Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  I have not been able to tell of the effect the ship made on me. It was profound; it was translation to another world utterly unlike anything before known, read of, or imagined. I had been plucked up by the roots and pitched endways, to strike root or die; now the roots were trying to catch something.

  I had been fond of stories of all kinds, and had read and invented many; with some thought even that some day I might write stories. My coming to the ship put what I now call ‘a stopper over all’ upon any such thought. Stories, reading and invention were shut suddenly away. I had to learn a new language and a new life, word by word, task by task; my past was dead, my present, not made.

  Masefield felt himself bending to the will of the sea and it looked like his aunt’s ambitions for him might well be fulfilled, but of course the ultimate test was to come: a real life sea voyage. The omens were not necessarily good: as an apprentice aboard the Conway, Masefield and his shipmates were occasionally given what was known as ‘Liverpool leave’, a day’s liberty to go into the famous port and look over the ships. The traditional pursuit was to go aboard some of the tall ships and get to ‘know the ropes’, so to speak, and for Masefield the results were distinctly mixed. At first, he was thrilled to be able to assist in some work aloft aboard a barque, which had become entangled in the rigging of another ship, but this satisfying experience was muted by an utterly dispiriting visit to the fo’c’sle of a steamer not long docked. Masefield was utterly dismayed at her accommodation, describing it as:

  a small frowsy bare iron box with a wet floor and a few wooden shelves. The ship had probably taken a sea aboard while crossing the bar that morning. I know that my young heart sank at the thought that that box was the home of many men for days together and that those wooden shelves were their resting places, after their battling with the sea. I had seen many dogs and many pigs better housed.

  This was hardly an encouraging view for a sensitive young boy preparing for a life at sea, and the sight of that miserable little fo’c’sle had a profound effect on him at the time, as he reflected:

  Ships were beautiful to me. Their building and rigging wonderful. It was, however, clear to me that something was amiss somewhere; there was too much grab, too much snatch, and I knew very well I did not want to belong to it. I wanted to be clear of the type of man who gave iron walls and a shelf and a little daily offal in exchange for a life’s work.

  Thus, Masefield’s battle between the beauty and the grim cruelty of ships and the sea was already well defined when, in March of 1894, he signed up as an apprentice aboard the four-masted barque Gilcruix bound around Cape Horn to Iquique on the west coast of South America. He was 15 years old, but when he stepped aboard the Gilcruix, he entered a man’s world.

  The barque was lying in Cardiff docks loading a cargo of patent fuel – essentially compressed coal dust. She was a 289-foot iron ship with a tonnage of 2,304. Twenty years previously she would have been viewed as a huge ship, but by the 1890s she was about par for the course. She was a relatively new vessel, having been built in 1885 by the Whitehaven Shipbuilding Company in West Cumberland. Her name reflected her Cumbrian heritage, as Gilcrux is a small village nestled on the edge of the Lake District. Her owners, the White Star Line, also owed a lot to West Cumberland, as one of the founding members of the company, Thomas Ismay, hailed from the Cumbrian town of Maryport. By 1891, the White Star Line was already famous for its fast and luxurious transatlantic passenger service, which reached its peak, and also nadir, with the launch and disastrous maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. In the 1890s, however, the company was still happy to run a mixed fleet of steamers and windjammers.

  The Gilcruix represented the final evolution of commercial sail, being built with a good cargo capacity in mind above all else. By 1891, the golden age of sail was over. The clipper ships of the 1850s, 60s and 70s were being driven off the seas by the advent of more efficient steamships which, slowly but surely, were supplanting sail. By the time Masefield joined the Gilcruix, most clippers had been laid up, scrapped or sold to foreign interests. The Cutty Sark and the Thermopylae, the most famous of the earlier clippers, were both sold abroad in the early 1890s and tramped the oceans in increasingly threadbare condition barely scraping a living. Newer, more efficient sailing ships such as the Gilcruix, ‘windjammers’ as they were scornfully called, still had many years left to run, and there was still a sizeable fleet of these big, steel vessels plying the seas up until the outbreak of World War Two. The last of the windjammers could survive in certain trades simply because their sails, on long voyages, were more economical when pitted against the coal-guzzling steamships. This was particularly true on long-haul trips over the wilder stretches of ocean. This meant that the trades into which windjammers were being forced were generally bulk cargoes to or from far-flung destinations where speed of dispatch was not the primary concern. Grain, timber and fossil fuels were favoured cargoes. To this end, tall ships continued to serve in the grain trade with Australia where the intimidating stretch of the Southern Ocean, where the infamous Roaring Forties with their endless howling westerly winds, kept the steamship at bay for the time being.

  The other decent money-spinner for windjammers prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, was the nitrate trade between Europe and the west coast of South America. Sailing ships made reasonable profits from battling out to ports such as Callao, Valparaiso and Iquique with general cargoes, returning loaded with the rich deposits of guano, or nitrates as they were termed, which were used in Europe as fertiliser or to make explosives.

  The outward leg of this trip was most feared by sailors as it frequently included an epic battle with the dreaded Cape Horn. Lurking at the southernmost tip of South America this uncompromising headland lies right down among the icebergs and great storms that ravage this area. Plunge down to 40 degrees south, and the Southern Ocean is unrestricted by any great landmasses. Thus the great westerly winds whirl around this section of the globe unfettered, often building up enormous menacing seas in the process. In order to get into the Pacific from the North Atlantic, sailing vessels had to butt straight into these prevailing winds and huge swells, often battling for weeks at a time to make enough westing in order to ‘turn the corner’ and make the run up the Pacific into more clement latitudes.

  John Masefield had all of this before him as he boarded the Gilcruix, where she lay loading in Cardiff docks. At the time, the vagaries of Cape Horn seemed a far distant concern. A ship is never at her best when loading, covered in the grime and filth of a port, she can often look rather forlorn. There is little doubt that Masefield’s heart must have sunk as he lugged his trunk aboard. Nevertheless, he will have admired the barque’s tall spars and modern appearance. After more than two years aboard the Conway, he was able to look over the Gilcruix with an expert eye. She was a four-masted barque, meaning she carried square sails on her fore, main and mizzen masts and a fore and aft sail on her fourth mast (or ‘jigger’ as it was known). This evolution of square-sail rig had proven the most efficient, and by the 1890s vessels such as the Gilcruix were being handled by crews of fewer than 30 men. Contrast this with the 1852 voyage of the racing clipper Sovereign of the Seas, which carried a crew of 106, and you get some idea of how manageable the last tall ships had become – or how parsimonious owners were becoming, depending on your perspective. Certainly, labour-saving devices were in surprisingly short supply, and most tall ships still had a fairly appalling safety record. Frederick Wallace was a master of one of the big Cape Horners of this period and gave the following withering assessment of the windjammer fleet:

  In the designing and building of sailing ships, the humanitarian aspect has generally been neglected. The comfort of the crew was hardly considered and seemingly very little was done to reduce the peril of the work. Life in the sailing ship may be heroic, but it was often desperately cruel and unnecessarily harsh, and that largely because nobody bothered to make it less so. If anything, the latter day sailers, huge switch backed ca
rgo tanks, are the worst ever built as far as sailor’s comfort is concerned.

  Masefield was one of six apprentices serving aboard the Gilcruix. The rest of the 33 crew was made up of captain, first, second and third mates, steward, cook, carpenter, sailmaker, bosun, ‘donkeyman’ (engineer) and a fo’c’sle made up of able and ordinary seamen. Able seamen were more experienced sailors than ordinary seamen and therefore received slightly more pay. The apprentices, also known as brassbounders, lodged in the half deck, separate from the fo’c’sle and were essentially trainees who were ‘bound’ to the ship by a premium paid by the apprentices’ family. In addition to undertaking all the same maintenance, sail handling and cleaning work that the sailors did, apprentices were also expected to learn the rudiments of navigation and meteorology in preparation for sitting their officers’ exams after a couple of years at sea. Thus, although the work was incredibly tough for apprentices, the intention was that these passages made men of them and set them up for a bright future. It was in this frame of mind that young Masefield headed down to Cardiff Docks and reported aboard the Gilcruix. He recalled his first impressions of the ship some years later:

  As I went down to the docks I felt, I remember, strangely at one with the sun, strangely hopeful and confident, telling myself rosy yarns and conscious of the nobility of a sailor’s life.

  I had heard of my ship, the Gilcruix, from the lads who had seen her and sailed in her, and I had a fine picture painted in my brain of myself in a brass bound suit walking her quarter deck. She lay in mid-dock, and it was a proud moment for me when I paid the boy who carried my gear, and hailed her from the grimy pier head, ‘Gilcruix ahoy!’

  A filthy youth in dungarees put in from her gangway in a dinghy. He was a Conway boy of my time and one morning’s work had altered him strangely from the neat midshipman I had known a month before. He tumbled my gear into the stern sheets and I jumped in and I took the oars from him and pulled alongside.

  When I reached the deck, a little pock marked man with a limp and a sallow face came shambling to me. He was in shirt sleeves and smoked a foot of clay.

  ‘So you’re another of ‘em?’

  He had ‘mate’ written all over him, so I touched my cap and said, ‘yes sir.’

  ‘Go forrard to the half deck and shift your duds [change clothes] and come on deck an’ turn to [get to work].’

  This was the salubrious start to Masefield’s seagoing career. If it was a bit of an anticlimax, worse was to come when he entered the half deck, where he and the five other apprentices were to be lodged for many months to come. He recalled:

  The Gilcruix was loading patent fuel and the black blocks of compressed coal dust were sliding down the hatches at a rate of, roughly speaking, 200 tons a day. One hatch was just abaft the half-deck door, and though fuel is tolerably clean, it had spread in fine particles through the closed edges of the skylight and the chinks of the door, till the half deck was like a colliers pantry. As I opened the door to enter, the desolation of the place came over me like a bad dream, for it was in a state of litter and disorder quite indescribable. It was not a large place (its measurements were twelve feet square by eight feet high), and the hurried unpacking of five boys had strewn it two feet deep in clutter and scattered clothes. Chests and sailor’s bags, sea bedding, pannikins and dungarees were flung ‘all how’ under the bunks and all over the floor and lockers. I had never seen such a dissolute sight and the rough discomfort of the place made me sick to be there.

  That evening he retired to the half deck utterly disillusioned and got his first taste of ship’s supplies. It was a shock to a lad used to the relatively pleasant fare aboard the Conway.

  This meal consisted of a sodden mess of ‘dry hash’ [minced meat], which fell with a most unreassuring ‘plunk’ when helped onto a plate. We had also some broken portions of a loaf, a block of rancid butter, some moist salt and a kettleful of ship’s ‘tea’. Coming to six hungry lads who had been doing the hardest kinds of manual labour all day, and who were fresh from the pleasant refinements of the Conway, this disgusting mess was at once an injury and an insult. Food at sea is bad always, but to give food not so much bad as vile when in dock in inexcusable. The very pigs in the sty refused it. We hove it into the pigs’ platter and supped on some Bovril, a few buns, a little jam and some tobacco.

  Sadly, the fare which so outraged Masefield was pretty standard among windjammers of this period. Eric Newby, a fellow voyager in one of the last of the windjammers, the Moshulu, recalled being delighted to receive fresh fish for breakfast on his first morning at sea. He was curtly informed by a fellow crewmember that it was actually rancid bacon and he had little choice but to throw it over the side, where a seagull picked it up and hastily dropped it again. Ship’s captains seemed to pride themselves on scrimping on supplies. This was largely because shipowners insisted on fully stocking their ship for a round voyage in her home port, possibly because they did not trust the captain to do it sensibly and without getting ripped off once aboard. This did not take into account any unexpected stopovers, delays, or failure to secure a cargo later in the trip and meant that, right from the outset, captains were obliged to save supplies and serve up the kind of muck that clearly disgusted Masefield greatly. There were a few exceptions to this rule, but they were few and far between. James Holmes, captain of one of the last wool clippers, Cimba, in the 1890s, clearly had the trust of his owners, A. A. Nicol, and was one of the few skippers able to correctly victual his ship. This led to him gaining huge popularity with his crews. He recalls one set of men giving him a rousing three cheers at the end of a voyage and skippers and officers from nearby ships running to the scene, fearing that the crew must be about to lynch him.

  Returning to the Gilcruix, and an increasingly depressed and hungry Masefield: there was a round of rather bawdy shanty singing among the boys, at the end of which Masefield was able to crawl into his bed, reflecting bitterly on his disillusionment with seafaring life:

  On my first night of my new life, these wretched ballads, heard in the unaccustomed squalor of a half deck, gave me a disgusted loathing for the sea and all connected with it. I was fifteen years old and I had looked forward to a life rough in the main but withal courtly. Instead I found a life as brutal as that of a convict, a life foul, frowsy, whose one refinement was that of a low tavern by the dock.

  It was not a good start and clearly Masefield’s romantic nature clashed horribly with the grim reality of life aboard, and the weeks of waiting while the vessel loaded proved to be immeasurably tough. Aside from the officers, there were no men aboard the ship yet, as they were paid by the day. This meant that any labour fell upon the six apprentices, and they followed a brutal routine that started at 5.30am with the night watchman tumbling them out of their bunks in order to start work at 6am. Aside from lunch and tea breaks, the boys were kept hard at it until 7pm. Masefield describes one particularly tough day:

  We trooped out on deck just as the clock over the warehouse was showing six. It was chilly on deck, and comfortless, but we were not there for comfort. We were marched aft to the sail locker in a body and there to ‘wrastle out’ staysails to bend [attach to the rigging] before breakfast. I was put to bend the main topmast and main topgallant staysails, a piece of work which necessitates a nice sense of balance in the performer. The bender goes aloft, say, a hundred and twenty feet, and seats himself astride on a cruel hard wire about as thick as a broomstick. He then has to lean gingerly forward and work, with both hands and every muscle above his belt, at a heavy sail dangling underneath him. When you come down from aloft after bending staysails you wonder why you left home.

  The remainder of this particular day was devoted to the incredibly laborious work of loading the stores aboard the ship from ‘lighters’ or barges that ranged alongside. This was backbreaking work, which completed a very long day of toil.

  Our hands were full of splinters, bleeding at the finger tips and quite raw down the palm. I don’t know how I did wh
at I did that afternoon, but I suppose it was just the sense of duty that had been drilled into me till it was habit. Soldiers and sailors are like that, I think; they have a collective wisdom of sheep, the unquestioning mind of the running guinea pig. Tell them to do a thing, they will do it, and keep on doing it until they drop. It seems a goodish quality in print. In life it is only goodish for those doing the telling. When we cast loose the last lighter that afternoon we sank gasping against the fife rail. ‘Great snakes’ roared the second mate, ‘what are you knocking off for? Get the brooms along and man the head pump, two of you.’

  Towards seven o’clock that evening, six utterly tired lads sat upon chests and blinked at each other stupidly in the twilight. They were too fagged to eat, or to wash, or to sing, or to undress and turn in. They sat there stupidly for twenty minutes, not saying a word, blinking at each other like owls. They had looked labour in the face and the exceeding glory of her countenance had struck them dumb.

  One begins to get an insight into why Masefield entertained such mixed feelings about life at sea. One blessing was that he was not afraid of heights, so the tall spars of the Gilcruix held little terror for him. This was just as well, for there were no safety harnesses, and it was very common to lose a sailor or two falling from aloft on a voyage. Given the hard work the apprentices were enduring as the ship loaded, the actual departure date must have been hotly anticipated, and after three weeks of misery the Gilcruix was readied for sea. To this end, a motley bunch of sailors was procured, all hungover to hell – with many still drunk – and the ship was all set for a sea passage. Here, finally, was some of the romance that Masefield loved so dearly: