Racundra's First Cruise

by Arthur Ransome

  “It’s the Aransgrund light-vessel sure enough,” I had said, inspiriting myself, and added, by way of giving the crew and passenger some confidence in my knowledge to replace that which they had lost owing to the unfortunate reappearance of the Revalstein: “She will show two red lights, one from each masthead.” I had just got this information from the Baltic Pilot.

  Dusk fell. We were all on deck, looking for those red lights. And then the vessel showed no red light of any kind, but a white light that vanished and reappeared, one of those called ‘occulting’ on the charts and in the light lists.

  “It isn’t the Aransgrund, after all,” said the passenger, but the Ancient supported me out of esprit de corps, and I, for our very honour, held to it that it was, in spite of the visible fact that it showed a white light instead of two red ones. I plunged down below and looked it up once more in the Baltic Pilot. “Two red lights.” I searched the German chart. Red. The English chart that I had bought in the spring. Red again. And then, just as a sort of last hope that was really no hope at all, I looked at the only other chart I had, which was a small sketch of the minefields attached to a little book of Notices to Mariners given to me by Captain Whalley of the Baltabor. This little sketch chart in general showed no details, but one detail that it did show fairly glowed before my eyes. “Aransgrund Lt. V. White occ.” The lights had been changed. It was the Aransgrund light-vessel after all, and I returned on deck with the book in my hand, my authority as navigator triply reinforced by the printed word of the British Board of Trade. It was a proud moment, but I had no time to enjoy it, for with the dark which fell suddenly upon us came a great wind out of the east, and Racundra, who had moved all day upon an even keel, was suddenly getting as much as she wanted. We could not fetch the light-vessel with that tack, so we stood on beyond it, then went about again, and fairly surged towards that white occulting light, which had become as it were a personal possession.

  I suppose it was near eleven o’clock when the question of the colour of Aransgrund’s eye was finally settled. At midnight we were within a cable’s length of it, rushing through the dark without sidelights, dependent, as usual, upon the riding light which I carried in the well. I had hoped to go into Helsingfors by daylight, for I did not know the channel, and, more important, not only did not know the way to the Nylands Yacht Club, but did not know where to look for it, having been told vaguely that it was on an island. There are several hundred islands about, and the Club is not marked in German, English or Finnish charts. I therefore decided to take a pilot, and, having no flares, waved the riding light. For a long time there was no reply, when, thinking that perhaps he took our riding light for the ordinary white light carried on the open fishing-boats, we hooted at him with the fog-horn. This may have been extremely incorrect, but it had an instantaneous result. Figures moved on the lightvessel’s decks. We heard shouts, and presently someone began swinging a lantern round in circles. They had understood, and all we had to do was to keep Racundra near the light-vessel while they launched a boat and put the pilot on board. This was not so easy as it might seem. Remembering the experience of Baltic Port, we had feared to take sail off her in spite of the wind, and, hove to, she was knocked about considerably, and drifted too near the vessel or else slipped off into the outer darkness. All this was probably due to our lack of knowledge of her. On later occasions I had her hove to under full canvas in the most decorous and ladylike manner. Anyhow, there was one horrid moment when we thought we were coming into violent contact with the light-vessel, the great bulk of which was heaving up and down in a most portentous manner right above us. The business of getting their boat out seemed very long, and we learnt afterwards that the pilot had been in his bunk and had to get up and dress.

  “Who are you?” they shouted at us.

  “English yacht,” we yelled back, and after that, perhaps because the Fleet was expected next day and might avenge us, they did at last seem to get busy. There was the splash of a boat in the water, a bobbing lantern appearing and disappearing in the waves, a bump, and a large Finnish pilot tumbled on board with: “Where do you want to go?.. Nylands Club? .. Right. Keep Grohara light so. Now, Captain ..” And with that, as pilots do, he expressed hunger and thirst.

  NYLANDS YACHT CLUB, HELINGFORS.

  NYLANDS YACHT CLUB, HELINGFORS TODAY.

  I fed him and poured Riga vodka into him, while he asked me, “Did we not see you just as night fell, close by a three-masted schooner?”

  “You did.”

  He laughed. “Do you know, we reported you by wireless to Helsingfors as a likely smuggler and told them to look out for you! Yours was the very last boat we thought would need a pilot.”

  I suspect that the reason why they had been so long in answering our signals from the lightship was that they supposed that, being smugglers, we were playing some new trick on them. The Esthonian smugglers, of whom there are many, make it their sport to tease the Finnish coastguards. I had heard much about it on the other side of the Gulf, where the smugglers are, as in old times in England, the heroes of the longshore population. One man in particular makes it his boast that he gets his cargo into Finland by a different method every time, and each time takes care to let the coastguards know the way they have been tricked. On one occasion he arrived at evening with a cargo of spirits covered with a thin layer of potatoes, and the Finns sealed up the hold of his vessel for examination in the morning. During the night he broke the seals, took out the spirit and disposed of it, and then woke the Customs officers while it was still dark and in a great state of perturbation asked them what he was to do, as in clearing up the deck he had accidentally broken their seals. “Fined two hundred marks for breaking the official seals.” He paid the fine. Then, when he left, he sent a small keg of spirits to the Customs officers, with a note expressing his gratitude for having been allowed for so small a sum to bring in such and such a quantity of spirit. After many such exploits he was actually caught and imprisoned, and it was announced in the newspaper that he had been captured with fifteen hundred litres of spirit. He wrote indignantly to the editor to say that he had been captured with three thousand litres of spirit, not fifteen hundred, and wanted to know what had become of the rest. The Censor, he complained, did not allow his letter to be published.

  When the pilot had finished his meat and drink we went on deck again, where Wirgo, recovered from his illness, was steering. I had left the matches on the cabin table and went down again to get them. Responsibility gone, the pilot in charge, and Racundra already safely across, I thought I would lie down for a moment. Out of the last thirty-two hours I had been twenty-eight in the steering-well. I lay down, just as I was, the box of matches in my hand; and three hours later, matches still in hand, rushed on deck in a panic, to find lights all about us, smooth water, the Ancient forward ranging the anchor chain, Racundra already brought to the wind and losing way, and the pilot on the point of saying “Let go”. The chain rattled out. The pilot went below with me to drink more vodka and collect his fee. I paid the money and uncorked bottles half-asleep and wholly angry. Twenty-eight hours of steering in calm and fog, and then to sleep like a log during this last three hours of good sailing weather, just when I had meant to use the pilot in order to learn for myself how not to need him again!

  HELSINGFORS: SWINGING THE SHIP

  NEXT morning I came on deck to find Racundra in the delightful anchorage of the Nylands Yacht Club. The Club House is itself on an island, and with other islands of pink and grey rock and a cliff on the mainland close above the water, gives perfect shelter to the little fleet that lie to mooring-buoys in this southern corner of Helsingfors harbour. The harbour proper lay before us, with white steamships along the quays, on which were the low Customs houses, the booths of a busy market, blue trams slipping swiftly by – a lively, comfortable scene – while over all were the great domed church and the cathedral spires that I have often admired from the sea when in ships bigger but not better than Racundra. Wirgo and I w
ent ashore in the dinghy, he to hurry back to Reval by steamship and I to look for the friends who, after waiting for us last night in the Club House, had supposed that the fog had kept us on the other side of the Gulf.

  In comparison with Riga and Reval, Helsingfors seemed not to have suffered from the war. The shops were full of all the things which for the last few years most Baltic towns have had to do without. With its clean white steamers and blue trams, it seemed more Swedish than Finnish. Finland, real Finland, is to be found in the country, not in the capital; and walking through the streets of this modem Western town, with its restaurants and taxi-cabs, I kept thinking of the simple country life I had tasted in Finland years ago. Near Hittola, by Lake Ladoga, paddling with a friend in a canoe-shaped boat, I remember finding a little ancient steam-yacht lying covered in on the reedy bank of a river. I was told that in its day it had made a voyage to Edinburgh and back. It was dropping into decay, that aged little steamer; those who had sailed in it were dead; the elk snuffed round it in the winter snow and wandered north to tell the reindeer, who perhaps, on the shores of the Arctic, had seen similar strange things. Looking north from that place to the Pole was nothing but wild country, lake, marshes, ragged forest and ice-infested seas. The little steam-yacht did not seem more foreign to it than this trim stone-built capital.

  So far as Racundra was concerned, I wasted all that day in friendship. But early next morning there was a coughing and spluttering and spitting alongside, and I tumbled out to find that by that friendship Racundra was to profit after all. Commander Boyce had brought his little motor-boat, Zingla, to take me for a run round the harbour to show me the way through the buoys and out into the fairway, which I had missed by falling asleep as we were coming in. We ran out one way and ran in another through well-marked channels between the uncompromising rocks. The Finnish coast is not a coast on which to make mistakes, and I was glad I had not attempted the foolishness of trying to find the Club for the first time in the dark. Once you know where it is, however, it is easy enough. There are short cuts for small boats, but any yacht coming in here for the first time can do so safely by following the sailing directions for big ships until she is well into the southern harbour. Once there, she has but to follow the quay round into the southern corner of that harbour and, if she cannot find a spare buoy, drop anchor until morning.

  After introducing me to a score or so of spar-buoys, eloquent in the language of up-turned and down-turned brooms, Boyce brought the Zingla back to Racundra, and the Ancient, for the first time – indeed, for the only time on the whole cruise, except for getting water – made up his mind to come ashore. He wanted a special size of sailmaker’s needles, besides some scrubbing brushes and mops which he did not trust me to buy. He was not in the least interested in the town. “Towns,” said he, “are all one and all dirt.” This was a manifest libel on the spotless Helsingfors, but the Ancient had been a little embittered by the thick fringe of black grease which our waterline had acquired while lying in the harbour of Reval.

  We spent an exciting and expensive morning. We bought new brass rowlocks for the dinghy which the builder had disfigured with coarse, badly galvanized iron rubbish which chafed the oars and did not fit. We bought rope fenders. We bought every block we could find that would fit our ropes, and regretted that we had not tried to buy them the day before, for we could only find half a dozen and could not wait while the shops sent to Äbö for more. We bought mops, woolly and stiff. We bought needles, shackles, hooks for the staysail, hooks for a hoisting strop for the dinghy, a vast hook with a strong spring clip for picking up a mooring-buoy, a tin of colza oil for the binnacles, brass clips for the main and mizen peak halyards, besides bread, butter, cheese, apples, Swedish oatcake, tobacco, stocking-caps, and a Finnish sheath-knife, a gorgeous piratical thing with a horse’s head for a hilt, a handle inlaid with red and blue and yellow, and a curved sheath of black and scarlet leather. Finally, with full pockets and empty purses, both of us laden like pack animals, we staggered back to the quay, signalled to the Club boatman and were put on board our ship.

  Then I went ashore again to inquire about a compass-adjuster, for I had seen a steamship being slowly shifted round and round a big wooden dolphin close astern of us. I had seen the white painted marks on the cliff and on buildings, so that I had no doubt as to what was being done. I was anxious to get our own compass corrected and a table of deviations drawn up, so that the homeward voyage might be made with a smaller proportion of guesswork. The Ancient, as always, was for starting at once.

  “The compass is right enough,” said he. “You found the way here with it and you’ll find the way back.”

  I showed him the list I had made of observed inexactitudes, some of them as much as two and a half points (for the compass was immediately over the motor), but he was unconvinced, and I left him hauling up the sails, “to dry”, as he said, but really, as I well knew, in hopes that, seeing them up, I should myself be persuaded that Helsingfors had done enough for us and that we might put to sea. When I came back from the harbour office he had already fixed the hook and strop on the fore-halyard and was prepared to haul the dinghy on board. He said nothing, but could not hide his disappointment when I told him that at eight o’clock next morning we were to be tied up to the dolphin and ready for the compass-adjuster who was to swing the ship.

  I spent that evening in the Nylands Club. The Finnish six-metre boat, Stella, was there, back from racing at Cowes, and looking at her slim body, built for speed and nothing else, and then over the water to the stout, imperturbable Racundra, I thought how differently men take their pleasures on the sea. I would not have her as a gift, and I am sure that Mr. Donner, her owner, would turn in disgust from my comfortable cruiser. After dinner I went into the Club library and found there a really wonderful collection of sailing-books from all the countries of the world. I read over again that excellent little book by Thomas Fleming Day, the American; and then, for the first time, settled down to read McMullen. Few books on sailing fail to quote McMullen, but his own book is rare, and I was glad enough to read, out here, on a Finnish island, the story of Orion’s return from France and of McMullen’s enviable death, sitting in the cockpit of Perseus, the tiller under his arm, in mid-channel on a star-lit night. I observed that McMullen, even in our temperate climate, laid up his ships early in September, and, looking at the calendar, remembered that we were far from home. It was after midnight before I put the book back on its shelf and, dropping over the pierhead into the dinghy, threaded my way in the dark through the little fleet to Racundra’s gleaming portholes, for the Ancient, long asleep, had thoughtfully lit the cabin lamp.

  I remember, in reading the logs of other people, experienced mariners, my disgust and annoyance when in a single sentence they dismissed the swinging of their ships. “Swung ship and drew up table of deviations.” That is the professional manner of recording the event, and, if you are not such as they, you are left wondering how they did it. At least, that was so with me. I was left wondering and was ashamed to ask. But the business of ship-swinging is an interesting one, and whereas experienced mariners may skip the next few paragraphs, I am sure there must be inexperienced mariners, and even people who are not mariners at all, who will be glad to know how the thing is done and, in place of the cabalistic words “swung the ship”, to have an actual picture of the ship being swung, or rather being lugged by main force round a wooden dolphin until she headed in turn on each one of the thirty-two points of the compass.

  There was a hard N.E. wind blowing in the morning, and letting ourselves swing by a long line from the mooring-buoy to which we had made fast, we paid out line slowly as we worked stern first towards the dolphin, the anchor hanging deep in the water ready to hold us up. When near the dolphin, we loosed the buoy and held with the anchor while I got into the dinghy and took a warp across to the dolphin. Then we hauled up the anchor, and, shortening the warp, were swinging close by the dolphin while waiting for the arrival of the stout, red-
faced, English-speaking Finn who spent every day of his life in the swinging of big ships.

  The dolphin is a stout wooden erection, built of piles and so fixed in the bottom of the sea. Above water it is shaped like an inverted cone, on the top of which is a smaller cone with the narrower end uppermost. The lower cone, being bigger than the upper, forms a platform on which a man can walk. Round the upper cone is an iron belt working in a groove. At opposite sides of this belt are rings, and from these rings warps are taken to the bow and stern of the ship. The ship presses against the lower cone and, in whatever direction it may point, is kept in position by the warps to the revolving ring. A steamship is swung by simply steaming round the dolphin and in contact with it, stopping for a moment at each compass point.

  “RACUNDRA” AT HELINGFORS (AFTER SWINGING THE SHIP).