The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  Praise for Jack de Crow

  “a great travel writer and more importantly a great traveller”

  —The Sydney Morning Herald

  “not just an adventurer, but an artist, philosopher and keen observer of the world around him”

  —The Canberra Times

  “a captivatingly odd tale”

  —Good Reading

  “a clever and entirely engaging read”

  —The Melbourne Times

  “a wonderful idea for a book – a series of even bolder improvisations … undertaken in praise of the spirit of adventure”

  — The Times Literary Supplement

  The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

  The Unlikely

  Voyage of

  JACK de

  CROW

  A.J. Mackinnon

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  Level 5, 289 Flinders

  Lane Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

  email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  © A.J. Mackinnon 2009. Reprinted 2009, 2010 and 2011.

  This is a revised edition of The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow by A.J. Mackinnon, first published by Seafarer Books, 102 Redwald Road, Rendlesham, Woodbridge, Suff olk IP12 2TE, UK.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963-

  The unlikely voyage of Jack de Crow / A.J. Mackinnon

  ISBN for eBook edition: 9781921825415

  ISBN for print edition: 9781863954259 (pbk.)

  Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963-

  Jack de Crow (Dinghy)

  Sailing--English Channel.

  Sailing--Europe.

  Sailing--Black Sea.

  Voyages and travels.

  910

  Illustrations and maps by A.J. Mackinnon

  Book design by Thomas Deverall

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  Contents

  PART ONE Bumping into Places

  The Teacher’s Thief

  The Dinghy and the Dreamer

  Departure and Dismay

  Sails and Stained-Glass

  Rapids and Repairs

  Steam Trains and Smooth Sailing

  High Tide to Bristol

  Wi’ a Hundred Locks an’ A’ an’ A’

  Death and the Dreaming Spires

  Return to Reading

  Capsize and Colleges

  London and the Law

  PART TWO My Purpose Holds

  Dooms and Delays

  Tide on the Thames

  Of Shallows and Shipwreck

  Cake and Carpentry

  Dashing to Dover

  Crossing to Calais

  Dead Dogs and Englishmen

  Et in Arcadia Ego

  A Jollyboat in Germany

  PART THREE Into the East

  Contrary Currents and Kindness

  The Kaiser’s Canal

  Pigeons and Palaces

  Wilderland and War

  Proud Hearts and Empty Pockets

  Bad Times in Bulgaria

  The Wings of the Morning

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Bumping into Places

  The Teacher’s Thief

  For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.

  —ROBERT GREENE, A Groat’s Worth of Wit

  This is an account of a journey made from North Shropshire in England to Sulina on the Black Sea, sailing and rowing over three thousand miles in a small Mirror dinghy. It was in many ways an accident that it happened at all. I had intended to spend a quiet two weeks travelling the sixty miles or so down to Gloucester on the River Severn. Somehow things got out of hand – a year later I had reached Romania and was still going.

  I have many heroes. They are mostly drawn from the world of children’s literature, I confess. But the earliest hero I can remember is Doctor Dolittle, that plump and kindly figure who lived in Pud-dleby-on-the-Marsh and talked to the animals. It was not this last attribute that first entranced me, however. It was the illuminated capital letters at each chapter heading which made a high-pooped, billow-sailed little galleon of each capital ‘S,’ or turned an ‘A’ into a frame of leaning palm trees, and, above all, it was the marvellously casual line:

  Doctor Dolittle sailed away in a ship with his monkey and his parrot, his pig and his duck, and bumped into Africa.

  Bumped into Africa! Here was the way to travel! No timetables, no travel agents, no dreary termini clanging with loudspeaker announcements. No grubby platforms, no passports, no promises of postcards to be sent on safe arrival, just the little ship slipping down the river to the sea. Indeed the chief attributes of all the good Doctor’s voyages seemed to be simple enough: a cheerful optimism and a beloved hat, both of which I happened to have. There was clearly nothing stopping me doing the same.

  I had been working for six years as a teacher in a place called Ellesmere College. This is a minor public school set amid the meres and meadows of Shropshire – a flat Shire land of grazing cattle and placid canals where narrowboats glide serenely across the countryside. In the distance rise the first blue hills of Wales, an altogether wilder and more enchanted land.

  Some of that dark Welsh magic must have leaked from those nearby valleys, seeping across the prosperous plain to lap about the confines of Ellesmere College. For in my first year there something happened which has a bearing on all this present tale.

  Amid the busy routine of a new term in a new place, there grew in my mind a faint but persistent daydream, a niggling ambition of the most childish and unlikely sort: namely, to own a tame crow. To this day I am not quite sure where such a fancy came from. Perhaps it was the weight of my academic gown on my shoulders, heavy as Prospero’s cloak, that prompted me to seek out an Ariel of my own.

  One does not, of course, share such daydreams readily with others. They have a habit of wilting on contact with outside scrutiny. But when my oldest friend rang to see how I was settling in to my new life at Ellesmere, I did confide to him, half jokingly, self-mockingly, my avian fancy. Well, Rupert has long ago become accustomed to this sort of thing from me, so after expressing a polite but distant acknowledgement of my latest daydream, he neatly turned the conversation to more immediate issues such as the quality of school food, coming holiday dates and whether I’d purchased a car yet.

  But perhaps such fancies are not so much wishes as faint psychic previsions of what will be. For the next day, the very next day, I received a brief note in my pigeon-hole via the College receptionist: ‘Crow arrives Friday next. Prepare.’

  Rupert had, within hours of putting down the phone, stumbled across a tame, slightly injured jackdaw that needed an owner.

  The bird arrived in a cat basket in the middle of the House Singing Competition and, from the moment he arrived, divided the entire College into two camps – those who adored him, and those who loathed him to the least of his sooty black feathers. The first camp consisted of the Headmaster’s family, the laundry ladies and me; the second camp was everyone else, who regarded him more as a Caliban than an Ariel.

  I called him Jack de Crow as a pun on the Headmaster’s surname, d
u Croz – though his full name was actually Jack Micawber

  The Master Summons His Familiar

  Phalacrocorax Magister Mordicorvus de Crow, a wild and marvellous name spun out of some dark, dog-Latin, cobwebby corner of my brain and which defies rational explanation. The Headmaster was, I think, suitably flattered. He did not, after all, dismiss me when his school was systematically plundered by the new arrival.

  For Jack de Crow found a wide field of play for his talents at Ellesmere. In the first week he burgled the Bursar’s bedroom and stole Mrs Bursar’s ruby earring, demolished an important set of exam papers in the office of the Director of Studies, and brought to a halt an important hockey match by sitting on the hockey ball and unpicking all the stitches before he could be shooed away. Week Two ended with the loss of a gold pen and a bunch of keys from my Housemaster’s desk, and the steady increase among the students of ‘Crow-ate-my-homework’–style excuses. And this was when he was still in less than peak condition.

  Once he had recovered, Jack strutted and swooped and thieved his way unchecked around College, taking refuge at times of crisis in the hallowed precincts of the Headmaster’s orchard garden under the protection of his kindly namesake. If I stepped outside and raised my arm and called ‘Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack!’ he would come fluttering down from some lofty chimney-pot to perch on my wrist, much to the consternation of the elderly Chaplain, who was convinced that – as if being Australian wasn’t bad enough – I was in league with the Devil. Thus did Jack live out my enchanter’s dream.

  But then, one day, he was gone. Many of my colleagues breathed a sigh of relief and stopped looking nervously over their shoulders, and even I felt that life might be easier; I had been held largely to blame for Jack’s list of crimes. But something ever so slightly magical had faded from the landscape. Time and routine and normality rose to obliterate that first dream-like year in a tangle of timetables and curricula, meetings and lesson plans, sporting fixtures, rehearsals and the slow grinding of the academic year, and the name of Jack Micawber Phalacrocorax Magister Mordicorvus de Crow faded from the memories of men.

  Until years later when I decided it was time to move on and Jack de Crow was gloriously revived.

  Five years had fled by. My feet were itchy and I felt it was time for a grand gesture and a dramatic farewell, and to have lots of people say touching things about me. Finally I hit upon it. The very thing! I decided to leave Ellesmere – not by the Inter-City 10.15 to Birmingham with a suitcase in each hand, not by a lift to the airport checking the whereabouts of my passport every three minutes, not even by hitch-hiking off between the dusty July hedgerows with a cardboard sign outstretched – but, like my dear Doctor Dolittle, by sailing away in a jolly little galleon and seeing what I bumped into on the way.

  The Dinghy and the Dreamer

  There was a merry passenger, A messenger, a mariner, Who built a gilded gondola To wander in …

  —J.R.R. TOLKIEN, Errantry

  Just over the fields from Ellesmere College lies a little mere, fringed with tall trees, dotted with ducks and coots and the odd haughty swan, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays, suddenly alive with the skim and swoop of white sails. Here on this strip among the speedwell lie thirty or forty little sailing boats – the fleet of the White-mere Sailing Club. Here are the gaudy pink and blue of plastic Toppers, constructed seemingly of Lego and Tupperware; the slim white forms of Lasers, half gull and half shark; the tiny wooden Optimists like little floating armchairs. But right at the back of this meadow strip in a corner of the fence, half smothered in thistles and golden ragwort, is the upturned hull of an ancient Mirror dinghy, lowliest and least of the College sailing fleet. Its deep curved wooden hull is a fading, peeling yellow. Its square pram nose is lost in a tangle of blackberry brambles, and out of the dark slit of the centreboard case a dozen spiders battle for supremacy with the scuttling woodlice.

  It is a sorry sight, but for all that my heart kicks with nostalgia. A Mirror is to the sailing world what a Volkswagen Beetle is to the world of motoring. Everyone, anywhere, without exception, who has ever sailed a dinghy seems to have learnt the basic skills in one of these gallant little tubs with their distinctive scarlet sails, almost invariably taught by some eccentric great-aunt wearing a big straw hat and calling out ‘Swallows and Amazons forever!’ with each tack and turn.

  People will tell you that the Mirror was first designed in the 1950s in response to a competition initiated by the Daily Mirror, but frankly I don’t believe it. No, it was clearly designed some time in the 1900s as a joint project between Arthur Ransome and Heath Robinson, with Ernest Shepard chipping in occasionally on the blueprints. Looking down at the familiar lines of this upturned dinghy lying in the hot May sunshine, I am suddenly struck by an odd notion.

  ‘Phil!’ I call out to the Master-in-Charge-of-Sailing. ‘Does this Mirror float?’

  He straightens up from some screw-tightening task on a nearby boat trailer and wades through thistles to join me. We both gaze down at the patchy hull in the hot sunshine.

  ‘Hmm. Not sure. It did once, I assume.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘1946, I think. No, no, I tell a lie. It was before the War, I reckon.’

  We turn it over, revealing a patch of sun-starved tendrils and blanched stems, a nest of five fieldmice and eight million woodlice, but, remarkably, a reasonably unscathed interior. I ponder. A good sand down. A tin of paint. A couple of coats of varnish. She might just do.

  ‘Er, Phil, could I borrow her, do you think? Just for a bit. I’m thinking I might take her on a trip when I leave College – sail away in her, even. What do you think?’

  Phil gazed out across the blue-silver waters of Whitemere, surrounded on all sides by woods and hilly fields, and stroked his beard.

  ‘Well, yes, of course. Only …’ He sounded doubtful.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, setting off from here, I don’t think you’ll get very far. No one’s discovered a Northwest Passage out yet. Twice round the mere and I think you’ll be getting bored somehow.’

  But it was decided. In six weeks’ time I would put the newly refurbished Mirror in the nearby Llangollen canal (a more promising through route than Whitemere) and see where I got to – Gloucester near the mouth of the Severn, I thought. Phil, that saintly man, even promised to drive down to wherever I reached and pick my vessel up in a trailer to return it to weedy retirement at Whitemere, leaving me to continue by balloon, elephant, in the belly of a whale or whatever else would avoid the tedium and predictability of International Air Travel.

  Meanwhile, there was much work to be done: paint and varnish and sandpaper to be purchased, the Mirror’s rigging and sails to be dug out from ancient mothballs in the sailing loft, maps consulted, oars and rowlocks obtained, and a dozen other things, all on top of the end-of-term scramble.

  Three weeks went by before I even gave the derelict dinghy another thought, by which time I found that Phil had quietly organised for the boat to be brought up to College, stripped, sanded, varnished and painted, and there she* was, looking as bright and sturdy as a toy duck in buttercup-yellow with her timbers honey-gold inside. The only thing left for me to do was to decide on a name. After three seconds’ thought, armed with a pot of gloss black, I painted in wobbly letters on her transom and both sides of the prow the proud appellation Jack de Crow.

  Just as I had arrived at Ellesmere with a daydream solidifying around me in the form of that notorious bird, so too would I depart it with Jack accompanying me – in a new guise certainly, but still, I suspected, with the same quality of waywardness that had been the original Jack’s trademark.

  Now is the right time, while I am standing over the dinghy in the warm sunshine waiting for the black paint to dry, to describe a Mirror dinghy for the benefit of those not fortunate enough to have had a nautical Swallows-and-Amazons great-aunt. I comfort myself with the thought that all the classics are unashamedly dull when it comes to describing the minutiae of nautical
travel.

  Jack de Crow is eleven feet long and four feet wide. Her nose is not pointed like most dinghies, but cut off square, giving her a sturdy, snub-nosed look. There is nothing even remotely aggressive or shark-like about a Mirror. She looks about as streamlined and racy as a toy hippo. The front three feet consist of a flat deck beneath which are two door-less lockers. This is where your aunt stows away bottles of ginger pop and pemmican sandwiches and more serious sailors store spare bits of rope or sail or shackles. It was where I was to stow all my worldly possessions: a space about the size of your average vegetable crisper.

  Three broad decks or seats run right around the cockpit, making a Mirror the most sofa-like of all small dinghies to sail, and enabling several First Mates, an Able Seaman and a Ship’s Boy to be deployed in relative comfort about the dinghy. Across the middle, however, is a sturdy thwart where a solitary oarsman will sit to row. Slotting into the gunwale on either side to hold the oars are the rowlocks, pronounced ‘rollocks,’ much to the amusement of the Third Form when attending sailing lessons. (Yes, alright, settle down, Smithers, settle down …) So much for the dinghy as a mere rowing boat. However, she is primarily a sailing vessel and as such needs a mast, rigging, a centreboard and a rudder.

  A Mirror’s mast is only ten feet tall, not nearly tall enough to take a full-sized sail, so it makes use of a gaff, a long light beam of wood with a hollow groove along its underside into which the thick leading edge of the sail is threaded. It is this gaff that is hauled aloft and when fully erect (Alright, Smithers, I’ve warned you once) projects out another six feet or so above the mast top, providing the necessary height for the sail.

  By modern design standards this is a clumsy contraption, but it was ideal for my purposes. Unlike most dinghy sailors out for a quick skim on a local reservoir, I would be encountering bridges, and it is a very rare bridge that is generous enough to allow a fully masted dinghy to sail beneath it with impunity. With the ability, however, to simply lower the gaff and dip the peak and still keep sailing onwards, I was sure that I could escape being mauled by all but the lowest and meanest of the bridge tribe.