Racundra's First Cruise

by Arthur Ransome

  I have got so accustomed to writing on board that I may not be able to put a sentence together in a room that does not rock just a little. I wonder whether you will be able to let me have a room to write in at Kemsing while I am in England.

  In any case I am enormously looking forward to coming home.

  Your affectionate son,

  His autobiography takes up the story:

  After laying Racundra up for the winter very early I went to Russia where I spent about a month. In December I went to England, and in London met my wife and a couple of lawyers to discuss arrangements for our divorce. Then I went to Barmouth where the Collingwoods and Barbara were staying. I took with me the diary-logbook which I kept while we sailed Racundra, putting down as fully as possible the happenings of every day. I told the Skald (W.G. Collingwood) that I hoped sometime to make some sort of account of sailing in the Eastern Baltic. He read it and urged me not to wait but to do it at once: “You’ve got a book there ready-made.” I needed no further encouragement, and when I got back to Riga in time for Christmas the book was well advanced.

  I finished Racundra’s First Cruise at Kaiserwald before the end of January 1923 (it was published by Unwin later in the year) and then went to Russia.

  Ransome was not completely happy with the book and he wrote to his mother on the 16th January 1923, the day he completed the final draft:

  (16th January)

  I feel that it betrays the process of learning how to write it, and that only the second half, when I have more or less caught the trick of this kind of anecdotal narrative, is really up to scratch ... I daresay there will be found some few lunatics of my own kind who will like it. And I have learnt a lot from doing it about how to deal with the next.

  (20th January)

  It has, in parts, a certain pleasantness. In parts, however, I do not much care for it and find it rather dull ... Nobody will read it, of course, but I shall he glad to have copies of it to give to one or two folk.

  Ransome and Evgenia were by now back in the Baltic. The book was published in July 1923 with a first edition print run of 1500; Ransome’s author’s copies reached him in Riga on 6th July. There was a picture of the Ancient Mariner on the dust jacket with the words: “No sailing man but will be interested in this account of autumn cruising in the Eastern Baltic. The publishers, whose ignorance of sailing is extensive, found that this misfortune or privilege in no way prevented their enjoyment of the human interest of the book and of a world in which it is not only possible, but easy, to forget that politics exist.”

  Ransome was obviously pleased with the final result and wrote to his mother on 11th July:

  Unwin has made really quite a nice book of it, and I am still full of joy over my new baby, my first non-political book since the war. I fear it will get slanged by my political enemies just the same. But that cannot be helped. Let’s hope somebody will find something nice in it. The American publisher writes enthusiastically about it, so I have hopes of the Yanks, though very little at home.

  THE WRITING OF

  RACUNDRA’S FIRST CRUISE

  We have already learnt that 30,000 words were already completed on his return from the cruise. He had planned for about 60,000 in the finished book. To achieve this he expanded the purely factual account with additional information and included several chapters of events and experiences from his previous two years sailing in the Baltic. 30 photographs were included, some of which were different from later editions. One of the photographs “Women of Runö coming out of church” was not used again. It shows the stone church that was built next door to the original, and better known, wooden one. There were also four charts included in the book, of which three had to be redrawn to reproduce properly. I believe the fourth, “Helsingfors, showing Nylands Y.C. anchorage”, is Ransome’s original. He wrote, and added as an appendix, a detailed description of the yacht. The expanded narrative of the cruise brought the length up to approximately 40,000 words. The additional, largely unrelated chapters made up the balance. He was concerned that the book would turn out to be too technical for the general reader. During the letter to his mother on the 2nd October 1922 (see above) he had already expressed his reservations in this respect.

  The additional chapters were:

  “The Building of Racundra” – a brief outline of the many problems encountered and how he came to consider the project.

  “The Crew” – Cook (Evgenia), Ancient Mariner (Carl Sehmel), and Master and Owner (Ransome).

  “Port of Reval” (Tallinn) – details of history, topography, and life in the capital of Esthonia.

  “Baltic Port Old and New” – recollections of his previous visits and the changes he found.

  “The Roogö Islands” – description of visits made to the islands the previous year.

  “The Ship and the Man” – reprint of the article published in the Manchester Guardian on 30th January 1922. The article is an expanded small portion of a substantial unpublished essay titled “On the Pirate Ship”. Whilst in Baltic Port (Paldiski North) in late July 1921 he saw a ship, about to embark, that he had previously seen laid up on the island of Roogö (Vaike Pakri). He arranged with the captain to ship as supercargo for the trip. The complete text of this essay is included below.

  “Toledo of Leith” – detailed description of a visit made the previous year.

  Ransome was happy with the finished book. He visited London in the spring of 1924 to finalise arrangements for his divorce from Ivy, his first wife, and thus leave him free to many.

  Racundra’s First Cruise is therefore an account of Arthur and Evgenia’s Baltic sailing in the third decade of the last century. In his lifetime he was never to publish another book about Racundra, although he fully intended to do so. Racundra’s second cruise was never turned into a book (he only completed some 6000 words), possibly because the trip was interrupted by work commitments and a weeklong gale in which nothing much happened.

  When the Ransomes married in 1924 they took “Racundra for a leisurely cruise in the lower reaches of the Dvina, up and down the Aa and up the Bolderaa to that fascinating, mysterious, romantic and claustrophobic maze of shallow narrow channels winding between enormously tall and strong reeds for what feels like thousands of square miles.” The full story of this trip is told in Racundra’s Third Cruise, published by Fernhurst Books in 2002.

  Arthur Ransome had at last been able to achieve his aim “to get back to my proper trade of writing” by the publication of his first really successful book, which has become a “Sailing Classic”.

  ON THE PIRATE SHIP

  A week ago, sailing by Roogo, I saw that the pirate ship which at my first coming had been lying nearly high and dry under a little islet between Great and Little Roogo had been hauled off, and was anchored in deep water. Next day I watched her sail under mainsail and staysail across the bay to Baltic Port where she was made fast between anchor and quay, close by the Kittiwake. Men were continually at the pumps, and streams of water poured from her on both sides. Balks of wood had been nailed on her from without and busy carpentry proceeded within, stopping the leaks. I rowed round her in the dinghy and learnt that her name was Venera, but she was a sorely battered Venus. Two great holes had been broken through her planking by the rocks. Her mainmast was rotting; her rigging tattered like a spiders web through which someone has thrust a careless hand. And yet, for all that, she looked more of a pirate ship than ever, a very old ship, but with fine lines at stem and stern, a ship that for all her age and battering would out run the clumsy-bowed potato coasters who lay beside her in the harbour spick and span with new paint and new rigging and freshly tarred hulls. A few days later, I heard that she was to put to sea as soon as she had been patched up, to fetch a cargo of wood from the further end of Dago. Her owner, Hinrikson, was to go with her, and I set off at once to find him and ask if I might travel as supercargo. Could I sail that night? I could sail any minute, of course, flung a few tins of meat from the Kittiwake’s stores into
a bag, took my bedding, and was ready. However, while waiting at Hinrikson’s a man came from the ship to say they could not start, as there were still repairs to do to the bowsprit, the foremast was unrigged, and the leak still considerable. I slept on a sofa at Hinrikson’s and next morning at nine o’clock, we took our dunnage to ship. Hinrikson, I should say, is the richest man of Baltic Port, who boasts that he never spends money on anything, dresses like a beggar and is proud of it and employs no one for what he can do himself. A little old man of sixty odd, he packed his things and mine on a handcart and, refusing to hire a man, he and I towed our things down to the harbour and put them on board. The ship had been hauled out of harbour and was moored by the bows to a bollard at the end of the pier. She was in a rare mess. Bits of rope, wire, planks, tools lay about all over her decks. She still leaked. Her masts had not been repaired, and her “pudding jib” was still unready. She looked more like salvaged wreck than a ship about to make a voyage, and the men about the harbour urged me not to sail in her unless I had to. However, she still had the indescribable air of a good ship, the fine lady showing through her rags, and I was more than anxious to see how she would sail. Hinrikson disappeared into the cabin and I turned to with the men to make sail. I will not describe in detail all the things that were found to be unready, the makeshifts, the general happy-go-luckiness of the start. At eleven thirty our hawser was cast loose, and we gathered way under mainsail, mizen, staysail and one jib. There was a fair wind from the north, and we tacked up out of the bay, making sail bit by bit as we went until when we went about for the last time and bore away beyond Roogo we had both topsails up and all three jibs. If she were built too late to be a pirate ship, that old schooner certainly should have been. There were many other vessels sailing west, but we did not sight a single one that we did not overhaul and pass. Said one of sailors, “When the Venera is at sea, all other ships are anchored by the stern” and indeed it seemed so. Even the cutters, which in these seas can usually outsail the schooners seemed to have run aground, or to have been held by a hand from under the sea like the ship in the story of Sadko, and scarcely moved from their places while the Venera overhauled them and left them far behind. There was very little wind, but the water foamed and spurted under her curved bows. By six o’clock we had passed the island of Odensholm, and when dusk came we were already far beyond Worms, and near the point of Takhona, the northern point of Dago. Here the wind fell altogether, and, in a dead calm, even the Venera ceased to make headway.

  In the cabin, the skipper, a man of my own age, very quiet, and, so he told me, as new to the Venera as myself, sat down with Hinrikson and myself to make a meal. The skipper had a herring. I had a small tin of bully beef. Hinrikson had a large basket, full of salt herrings, eggs, bread, butter, cold meat and other good things. Hinrikson closed his eyes, said grace, and then set to work on his provisions. He did not offer any to us. This was repeated at each meal, until my provisions were run out (I had given him half my meat and a share in my sardines, and half the apple cakes I had brought from Baltic Port). Then he twice offered me a piece of a large pike, which I had caught myself and given him the previous day. Finally however, when I had nothing left to eat at all, he gave me a piece of bread and also two eggs. But at each meal the skipper and I said no grace and ate dry bread, while Hinrikson enjoyed bread and butter. I do not recall these details in any spirit of complaint, nor will Hinrikson in the least mind the truth. While we were towing our goods on the handcart to the harbour, he, the richest man in the countryside had said to me, “Other people would employ a man. Other people would be ashamed. But I have no shame.” It is said of him that he has never given anybody anything in his life, but that his church will be the gainer by his death. He is president of the local Lutheran community and on Sunday goes to sleep in a prominent place amongst the congregation. His carefulness in small matters is part of his character, and I am sure he would not part with it. He is interested in etymology and history. After supper he gave me a lecture on the Plantagenets, informed me that Ivanhoe was the greatest work in English literature, told me that Esthonian and Japanese were kindred languages, and that “Let go” (in dropping the anchor) was not as I supposed an adoption from English but taken from the Swedish “Leggo”, from which if we used a similar term we had probably adopted it. As far as present day politics are concerned, he is against all war between Christian nations (this would allow us to punish the Bolsheviks) and regards the Versailles peace as an idiocy, quoting Esthonian proverbs to the point, such as, “Too large a bite spoils the mouth” and saying that we could have had a good peace with good will instead of this peace with mutual hate, added, “Half a good egg is better to eat than a whole one addled”.

  When it came to sleeping, he told me that he did not like sleeping in the bunks of these old ships, because of the bugs, and drove me from the place I had taken on the floor, took the mattress and went to sleep there himself. I had no mattress, but slept a fine voluminous ample sleep on an old sheepskin coat. If there were bugs, they might have eaten me to the bones and I should not have felt them nor grudged them the meal. I was waked by hearing the order to trim the sails, and tumbled out of the cabin in my breeches in time to bear a hand. A very gentle breeze was now ruffling the water from the northwest, and the Venera, which had hardly moved during the night, began to make headway. Away to leeward was a low coast with trees, the Takhona lighthouse, a little church, and the chimney of a brickfield alone breaking the monotonous line. Far ahead half below the horizon was the cape of Dagorot, below the horizon, so that the higher land looked like a series of wooded islands with shining straits of sea between them.

  With an old chart and my pocket compass which I had brought with me from the Kittiwake (for the compass of the Venera was not in working order) we made out where we were, and set a course that should bring up along the coast to a point on the eastern side of Cape Restna. As we came near we saw what seemed to be stacks of wood on the shore, and turned in directly, finding, as we ran in that there was a wooden pier, a discovery that caused great delight as we supposed we should be able to load from the pier instead of from small boats. We anchored some hundreds of yards from this pier, and Hinrikson, the skipper and I rowed ashore in the ship’s boat. The coast seemed a solid mass of pinewoods, and our hopes fell as we found that the pier had been partly destroyed, but rose when among the pines. Close to the shore we saw a fair sized sailing ship nearly finished, the raw wood of her gleaming in the threads of sunlight that fell upon her through the trees. At least there must he people here, since a ship was being built. But we could see no one about her, and, but for the ruined pier, and that golden hull in the shadows under the tall pines, the coast might have been that of an uninhabited island. There was not a sign of human life, and no land noises except the calls of a woodpecker somewhere in the forest that ran right down almost to the water’s edge. We rowed in between sunken rocks and grounded our boat on a shore of small pebbles, and after pulling her up, made for the ship among the trees. There was a rough railing round her, and we went through looking at the hull, and admiring the workmanship thereof, which was indeed very fine. A little behind her, quite invisible from a few yards away in the thick wood, we came on a tiny clearing, with a loud noise of grasshoppers, a hayfield not much bigger than a small suburban garden, a cornfield perhaps three times the size, and a log but with deep thatched roof. Still there was no sign of life. No dog barked, and no one answered when we knocked at the door. We lifted the wooden latch and walked in. The but was divided in two parts. In one were a couple of spinning wheels, one very old, black with age, and another, seemingly new, a precise copy of the first. There was a wooden bed, and a great chest, and a wooden stool or two, all made as if to last forever. A very little light came through the small windows. The second room held nothing except a stove and a big hand loom for weaving, with some grand strong cloth being made upon it, meant, I think, for the sails of the still unfinished ship. A few clean cooking things were hanging
over the stove, and fishing lines and nets were hanging on the walls. We walked out, and, leaning on the gate into the cornfield, as if he had been there all the time, an old man stood watching us. He had steel grey curly hair, and eyes of very dark blue. The skin of his face was clear walnut. He reminded me a little of the fine old head of Edward Carpenter. His clothes were all of some strong homespun cloth, probably made on the loom we had seen, and on his bare feet were shoes made, I think, of woven string with soles of thick rope. With his arrival the whole place seemed to have sprung to life. He was accompanied by three sheep, and two pigs snuffled in the ground close by. Hens also came clucking round his feet, and a dog, as impassive as his master, lay beside the gate, half opening his eyes as if he had been awaked from sleep. He told us that our wood was not there, and told us further where to land further eastward on the coast to find the cottage of the forester which was some way from the shore. I tried to buy eggs and butter from him, but he said that he had no eggs and never made more butter than he needed. We should get some from the forester, perhaps. Whether he had wife and child, I do not know. I saw no signs of them, nor of any men who could be helping him in the building of that ship which was so very much larger than his own hut. The bit of coast where he lived is called Ermuste, that is, “The Terrible”, for its rocks and the roughness of the sea there. It is a place of many wrecks. I wondered how many this aged Robinson Crusoe had watched with those dark blue eyes of his, impassively as he watched us now, indifferent as fate or as the sea itself.