Racundra's First Cruise

by Arthur Ransome

  The inhabitants of Lillaby are very timorous of strangers. Besides the three fishermen, we could not get speech of a soul, though we saw several peeping at us through cottage windows as we passed on through a seemingly deserted village. We wanted water, and saw a girl in an orchard by a pump, so the Cook went in there to ask leave to draw some for herself, but the girl rose and fled silent into the cottage, and the Cook filled her can at the pump and came away. Afterwards we saw the girl’s head, looking after us round the corner of the wall.

  We did, however, have one other interview, but that was with a pig. We had come on the nearest thing to a street to be found on the island – low stone walls, with a mud lane between them, and barns and painted cottages on either side. I wanted to photograph it, but wanted something in the foreground, and since there were no inhabitants, and I remembered that rather hostile pig I had met on my first landing, said aloud, “If only there were a pig.” At that moment we turned the corner of a barn, and there in the very middle of the lane lay a pig indeed. It was such a pig as that described in a novel of the Goncourts’, which slept a sleep that could only be due to a heart of gold and a stomach of iron. It lay on the edge of a shadow, in the muddiest bit of road, its forepaws idly crossed, like the hands of a gentlewoman resting from her knitting. She (for it was a feminine pig) raised her head and grunted at us. The ice was broken. I approached her with affectionate words, camera in hand, begging her to move a yard, no more, into the sunshine. She understood me perfectly, moved into the sunshine, and took up one pose after another which she judged characteristic of her temperament. I asked her to snuffle in the mud and she snuffled in the mud. I took off my hat to the pig and thanked her, and she, after showing that she was not to be outdone by her owners in kindness to those who could talk Swedish to the inhabitants of Roogö (for I feel sure that if it had not been for Leslie’s conversational successes she would have treated me in the manner of her brother of Storaby), returned sedately to her place, judged the lengthening shadows, chose the dampest spot that had recently been warmed by the sun, and resumed her calm and contemplative attitude of benevolent repose. Unfortunately every one of the photographs was a failure.

  We met no one else on the island and came out from the village on wide open grassland, and over that to the woods, where we gathered lilies of the valley, made fire on a stone, and tea, which we drank squatting on our heels, which squelched beneath us in the marsh, while a woodpecker shrieked and jeered in the birch-trees overhead. Then, as evening fell, we hurried back to Kittiwake, made sail again, and returned to our anchorage in Baltic Port.

  THE SHIP AND THE MAN

  SAILING from Baltic Port, one of a crew of four in another man’s ship, I came to the far end of the Dagorort Peninsula, and there had an experience which I cannot refrain from putting in this book, so full it was of the romance of those rarely visited waters.

  * * * * *

  We had anchored half a mile from the shore off the place that is called Ermuiste, which means “the terrible”, for it is a place of many wrecks, a rocky point open to the widest sweep of the winds across the Baltic Sea. We had not dared to go nearer, and I was glad we had not, for, as I rowed ashore in the little boat, I passed many rocks awash and saw others a foot or two under water. There were dark purple clouds rising over the sea to the N.W., wind was coming, and we were impatient to be off again, to find shelter, or at least to put some miles of sea between us and that notorious coast. But there was still sunlight on the rocky shore and on the dark pinewoods that ran down almost to the water’s edge and on the little wooden pierhead, unmarked on the chart, which, seen through binoculars, had tempted us to run in and look for information and supplies. Beyond the pierhead was a little stretch of beach where I meant to land. But, looking over my shoulder as I pulled in, bobbing over the waves in my little boat, I could see none of the things that a pierhead usually promises. There was no watchman’s but on the pier, no smoke above the trees, no cottages, no loafers, no fishermen, no sign of any kind of life. And then, coming nearer, I saw that the pier was in ruins. Much of its planking had gone, great beams were leaning perilously over from it, and here and there masses of it had actually fallen into the water. I wished to waste no time, and was on the point of turning and pulling back to the ship, when I saw something else more promising than the pier. Just within the forest that stretched down to the beach, almost hidden by the tall pines, was the great golden body of an unfinished ship. Where a ship was building, there, surely, must be men, and I rowed in confidently past the ruined pier, slipped off my shoes, rolled up my trousers and, jumping overboard, pulled the little boat through shallow water and up on a narrow strip of small pebbles.

  Then, walking up into the shadow of the trees, I came to the ship, the upper part of which, far above my head, was glowing in the splashes of sunshine that came through the tops of the pines which brushed the sides of the ship as they waved in the gathering wind. There was not a man to be seen, or a but for men, nor was there sound of hammers or any of the usual accompaniments of shipbuilding. But for the ruined pier and that golden hull in the shadows among those tall trees, the coast might have been that of an undiscovered island. And then I began to notice one or two things about the ship herself which seemed a little odd. She was a very large ship to be building on that bit of coast, where there is no real harbour and the most ambitious launches are those of the twenty-foot fishing-boats which a man builds during the winter to earn his living in the summer months. She seemed even larger than she was, as ships do on land, shut in there among the trees that pressed about her as if they had grown up round her. And her lines were not those of a new ship. There was something a little old-fashioned about them, as though she were an unfinished masterpiece of an older period. A few schooners of her type survive today among those “laibas” that carry timber and potatoes round the Esthonian coast, and they outsail those modern ships in which an obstreperous motor, tucked away in the stern, makes up for the want of the love and thought that went into the lines of the older vessels. And then I saw that I was wrong in thinking that she had been newly planked. The upper planking was new, certainly, ruddy gold where the sun caught it, but lower down her hull was weathered. Only the topmost planks had been freshly put on, and as the eye descended from them it passed imperceptibly from a new to an old piece of shipbuilding. The keel, laid on great stones, was joined to them by moss. There was lichen upon it, and on the foot of the stern-post was a large, bright cluster of scarlet toadstools.

  SHIPS THAT PASS...

  Just then I found a narrow, lightly worn track running from the ship farther into the forest. I walked along it, and only a few score yards away, but quite invisible from the shore, I came out of the silence and the trees into a small clearing and a loud noise of grasshoppers. There was a tiny hayfield, not bigger than a small suburban garden, a cornfield, perhaps three times the size, and an old log cabin with a deep thatched roof, an outhouse or two, a dovecot and pigeons fluttering about it.

  The pigeons fluttered and murmured, but no dog barked and no one answered when I knocked at the low door of the hut. I knocked again, and then, doubtfully, tried the wooden latch, opened it and walked in. A very little light came through the small windows, heavily overhung by the deep thatch. The but was divided into two rooms. In the first were a couple of spinning-wheels, one very old, black with age, the other quite new, a precise copy of it, the two contrasting like the upper planking and the keel of that still unfinished ship. There was also a narrow wooden bed, a great oak chest and a wooden stool, all made as if to last for ever. A few very clean cooking-things were on the stove, and fishing-lines and nets were hanging from wooden pegs on the walls. The second room held no furniture but a bench and a big handloom for weaving. There was some grand strong canvas being made upon it, and, as I looked at it, I guessed suddenly that here were being made the sails for the ship.

  Without knowing why, I hurried out of the cabin into the sunshine. Leaning on the gate into the corn
field, as if he had been there all the time, an old man stood watching me. He had steel-grey curly hair and very dark blue eyes. The skin of his face was clear walnut. He might have been any age from fifty to a hundred. His clothes were of some strong homespun cloth, probably made on the loom where he was making the sails. The shoes on his bare brown feet were 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. A dog, impassive as its master, lay beside the gate, half opening his eyes, as if he had been waked from sleep.

  Somehow I could make no apology for having gone into his cottage. I asked him where to land eastwards along the coast and for the nearest anchorage sheltered from the north-west. He told me what I wanted gravely, and with a curious air of taking his words one by one out of a lumber-room and dusting them before use. I tried to get eggs and butter from him, but he said he had no eggs and never made more butter than he needed. I should get some from the forester at Palli or at Luidja, near the anchorage. I asked him about the pier. Once upon a time there had been people here and timber traffic?

  “Yes, but that was a long time ago, and the people have all gone away.”

  “Was it then that you began building the ship?”

  “Yes; that was when I began building the ship.”

  His dark-blue eyes, watching me, but indifferent as the sea itself, invited no more questions. I turned back by the path under the great ship so many times larger than his cottage, and found myself oddly hurried as I pushed our little boat into the water and rowed away. I could just catch the sunlight splashes on the body of the ship among the trees. Would she ever be finished? And what then? What had he planned as he worked at her year after year? Would he die before his dream came true, or before he knew that the dreaming was the better part of it?

  But the sunlight faded and the wind had freshened, and for a time I thought no more about him, for we had enough to do with our own ship.

  BALTIC PORT TO SPITHAMN

  SEPTEMBER 7th. Barometer 30.25. Wind at dawn S.W., slight. We sailed at 7 a.m. without incident, except that in pushing our way out along the eastern quay the sharp point of our long boathook (a Dvina lumberman’s pole with a really sharp spike on the end, used for handling floating logs) stuck fast in the wooden piles and the pole remained quivering there, like the Trojan’s spear in the wooden sides of that barrack of a horse, until it was extracted by a good fellow who climbed down for it and brought it round to the narrow harbour mouth and gave it back to us as we rounded the pierhead. We then had a fair wind out of the bight into which we had so laboriously tacked the night before last. It was a fair wind, but a very light one. It shifted to the S., and at 8.20 we were at the mouth of the bay on a line between the point of East Roogö and Pakerort.

  We bore up to pass as near as might be West Roogö Point, where the English charts are right in marking “a conspicuous tree”. The tree is a very little one, but it is the only one on that desolate promontory; no, not quite the only one, for, as we came nearer, we saw that its successor was already being prepared. A little tree, exactly like the first, is growing close to it, so that when the old one dies or is blown away, another shall be conspicuous in its stead. The tree is dead; long live the tree! – and the charts shall need no correction. Would that similar precautions had been taken in other places!

  It was a glorious morning of brilliant sunshine, but the wind grew less and less, and what there was shifting against us. At 9.45 we were off West Roogö spar-buoy, close by the wind and heading W.S.W. and ½ W. At eleven we were still between West Roogö and Grasgrand, but were now on the starboard tack and heading SW. and ½ W., the wind having shifted northerly. The rock of Grasgrund, which had been visible on our way eastwards, was now not alone, and a considerable island had appeared above water. A fishing-boat had tied up to this amphibious place and a couple of lads were sunning themselves on ground far out at sea which is almost always a foot or two under water. Far inshore, behind Roogö Island, we sighted a cutter which had probably spent the night by the little village of Wichterpal, now slowly working westwards like ourselves. We held her all day.

  At noon the wind increased a little, coming from W.N.W. We set the mizen staysail and tried to pretend to ourselves that we were moving quite fast. We were able to keep more or less on our course, and, as the afternoon wore on, Odensholm from being a row of spots on the horizon became a visible definite island, with a lighthouse at one end and a cutter’s mast at the other, near by a shed or two.

  The barometer, however, was falling. We were bound for the Worms Nukke Channel, which is not lit, and we had no longer the smallest chance of getting there by daylight. Once round the point of Spithamn we should have a long way to go for shelter. Looking S. towards the land we saw that the cutter which had sailed abeam of us from the Roogö islands was far inshore, clearly making for the hither side of Spithamn, where a schooner was already at anchor. We made up our minds to trust to “local knowledge” and do the same. We altered our course, and having the wind free, stood straight in for the two ships, encouraged by seeing the cutter round up close by the schooner and lower her sails just as we put the helm up. We sailed in close by the rocky side of Spithamn and saw the six windmills (five according to the charts, but really six) on the little hill. Boats, loaded gunwale-deep in firewood, were coming off shore to the schooner, just as I had seen last year off the northern coast of Dagö, where also is no harbour. The schooners anchor off shore. The wood is carried into the water on little carts, then packed into boats, leaving just room for a couple of boys, who on reaching the ship throw the wood up log by log to the captain, his wife, his men and his children, who stow it in the hold. If the wind blows on shore, loading is interrupted and the schooners put to sea, returning when a change of wind brings smooth water.

  As we slipped along towards them, the captain of the cutter gave us the use of his local knowledge in the nick of time by waving us eastward of a shallow patch which, in the failing light, we had not observed immediately on our bows. We were using the lead, but had no warning of it until the captain’s hail and wave, instantly obeyed, saved us by a few yards. When we had cleared the shoal he waved again, and five minutes afterwards we were at anchor beside the others. We were three – the firewood-loading schooner, big and quite new, the elderly cutter, about twice our own size, and the little Racundra, shielded from the W. by Spithamn Point (Spint Head on English charts), more or less shielded from the E. by the distant islands of Roogö, but open to the N. and N.W., with nothing but the little island of Odensholm between us and the coast of Sweden, near two hundred miles away. Not a very good anchorage, but, as I reasoned, the schooner, being worse than ourselves in working to windward, would clear out in plenty of time to give us warning, and the skipper of the cutter would hardly be putting the covers on his sails and be getting ready to go ashore if he had expected anything very bad during the night.

  We slung the dinghy overboard with a tackle, and the Cook and I went ashore to see what we could of Spithamn before it grew too dark. An elderly man in grey homespuns saw us coming and walked from his cottage just above high-water mark down to the shingle. He helped us to pull up the dinghy, and fastened the painter to a thwart of a boat of his own that was lying well out of reach of the waves. Then, having in this manner made us his guests, he spoke to us in German, in Swedish, in Esthonian and in Russian, apologizing for not knowing more than a few words of English, and those words of the sea and unlikely for the moment to be of much use. He was very pleased to know so many languages, delighted that we could answer him a word or two in each of them, inquired politely in Swedish which language we preferred to talk, and finding that Russian came easiest to us went on with our talk in that. He was a Swede and his name was Anders Ringberg. He took the Cook into his charge and sold her milk, potatoes, and little very salt fish, which he swore had been caught the previous day and were hardly salt at all. For this gross error,
however, he atoned by making her a present of some cranberries and giving me copies of two Swedish newspapers, issued specially for the Swedes of the Esthonian islands, these relics of the old Swedish colonization; the Reval one a typical local newspaper, with its little scrap of gossip about Odensholm, about Runö, about Worms, about each one of the Swedish settlements, so that no one of its purchasers should fail to find in it something of peculiar interest to himself. It even recorded with proper solemnity the rare visits of yachts to the outlying islets. Anders Ringberg was very disappointed that we could not play the harmonium, for he had one in his house and had made sure at once that we, as educated people from far countries, would be able to do wonderful things with it. Hemp was growing in his garden, and he told us that the men of Spithamn not only build their own boats (they had built the big schooner that was lying beside Racundra), but spun and wove the hemp, making nets, ropes, fishing-lines, and very stout clothes for their sea-going.