by Adams, Max;
On Easter Sunday we sailed for the Scillies: due south until we weathered the rocks known as the Manacles (Carn du in Cornish)—the site of many a wreck—at a healthy distance; then south-west to round Black Head before the loom of the Lizard’s green cliffs appeared to starboard. In good weather the Scillies are a day’s sail from Falmouth. By good weather I mean good sailing weather; not so good, perhaps, for those who need a little time to find their sea legs. We lost a few below deck on a very lumpy Channel that bore traces of contrary Atlantic winds and the opposing northerly that set in behind us. It was a blast. I had last seen Falmouth in 2005 when, during the bicentenary commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar, I crewed on the square-rigged barque Lord Nelson from Cadiz, carrying a copy of Admiral Collingwood’s immortal dispatch with its dramatically poignant account of Nelson’s death and the defeat of the combined French and Spanish fleet. From square-rigger to gaff cutter is a huge drop in scale—Eda’s freeboard at the taffrail is not much more than eighteen inches—but being so close to the water, and on such a weatherly and beautiful boat, was perfectly exhilarating; like swapping a Land Rover for a toboggan.
I was given the helm for the two-hour passage around the Lizard and Wolf Rock and the dimly viewed Land’s End, grey skies pressing down overhead and white horses galloping along the Channel before and behind us. With the wind at a steady force six, we knocked along at a very respectable eight knots and made landfall late in the afternoon—a twelve-hour, sixty-mile passage. We anchored in the tight, rocky bay of Porth Cressan off St Mary’s, the perfect shelter in a northerly wind. It was raining and the process of stripping off layers of waterproof clothing in the confines below decks farcical. It had been a tiring first day; we were cold. But the craic was good and a beef stew with mashed potatoes restored us. Some miraculous chocolate confection followed and we shared a bottle of wine and a dram. Only Sarah had not sailed much before; the others were all sea-dogs. Melissa crewed on the Clipper Round the World race and survived a dismasting in the Pacific, so she has seen a thing or two. James is a veteran of Atlantic crossings; he is also a boat builder and a thoroughgoing seaman, who loves getting the most out of his boat and whose veins run with salt. That first night we slept right through, barely noticing a considerate but not very discreet operation when skipper and mate weighed anchor and motored Eda round to Hugh Town as the wind veered easterly. We woke with a view of the Scillies’ main harbour and of the archipelago of small islands to north and west that bring thousands of tourists here in the summer for an easy-going, nostalgic holiday. Small boats filled the grey bay, pricked with fluorescent orange buoys and alive with the sound of clanking halyards and cries of seabirds out on the scrounge.
In the early Roman period the islands were still a single land mass; rising sea levels created the islet landscape we see now. A sense of detachment from the real world is palpable. The Scillies have, charmingly, not caught up with the twenty-first century. Their natives ride bicycles. We saw a woman driving a 2CV with an article of furniture poking through the roof. The pace is slow, the scale intimate. Red telephone boxes look as though they might be used occasionally. Cornish, a dialect of Brythonic, seems to have died out here late in the Medieval period.
I would have liked to make it to St Helen’s, almost the most northerly of the islands and right on the fringes of this semi-submerged Atlantis. An Early Christian oratory stood there, with a seventh- or eighth-century chapel and a cluster of monks’ cells associated with St Elidius. It is the very ideal of the desert island, the perfect location for a contemplative life on the edge of the world. Intriguingly, the chapel is reported to have contained an altar similar in construction to that at St Ninian’s Point on Bute, where we had camped the previous autumn. After Rome’s withdrawal the islands were busy with maritime traffic, from the Mediterranean and especially from Francia. Tin ingots have been found here and although several of the islands have saintly connections (not least St Samson, which we could see across the harbour from Hugh Town), many of the material remains are distinctly secular, even domestic: E-ware41 cooking vessels, for example, of the sort found at Dunadd and many other sites along the Irish seaboard. The most recent review of evidence for Continental trade with the Atlantic West, by Ewan Campbell, suggests that the Scillies were an important stopping-off point for European merchants on their way up the Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea; that the natives actively encouraged them by providing shelter and accommodation. Merchants may have stationed themselves here during the summer months. Looking at the charts of these waters it is easy to see how central the Scillies were to the shipping lanes, especially in an era when passages were made by short hops rather than long ocean-going routes out of sight of land. But even if the Scillies were busy in the Dark Ages, those monks seeking solitude and the contemplative life had fifty or so of the now-uninhabited islands set in the shallow, sandy jade waters of the Atlantic’s eastern edge to choose from.
The tides were against both a visit to St Helen’s and my plan of exploring St Mary’s for its prehistoric field systems, cairns and Dark Age settlements. It was as much as we could manage to visit the small, crammed museum, stroll among the four-square granite houses, taking in the succulent and semi-tropical plants flourishing in the mild Oceanic climate (in Northumberland spring buds were only just appearing) and join a couple of our fellow crew members for a coffee, before Melissa whisked us away in Eda’s dinghy to her anchorage. After that first full day’s passage since her winter makeover, skipper and mate had shaken a few things down on board: tightened lashings, checked blocks and bitts and generally given Eda a pit stop before the next leg. Even shorn of her sails she made a striking silhouette against a sky that had begun to brighten after the rain and murk. Her prow is high, in common with fishing boats all over the world; her bowsprit long to give maximum sail area for the single mast. Tourist ferries came and went past us as we readied for sea, with envious looks from those dreaming vicarious dreams of blue-water sailing ahead.
The skipper had plans for a two-day passage to the Isle of Man that meant sailing watch-on-watch overnight. We caught the afternoon tide on Monday and cruised north on a desultory breeze coming over the starboard beam. We were formed into two watches: me, Sarah and Rolf in Melissa’s watch; Paul, Frank and Alex under Georgia’s supervisory eye. From the helm, an idiosyncratic arrangement like a cowboy saddle with the wheel before it, you could see the skipper below with his charts and AIS system—satnav for sailors—tracking tides and other shipping and calculating our speed through the water and over the ground. Unless there was an emergency or a need to heave-to to gain or lose canvas, the watch on deck sat four-hour shifts on and off around the clock. In line with the traditional double-watch system, two watches of two hours each (the so-called ‘dog-watches’) began at noon, so that every twenty-four hours the shift pattern alternated. It meant that nobody got the midnight or four a.m. shift two days running. Even so, with only four hours off, the body had to get to grips with the rhythms of the shift pattern pretty quickly.
Sarah was not wholly gracious the first time she was tumbled out of her bunk at midnight; but at least, that first night, the sea was calm. It was not so easy in anything like a rough sea, piling onto a deck sloping at thirty degrees with waves washing through the gunwhales. Getting clothed took a good fifteen minutes in the dark and longer in poor weather: thermals, lined trousers, warm fleece; then oilskins and wellies, lifejacket and harness, all clips and trailing belts, clumsy cold fingers and heads banging against bulkheads. Then a very hurried cup of hot tea gulped down; and maybe a biscuit or a bun. You stumbled up on deck in the pitch black, disoriented and grumpy, grabbed something solid to stabilise yourself against the boat’s corkscrew pitch and yaw, clipped the safety harness onto one of the jack stays that ran aft along the deck, and went to relieve the knackered watch huddled around the wheel or sitting backs to the taffrail with senses overwhelmed. Anyone going overboard in these conditions was unlikely to be found very quickly. But it is sur
prising how soon one gets used to it; how quickly the routine assumes an ever-present reality that has no future and no past. You exist entirely in the moment. Minutes at the wheel become hours; the odd conversation breaks out now and then, or the skipper pokes his head up to see how the wind has changed; a reef might be taken in at three in the morning; an adjustment to the bearing for a fishing fleet to be avoided; then a change to our course of 010 degrees as we headed into the black expanse of the Atlantic, Cornwall now far to the south-east, the coast of County Cork eighty miles off to the north-west. The sea is a giant; we were mere nothings in a horizon of endless night and limitless, lightless depths.
BITTS
I don’t know any other Swiss border guards, but I imagine them to be quite a straight-laced lot. Not so Rolf, a man with a face like a bearded teddy bear who relished every single moment at sea in the companionship of others. I hardly ever caught him without a smile. He was handy on a rope, so that he and I often formed the sweating partnership on sheet or halyard, hauling while others tailed the rope tight against its belaying pin. Not that there was any gender division on the boat: Melissa was an extremely handy and powerful girl, tough and strong, endlessly patient and unconsciously witty. Sarah, a nurse, is not shy when it comes to shifting heavy weights. We made a good team.
In the dead of night, in those moments after going below from such a watch, shedding all the wet gear and climbing into the bunk in an adrenalin daze, the gurgle of water against the hull, inches from my head, the occasional slamming of the bows into the surf and the clanking of block or anchor chain: these were lullabies, seductive, pulling mind and body down into the arms of sleep.
During that first full night at sea we passed through the ranks of north Cornwall’s fishing fleet, their navigation lights a shifting constellation. Tuesday 23 April dawned with Eda motoring, appropriately, through St George’s Channel in a milky flat calm. We were on watch from eight a.m., our breakfast eaten on deck. The sea was for the most part as empty as the sky. Puffins, guillemots and shearwaters, an adventurous warbler far from land and a curious seal were our only companions. A few promising gusts of wind died without a whimper; the jib hung limp and the skipper, bored, had us sewing whips onto a new set of reefs for the mainsail. Chlöe brought tea and biscuits on deck, looked around at the blank canvas (she is an artist, among other things) and disappeared below. The galley skylight opened and interesting smells wafted aft, torturing us. The skipper, still bored, went below and cleaned the heads—not many skippers take that unenviable chore on. Then he bled the radiators; he was really bored. At twelve our watch passed seamlessly into the hands of the starboard crew as we drew level with the Smalls lighthouse on its isolated rock twenty miles or so off St David’s in Pembrokeshire. Wales’s patron saint, unlike England’s (St George was a Palestinian), was born in the country that venerates him, around the year 500. An opponent of the prevailing Pelagian heresy (see note 42), he founded monasteries, became archbishop by popular acclaim and established a hard-line ascetic rule. He is an exemplar of the pure virtues of the Desert Fathers, coming from quite a different tradition to George, a martyred Roman soldier of the late third century in the decades of persecution before Christianity was officially tolerated.
Some time during the second dog-watch, an east-south-east breeze first teased and then caressed the mainsail, which rippled with pleasure like a cat being stroked. James, still bored, had us hoist a staysail and rigged it with the boat’s spare boom to starboard while the mainsail was braced to port, like a goose wing, and in this unlikely rig we pootled along at three knots, with a knot of tide helping us along. By the time we came back on watch at eight it was about dark; the wind had got up and the sky was a duvet of cloud.
Those next two watches, separated by fitful dozing, fully clothed, on the bunk, were so intense—black sea all around, waves piling up under the stern propelling us north at a crazy speed; anxious looks at the sails in case we carried too much canvas; porpoises zipping beside and beneath the bows and cutting the surface like tracer fire; no stars visible so that steering was by the seat of the pants, responding only to the swinging compass needle and the feel of wheel against current—that later, pooling the watch’s collective memory, we could remember practically nothing except the blur and buzz. The only other time that has happened to me was during the first week on Corsica’s alpine GR20 trail, whose narrative is fragmented, discontinuous, images lying curled and chaotic on the cutting-room floor of memory.
We gybed across Cardigan Bay all night, taking short turns on the wheel and watching and feeling the boat’s excitement as the wind rose again: a rocky night, cold, wet and sensationally alive. James came on deck at some unremembered time and we took the topsail in to ease Eda’s frantic capers. The odd celestial sparkle appeared, tantalising us, and I remember staring manically at the Pole Star for an hour or so while I was at the helm, trying to keep it in an eyeline triangle between the tip of the mainmast and the starboard shrouds, ignoring the compass’s lurching and letting the wheel pass through my hands almost without conscious thought. Steering is a pure art, subliminal. And the relationship between helmsman or walker and Polaris is as old as the ages of man. The empirical cycles of day, month, season and year are rocks to which we moor ourselves gratefully; and at times it seems as though we can still hold the hands of those who have gone before in an unbroken chain of cultural adventure. At midnight we slunk below with Bardsey Island, off the tip of the Llŷn peninsula, twenty or thirty miles away to the north-east.
At four, with no sign of dawn yet, we were back on deck, all clumsy from the motion: Eda still heading more or less dead north with the lights of Holyhead to starboard and a succession of dazzling firework-display light shows from car ferries crossing to and fro before us. Dublin lay thirty miles or so to the west—a purple glow on the horizon. Now the tide was with us we cruised over the ground, some three hundred feet beneath, at almost nine knots, ten miles every hour. A short orange burst of low sun at dawn to the west, then the cloud closed in again and we careered on. With first light it became a little easier to steer and to move about on deck; just before we were due to go below, the off-watch emerged (we had hardly seen them in two days) and for forty minutes nine of us cluttered the decks hauling on ropes: we hove-to and swapped the large jib for a smaller sail so that Eda would not plunge her forefoot down so much, wasting the wind and making her helm sluggish. James was the all-seeing, all-thinking conductor, barking orders when someone was about to come a cropper but always patient and always wanting us to understand why we were doing what we were doing.
Heaving-to is one of those counter-intuitive seagoing manoeuvres that landlubbers (among whom I count myself) find it hard to credit, even when they see it for themselves. The vessel is steered dead into the eye of the wind: there is a tremendous cracking and flapping of sails, sheets, stays and halyards and it feels as if something must tear loose, or snap—the racket is terrific. The rudder is turned fully to one side and lashed in that position; the boat bounces up and down on the spot, giving the crew time to get sails in, haul the boom amidships (four of us on the mainsheet, wellies slipping on the tilted deck and water washing around us as we braced ourselves against the port gunwale) and take a reef in the mainsail. Apart from sail-changing, this is the standard procedure if somebody goes overboard: it’s the marine equivalent of pulling onto the hard shoulder. The decks were slippery and we suffered a few comedy falls; no one was hurt, though, and no one got whacked on the head by the boom swinging across the deck as Eda resumed her course. At half-past eight we went below for a sausage-and-bacon butty and mugs of hot, sweet, reviving tea. At midday, just as we came on deck again, the skipper spotted the faint murky outline of the Calf of Man, dead ahead: we had made our landfall.
The mole at Peel harbour, halfway up the west coast of Man and our mooring for the night, juts out from the north end of St Patrick’s isle—almost an island, it is connected to Man by a narrow, sandy isthmus and a modern promenade and
road. Patrick may never have visited the place, but a monastery once stood beneath the site of the medieval castle and St German’s cathedral which stands inside it. Germanus is well known in the literature—he was sent from Gaul to rid Britain of the Pelagian heresy42 in the fifth century. Man’s patron saint, Maughold, is said to have been converted by Patrick. The church that bears his name, on the north-east coast near Ramsey, was probably the core of the island’s principal monastery. It is no coincidence that harbour and monastic site are so closely associated. Monks and traders, raiders and royal fleets found the same places convenient and congenial; and where economics and patronage meet in the world, power follows.
Early Medieval sailors suffered the disadvantages of their technologies: the square-rigged vessel with a shallow keel cannot very well sail up-wind—much of any windward advantage gained is negated by leeway; but it can be drawn up on beaches or sailed up shallow creeks when larger seagoing craft with greater draught cannot. And oars give the shallow-draughted coaster the ability to make progress up rivers or lochs, or when there is no wind. In those opportunistic centuries before trade was once more regularised and controlled, coastal trading seems to have been an ad-hoc affair; but not without its own unwritten rules. Navigational and geographical realities constrained the number of good landing sites. Often kings gave special privileges to locations close to their centres of power in return for first pick of the goodies. Sometimes, foreigners were kept at a distance so that their bona fides could be checked before they were allowed entry to royal township or stronghold. On the Continent, famous trading sites, merchant towns in effect, grew up at places such as Quentovic on the River Canche in Picardy; at Dorestadt on the Rhine; at Dalkey Island off Dublin.
