Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  One morning, before breakfast, we were set to weeding in a potato-patch; and the planters being engaged at the house, we were left to ourselves. Now, though the pulling of weeds was considered by our employers an easy occupation (for which reason they had assigned it to us), and although as a garden recreation it may be pleasant enough, for those who like it – still, long persisted in, the business becomes excessively irksome.

  Nevertheless, we toiled away for some time, until the doctor, who, from his height, was obliged to stoop at a very acute angle, suddenly sprang upright; and with one hand propping his spinal column, exclaimed, ‘Oh, that one’s joints were but provided with holes to drop a little oil through!’

  Vain as the aspiration was for this proposed improvement upon our species, I cordially responded thereto; for every vertebra in my spine was articulating in sympathy.

  Presently, the sun rose over the mountains, inducing that deadly morning languor so fatal to early exertion in a warm climate. We could stand it no longer; but, shouldering our hoes, moved on to the house, resolved to impose no more upon the good-nature of the planters by continuing one moment longer in an occupation so extremely uncongenial.

  Thus the pair quit their employment and, after a brief attempt at becoming courtiers in the house of the Queen Pomare, the exiled ruler of Tahiti, they separated. Melville again turned to the sea and signed aboard the whaler Charles and Henry of Nantucket. The ever languid Troy decided at the last moment that the trip would simply be too much, and remained lolling on the beach, while Melville headed out into the rolling billows of the Pacific to battle the great whale once more.

  Melville’s third stab at whaling was far less of an eventful affair than the previous two attempts. The Charles and Henry was nearly two years into her cruise and was having a pretty lean time of it. Her captain, John Coleman was, by all accounts, a very competent master, a ‘fighting master’ in whaler’s parlance, as he still took an active part in hunting the whales once found, just as Melville’s Ahab did in Moby Dick. Yet on this cruise, all his efforts had so far been in vain and he had just 350 barrels of sperm oil to show for two years at sea. Melville served for six months during which time Charles and Henry added a further 150 barrels of sperm oil. Melville later claimed that he served as a harpooner in a whaler and, if this was the case, it would no doubt have been aboard this ship, for Melville was now a seasoned hand. In this role he would have occupied the boatsteerer’s oar in the whaling boat, and it would have been he who first ‘darted’ the mighty sperm whale before swapping ends with the mate and steering the boat as it was towed helter skelter by the enraged creature. Whether this was the case or not, it was not long before he again sought his discharge, taking the first opportunity when the ship touched at Maui, Hawaii. This was the last of Melville’s whaling activities and whether it was the lean times in the Charles and Henry, the discord in the Lucy Ann or the hard treatment in the Acushnet that decided him on turning his back on this perilous trade we will never know, but lovers of nautical fiction can be grateful that he went to such extreme lengths to gather the source material for later masterpieces.

  Yet this was not the end of Melville’s seafaring career; you must remember that he was still trapped on the opposite side of the world and that getting home was far from easy. After a brief stay in Hawaii, where he worked in a bowling alley setting up skittles and also briefly as a clerk, Melville saw his chance at getting home when the American naval vessel United States arrived off Honolulu. It was known that she was homeward bound and recruiting and Melville signed up for ‘three years aboard or the cruise’ in August 1843. He had been adrift for over two years and must have been itching to get home. His exploits aboard are recorded in great detail in his later book White Jacket, which he opens with the following sentence:

  ‘All hands up anchor! Man the capstan!’

  ‘High die! my lads, we’re homeward bound!’

  Homeward bound! – harmonious sound! Were you ever homeward bound? – No? – Quick! take the wings of the morning, or the sails of a ship, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. There, tarry a year or two; and then let the gruffest of boatswains, his lungs all goose-skin, shout forth those magical words, and you’ll swear ‘the harp of Orpheus were not more enchanting.’

  The sigh of relief is almost audible; yet Melville still had a long way to travel before he was home and he now found himself in a new and strange environment ill suited to his free-spirited itinerant ways. As an ordinary seaman serving aboard a US naval vessel, he could expect strict discipline, and none of the carefree loafing and laxness of his whaling days: desertion or mutiny would carry the sentence of flogging and death respectively.

  There were many other contrasts too; the United States was a fast frigate 178ft long. She would have looked very smart alongside the slovenly whaler, with her gleaming white decks and acres of highly polished brass. But all of that smartness came at a price; soul destroying, mind numbing toil. The biggest contrast with the whaling vessels was the immense size of her crew. She carried 480 men all told and this must have made for a very cramped and unpleasant trip. Her captain was one James Armstrong, who was renamed Captain Claret in White Jacket, as Melville felt he was rather too fond of a tipple. In actual fact, Melville would have had precious little to do with the captain and he was given the role of ‘maintopman’. This meant that during his watch he was continuously stationed in the maintop and was therefore easily at hand if there was any sail to be taken in or loosed. Melville stated in White Jacket that it was his personal responsibility to loose the main royal sail, which is one of the uppermost sails on the ship. He was accompanied by several other maintopmen, commanded by an Englishman, Jack Chase, who supervised his men with aplomb and seems to have been the object of hero worship from Melville, for Chase was a different class of seaman: erudite, debonair and extremely well read. Thus, hours in the top seem to have been whiled away discussing literature and composing witty observations, which must have been a pleasant change.

  If all was well in the maintop, little else aboard the United States served to please Melville. This was no place for a nonconformist and it didn’t help that his first order on stepping aboard was to strip so that he could be fully inspected for any ailments or bodily defects. Thankfully he passed the test and was then immediately forced to observe the brutal flogging of several men who had committed various minor offences. It was all going to be a bit much for a young idealist who had already railed against the stupidity of missionaries in the South Seas and had struggled with the harsh treatment aboard the Acushnet. Nevertheless, Melville was bound to the ship by the Articles of War and had little choice but to bite his tongue. His later book, White Jacket is damning of the US Navy, and finds fault with almost everything therein: floggings are excessive (he devotes three chapters to this), the hierarchical system is flawed, the officers are ignorant, the midshipmen are brats, sexual deviancy among the crew is heavily hinted at, and the list goes on. Melville was also horrified with the general attitude of the officers when rumour got around that war might break out between the US and Mexico. While the men were downhearted, Melville noted with a sneer that the officers were clearly excited:

  But why this contrast between the forecastle and the quarter-deck, between the man-of-war’s-man and his officer? Because, though war would equally jeopardize the lives of both, yet, while it held out to the sailor no promise of promotion, and what is called glory, these things fired the breast of his officers.

  It is no pleasing task, nor a thankful one, to dive into the souls of some men; but there are occasions when, to bring up the mud from the bottom, reveals to us on what soundings we are, on what coast we adjoin.

  How were these officers to gain glory? How but by a distinguished slaughtering of their fellow-men. How were they to be promoted? How but over the buried heads of killed comrades and mess-mates.

  Clearly these are not the words of a man who truly belonged in a man-of-war. Nevertheless, the passage progressed p
eacefully enough and Melville was to enjoy yet another visit to Nuku-Hiva prior to quitting the South Seas. On this occasion there is little doubt that he would have regaled his mess mates with tales of his exploits in this beautiful island and, consciously or subconsciously, he was already piecing together the plot for, Ty-Pee, written on his return.

  The passage home was largely a fair weather one, but there was still the dreaded Cape Horn to be rounded, and the United States received the usual harsh treatment at the hands of this rugged meeting of land and water. After enduring an eerie calm, the vessel was pinned over in a ferocious gale and Melville, in his role as maintopman, left a beautiful and vivid description of the fight aloft and the feeling of being lost within the fury of the storm:

  By assisting each other, we contrived to throw ourselves prostrate along the yard, and embrace it with our arms and legs. In this position, the stun’-sail-booms greatly assisted in securing our hold. Strange as it may appear, I do not suppose that, at this moment, the slightest sensation of fear was felt by one man on that yard. We clung to it with might and main; but this was instinct. The truth is, that, in circumstances like these, the sense of fear is annihilated in the unutterable sights that fill all the eye, and the sounds that fill all the ear. You become identified with the tempest; your insignificance is lost in the riot of the stormy universe around.

  After a lengthy stay in Rio, the United States made her way back to Charleston Navy Yard, arriving in October 1844. No doubt Melville must have been shell shocked to be home after such an epic adventure. He had been away for four years and it must have been disillusioning to find that all those dreary everyday problems of debt and unemployment were still there, lurking in wait. He did have much to be thankful for, even if he did not know it just yet, for he had gathered all the source material required for his first six novels, Ty-Pee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn (a narration of his 1839 transatlantic voyage), White Jacket and Moby Dick. During this period he had experienced things that were far beyond the imagination of ordinary people leading humdrum lives and it was apparently this that made Melville take up his pen and begin to write Ty-Pee. Even without his splendid prose, the book was so crammed with adventure that it was bound to be a hit and its success sent Melville down a new path, far away from the sea. His first book was his most successful during his lifetime while Moby Dick, that ‘great blasphemous book’ as Melville described his epic of madness, monomania and malice, was only regarded as a classic after the author’s death, which came in 1891.

  Melville’s seafaring days were not quite over, however, for 16 years after he was discharged from the United States, he once again paced the deck of a mighty tall ship bound around Cape Horn. This time, however, he was a paying passenger and the vessel was the clipper ship Meteor, commanded by Melville’s younger brother, Thomas, who was keeping up the family tradition of seafaring with admirable aplomb. She made the trip from New York to San Francisco in 120 days and was actually three days longer than the stumpy old Acushnet off the pitch of Cape Horn. Clearly Melville had not fully lost his love for the sea, which not only brought him great adventure, but also provided lovers of literature with some of the finest tales of adventure and misadventure afloat you could ever imagine. His writings are far more comic than many give them credit for and are accompanied with a flair for description that brings nautical scenes to life in a manner few others have managed. I will leave this chapter with a short passage describing a calm off Cape Horn that encapsulates his skills in a few well-formed sentences:

  And now coming up with the latitude of the Cape, we stood southward to give it a wide berth, and while so doing were becalmed; ay, becalmed off Cape Horn, which is worse, far worse, than being becalmed on the Line. Here we lay forty-eight hours, during which the cold was intense. I wondered at the liquid sea, which refused to freeze in such a temperature. The clear, cold sky overhead looked like a steel-blue cymbal, that might ring, could you smite it.

  Makes you shiver just to read it.

  Arthur Ransome

  In search of utopia

  Houses are but badly built boats, so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.

  Racundra’s First Cruise

  This was the opening gambit in Arthur Ransome’s career as a nautical writer and this single paragraph gives you a great insight into Ransome the sailor and writer. He managed to convey the joy of sailing effortlessly, genuinely and with a unique charm. For all that, if you had told Ransome at the age of 30 that he was going to become one of the bestselling nautical writers of all time, he would have been utterly bemused. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 83, this is exactly what he was. The mass following that his cosy, slightly otherworldly children’s tales of sailing have gained is extraordinary, and the affection many adults retain for them is staggering. Working between the two grim pillars of the World Wars, Arthur Ransome succeeded in creating an idyllic England of ginger beer, jolly adventures and chaps who start their sentences with, ‘I say…’ Alongside PG Wodehouse, Ransome managed to conjure up a kind of English utopia, inviting his reader to forget about the pointless savagery and cruelty of World War One, and ignore the storm clouds again gathering on the continent by escaping to a different, less complicated England where the sun always shone (even in the Lake District). To immerse yourself in one of Ransome’s incomparable tales is akin to sitting down in your favourite armchair in front of a roaring fire – preferably in some kind of low-beamed Lakeland cottage – and tucking into hot buttered toast, laden with Oxford Marmalade. His stories are pure balm; the soothing hand on a fevered brow, utterly irresponsible escapism from the rigours of daily life.

  Of course, his tales are also rattling good seafaring stories, bubbling over with the life-affirming joy of being afloat. This is doubtless why his Swallows and Amazons series remains so fiendishly popular with children of all ages, even beyond the context of the two World Wars. Indeed, so much has been written about Swallows and Amazons that I really don’t think I can add much more. Instead, I would like to explore how Ransome became the bestselling nautical author of the 20th century. To find out, we have to head back to 1920, when Ransome stepped aboard his first command, the Slug, a 18-foot open sailing boat with sails looking suspiciously like old bed sheets, and planned a highly foolish trip from Reval (now Tallinn) to his home, some 40 miles along the Estonian coast. To understand why Arthur Ransome was in this unlikely spot in the first place also requires a bit of explaining, so at this point we must leave him standing on the shores of the Baltic, clutching Slug’s battered gunwale and dipping his toes into that crystal clear water, and go right back to the start.

  Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884 to Edith and Cyril Ransome, a very respectable middle-class couple. He was the eldest of four children and right from the start he approached life with a puppyish enthusiasm that drove his father, a professor of history at what was to become Leeds University, quite round the bend. He never seemed to settle on anything, charging from one project to another without ever completing the job in hand. His father died of tuberculosis when Arthur was 13, but not before he had introduced Arthur to the three things that would dominate his adult life: fishing, the Lake District and the nagging feeling that his father was in some way disappointed in him. Around the time of his father’s death, Arthur won a scholarship to Rugby School where he failed abysmally. He then went to Leeds University, where he was pressured into studying science at which he also failed abysmally, yet cheerfully. Mid-way through his degree, he decided he was going to be a writer, and headed to the capital, determined to immerse himself within London’s bohemian set, which he did with a modicum of success. For the next few years he proceeded to write,
for the most part badly, and marry unhappily. Things were not looking too positive, but Ransome was, if nothing else, a livewire of enthusiasm and each fresh failure was greeted with gung-ho optimism, almost as if it was an opportunity. He continued to holiday in the Lake District, which was unquestionably his great love in life, but until 1920 his sailing experience was limited to the odd excursion across Lake Coniston in the Jamrach and the Swallow, two dinghies owned by his firm friends, the Collingwood family.

  This still leaves us a good few leagues short of Estonia, and how he got there owes a lot to three things: his wife, his lover and fishing. Ransome had married unwisely. His enthusiasm and his youth made him prone to rashly falling in love with any young lady that gave him the time of day, and even some who didn’t. He met Ivy Walker at a social gathering in 1908 and shortly after had jocularly suggested they should get married. To his surprise, Ivy took him up on the idea and Ransome was too polite, feckless and smitten to wriggle out of it. After their wedding, the pair struggled to get along for several years, through what Ransome later described as, ‘a bad, incredible dream’. Ivy was – to put it mildly – highly strung. An indication of the strain she put on Ransome is illustrated by a short walking trip he took with Ivy and a mutual male friend. At the end of the trip, Ivy hysterically told Ransome that she was having an affair with the mutual friend. Arthur replied that they, ‘had better see about a divorce then’ and Ivy promptly admitted it was all a fiction. Despite these dramas, the pair did have a child, Tabitha, but by 1913 the situation was too much for Arthur. He took the unusual step of simply disappearing to Russia on the rather flimsy pretext of going to Sweden for a holiday. Why he chose Russia is unclear, except that it was the most far-flung outpost of Europe and his wife was unlikely to track him down. He rapidly gained a real affection for the country, learning Russian and gleefully integrating into the cosmopolitan life of St Petersburg. Ransome was still lying low here when war broke out in 1914 and he remained there as a reporter. He had never wanted to be a journalist, but was keen to serve his country in some way and had been advised that his eyesight was far too weak to serve in the armed forces. At 30, he was also getting a bit old to fight and he reasoned that as a reporter fluent in Russian he could be of use.