by Ice! [V2. 0]
As I took my departure from the heartbroken islands of St. Kilda, I thought of this long-ago time, and with a slight wind barely moving the vessel over the swells from the west, I settled down to watch the moon set beyond the-stupendous cliffs of strange Boreray.
A whole island tipped over on its side. Cliffs fifteen hundred feet high, ghostly white under the moon, with millions of skuas and guillemots clinging to the ledges, so many that the black granite rock looked like some spirit-land rearing straight up into the clouds from the black, night-gleaming, heaving, ocean sea.
Soon the ghost-rocks had dropped astern. We were alone in the night at the edge of the world, with only the rustle of the wind on the stays and the slop-slop of the bows. The boat plunged on into the night, black silver with the moon's west-sinking, until the first flickering spider's touch of pale dawn light, low on the eastern horizon. Before I hove to, to sleep an hour, I searched below the dawn. There, a mere smudge of deeper color in all the other greys, was St. Kilda—the Islands of the Dead. I stared for a minute or so, then, hungry and sleepy, clambered below. It was my last glimpse of Britain for over three years.
Part III
Vici (I Conquered)
For my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the
Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson "Ulysses"
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Old Spanish saying.
14
A Rough Passage
With the wind in the southwest, the passage from St. Kilda to Iceland, for the first two days, was on a broad reach, the fastest and the easiest sailing. Frequently sighting the fountain-spouts of whales, the great blue whale and the sperm whale, in patches of bright sunlight as the dark shadows of wheeling clouds slid over the rough face of the ocean waters, Cresswell danced and streamed to the northwest. Often, we were accompanied by porpoises, shooting over to the boat's side at tremendous speed, jumping high into the air off the tops of the seas. They would convoy us, sometimes for hours at a stretch, sometimes flashing away with a squirm of their powerful tails, sometimes drifting alongside, flickering their bodies every now and again, seeming to make no effort, yet keeping up with us at a good five knots.
Down below, I would know when the porpoises were arriving, for their conversations, their whistling screams of joy, were plainly transmitted through a mile of water and through the hull.
Nelson's attitude to the porpoises was exactly the same as it would have been had they been children. He balanced himself against the knighthead, on the bow, and jumped around, watching their every playful move, yapping as they performed their rolls. He jumped with excitement when the mothers playfully rammed and nudged the youngsters against the bow of the boat.
On the third day out there was a radio forecast from the BBC: "Sea areas Rockall, Malin, Iceland, winds increasing to gale force, storm imminent." I was not surprised. Already, the night before, I had picked up a transmission from a trawler to a weathership keeping gallant and sacrificial watch out in the vast deeps of the ocean indicating that the weather was deteriorating seriously. Sure enough, towards dusk, at about latitude sixty north, longitude fourteen west, the sky in the west was coal black torn cumulus, while overhead stretched ragged strips of cirrocumulus, the "mackerel's tails." Away to the east, in a deep purple sky, the moon rose blood red. I hoisted my way up forward onto the heaving foredeck and handed the staysail. Then, after bringing the boat's head up into the wind, I lowered the gaff head and peak and tied two reefs in the main.
Half an hour after all was battened down, the weather slammed down on us, and soon we were in a sea of frenzy. Cresswell was still able to steer herself roughly north by northwest, so I lashed the wheel and let her go at that. All that night I was occupied in pumping out the hull, for despite the dodgers, a lot of sea was coming onboard, and I was often knee-deep in icy cold water in the cockpit.
Cresswell's cockpit, unlike those of most modern oceangoing sailing craft, was not self-draining, and no matter how much precaution I took against seas coming onboard, the cockpit, in rough weather, would always take a great amount of water in a surprisingly short time. This was because the boat was a shallow draft hull with almost flat bilges; unlike the modem deep-keel craft, there was almost no room for water taken onboard to stow itself. A ton of water coming in meant about six inches slopping around right through the boat. So it was pump, hard and often. But I had a good old Royal National Lifeboat Institution pump, a great brass monster, which could jerk out half a gallon at a stroke, and the water was soon got rid of. It was heavy work, though, and coldly wet. I was out in the cockpit, almost smothered under two jerseys, two pairs of fear naught trousers, seaboot stockings, seaboots up to my thighs, apron-type oilskin trousers, an oilskin coat, a sou'wester, and a towel around my neck, lashed to the binnacle with a heavy line tied with a bowline. But still the cold spray continually found its way inside my clothing, and I spent the whole storm, all three days in it, pumping out the hull, tending the sheets, adjusting the wheel, grabbing a bite to eat when the chance arose, which was not often, thoroughly wet and miserable.
With the boats sails reefed down and the seas growing as the wind drove them from the west, progress was much slower. When she was reefed down, Cresswell never made more than 2 1/2 knots, which is about the speed of a man walking at a moderate pace. And most of that was sideways, because she made a lot of leeway, not having a big, deep, outside keel.
These defects in her windward ability I had accepted. I intended to get into the ice, and with a deep keel that would have been almost impossible, as the keel would be crushed between the ice floes; but with a rounded hull and no outside keel the possibility was that she would be lifted upwards by the ice pressure, as you squeeze an apple pip out from between forefinger and thumb.
The action in a small vessel in a storm is a wonder to behold. Every separate part of the hull and rigging works its own way, tremendous forces pulling and pushing every three seconds or so. The strains imparted onto the masts and the running-rigging are stupendous, and unless you are absolutely familiar with every little bit and piece of the craft, unless you know the strength of each block, each wire, each halyard, you spend the time waiting for something to give. And when something gives on a sailing craft in heavy weather, with everything tensioned like a violin string, something else is going to go with it, and something else with that, and so on, ad infinitum. This anticipation of something giving way is probably the most worrisome thing of all and is probably the main reason for exhaustion. More so, even, than lack of sleep or hard physical effort. That, and the lack of food due to the inability to cook it. I reckon that many craft have been lost because of exhaustion, both mental, caused by worry, and physical, caused by neglecting to eat properly.
The answer, of course, is always to sail in the best order you possibly can, with all the hull and rigging, sails and gear well maintained, and always to have food available which can be eaten without cooking. Even bars of chocolate or corned beef. Food undeniably tastes better warm and is more comforting; but when it comes to refueling the body, all that really matters is to get the protein inside you.
The storm south of Iceland lasted for three days and nights. Wet, cold, and weary, I watched the skies clearing in the west, grabbed a handful of burgoo, dolloped some out for Nelson, then turned in, with the boat handling herself in a diminishing wind, still under reefed sails.
When I woke it was close to noon, so I hove the boat to and snatched a sextant sight of the sun. We had moved only seventy miles in three days, on a course almost due north! But as the wind dropped to a moderately stiff breeze of about twenty knots, it backed around to the south. I prepared to shake out the reefs and get her once more on a broad reach, this t
ime heading west-north-west, so as to keep plenty of sea room between me and the south coast of Iceland, which, at this time, was about three hundred miles to the north.
I climbed up to the foot of the main mast and let go of the peak halyard; then, holding that under one foot, I prepared to let go of the throat halyard. Suddenly there was a loud crack aloft. I jerked my head up to see what was happening—then everything went black.
The first thing I saw when I tried to open my eyes was blood all over the side-deck and the doghouse side. My head was throbbing and every movement increased the pain. Then I realized, with a shock, that I could only see through one eye! The other was blackly blank, and blood was dripping down my oilskins. For the first and only time in my life at sea I was violently sick. Nelson, covered in blood and spew, was still holding onto the bottom of my pants leg, and I could see where his teeth had bitten in so hard that the tough oilskin material was chewed away. He had saved my life by stopping me from sliding over the side.
Slowly, sitting there on the pitching deck with the green seas still breaking in great waves over and against the sides of the boat as she rocked and rolled and pitched and tossed, I came to, grabbing at the handrail, and looked around me.
Through my good eye I saw that the throat-block grommet, the heavy wire cable-strap slung around the mast above and resting on the hounds-bands (heavy blocks of hard timber bolted through the mast), had snapped as I had eased the throat halyard to raise the mainsail. The continual wear and tear, the everlasting rubbing and chafing had worn through the seizing around the throat-block strop and had finally worn away several strands of the wire, making it so weak that it gave way. The peak halyard block, also held on the same strop until then, had exploded loose, and the twelve-foot-long spar, with its heavy iron head band on the outer extremity, had crashed down and walloped me right over my right eye. I gingerly touched my forehead and eye socket. My eye was out on my cheek! There was a great round thing sitting just below the eyebrow!
Horrified, I took hold of it and, opening my eyelid with the other hand, shoved it back in. The salt of my hands stung my eye socket. For the first time in years I wanted to cry. Nelson was still hanging on to my trouser leg, whining, looking up at me pitifully with his one eye.
Slowly I made my way down to the cabin, where there was a small mirror set into the doghouse side. What I saw was a bloody mess. My right eyebrow was split wide open, with an half-inch bloody gap, now beginning to coagulate, while the eyelids were swelling. I forced the lids open and saw that the eye was blood red. I tried to move it and to my immense relief it moved; through the damaged eye I could see a glimmer of daylight. I hadn't lost the sight!
The first-aid gear was kept up forward, with the sail repair kit, and I made my way along the pitching cabin, grabbing the table as I struggled forward, and snatched up both kits, the first aid in its metal box, the sail kit in its blue bag. Back in the companionway, I fumbled around for a match to light the stove and heat up some water. In this I boiled the smallest needle I had onboard and the smallest fishing line, a nylon wisp of baitline, used for catching sprats. Then, with my seaman's knife, always kept razor sharp, I opened the wound up, squeezed the two sides together and put three great big stitches right across it, and tied a round turn and two half-hitches in the end of the nylon line. In the process I was sick three times, until my stomach could cough up no more.
Still covered in blood and regurgitated burgoo, I sat down and, shaking, made cocoa while Nelson stretched out on the opposite berth and looked at me as if to say, "You silly bugger, what did you do that for?"
After turning out the stove, with the boat still wallowing violently, I turned in to steady myself. I rose an hour later, head still throbbing, and spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the blood and spewed food.
Next morning, I hauled myself up the mainmast carefully, by the topping lift, seized the strop around the mast (a hard, cold, windy job), secured the blocks, slid down again to the deck, hoisted the mainsail; and we were off again. All in all, this took ten hours in a sloppy, jerking sea, with waves as high as eight feet, suspended atop a wildly waving mast, blind in one eye.
The weather for the remainder of the voyage to Reykjavik was fairly steady, winds of around twenty to twenty-five knots, and on the tenth day out of St. Kilda, I sighted through my one good eye, Reykjanesta, the southwest corner of Iceland, through a misty haze of low clouds sweeping across the Skagi. I left plenty of sea room between Cresswell and the long, rocky, dangerous shore of the Reykjanes peninsula, then hove to for the night, ready to sail into port the following day. It was only thirty-five miles away, on the southeast side of the Faxafloi, so there was no hurry. There was no point in entering at night. In this moderate weather the bay would be alive with fishing craft.
I bandaged my head up; fortunately, my eye no longer hurt very much. Apart from bloodstains on deck and a few dents and scratches where the gaff boom had clattered down, the boat was in good order. However, there was sea water in the fuel tank, so the engine was out of commission. I did not feel like siphoning out the tank, a messy job, even in port, and a nauseating job at sea, as I would wind up swallowing about a pint of diesel oil. I left that job until arrival, as the weather forecasts indicated a good breeze on the morrow, which would blow me right into harbor.
The sun rose at around four in the morning; I hoisted sail after breakfast and made my way into the wide Faxafloi, past the port of Keflavfk, busy with fishing craft, and so into the harbor of Reykjavik.
With the yellow-jack pratique flag flying from the main mast, I waited for the customs to come onboard.
"Hello, Englishman!"
"Good afternoon."
"Where you come from?"
"Scotland, Barra."
"Good trip?"
"Fair."
"What happen your head?" The customs man, a jolly looking fellow around fifty-five, with a red face, pointed at my blood-soaked bandages.
"Oh, I always dress like this."
He laughed. "What happen?"
I told him.
"You go up the hospital; free for seamen. See Dr. Jorgensson; he put you right. Then you come to my house, we have some schnapps, yes?" He punched my shoulder playfully.
"Right, mate, you're on!" I would have grinned, but cracking my face hurt too much.
At the seamen's hospital, Dr. Jorgensson said I had made as good a job of the eye repair as he could have done. But I think he was merely trying to cheer me up. It left a wide scar, which reminds me, to this day, to always keep an eye on the blocks.
"Now take it easy here, rest for a week," he said. "And mind you, no strong drink."
"Right you are, sir."
I made my way up to the house of Alpi, the customs officer, where supper, cooked by his beautiful, merry, Rubenesque wife, was waiting, with a portion for Nelson. Then Alpi and I got stinking drunk and finished up flaked out over the floor of the living room in the warm, wooden house on the side of the hill overlooking the bay where Floki had sailed with his sacrificial ravens so long ago.
The schnapps did more for my eye than anything else I could think of, and in a few days I could see as well out of it as before, except perhaps when I looked aloft at the rigging strops. Then I could see a hundred times better.
By now, in mid-June, the days were much longer, and sunset was not until about ten-thirty at night, so I determined to make sail again from Reykjavik, now that my eye was good, and head for Greenland, where I would make the first attempt to reach latitude eighty north. It was already too late to try for Svalbard, unless I was going to winter there. It would be better to sally up the Greenland coast this year, and, if conditions there were too hard for wintering, try to get back to Iceland. Here, I could winter on the north coast and prepare the boat for the voyage into the deep Arctic early in the spring of 1960. The idea was to get to the edge of the pack ice as early in the summer as possible, so as to be able to shoot the sun right through the twenty-four-hour day, and then, with
a northerly running current shifting the ice and the boat, to try to drift north over the winter, as far north as possible—I hoped to beat Nansen's record of eighty-four north—then emerge from the ice in the spring of '61.
I would need the boat in good order and a minimum of two years' food and stores. Iceland was the place to get ready to tackle the Arctic!
I'm a sailor lad in a fishin' boat,
Learnin' all about seafarin',
An' me education, scraps of navigation,
As we hunt the bonny shoals of herrin'.
Old fisherman's song about the Icelandic grounds. It originates in
Yarmouth, England.
15
Around Iceland Single-Handed
One evening while we were sitting in Alpi's living room eating liverwurst and jam sandwiches, Mrs. Alpi asked me, "What will you do now, Tristan?"
"Well, love, my eye's a lot better, but it's still a bit early to head up for the Scoresby Sund in Greenland. There'll be far too much pack ice and bergs yet to make the Sund safely. What I would like to do, while I'm waiting around, is have a go at sailing right around the island."
"What island?" she asked.
"Iceland," I replied.
Alpi perked up. "Alone?" he asked, over the sound of Grieg from the record player.
"I'll take Nelson, of course, he's very handy. Keeps a good watch when I heave to, and he's great in a fog."
"My God, but don't you know the distance involved? It's over one thousand miles straight sailing. If you get contrary winds, it will be more like two thousand."
