Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  As a Russian correspondent in St Petersburg (renamed Petrograd during the war, as St Petersburg was deemed too German-sounding), Arthur was given a grandstand view of Russia’s descent into revolution, witnessing first hand the jubilation as the Tsar was overthrown in 1917. He felt the great wave of optimism that swept through the country and was there to witness all the growing pains of the new Soviet Republic. In the process, he became one of the foremost reporters on the subject, working closely with the Bolsheviks, whom he came to admire. He played chess with Lenin, sparred verbally with many of the Bolshevik elite, and fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, a woman who was to be his faithful companion for the rest of his life. I am aware that this still leaves us some miles short of sailing on the Baltic, and, furthermore that it is still unclear where the fishing comes into any of this, but bear with me. Anyhow, by the end of the war, Ransome had become close enough and sympathetic enough to the Bolshevik cause that he was suspected by the British of being a Bolshevik himself. This seems laughable with hindsight, but it is true that Ransome had been caught up in the political optimism that had swept through Russia during this period, and his writing reflected that. He was also strongly opposed to the British policy at the tail end of the war, which involved sending troops into Russia to support the White Army, with the aim of crushing the Bolshevik movement. Ransome’s inside knowledge of Russia meant he felt this was untenable and he was sufficiently vocal in this view to upset the authorities back home. At this point, he headed back to the UK for a holiday, and received a nasty jolt when, on arriving at King’s Cross Station, he was promptly apprehended by an officer and taken to Scotland Yard for questioning by Sir Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch. ‘Spycatcher’ Thomson was a serious man and, still operating under the special wartime jurisdiction granted to him during this state of emergency. Under this jurisdiction, he had been given sweeping powers to interrogate and prosecute anyone he deemed a threat to national security. To make matters worse, he had a reputation for hating Bolsheviks and he always seemed to get his man. Basically, things weren’t looking too positive for the young idealist as the interview commenced. What happened next is recalled by Ransome as follows:

  Sir Basil, looking extremely grim, looked hard at me. After a moment’s silence, he said, ‘Now, I want to know just what your politics are.’

  ‘Fishing,’ I replied.

  He stared. ‘Just what do you mean by that?

  I told him the exact truth, that in England I had never had any political views whatever, that in Russia I believed this very fact had let me get a clearer view of the revolution than I could otherwise have got, that I now had one clear political opinion which was that intervention was a disastrous mistake and that I hoped it would come to an end and so release me to turn to my ordinary interests.

  ‘Fishing?’ He said.

  ‘We are very near the beginning of the season.’

  Thomson was charmed, seeing Ransome for what he really was: likeable and a little bit politically naive but most of all, harmless and well meaning.

  More acute readers may have noted that none of this has much to do with sailing, but I am getting to that. Thomson’s assessment of Ransome meant that he was free to return to Russia at the end of his holiday, and there were pressing reasons to do so. It looked as though, after all, the White Army would defeat the Red Army and, with Evgenia in Moscow serving as Trotsky’s secretary, the future looked far from rosy for her. Ransome determined that he must find her and bring her to safety. This was easier said than done, for he would have to get through the lines of both the White Army and the Red Army to reach Moscow, then re-cross them in order to escape with his lover. In order to do this, he landed in Estonia and passed through the front line of the White Army with no trouble, having all the relevant papers. The next step was the tricky one; after being dropped in the no man’s land between the Whites and the Reds by a guide, I leave it to Ransome to describe the rest of the story:

  I filled a pipe, lit it and, with typewriter in one hand and bag in the other, walked over the hummock behind which we had stopped and set out across the open country towards the line that might or might not be the trenches of the Russians. I puffed pretty hard on my pipe, burning my tongue, but producing lots of smoke. Nobody, I reasoned, was going to shoot at a man walking slowly across and obviously enjoying his tobacco. Certainly no Russian, whose curiosity was sure to be greater than any wish to let off a rifle.

  Suddenly I caught a glint of light on rifle barrel. I puffed harder than ever. With my hands full I could not wave a greeting and knew that any stoppage to put down my baggage might cause a regrettable misunderstanding. So I walked on and presently saw half a dozen men with their elbows on the parapet and their rifles pointing in a direction I deplored.

  After being seized by the officers, Ransome was told that orders were to shoot any spies crossing the front. Despite this unpromising start, Ransome managed to persuade them to make him a cup of tea and explained that he was going to see Lenin and they might as well let him past as, once he was shot, they couldn’t undo it and Lenin might well be annoyed. Thus, he won his way through to Russia, found Evgenia and, after further exploits, the pair re-crossed the Red and White trenches and returned to Reval. This was 1919 and the couple remained here or in neighbouring Latvia until 1922, while Arthur tried to obtain a divorce from his abandoned and increasingly angry wife. On arriving in Reval, Arthur had entered a state of physical and mental collapse and was laid low for several weeks. As he convalesced in his hotel bed, he wrote this solemn affidavit to himself:

  Dear Arthur,

  I hereby promise you on my word of honour that I will undertake no political commissions from the Bolsheviks or any other political party and further that I will engage in no conspiratorial work whatsoever without expressly informing you that I consider this promise no longer binding.

  In the meantime, he continued to work as a reporter on the Russian situation, fished a little and became hooked on the idea of going sailing. Finally, we are where we want to be, on the shores of the Baltic, Arthur clutching the gunwale of Slug preparatory to his maiden voyage in her. Ransome had been hankering to get in a boat for some time, and the picturesque old port of Reval has a most inviting view out onto the Baltic Sea, as Arthur explained in his memoirs:

  Reval, our metropolis and shopping centre, was built as a fortress on a rock, and from that rock one looks out over a wide bay, with the green wooded island of Nargon on one side of it, a long promontory on the other, and far out beyond the bay a horizon of open sea.

  I do not believe that any man can look out from that rock and ever be wholly happy until he has got a boat of his own. I could not, and on each of my visits to Reval, I walked round the harbour looking for something that would float and had a mast and sail.

  Arthur had also been inspired to some extent by EF Knight’s memoir of his own cruise in the Baltic, entitled Falcon on the Baltic, and was keen to acquire a vessel of his own. This Falcon had been a converted ship’s lifeboat, and for some time Arthur pestered various ship’s captains to bring him a lifeboat from the UK that he could convert for himself. Although many humoured him, none actually came up with the goods, and brought one back. An increasingly desperate Ransome eventually spotted a mariner daubing a rather battered looking vessel with green paint. Arthur enquired as to the price and, shortly thereafter he was the proud owner of a very old open boat some 18ft in length, soon to be named Slug on account of her sailing abilities.

  The Slug was a most unpromising vessel and Ransome arranged for her to be inspected by a seafaring friend who was in port at the time. He eyed her dubiously and said that she would be fine for sailing in the bay. Once Arthur had explained that he wanted to sail her to his home in Lahepe Bay, some 40 miles away, the sailor raised his eyebrows and said, with great understatement, ‘pick your weather’. The next day, with Evgenia accompanying him ‘full of unjustified faith in me as a mariner’ (as Arthur put it) they set o
ff. His memoirs recall the voyage vividly:

  Next day there was almost a dead calm. We were in a hurry to try the new boat. The owner had brought down to the beach an ancient, patched gaff mainsail and a staysail. Several boulders from the beach had vanished and were now in the boat. ‘Big sail’ said the owner. ‘You want plenty stone for ballast.’ We climbed in and were pushed off. There were a pair of abominable heavy sweeps [oars] with which I pulled offshore, determining never to use them again. I hoisted the sails. There was a breath of wind and slowly, slowly, so slowly we there and then christened her Slug, she moved out into the middle of the bay and we were looking at the rock of Reval from the sea as I had so often promised that we should.

  We were in the middle of the bay when the wind died to nothing. Slug lay with drooping sails on glassy water. It was very hot. I jumped overboard to get cool and to look at my lovely command. I lay in the water admiring her and did not notice a light ripple that crept across the bay. The sails filled and Slug began to move. She moved slowly, but I should have liked her to move slower. Evgenia shouted at me to come back to the ship. I swam after her as hard as I could, caught hold of her gunwale, which now seemed a long way above me, and found that I could not get into her. I tried again and again, and began to think that I should have to hang there until she found her way into shallow water. But the wind was getting up and Slug was heading as if for Finland. I pulled myself hand over hand along her gunwale to her bow. She had a short iron bowsprit, and with the help of this unsympathetic bit of iron, I scrambled back aboard to be received, very properly, with curses. Afterwards, in shallow water, I tried many times to climb aboard in that way. I could not do it. I suppose the knowledge that there was no other way was the only thing that made it possible. Once I was aboard, the wind dropped again and we slowly drifted to the eastern side of the bay, landed, took the anchor up the beach, made a fire and camped. It is astonishing that this experience did not deprive me of my crew.

  This gives you a fair indication of what Ransome the sailor was like; good humoured, hardy, and just a little bit foolish. The Slug headed on for Lahepe via the island of Nargon. Quite incredibly, Ransome was happy to indulge in a night sail with nothing but a prismatic compass to guide him. He had no chart. I will leave him to conclude this foolish episode:

  There were no lights ashore. It must have been about two in the morning and wise folk on land were asleep. Suddenly, close by, we heard a loud barking. Next moment, I thought our keel must grind ashore. I dropped the anchor over and found the bottom with it in two fathoms. I brought the sails down. Tired right out, too tired to talk, we fell instantly asleep.

  We were woken by more barking, so loud and near that I thought we must have drifted ashore while we slept. The dawn had come. I looked sleepily over the gunwale into the eyes of a large seal who, with shining head and dripping whiskers, might have been an elderly business man bathing at Margate. He blew through his whiskers, barked again, dived, and was gone. What I had thought for a moment were other seals were the tops of rocks. I still do not understand how we had come to where we were without hitting any of them.

  Thus ended Ransome’s first meaningful cruise and both he and Evgenia were remarkably fortunate to escape unscathed. Slug was retained at Lahepe Bay, but was not a huge success, sinking at her mooring on several occasions and also having her rather questionable mainsail stolen. Nevertheless, she was a start and, following this, as Ransome noted, the couple were never without a boat of some sort for the rest of their lives. The following season, Arthur had a new command, the Kittiwake, a tiny 16-foot cutter with an equally tiny cabin. In the choice of Kittiwake, Ransome betrayed his inexperience as a boat owner. There are pictures of this little vessel under sail and, quite frankly, she looks ridiculous. She is so tiny that her cabin makes her look ludicrously foreshortened and stubby, while her sail area seems disproportionately huge. Meanwhile, clinging to her mast, a crewmember teeters ponderously. How they got back to the cockpit without flipping the little boat right over is a mystery. In his desire to get a yacht with a cabin, Ransome had bought rashly, and a quick test sail in the little vessel did not inspire confidence, for she was dangerously unstable. How Arthur and Evgenia, both over 6ft, ever managed to squeeze themselves into her narrow bunks is never touched upon. Nevertheless, she was a command, and the little cutter was fitted out with new mattresses, a primus stove and some much-needed extra ballast. One of the problems with Slug had been that, in order to get to shore, the couple had been forced to swim or wade. A more practical solution was required, but dinghies were at a premium in post-war Estonia, and Ransome was eventually forced to commission an undertaker to build one. The result was, less than astonishingly, coffin-like and even more unstable than Kittiwake herself. Ransome used to claim that she would capsize if he so much as shifted his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. With two such tenuous craft, it is unsurprising that sailing trips were limited to day excursions from Baltic Port, near Reval, where the couple were based for most of that summer. But Kittiwake did make Arthur realise that if he was serious about going sailing he needed a proper boat. That boat was to be Racundra, the yacht that launched his career as a nautical writer and set him on the path that led inexorably to Swallows and Amazons.

  It was during the summer of 1920 that Arthur and Evgenia met and ‘fell in love’ with the boatbuilder Otto Eggers. Eggers was a German living in Estonia and prior to the war he had established a reputation for building excellent and seaworthy craft. During the war he had lost his boatyard and, as a German, there was little hope of him ever getting it back. He could, however, still design yachts and after several hours of earnest discussion about the perfect boat agreed to draw up the plans for Arthur and Evgenia. The problem was now the simple one of finding a boatbuilder who had sufficient experience of putting together and commissioning yachts. This was not an easy task in post-war Estonia, and Ransome eventually plumped for a boatbuilder in Riga, Latvia, who had initially built Arthur a less coffinlike dinghy and professed to some experience with building yachts. In the autumn of 1921, Arthur took the plunge and signed a contract to have the Racundra built, on the understanding that she would be ready for the next season’s sailing, which in the Baltic generally began around late May. In the meantime, Ransome waited with all the puppyish eagerness of his younger days for his dream boat to become a reality.

  The specifications that Racundra was built to are described by Arthur as follows:

  She was to be a cruising boat that one man could manage comfortably if needs be, but on which three could live comfortably. She was to have writing table and book-case, a place for a typewriter, broad bunks where a man might lay him down and rest without bruising knee and elbow with each unconsidered movement. She should not be fast, but she should be fit to keep the sea when other little boats were scuttling for shelter. In fact, she was to be the boat that every man would wish who likes to move from port to port – a little ship in which, in temperate climates, a man might live from years end to years end.

  That Arthur did not live in a temperate climate is brought home quite nicely by the fact that he was able to go to the boatbuilder’s shed, situated on a small island just outside Riga, by skating across the thick ice that had formed in the mouth of the River Dvina. His pleasure at seeing the little yacht take shape was meted by his desperate frustration at what seemed to be an endless succession of delays. Racundra was meant to be ready by late April, just as the River Dvina was starting to crack and thaw and great floes of ice began to drift lazily seaward. She was not ready nearly in time and henceforth, Ransome referred to the boatbuilder simply as ‘the Swine’. Delay followed delay, and Arthur could see the whole summer of cruising ebbing away. Perhaps only he can fully convey the extent of his frustration:

  I pass over briefly as briefly as I may the wretched story of the building and the hundred journeys over the ice to the little shed in which Racundra slowly turned from dream into reality. She was to be finished in April, was promise
d to me on May 1, May 15, May 20th and short intervals thenceforward. She was launched, a mere hull, on July 28. I went for the hundred and first time to the yard and found Racundra in the water. The Lettish workmen by trickery got the builder and me close together. They planted us suddenly on a wooden bench which they had decked with bean-flowers stolen from the neighbouring garden and lifted us, full of mutual hatred, shoulder high. The ship was launched. Yes, but the summer was over, and there had been whole weeks when the Racundra had not progressed at all while the builder and his men did other work. He promised me then that she should be ready to put to sea on August 3rd. She was not. On August 5th I went and took the boat away unfinished. Not a sail was setting properly. The centreboard was half up, half down and hopelessly stuck. But under power and sails, somehow or other, I got the ship under way and took her round to the lake, had her out on the yacht club slip, removed the centreboard, had another one built, relaunched her, and just over a fortnight later turned the carpenters out of her and put to sea.