By way of Cape Horn

Front matter

THE GRACE HARWAR PHOTOGRAPHED ATLANTIC

IN THE SOUTH

BY

I. Il

Til.

LAST OF HER CLASS .

FELLOW ADVENTURERS FIRST WEEKS

CALL WELL”. . : ; “HE IS DEAD!” : : : : THE COST ; : :

FIFTY-SEVEN DAYS . : AFTERWARDS. , 2 : ; THE WIND CHANGE . ; : SHIPS AND THE SEA .

THE TRAGEDY OF THE DISEASED PIG THE “RACE”

= cca ave

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GRACH HARWAR PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE SOUTH

ATLANTIC : : . : : f frontis ptece

FACING PAGH

RONALD WALKER

CAPTAIN SVENSSON—IN LEATHER COAT—AND THE CHIEF MATE

ON THE WAY TO CAPE HORN

IN BETTER WEATHER, SAILING IN A LEE SEA

A DECK VIEW, FROM THE BOWSPRIT

LOOKING ALONG THE LEE SIDE FROM THE POOP . GETTING IN THE MAINS’L IN A BLOW : : é MAKING FAST A SAIL AT SEA

AFTER THE STORM: STRETCHING THE HALLIARDS AT THE MAIN CAPSTAN

CROJACK BRACE! A HAUL ON THE MIZZEN BRACES IN A CAPE HORN SEA

SHIPPING A SEA!

A SEA SMASHING ABOARD THE GRACE HARWAR . : HOVE-TO ; ‘ 3 k : : } °

THE GRACE HARWAR PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE WEATHER SIDE

UNBENDING THE BLOWN-OUT MIZZEN TOPGALLANT

SAIL : ' xi

24 72 712 94 94 122 122

140 162 162 194 xii ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGH

LOOKING UP THE MAINMAST . : : é . 216

GETTING IN THE MAIN UPPER TOPGALLANT SAIL . 238

BENDING THE MAIN ROYAL IN THE TROPICS . _ 59338

THE BOWS FROM ALOFT . , é : : . 280 )

LOOSING THE MIZZEN LOWER TOPS’L ; : . 280

JOURNEY’S END—THE GRACH HARWAR ANCHORED IN QUEENSTOWN HARBOUR : : : . 826

DECK VIEW IN SUNNY WEATHER : p ; . 826

Map at end of book

CHART OF THE GRACH HARWAR’S VOYAGE

Oe f f

LOS ANGELES MUSEUM EXPOSITION PARK

CHAPTER I HERE was an atmosphere of somnolence about

the sub-editor’s room and of decrepitude in the reporters’. Nobody occupied the ancient chairs;

no one pored over the dusty files, nor sought to operate the broken-down typewriters. The assignment book, much corrected and much cursed, lay open at the previous day’s date; a score of heavy initials signified their owners’ disapproval opposite the entries of a score-odd footling engagements, unimportant meetings, unproductive “rounds,” trifling interviews, useless conferences, boring receptions, at all of which vast numbers of persons of utterly no importance got upon their feet, said their remarks would be brief, and never kept their word. In a corner, upon a breast-high bench, were three files of the morning daily which the office produced. Loose pages hung from them untidily; their columns were cut and hacked about as much as they well could be, and cuttings and derelict pieces of paper lay cluttered round in mute contempt of the large and dusty notice above them which read “These files must not be cut.” On a low table along the wall lay a copy of Lloyds’ Register for 1903, a much battered and ill-used “Who’s Who” for 1920, and a pot of paste. Above the fireplace was a notice-board, covered with cloth that had once been green. No correspondence waited here hopefully to be claimed. There was nothing, 3

A BY WAY OF CAPE HORN save a lodge notice of some kind for a reporter who had died seven years before and an income tax demand, for a very much alive young reporter, that had even less chance of being rescued from the despair of its surroundings. Draughts wandered unhealthily about, stealing in through ill-fitting windows; there was cigarette ash on the floor, and a pile of galley proofs, hot from the lino room downstairs at an early hour that morning, had been flung into a coal box in a corner. The telephone rang spasmodically, now and again. Nobody answered it.

Not that that mattered much. There wasn’t much likelihood of missing any news—real news—that way ; mostly the persons who called up the office wanted to have their names erased from the reports of police court proceedings, or inserted into chronicles of social happenings. If by any chance there were a real good murder going for the moment unpursued, well, the corpse would still be there and the murder still unsolved in the afternoon.

It was Sunday morning—a lovely Tasmanian Sunday morning in March, 1929, with sunshine and a fresh happiness in the air—outside, of course. Indoors in the newspaper office it was cheerless and grey enough. But then there was no need, on this one day in the week, for anyone to be there at that early hour. Sunday morning, if there were no church services worth reporting—there seldom were—and no crowded sports gathering of the previous afternoon to be written up—there always was —the majority of the reporters had free. There was an instruction in the all-powerful assignment book, of course, to the effect that all copy from the previous day’s engagements had to be in by two on Sunday afternoon, for the Chief of Staff knew that his men, once the actual function itself was over, liked to be free of work for their Saturday evenings and let the writing-up wait until the morrow. At least on Saturday nights they could be with their wives, if they had to pay for it by scribbling away their Sunday mornings. And then they could do that at home.

But there were some stalwarts who had no interest save the office, who lived for nothing but their work and the joy of growling about it. They had given up their souls to journalism for so long that now they never looked for anything else. They had no other interest. If they were not at the office, working or yarning away an hour or two with their fellow reporters, they were asleep. Their wives came into their lives obscurely as persons who cooked meals for them for which they always arrived late, breathless, and in a desperate hurry. ‘They had married before they realised the unfortunate truth that a reporter on a morning newspaper had no mortal right to take unto himself any woman, had nothing to offer any woman save lonely evenings, unshared meals, and lost friends. His life had to be his job, and his joys and his wife had to come from it.

I had been unlucky the previous evening, for once. There had been a bowlers’ smoke social or something of the kind—some entertainment at which there had been a little whisky and a great deal of talk. Whatever it was, there must have been sufficient of the whisky to interfere with the chronicling of the talk, and I found myself wandering along the well-known streets leading to the office that bright Sunday morning, hopeful of finding a usable typewriter not in use that I might hastily run out my report. But there was such a Sunday morning air of depression about the place that I did not care to work. I could not bring myself to begin, and instead dropped into the unoccupied sub-editor’s room to browse among his files of other newspapers.

Here, in the columns of a Melbourne daily, I suddenly came across a small paragraph that swept the whole of those surroundings instantly away. There was a picture of a four-masted barque inset into the letterpress, and the paragraph was a reprint of a cutting from a London daily, urging that before it was too late someone who could should ship in one of the big Cape Horn sailing ships that still survived and make a motion picture film of his voyagings. That was the very thing that I had in mind, the very idea that I was working on, the very plan that I had laid, after long consideration, for one voyage more in the ships of sails—one voyage more around Cape Horn that would be productive of a record more vivid than a book. It wasn’t my idea, originally. A young yachtsman fellow-reporter had long brooded over it, a brilliant and enterprising youth to whom the majesty of old sails had always been alluring and the call of the sea—the real sea of the winged wind ships—always strong. Ronald Walker was his name: Ronald Gregory Walker, fair-haired, broad-browed, cheerful, smiling. If we had been able to foresee what these ships of wind would mean for him; if we had had the slightest idea of the cost to us of trying to make this motion picture film, then we should never have thought about it and we should never have gone. At least, I would not have; I think he would have tried, even if he had known.

He wandered in, curiously enough, just as I had finished reading the fateful paragraph.

“I say, laddie,” I remember saying, “have a look at this.”

He came over to the file and eagerly scanned the cutting.

“We'll have to go now,” he said when he had read it, “or some other bright youth will be on to our idea.”

“Exactly what I thought—not that there’s much chance of anyone else getting in just now, but one never knows, once the thing has been made public. It’s most likely that nobody will take any notice of it, but we can’t leave it to chance.”

“We'll have to go, old man,” he said. “There’s nothing else for it now.”

We discussed the position. ‘The bowling social report was somehow not written, nor was his weekly chronicle of yachting races. For who cared for yachting races, when there was talk of full-rigged ships? And what mattered bowls, when there came the call of adventure? ... In truth, the call of adventure was loud, but it came at a most inappropriate moment. Our plans had always been that we should not set out until the grain race of 1930. We could not see how we could be ready before then. We knew that there would still be some square-riggers left by then, and the fewer that there were, the more valuable would be the film. We had no filming experience. We were not motion picture camera-men. We had, neither of us, ever operated a motion picture camera. I had once been sent, by my newspaper, to watch the filming of a portion of a scene from a film of a Tasmanian convict story, to write it up; and for two days I watched the camera-man, the director, and the actors at their work. Itwas an interesting experience but not an enlightening one. The camera used by that camera-man cost something like *£1,500. We had not, and could not get, 1,500 pence. We did not care to tell anyone of our scheme for fear of ridicule; we knew that any quest of capital would be impossible. Besides, we wished to avoid, if at all possible, the risking of anyone else’s money in a venture which we knew only too well would be a very great gamble; we were prepared to risk our own, if we could get any, but not to lose somebody else’s. We had planned to wait for the following year in order that we might secure some capital, and buy an inexpensive but efficient motion picture camera with which we could give ourselves some experience. The raw film was quite an expensive item, and there were other considerations. Only four months previously I had returned from a voyage in the four-master Herzogin Cecilie. I did not care to go straight back to the sea again, before the mast in a Cape Horn square-rigger. It was March, and most of the ships had gone —Herzogin Cecilie, Beatrice, Lawhill, Archibald Russell, C. B. Pedersen, Pommern, Garthpool, and all the best of them. ‘There were still a few about, picking up the remnants of the wheat, and it might have been easy enough to ship in one of them. But the point that worried us was that, being March then, a setting out at that time of the year from Australia would mean a winter rounding of the Horn—a ghastly and unpleasant experience, as more than I had good cause to know. It was not so much the discomfort that worried us; it was the fact that, being winter then in those high southern latitudes, there were only a few hours of light daily and much of that was unusable for photography. Matters like that were of the greatest importance. It would have been much better if we could have waited until the next season, and set out in some well-chosen ship, carefully prepared, with the cameras, the gear, and the eaperience that we so needed.

But we could not have these things. We had to choose, we thought, between setting out without experience and with what gear we could get, and probably not setting out at all. For we knew that if anyone else on earth was taken with the idea and set about its accomplishment, he could not very well be worse equipped for it than we were; we knew that if anyone else began we were finished. We chose to go, then, as we were. .. .

We were greatly taken with this idea of a film of one of the last of the great sailing ships, upon probably one of the last of her voyagings. Written about, it seems dull and uninteresting, but we thought that here was something that was worth trying, at any rate. We wanted to make a picture that would capture some of the stirring beauty of these ships, that would perpetuate, in the realm of shadows at least, something of the glory of their wanderings and the courage of their battles with the sea, that would embody, in some vague and unsatisfactory way, some shadow of the spirit of these lovely old sea wanderers, some glimmer of understanding of the attraction which they hold over those who sail in them. It had never been done. There had been “shots” of big sailing ships in various films which we had seen, some of them most lovely; but they were incidents, atmosphere, for the most part badly used. Their obvious sincerity was broken down irremediably and utterly detroyed by other scenes depicting ships in tanks, and “sets” which were obviously concocted in studios by persons whose acquaintance with the sea was bounded by books. We had seen heroines, supposedly upon the decks of great ships in terrible storms, registering the most violent anguish against a background of pasteboard waves that never moved; we had seen disaster overtake ships that never sailed, models that looked like nothing that ever floated upon the face of the waters, sailors at work that sailors never did. We wanted to make something real, no matter what imperfections it might have. There were very great disadvantages, we were well aware, even if we had both been most experienced camera-men. We had no feminine interest. We had no story. We were prepared to set out, and take what the sea and the voyage gave us. We could interest no great monopoly in our poor schemes. We had a vague idea that if we did try to and should succeed, we would be much more likely to see some ship chartered and some experienced producers and photographers set out than ever to be going ourselves. And whatever there was against us, we had at least this upon our side—that we did have something of the spirit of the sea, and we did bring to the making of this very problematical picture, some understanding of the loveliness of the ship of sails and some real feeling for her beauty, her courage, and her grace.

There was also this very important factor of time. I had always been a little chary of the following season; if it were a bad wheat season in Australia, as like as not there would be few big sailing ships chartered to help carry home the grain. And now that the idea had been broadcast to the world something had to be done about it. Walker said that the modern motion picture camera, even standard size, was almost as fool-proof as the ordinary snap-shot apparatus had been made; we should soon overcome the handicap of no experience. He had made photography—still photography—his hobby for years and had made a study of light and other factors that play so great a part in cinematic art; I had had a little experience of pointing cameras at things, first having inserted a roll of film, and pressing the release catch, and had found that if the light were good (as it generally is at sea) that was all I required to know to get results. I had been doing that in the whaling ship Sir James Clark Ross upon her cruise to the Antarctic in 1923-24, and again in the Herzogin Cecilie in 1928; but I had never even attempted to handle a motion picture camera... We had discovered earlier that a standard size motion picture camera, quite good enough for our purposes, could be bought in Australia for about £40. We had to have two in case one went overboard, or fell from the rigging, or went wrong. We would call at no port to take in fresh supplies on the way. We had to have about eight thousand feet of film, the best we could get. We had to have, pretty quickly, about £300.

We both knew all these things only too well, as we looked at each other across those newspaper files in that old office—an old office in which we had been reporters for years, among a team of splendid fellows we did not like to leave; we knew that we were about to embark upon a very big proposition indeed. Ronald Walker had not sailed before the mast before. He had never been to sea, save for a voyage or two between Tasmania and New South Wales, and Victoria, as a passenger in the steamers on those services. But the sea was in his blood and he loved his yachts. I had gone to sea straight from school and had been in the half-decks and the foc’sle of a few square-riggers in the Cape Horn trade—perhaps about half a dozen; enough to know sufficient of the life not to return lightheartedly.

What ships were still available for us, if we set out then, young Walker—he was just twenty-two—asked me. I knew that the four-masters Howgomont and Olivebank were in Port Lincoln, but they must have been almost ready for sea and fully manned by then; my younger brother had shipped already in the Hougomont and had left Melbourne to join her some weeks before. She would have been a good shop for the film, she was a big four-masted barque, low in the sides, long, good at flinging the sea over herself, fleet to run before the wind, and heavy to handle for the small crew she had. She was tall, still with the original sail plan with which she had been first built years before on the Clyde; she carried her three royals, and was picturesque enough. She had a long open main deck, somewhat filled with deck-houses but still offering a splendid setting for the scenes we sought; the only thing against her was her wheelhouse. We wanted a ship without a wheelhouse and without brace winches, and those other man-saving gadgets of later days. We wanted a real old-timer, one on which the frozen wretches making up the crew, on the long bitter run to the Horn, had to stand their frigid tricks at the huge open wheel, unprotected, tortured by the cold fury of the wind, sodden by the ceaseless rain, cut by the merciless hail. We had no desire to share in their misery! But that was part of the life we wished to record on the film, the romance of the helm. A wheelhouse would take it from us. A wheelhouse gave shelter to the crew, and was a boon indeed.

It transferred the wheel from the worst place in the ship, in bad weather, to the best. It meant that no man might be swept overboard and drowned by a pooping sea, while he struggled with the helm. It meant shelter, and safety, and some minor degree of comfort. And it meant a loss of some of the most vivid, most striking, and hardest to obtain of the pictures we sought. We wanted to film the real life aboard the Cape Horn ship—a life that would stir people’s blood, and bring them from their seats in warm and comfortable cinema halls ashore, and compel in them some fear of the cold heartlessness of the bitter sea, some admiration for the courageous spirits who set out in their old sailing ships and always fought it. ‘There would be, in this film of ours, “shots” of the rolling, sea-swept decks of the sailing ship down below New Zealand on her way to Cape Horn; the great seas would sweep aboard her over each side as she rolled, sweeping triumphantly along the length of her, pressing her down, weighing heavily against her in the fight to stay afloat; and in all this there would go on the endless battle with the sails, the braces, the heavy, back-breaking gear—the puny things with which man sought to conquer and by the strength of his arm and the spirit that was in him, to win through; the wind-distended, sea-stiffened sails, blown into ribbons time and again on the gaunt high yards; the perilous, exhilarating, mad work upon the rigging of the pitching, terrified ship, high aloft in the shrieking gales and the rain-filled sky ; the infinitely more dangerous work on the sea-swept exposure of the decks, from which now and again, despite life-lines and sharp lookouts, the hands went overboard; the straining at the open wheel, with the giant seas raging astern at which the helmsmen did not dare to look, while they strove ceaselessly to keep the running ship somewhere before them; the ice and the snow on deck, and the ghastly physical misery.

And then, beyond Cape Horn, the bad weather of winter in the South Atlantic, with more gales and unending slavery ; and afterwards, sunshine and happier skies, and milder days and loveliness returned to a sea which did not seem before to know of joy’s existence; and so through the Trade Winds, unto the Line, and the doldrum belt, with its torpid calms, and weak cat’s-paws of feeble, baffling winds, and heavy downpours of tropic rain; and the North Atlantic, with its ship lanes again and meetings with other vessels, and flying fish, and the weedy outskirts of the Sargasso Sea (for the sailing ship wanders curiously on her voyagings); and at last the haze of England, the sea-swept cliffs and Home . . . We had to sign before the mast and work our way, to get these things; there was no other manner in which we could attempt our scheme. We did not seek to write for owner’s permission, and enter into long negotiations concerning film rights (if such a question were raised) and things. Our plan was to get a job and go, in whatever capacity there were vacancies . . . The Hougomont would suit us well, except for the drawback of her wheelhouse, if only there were still a job or two before her mast. We knew that it was mostly easy enough to get a job in the foc’sle of these Finnish sailing ships, when they came to load Australian wheat. They were manned by young Finnish boys, many of whom had paid for the privilege of working in them; it always happened that, in each of the ships, some of these boys deserted in the Australian ports. They had had enough of it. They had discovered that there was little of romance in these ships, and very much of work and horrible discomfort; they looked upon Australia as the land of chance, and did not know anything about its unemployment. ‘They cleared out and left their ships shorter handed than they were before—and that was usually bad enough—and the Finnish captains had to ship what hands they could. I had a friend in Port Lincoln who looked after the loading of these sailers in the little South Australian ports and did what he could to find them suitable crews. Mostly they were glad to sign on Australian farmhands, sturdy, sun-tanned chaps who got an awful shock at first but afterwards settled down into the life and made first-class sailors; now and again they were lucky enough to get real sailors . .

The Olivebank was a little big and also had a wheelhouse. She carried only one royal, which was a good point as far as working her was concerned, but a disadvantage pictorially. She also should have been nearly loaded by then, fully manned and ready for the sea. We didn’t have much hope of getting anything in either of those vessels. There was also the little Finnish barque Favell, lying in Wallaroo. But she was a training ship, manned by a horde of Helsingfors apprentices; even if half of them cleared out (as they generally did) she would still have hands enough to take her home. She was a little yacht, of not much more than a thousand tons, and did not need so large a crew to handle her. There was also the Finnish four-master Ponape lying in Melbourne, just arrived from the Baltic after a stormy and long passage during which two of her boys had gone overboard and been drowned. She was chartered to load wheat; against her was the fact that she had brace winches and other gadgets, halliard winches and the like, which while they made her working a matter of much greater lightness than it could otherwise have been, robbed her of pictorial value and took from her all possibility of grand pictures of the watch at the lee fore brace, swept under water when she dipped her side. Her fore braces were huge wires wound about a drum arrangement on a house abaft the mainmast and they were dragged about by handles; how could a picture of a watch winding round a winch, high on a deckhead out of the water, compare with the same watch, dragging upon a fearful sodden brace of rope along the wet side of the ship, with the sea and the spume flying everywhere! No, there were better ships for us than the Ponape .. .

There remained one other ship which I had not mentioned, one other ship which I had always favoured and in which I had always wanted to sail. This was the ship Grace Harwar, a full-rigged ship of some 1,565 net register tons. She was the last Cape Horn full-rigger in the Australian trade. Year by year the number of the deep-water square-riggers was steadily declining and now their number included only this one full-rigged ship, this last survivor of a rig that had been most popular of all. There were about sixteen big sailing ships still in commission, lifting Australian wheat year by year, when they could get it, in this last trade that was open to them. They sailed out from Europe in ballast, for the most part, and because they all sailed upon the same voyage —round the Horn to the Channel for orders, scupper-deep with wheat—at more or less the same time, it was called a race. It wasn’t a race, really, except in those few rare instances when two of them were able to set out from the same port on the same day; and then most of them were in no fit condition to race. ‘They were very old, and had been battling with the sea a long time. They had not been as well looked after as they might have been, as the years passed by and left them relics of another and lovelier age; their rigging was old, and they had few sails. They carried small crews, to keep down costs, and very little canvas because it was so expensive. It was by no means unknown that they should set out upon a long voyage even with insufficient food.

If they were not under the Finnish flag they probably would have been under none at all; many of them were known as training ships, but even these carried the smallest of crews and were sadly undermanned. One or two were splendid ships, in grand racing trim always—the Herzogin Cecilie, for example, the Swedish Beatrice, and perhaps the Archibald Russell and one or two more. But for the most part, if they delivered their cargoes safely, that was as much as could be expected from them. They could not be driven with their small crews in such a trade; sail had to be taken in in time, or quite probably not at all. If they made good passages it was good luck, for the most part; if they made bad ones that was all that could be expected of them. Now and again one set out and never arrived; the beautiful big Danish five-masted barque ‘Kébenhavn, strongest, stoutest, and best of them all, was on the missing list then and has never sailed out of it. She set out from Buenos Aires, bound to Australia to load grain, in mid-December, 1928, and she has never arrived nor been seen or heard of anywhere with her seventy boys . . . We were not concerned with the race aspect of the voyage; it was the voyage itself that we wanted, and the Grace Harwar looked like the very ship to suit our purpose. She was small and lofty; she carried her three royals, was devoid entirely of brace winches, halliard winches, and all those other things of later days; she had come from Clyde-side before the ’90’s, and though she had been through many vicissitudes and more than one serious accident, was still much the same lovely old Grace Harwar that had first felt the coldness of the sea’s embrace upon the narrow Clyde. She had no wheelhouse. Her deck was not too cluttered up with houses; she had but one house, a long low foc’sle abaft the foremast, where the crew had their quarters and where we should be domiciled, if we could get a job. And she was a real Cape Horner. She was out then about two years, and I had something of an idea that her crew would be pretty well fed up with her. She was, as far as I knew, due at Port