’ second cruise to France, accompanied by his brother Henry. This was undertaken in late September, a period when the weather in the English Channel can be quite volatile. Indeed, some would argue that the Channel in autumn is no place for an 18ft open boat, which in bad weather could conceivably swamp and fill with water. Nevertheless Mad Agnes departed England with little fanfare or concern, and after a 29-hour crossing the Childers arrived off Cherbourg. This in itself was something of an epic voyage, but perhaps the most illuminating fact is that after anchoring in Cherbourg and dining out, the two brothers went their separate ways; Henry retiring to a comfortable bed at the Hotel du Louvre, while Erskine preferred the draughty pleasures of Mad Agnes’ bell tent. He seems almost masochistic in his refusal to accept any level of comfort, though confessed that he much preferred an isolated tidal anchorage. ‘I have the strongest antipathy to the dirt, odours, publicity and general discomfort of a quayside berth in a crowded basin.’ This statement can be read almost word for word coming from Davies’ mouth in The Riddle of the Sands.

  From Cherbourg, the brothers cruised up the coast to Le Havre and, arriving before dawn, endured a miserable couple of hours lying off the port waiting for first light in order to find their way in. It was at this point that their adventures took on a truly hair-raising tone, as Childers relates:

  In the first light of dawn we were approaching the land, but the mist prevented our seeing the position of the piers. Suddenly we sighted a large fishing boat just ahead, apparently running for the harbour too. We thought it safe to follow her. Suddenly the wind changed instantaneously from SE to NW, causing us to gybe all standing [no damage] and setting up a confused cross-sea in which the boat behaved admirably. Blowing a hard gale. Suddenly made out both piers at distance of 200 yards, now right to windward owing to the change of wind. When quite near we realised we could not make the entrance. The question was, would she stay [tack through the wind] in the heavy sea there was? The fishing boat failed to do so and was driven on the rocks and wrecked.

  We put her about and she stayed beautifully. We tacked out about a quarter of a mile, shipping one nasty sea, came in again, and found we gained nothing owing to the strong adverse tide. Tacked out again but nothing better.

  Eventually the pair had to head to a creek some miles down the coast where the heavily battered Mad Agnes was allowed a well-earned rest. Childers’ own spare, understated account of this terrifying incident does little to convey the utt
er chaos of wind screaming in the rigging and sails thrashing, as the little boat battled gamely with a howling gale and vicious cross sea that threatened to swamp and sink her at any moment. It is to the credit of both boat and crew that they survived. The Childers later discovered with some relief that the crew of the wrecked fishing boat were rescued. The vessel itself, however, was a total loss. Perhaps this incident served to cool Erskine’s ardour for open-boat cruising in the autumn, for after this he took the prudent step of having his little craft shipped back to the UK aboard a cargo steamer.

  Nevertheless, Erskine’s adventures continued unabated. His ‘thirst for the sea’, as he picturesquely put it, seemed insatiable at this point and he approached it with a dedication verging on fanaticism. By now he was confident enough in his own abilities to undertake lengthy passages singlehanded; quite a contrast to those early travails aboard Shulah with paid hands. Childers’ description of a singlehanded night passage off the Kent Coast offers a wonderful insight into the delicate balance between the thrill of being out on your own, and the almost unbearable tension of a sea passage in an open boat without anyone around to reassure you.

  … off the East Swale I lost the ebb tide and off Whitstable all but a faint draught of my westerly wind. There was nothing for it but to anchor out in the open. It was a black night, with a mist just opaque enough to shroud all lights; the barometer was inclined to fall, and a swell beginning to roll in from the east was at once a presage of things to come and a source of much physical discomfort; for this was the first day of my season in open water. Supperless, spiritless, I trimmed and hoisted my anchor light and tried to sleep.

  The mast whined with every roll; with every roll there were flickings and slappings of ill tautened ropes which I had neither the energy to pacify nor the philosophy to ignore. Fevered dreams came at last, culminating in a hallucination that, like Shelley’s doomed mariner ‘longing with divided will, yet with no power to seek or shun’, I was drifting with fatal impotence over a stormy sea. In point of fact, a brisk northeast wind had awakened my vessel into a very lively motion. In daylight this would have seemed as a very simple and welcome phenomenon; alone, in the chill depressing hour before dawn, when vitality is at its lowest and with shoals on either hand and all guides to navigation obliterated, I shivered miserably at the prospect.

  Now, as always, salvation came from the cogent need to immediately do something definite and the lighting of the binnacle lamp was to find a companion, benevolent, imperturbable and at least giving one an indication of the lie of the lands and shoals. At the worst one can heave to and wait; at best, groping with lead and compass, one can make progress in a light draught boat through the restricted channels of the Kent coast.

  And now dawn is breaking, grey and ghostly, a buoy is sighted and safely identified, blurred traces of the coastline appear, marks multiply and at length the sun, dispelling the last mists, dispels with them all that remains of mystery and doubt. Once more the ebb tide is under you and the mainsheet sings in its sheaves – delicious music – as you bear up for Ramsgate and the Gulf Stream. Short as a child’s is the recollection of those evil night hours, keen as a child’s zest for this reward, rightfully yours by conquest. And now for breakfast!

  And what a breakfast it must have been after that long night! In fact, many of Erskine’s crew fondly recalled that he was an excellent cook, and there is an amusing account by Erskine himself detailing the difficulty of boiling eggs and making a cup of tea while battling with steering the vessel and trimming the sails. This is truly the sort of sailing that many yachtsmen aspire to but few have the hardihood to actually carry out. Childers was different, and it is fair to say that his dedication to small-boat sailing channelled his enthusiasm and almost total lack of fear in a very worthy if slightly trivial direction. One can only look at the results when his intense personality became involved in Irish politics to see how dangerous it could become. As Childers describes Davies in The Riddle of the Sands: ‘I saw strength to obstinacy and courage to recklessness.’ Childers shared these attributes with his fictional character.

  If there was one thing that Childers was not fanatical about it was his occupation. Certainly he was diligent and efficient, but that is all. He relates most vividly navigating the streets of London from his own home to Parliament; how he would gauge the direction and force of the wind and dutifully beat his way up to Westminster, mindful of any lee shores along the way. A beautiful picture of eccentricity and one that was recreated by Arthur Ransome in the opening page of his first book, Swallows and Amazons, when young Roger tacks up a field in the same manner. Although Childers and Ransome were contemporaries, there is no record of them meeting and it is likely that they simply shared a similar obsessive passion for the sea which led to this little coincidence.

  Strangely, Childers’ intense love of sailing and wild, almost reckless need for adventure, remained almost totally hidden from his colleagues, who expressed astonishment when they discovered some of the scrapes this taciturn young man had got himself into. Basil Williams, who also worked at the Commons and who became a firm friend, relates their surprise:

  We were astonished when we heard that our quiet friend was wont, in the long recesses from parliamentary business allowed us in those comparatively placid times, to go away, often alone, in a little cockle shell of a boat, navigating through the storms of the Channel or the North Sea or threading his way through the complicated shoals of the German, Danish or Baltic coasts.

  The reference to the German and Baltic coast is a nod to what was arguably Childers’ finest (and certainly his most ambitious) voyage aboard a new vessel, Vixen. This trip included an exploration of the Dutch canals, a thorough investigation of the Dutch and German Frisian Islands and from thence through the Kiel Canal to Denmark before doubling back through the Frisian Islands to Terschelling, where Vixen was finally laid up. This being Childers, the cruise was undertaken from late September through to December and the stoical Henry was once again along for the ride. The adventure was to form the bare bones of The Riddle of the Sands.

  Vixen was purchased in late August 1893 and it is perhaps best left to Childers to describe her. It is safe to say that it was far from love at first sight:

  I have never begun a cruise under less propitious circumstances. To start with, no one could call the Vixen beautiful. We grew to love her in the end, but never to admire her. At first I did not even love her for she was a pis aller, bought in a hurry in default of a better, and a week spent in fitting her for cruising had somehow not cemented our affections. Nor could the most sympathetic of friend, tactfully avoiding the aesthetic point of view, dwell on her weatherly and workmanlike appearance. A low freeboard, a high coach house, coach roof, and a certain over sparred appearance aloft, would unnerve the most honied tongue.

  Comfort below might be the flatterer’s last resource, but there again the words of compliment would die on his lips. In the ‘saloon’ he would find but just enough headroom to allow him to sit upright; and before he could well help himself the observation would escape him that the centreplate was an inconveniently large piece of furniture.

  Nothing could make the Vixen a beauty, but she proved herself to be admirably suited for the work we gave her. A couple of small bilge keels make her sit nearly upright when on the ground, a feature which we found most valuable in North Germany. As to headroom below, we very soon decided that it did not matter in the least. For heating and cooking we found a large oil stove admirable. I had the main boom and mainsail reduced and then found her handily and adequately canvassed. We were in the habit of speaking contemptuously of her seagoing qualities, but she never, as a matter of fact, justified our strictures.

  The description is the same, word for word, as far the Dulcibella in Riddle of the Sands and indeed any technical or scenic description within the book is almost always taken directly from this cruise. The logbook of the voyage is still extant and bears this out beautifully. Perhaps the most delicious
irony is that Childers was actually trying to get to the Mediterranean on this voyage. After fitting out his new yacht he determined to head across to France, with a rough plan to sail down to Bordeaux and from there through the Canal du Midi and onwards to the Mediterranean. This plan was scuppered by a persistent south-west wind. Childers was always loath to throw away a favourable wind, and the fateful decision was taken to head north instead and explore the canals and waterways of Holland. The rest is literary history.

  The cruise was an utter epic even by modern standards. The adventurers headed inland at the Oosterscheldt and sailed as far as they could towards Rotterdam. When the waters were too restrictive to sail, they were forced to take it in turns to drag the Vixen from the side of the riverbank. All the while they were dogged by the youth of Holland, who seemed to take particular delight in pelting the vessel with mud, crabs and other detritus as they made their painful way back out to the North Sea at Ijmuiden. From here, the sailors determined to go wherever the wind suggested they should and as it was still blowing from the south-west, it pushed them further and further east towards the maze of channels and sands of the mysterious Frisian Islands. It was at this point that the cruise became an earnest exploration. The first taste of things to come arrived as they headed out of Lake IJsselmeer on 17 December:

  The weather had broken at last for we woke to a strong bluster from the NW and the promise of more, but we were indifferent now, for we could run NE over the Zuyder Zee, behind the shelter of islands and banks. So we started double reefed before the wind. It was fine at first, but we soon had to take in [sic] third reef while heavy rain squalls fell on us in succession. It was our first experience of a kind of sailing [to] which we afterwards became quite accustomed. The channels were deep, narrow and complicated, and buoys and beacons of all shapes and colours seemed innumerable. ‘We’re lost’ we concluded once, but we found the way in the end.