Many a boatbuilder will give a wry smile at this description of the many delays entailed in putting together a yacht, ‘fools build and wise men buy’, Ransome reflected. Nevertheless, unfinished as she was, the Racundra was a sturdy, well-built vessel, double ended with a stupendous beam. Ransome loved her from day one and described her with great affection in the postscript to Racundra’s First Cruise:
Racundra is nine metres overall – something under thirty feet long. She is three and a half metres in beam – nearly twelve feet. She draws three feet six inches when the centreboard is lowered. Her enormous beam is balanced by her shallowness, and though for a yacht it seems excessive, thoroughly justified in her comfort and stiffness.
She is very heavily built and carries no inside ballast. Her centreboard is of oak. She has a three and a half ton iron keel so broad she will rest comfortably on it when taking the mud, and deep enough to enable us to do without the centreboard altogether except when squeezing her up against the wind. Give her a point or two free and a good wind and her drift, though more than that of a deep keel yacht, is much less than that of the coasting schooners common in the Baltic. With the centreboard down she is extremely handy.
But the chief glory of Racundra is her cabin. The local yachtsmen, accustomed to the slim figures of racing boats, jeered Racundra’s beam and weight, but one and all, when they came aboard her, ducked through the companionway and stood up again in the spacious cabin agreed there was something to be said for such a boat. And as for their wives, they said frankly that such a cabin made a boat worth having, and their own boat, which had seemed comfortable enough hitherto, turned into mere uncomfortable rabbit hutches. Racundra’s cabin is a place where a man can live and work as comfortably and twice as pleasantly as any man ashore. I lived in it for two months on end, and, if this were a temperate climate, and the harbour not a solid block of ice in winter, so that all yachts are hauled out and kept in a shed for half the year, I should be living in it still. Not only can one stand up in Racundra’s cabin, one can walk about in there, and that without interfering with anyone who may be sitting at the writing table, which is a yard square. In the middle of the cabin is a folding table, four feet by three, supported by the centreboard case; and so broad is the floor that you can sit at that table and never find the case in the way of your toes.
So he goes on and on, with evident pride and affection for his little yacht. There is little doubt that she was about as commodious a vessel as you could cram in to 30ft. You will have noted several references to a writing table, and, if you were wondering how Ransome was funding the largesse of buying a brand new yacht, here is a clue. He was still a reporter for the Daily News and also the Manchester Guardian, but he still harboured dreams of becoming a full time novelist, viewing being a journalist as ‘rather like a substitute on a cricket field, only on because of injury and liable to be removed at any moment.’ His writing, although stymied by war and revolution, had continued to some extent and the publication of Old Peter’s Russian Tales, a translation of a number of Russian folk stories such as The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, was rapidly becoming Ransome’s best selling and most coherent work to date. That book had been published in 1918, however. It was now 1922 and, aside from two small pamphlets entitled Six weeks in Russia and The crisis in Russia, both dealing with the state of the country post revolution, and a few odd bits of writing here and there, Ransome had precious little to show for the post-war years. Thus, Racundra proved to be a step in the right direction, for financial necessity meant he would need to turn back to writing books to supplement his income. Reflecting in later years, Ransome concluded that the commissioning of Racundra was one of the few wise things he did in his life, for it got him away from politics and journalism and took him back to his true vocation.
Preparations for the long-awaited cruise continued apace and, on 17 August, about the time many yachtsmen in these waters were starting to think about winding up their sailing activities and finding a snug berth to lay up their boat, Ransome was just about ready, writing to his mother thus:
After all kinds of tribulations which I will not recount in detail I have got the Racundra in the water, taken her away from The Swine, and with a couple of workmen have got her almost ready for sea. Ship’s papers are ready and I hope to move down to the mouth of the river, starting for Reval (about 250 miles away) with the first S.W wind. I have slept onboard since getting her. The workmen turning up at six and working until dark, and today, really all of the important things are done. I had to make a new centreboard, the old one being stuck and hopelessly warped, and took her up on the slip, after which I made sail and brought her back to the little harbour all by my wild self, the two workmen hammering away till I got halfway and they put up their astonished heads. She is very easy to manage, and so slow on her helm that I have plenty of time to run about and do things while she takes care of herself. But SLOW. My word. Something terrific. Our motion has a stately leisuredness about it that is reminiscent of the middle ages.
This slowness was not altogether Racundra’s fault. She was ketch rigged, but carried such a moderate sail plan that it must have been hard to truly get her going in light winds, particularly given her heavy build. This may have been a hangover from the Kittiwake experience, as that boat was poorly ballasted, over canvassed and tender to the point of being dangerous. Racundra was one of the new breed of yachts that carried an auxiliary engine, although this was not initially a great success, Ransome noting sardonically that it was a five-horsepower motor, but seemed to need forty horsepower to start it.
Thus, on 20 August, the Racundra finally left Riga with Ransome the proud master and commander of his new vessel, the redoubtable Evgenia relegated to cook, and a third crewmember, Carl Sehmel. This wizened old mariner had served aboard the celebrated clipper ship, Thermopylae and also aboard the famous Sunbeam which, under the ownership of Liberal MP Thomas Brassey, became the first privately-owned yacht to circumnavigate the globe. Sehmel was always referred to simply as ‘the Ancient’ for the duration of the voyage and proved invaluable to Arthur and Evgenia as they learned the ropes. He also played an important role in getting the little yacht shipshape following her rather hurried departure. Sehmel was later immortalised in Ransome’s Peter Duck, the third in the Swallows and Amazons series. Here, the experienced sailor is portrayed as a native of Norfolk, but in other details is the same stolid, wise and steady seaman he was on this voyage. The interplay between him and the eager, excitable Captain Flint is a very clear link between Peter Duck and Racundra’s First Cruise.
Thus the crew was complete and a course was set northwards, although not before customs had been cleared. This was quite an undertaking in itself, involving all manner of bribes, including vodka and a ham sandwich. The rough plan was to sail up to their old haunt of Reval, some 400km (250 miles) to the north, and then head on to the Finnish port of Helsingfors (Helsinki to us) another 160km (100 miles) or so miles northward again. Ransome was the chief navigator and, as a novice, he faced a fairly tough challenge. Granted, the Baltic has a negligible amount of tide, but the coast is dotted with an absolute myriad of tiny islands and rocks, all of which would have to be negotiated with skill, accuracy and confidence. Given that two years previously Ransome had been pottering around in Slug with no chart at all, he had already come a long way. In addition to this, there was the added challenge of heading out so late in the season; the Baltic is not a particularly forgiving place even in the middle of summer, but by late August, things are starting to get serious, and it is no place for the inexperienced. Thus, Ransome must have been pretty apprehensive as he swung out of Riga and headed north for Runo Island, the first stop. Despite a heavy swell on that first day out, the novice skipper wasn’t nervous for long, and once the afternoon drifted by and the evening glow faded from the sky, Ransome found himself at the tiller of his own yacht and he was beguiled by the experience of command:
At ten o’clock, the others turned in. F
or the first time, not on paper or in dreams, I had the little ship alone in my hands in a night of velvet dark below and stars above, pushing steadily along into unknown waters. I was extremely happy.
This set the pattern for the trip. Ransome really was exceedingly happy and this translated into his good-humoured writing. The trip was not exactly crammed with incident, but it was carefully and joyously observed, seen with the kind of child-like wonder that many of us lost long ago. The first landfall, the island of Runo, was typical:
I suppose most readers of this book [Racundra’s First Cruise] have already lost the ecstatic joy of sighting land at sea. Yet no, I do not believe that even for the oldest mariner that joy can ever fade. It is always new, always a miracle, never in the common ruck of absolutely predictable events. Islands especially stir the blood, and Runo, that lonely place, only fifty miles out from Riga and nearly as far from the Estonian coast, with its Swedish seal-hunters using words that in Sweden have become archaic, living in the twentieth century a life of medieval communism, a place where the steamer calls but once a year, coming up out of the sea before me, sought and found by my little ship, gave me moments of unforgettable delight.
So Racundra and her crew were able to sail back in time to a less complicated world untainted by war, and Ransome continued to wax lyrical about the abandoned shore and whispering pine trees, until jolted from his reverie by the old lighthouse keeper of Runo, who accosted him by asking how things were between Britain and Ireland. Ransome was resentful of this rude intrusion of modern politics which he felt had no place on his cruise. On they went, Ransome’s belief in his navigation gaining strength with every new landfall. They threaded the narrow channel of the Moon Sound without incident and it wasn’t until they were at Baltic Port, near Reval, that Racundra took a real battering from the elements and some of the Swine’s suspect workmanship was exposed. Racundra’s master had hoped to make it to safety before night drew in, but as they pushed the little boat to windward in deteriorating weather and rough seas, the jaws of her main gaff started to part. In the fading light it was soon obvious that they would have to drop the mainsail. This made her dreadfully unhandy and incapable of beating into the mounting gale. There was no option but to stand off the land and await morning in order to effect repairs. Thus they ran back out to open water and prepared for a night bobbing around in increasingly unpleasant weather. As was so often the case with Ransome, the experience ended up being a cheerful one:
As we careered in the dark over waves which always seem bigger at night, I had the definite impression that Racundra was enjoying it in her fashion. I found myself, who does not sing in happier moments, yelling ‘Spanish ladies’ and ‘summer is icumen in’ and ‘John Peel’ at the top of my voice. The Cook struggled up the companion way with a sandwich. She asked, with real inquiry, ‘Are we going to be drowned before morning?’
I leaned forward from the steering well and shouted, ‘Why?’
‘Because I have two thermos flasks full of coffee. If we are, we may as well drink them both. If not, I’ll keep one till tomorrow.’
We kept one.
This is the first meaningful contribution of the ‘Cook’ in his story. If you get the impression that Ransome had a rather derogatory view of the love of his life to simply refer to her thus throughout the book, there were pressing reasons. Ransome was still very much married to his wife Ivy, despite his desperate pleas for divorce she remained intransigent on the matter. This meant that for the sake of Edwardian delicacy, he was obliged to refer to his lover as the ‘Cook’ throughout Racundra’s First Cruise. In fairness, Evgenia also definitely was the cook and certainly seems to have displayed a level of stoicism rarely witnessed either in her time or ours. It was clear that she took to the sea like a duck to water (if you’ll excuse the phrase) and was just as comfortable helming as battling with the cooking.
It is also perhaps fortunate that none of the crew, most particularly Evgenia, was prone to seasickness. Anyhow, the cruise continued with a welcome stop at Reval, where they were reunited with Otto Eggers, who was able to remedy a number of Racundra’s defects and to fit some battens in her sails, which greatly improved her ability upwind.
From here, the cruise continued up to Helsingfors in Finland. Perhaps due to the strenuous nature of Evgenia’s role, she opted to remain with friends in Riga during this part of the voyage, and was replaced by a mysterious chum known as ‘Mr Wirgo’ who seemed to spend the entirety of the trip in his bunk. Who cooked in the meantime is not elaborated upon. The only drama on this leg was in trying to pick up a pilot to take them through the tricky entrance into Helsingfors. The pilot spotted the Racundra approaching the coast through the dusk, but assumed she was a smuggler and let her be. It therefore took strenuous efforts and the blasting of the foghorn to persuade him that they needed his assistance.
The return leg was pretty much a repeat of the outward trip, although they took in a few more island stopovers on their way back. The weather grew increasingly inclement and they were stormbound in Werder, just to the north of Riga, before bowling into their home port on 26th September. Ransome wrote triumphantly to his mother upon arriving home:
The Equinox flung us home with a flick of his mighty tail after giving us a lively time for a fortnight or so. In the way of writing I did pretty well, and came home with eighty photographs and over 30,000 words. My greatest joy is the navigation, which went through in all four of the out of sight of land passages without a hitch. The sheer excitement of being out of sight of land for 24 hours and then seeing the land appear and finding that you have hit it exactly as you have intended is something not to be equalled in any other way.
The trip had been a success and all had enjoyed it, even the long-suffering cook. Although yachts had sailed the Estonian, Finnish and Latvian coastline before, Ransome must have been one of the first Englishmen to do it and, as such, it remains an impressive effort. Even to this day it remains a beautiful but rather obscure cruising ground. All that was left to do was to write up the trip, and Ransome set to work in earnest almost as soon as he returned to land. By the time he visited friends and relatives in England in December, the book was pretty much complete and he was further encouraged by positive noises made by his old Lake District friends and mentors, the Collingwoods, who expressed their enjoyment of the manuscript. He was also buoyed by the news that his wife had finally consented to a divorce. It began to look like he would be able to escape his self-imposed exile and he and Evgenia could begin to plan a life together in England. Although Ransome loved the Baltic states and Russia itself, by 1922 he was beginning to seriously miss home.
These hopeful thoughts must have been with him as he made the final amendments to Racundra’s First Cruise in January 1923. Yet, although the outlook was rosy, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the content of his latest book, noting to his mother that, ‘In parts I do not care for it and find it rather dull … Nobody will read it, of course, but I shall be glad to have a few copies to give to one or two folk.’
Ransome was an optimist when it came to most aspects of his life, but he often plunged into bouts of severe self-doubt when it came to his writing. This was to become progressively painful as he worked on his Swallows and Amazons pieces, and his dissatisfaction with Racundra’s First Cruise was an early instance of this. In fairness, the story is not crammed with high drama, but what it lacks in that respect, it makes up for with Ransome’s own gentle wit and the interaction between the crew and Racundra herself, who often takes centre stage. This was the book where Arthur found his voice as an author of nautical literature, and there are plenty of signposts in Racundra’s First Cruise that point firmly toward the inimitable style to be found in the Swallows and Amazons series. Perhaps not least because its almost aggressively non-political content pointed toward the pastoral utopia he would create in his later books for children. If Arthur had wished, he could have peppered the book with digs relating to politics, for they were never far away in
this war-ravaged region. It is telling that in one of their stopovers they commented on the damage wrought by the Germans, only to be to be informed that these had been ‘Churchill’s Germans, paid by the British’. This was an allusion to Britain’s anti-Bolshevik meddling in Russia at the end of World War One, a subject close to Ransome’s heart. Yet he wisely resisted the temptation to politicise Racundra’s First Cruise, and it gives the book a wonderfully dreamy, escapist feel.
Arthur relented in his dismissive views toward the book once it was published. In July 1923 it was handsomely packaged, and his usual enthusiasm returned when he received a copy of it, writing to his mother that, ‘Unwin has made really quite a nice book of it and I am full of joy over my new baby, my first non-political book since the war.’
The book was a relative success, and the publishers were more than happy to accept a proposal for a sequel. Thus, the sailing season of 1923 was devoted to gathering material for a new book, and the original crew, augmented by a grass snake that Evgenia insisted on having aboard and slept with entwined around her neck, gathered in Riga. Arthur harboured dreams of sailing Racundra through the Baltic and the North Sea to England, and this was certainly an achievable trip for both yacht and crew. Sadly, work intervened and a commission from the Manchester Guardian ensured that there was no way he had enough time for such an extended voyage. Racundra and her crew satisfied themselves with further exploration of the Finnish and Estonian coast. Later in the cruise they were joined by an extra crewmember, Ernest Boyce, who was head of the Russian branch of MI6. The revised plan was to get to St Petersburg, but even this was scuppered by bad weather, and Ransome did not feel there was enough excitement in the trip to justify a sequel to Racundra’s First Cruise. Perhaps the dramatic highlight was an encounter with a waterspout:
Sea Fever Page 30
